Authors: Andrew Bridgeford
1066 (25 page)
10 Bishop Odo encourages the young knights at the Battle of Hastings
11 Count Eustace II of Boulogne points out Duke William
12 The death of King Harold
There is one further piece of evidence. In 1982 Professor D. D. R. Owen published an article in which he showed that more than a dozen parallels and similarities can be identified between the famous Latin poem about the Battle of Hastings,
Carmen de Hastingae Proelio,
and the French
Chanson de Roland.
45
Owen argued that these parallels strongly suggest that there is some direct relationship between the Latin and the French poems. He concluded that the poet of the
Carmen
was deeply familiar with the vernacular
Roland,
and that he drew upon it, 'deftly garnishing the historical facts as he had received them with epic turns of phrase, accentuating oppositions, adding picturesque touches to both characters and events'. Moreover, it would appear that the version of the
Roland
with which the
Carmen-pott
was familiar was more or less the one which has been transmitted down to us.
This conclusion is extremely important, but its importance has been obscured. At the time when Owen published his article it was widely considered that the
Carmen
was a twelfth-century work and that it could not have been written by Bishop Guy of Amiens. But Guy's authorship of the poem has now been firmly re-established.
46
So if Owen is right that the author of the
Carmen
knew and used the
Roland,
then the
Chanson de Roland
must have been composed, in a form not dissimilar to what we know today, before Guy died, which was in either 1074 or 1075.
47
This is a dating remarkably consistent with what has been proposed above. Furthermore, if Bishop Guy was familiar with the
Chanson de Roland,
at a time so close to its presumed date of composition, the two poems could well have originated in broadly the same milieu. This cannot be proved; the
Chanson de Roland
might quickly have become popular. But the influence of the
Chanson de Roland
on Bishop Guy would be all the more understandable if he were working not far from where the
Roland
was composed. We know that when Guy wrote the
Carmen
he was the Bishop of Amiens. His episcopal seat lay only two dozen miles along the River Somme from Abbeville, where his nephew Count Guy ruled over Ponthieu. In his youth Bishop Guy had even been a student at Saint-Riquier. Once again our hypothesis that the
Chanson de Roland
might well have been composed in the region of Abbeville and Saint-Riquier, and by none other than Turold, Count Guy of Ponthieu's household
jongleur,
is remarkably consistent with the evidence. It is consistent, too, with the theory that Count Eustace II of Boulogne was the patron of the Bayeux Tapestry for it was Eustace, the noble heir of Charlemagne, who stood to gain most in prestige from the tapestry's implicit allusions to the
Chanson de Roland
and its talented author Turold.
48
The discussion in this chapter has ranged over a number of matters; no doubt a great deal more could be said. It would certainly be remarkable if we have an embroidered portrait of the author of the first great work of French literature. If that were true, the whole magnificent edifice - from Moliere to Flaubert, from Corneille to Hugo, and all the other luminaries as well - would rest on the shoulders of this enigmatic dwarf. That there is considerable scope for caution is clear. The clues are slender; much mystery remains. But the possibility that the two Turolds are identical is distinctly more interesting than has hitherto been supposed.
The lady named as Ælfgyva in the Bayeux Tapestry intrigues and teases us in many ways [scene 17; plate 3]. She is clearly meant to be a focus of our attention. There are only three women depicted in the whole of the main frieze; by contrast, some 600 men strut and saunter across the embroidered stage. Out of the three women, Ælfgyva is the only one who is given a name and it is a name that was popular in the very highest echelons of Anglo-Saxon society. Who this Ælfgyva was and what she is doing in the tapestry are questions which have long baffled observers. With its hint of sex and scandal the Ælfgyva scene remains one of the most mysterious in the whole work.
