1066 (29 page)

There is some evidence to connect Wadard, in particular, with Dover and the defence of its castle. The Domesday Book, compiled in 1086, records that he held six houses in Dover as Odo's tenant (which is more than any other sole tenant mentioned). Wadard, then, clearly had an interest in Dover. There is some further, striking evidence to link Wadard with the defence of Dover Castle. The Domesday Book does not tell us how its defence was organised. But, strangely enough, surveys which date from two centuries later can be used to show that there is an obvious correlation between the defence of Dover Castle and the lands held by certain tenants of Odo, including Wadard. What is remarkable in the thirteenth-century surveys is that we find that