The scene seems like a curious interjection into the flow of the story, with no obvious link to what occurs before or after. During his enforced stay in Normandy, Harold has been brought to Duke William's palace, probably at Rouen. Harold is seen in earnest discussion with William: we have seen how the artist is probably illustrating his attempt to negotiate the release of his brother Wulfnoth. Then follows ÆElfgyva's scene. She is shown being touched, perhaps stroked, on the cheek by a priest; and a bizarre naked figure in the lower border, gesturing up Ælfgyva's skirt, lewdly appears to mimic the action of the priest. Immediately after this scene, the story moves on. Harold and William depart together in order to campaign in Brittany; they are soon seen crossing the flat sands near Mont-Saint-Michel into Breton territory. The inscription above the Ælfgyva scene is enigmatically short. All it says is UBI UNUS CLERICUS ET ÆLFGYVA (Where a certain cleric and Ælfgyva). Dot, dot, dot, one can almost hear.
What is going on? Who is Ælfgyva? Who is the priest? Does the absence of a verb in the inscription hint at some sexual scandal, as we might suppose from the lewd figure in the lower border? Ælfgyva's identity and her role in the story have been given a great deal of attention by scholars, but there has been little agreement; much mystery remains. For one thing, the meaning of the priest's gesture is disputed. For another, there was no shortage of well-born ladies named Ælfgyva.
The name Ælfgyva (elf-gift) was the name of a family saint in the West Saxon royal dynasty. St Elfgiva, as she is also spelt, died in 944, having piously retired to an abbey. 'She was,' wrote William of Malmesbury in the 1120s, 'a saintly person to whom God granted many revelations.'
1
This lady was the wife of King Edmund of England and the mother of Kings Edwy and Edgar; and through her grandson, Æthelred the Unready, she was a great-grandmother of Edward the Confessor. A name with such connections was bound to appeal, and by the eleventh century it was a common name in the best circles of Anglo-Saxon England.
Many Æ
lfgyvas/
Æ
lfgifus
(the spelling is used interchangeably) have, over the years, been proposed as the tapestry's lady. In the very highest echelons of Anglo-Saxon society we know of three Ælfgyvas/Ælfgifus in particular; each held the status of a queen in the generation before 1066.
2
A lady named Ælfgifu was the first wife of Edward the Confessor's father Æthelred the Unready. From her union with Æthelred descended the once-exiled and now returned branch of the Anglo-Saxon royal family represented in 1066 by Edgar Ætheling. Edgar's hereditary claim to the throne was strong. Could his great-grandmother Ælfgifu, who had died at the dawn of the millennium, be the lady in the tapestry? Is, perhaps, some point being made detrimental to Edgar's claim to the throne?
When this first Ælfgifu died, King Æthelred married Emma, the daughter of Duke Richard I of Normandy. Upon her marriage to Æthelred, Emma of Normandy abandoned her name of birth and obligingly took the same name as her husband's first wife, Ælfgifu. Their children were Edward, Alfred and Godgifu; and Edward, of course, was later to reign as Edward the Confessor. Æthelred died in 1016. Following the Danish conquest of England, and the flight of her children by Æthelred to Normandy, Ælfgifu-Emma retained her position as queen by marrying the new all-powerful King Canute. The vast empire of her Danish husband included at its height England, Denmark and Norway. She now despised Æthelred. By Canute, she had a son Harthacanute and a daughter Gunnhildr; Harthacanute would reign as king of Denmark (1035-42) and as king of England (1040-42). Ælfgifu-Emma's Norman parentage also provided the tenuous blood link that gave William the Conqueror part of his justification for invading the country in 1066; she was William's great-aunt. In these ways, Ælfgifu-Emma was a pivotal person in the great struggles for England, both Scandinavian and Norman, that marked the eleventh century.
When Ælfgifu-Emma married Canute in 1017 she found that he already had an English mistress, a mistress, moreover, who had already borne him two sons. The mistress turned out to be a strong-minded lady intent on following her own agenda. Her name - could it be anything else? - was Ælfgifu. 'The other Ælfgifu' is how the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
describes her. But in modern history books Canute's mistress is most commonly called Ællfgifu of Northampton. In the circumstances, Ælfgifu of Northampton and Emma were at odds from the start. Indeed, the next twenty-five years of English, Danish and Norwegian history were to be profoundly affected by the personal jealousy and bitter rivalry that existed between these two able and ambitious women. Ælfgifu of Northampton succeeded in placing one of her sons by Canute on the English throne, Harold Harefoot (king, 1037-40); and she was also the mother of Sveyn 'Alfifasson', who ruled as king of Norway under her own regency between 1030 and 1035. She died at some point after 1040, although exactly when is not known. Could she be the eponymous lady depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry?
Most commentators take sexual scandal to be the point of the Ælfgyva scene. Some, however, have argued that what is being represented is not a sexual scandal at all. We learn from William of Poitiers that in 1064/5 one of the undertakings made, and later repudiated, by the captive Harold was to marry one of Duke William's daughters (the fiancee may have been called either Agatha or Adelaide).
3
It has been suggested that the lady named as
Ælfgyva.
in the tapestry is in fact this Norman lady; and that what we see is some ceremony of betrothal. Thus, according to this theory, there is no scandal; it is said that the priest is actually
placing a veil
over the bride-to-be's head, this apparently being part of the formalities of engagement.
4
(Alternatively, it is said that the priest is
removing
her veil, which, according to another theory, was what was involved in the formalities of engagement).
5
William's daughter is called by the English name Ælfgyva because, so the theory goes, she would have taken that name upon her marriage to Harold - just as her great-great-aunt Emma had done when she adopted the English name Ælfgifu in 1002 upon her own marriage to King Æthelred the Unready. This theory has the great advantage of allowing us to place the Ælfgyva scene not only in Rouen, but also neatly within the thread of the story line. It is suggested that in the immediately preceding panel Harold and William are meant to be discussing the planned marriage. The formal indication of betrothal thus follows; and there would otherwise be no mention of Harold's betrothal.
There are nonetheless considerable difficulties with this theory. For one thing, it is a matter of conjecture that William's daughter would have taken the name Ælfgyva on her marriage; Harold repudiated the engagement and it never took place. And can we really take the designer of the tapestry, working most probably in the 1070s, as referring to the king's very daughter by a purely hypothetical name, a name by which she was not known in the 1070s and indeed which she had never borne and which she would only have taken had the thoroughly discredited marriage to Harold taken place? For another thing, the marriage was deferred in 1064/5 because the girl in question was a mere child; but the lady we see in the tapestry is clearly an adult.
Most problematic of all, however, is the allusion to scandal. For it is very hard not to regard the Ælfgyva scene, with its teasingly incomplete inscription, as relating in some way to a sexual scandal. The naked figure in the lower border, gesturing up Ælfgyva's skirt, explicitly seems to mimic the action of the priest; and there is another partially clothed figure, a workman wielding a tool, in the immediately preceding lower compartment. This is not, it has to be said, the way one would naturally expect a royal princess, one still living and unmarried, and a half-niece of Bishop Odo, to be portrayed in the embroidery. Even if, as some would implausibly argue, the figure in the lower border is purely 'decorative', and nothing to do with the scene above, to juxtapose such lewd imagery with a portrait of the king's daughter would have been unbelievably negligent on the part of the designer. The contrasting buildings in which Ælfgyva stands and from which the priest strides are open to similar sexual innuendo.
A not dissimilar explanation of the
Ælfgyva
scene is that the eponymous lady is the sister of Harold whom Eadmer tells us (without giving her a name) was to be engaged to one of William's nobles.
6
This was part of the agreement Harold was constrained to enter into in order to secure his release from Normandy. Harold may have had a sister named Ælfgyfu; she is mentioned in the Domesday Book.
7
This Ælfgyfu's existence is otherwise unattested, and it is possible that the Domesday entry is a scribal error, but assuming she did indeed exist, she may be the sister of Harold whom Eadmer referred to and we have the beginnings, at least, of a more promising explanation. Given the tapestry's close association with Eadmer's account of Harold's visit to Normandy it cannot be without interest that the story of the betrothal of Harold's sister should also come from Eadmer. The appearance of Ælfgyva where we see her in the embroidery, just after Harold and William's discussions, is consistent with this explanation, although it is unlikely that she was actually in Normandy at the time. Thus there may just be an allusion in this scene to Harold's promise to wed his sister to a Norman noble; but even if true it cannot be the entire explanation. We have noted on many occasions the artist's ingenuity at teasing his audience with multiple meanings. Invariably, however, he has one underlying meaning which he wishes to convey. Failure to realise this has long bedevilled research into the Bayeux Tapestry; historians have too often assumed that there can only be one meaning and have thus been misled on to false trails by one of the more superficial interpretations. What suggests that the Ælfgyva scene has some further, deeper meaning is the sexual innuendo.
The gesture of the priest, using a single open hand, does not obviously amount to the placing or arranging, or even the removing, of a veil. On the contrary, the closest, if somewhat later, parallels in medieval art once again give the scene an erotic import. 'The face-fondling gesture,' writes J. Bard McNulty, 'was for centuries charged with sexual meaning. It continued to be used in the art of later centuries, where it was sometimes combined with gestures even more sexually explicit.'
8
The earliest example of such a gesture quoted by scholars is a sculptured scene of Salome dancing before Herod from a twelfth-century capital which originally decorated the church of Saint-Etienne in Toulouse (the capital is now to be found in the Musee des Augustins, Toulouse). Overall, the evidence for the view that the Ælfgyva scene relates to a sexual scandal appears to be pretty compelling.
Were there any important women named Ælfgyva/Ælfgifu who were known, or rumoured, to have had some scandalous involvement with a priest? Intriguingly, rumours of this nature circulated at various times about two of the Ælfgifus already mentioned: Canute's wife Ælfgifu-Emma (whom we shall henceforth refer to as Emma) and her bitter rival for her husband's affections, 'the other Ælfgifu', she of Northampton. Both were long dead in 1064/5. If either of them is the tapestry's Ælfgyva we will be forced to conclude that the designer has used a 'flashback' to an earlier event in order to make some point about the present. The existence of rumours of clerical impropriety involving not one but two persons named Ælfgifu cannot fail to interest us.
According to a curious story that was circulating in the fourteenth century, the widowed Emma, Canute's former queen and mother of Edward the Confessor by her earlier marriage, was accused in 1043 or 1050 (the accounts differ) of a liaison of particularly scandalous proportions.
9
In short, she was supposed to have been on much more friendly terms than she ought to have been with one of England's foremost ecclesiastics, Ælfwine of Winchester. At first King Edward believed the stories, but protesting her innocence, and that of the bishop, Emma successfully endured a trial by ordeal by walking unscathed across nine red-hot ploughshares (the horizontal cutting blade of the plough). A penitent Edward begged forgiveness; but he was nonetheless beaten with a rod (so the fourteenth-century story goes) by both his mother and Bishop Ælfwine. Could it be that the tapestry's Ælfgyva scene is an allusion to this late-reported scandal involving Emma and the Bishop of Winchester?
The story is found in no contemporary source. It has every appearance of being purely legendary. Its relationship with known events is confused and no modern historian takes it seriously.
10
It also differs in key respects from what we see in the tapestry. For one thing, the alleged affair was with a bishop. If the Ælfgyva scene concerned Emma and an episcopal lover, the Tapestry would surely have called the tonsured character a bishop, 'UNUS EPISCOPUS', not simply a cleric, 'UNUS CLERICUS'. For another, according to the story, Emma was widely believed to have proved her innocence by enduring hot iron: in other words by the miraculous intervention of God; and to the medieval mind that was the highest and most indisputable indication of the purest innocence. That the scandal was raised again in the 1070s by the artist of the Bayeux Tapestry, if indeed it was ever raised at all, seems pretty inconceivable. It is also hard to find a reason why Emma should be called out as a subject of special interest at this point in the Bayeux Tapestry. We must therefore turn to the story of scandal that involved her rival and namesake Ælfgifu of Northampton, Canute's mistress. To do so it is necessary to enter the turbulent world that threw these two forceful woman into bitter rivalry.
11
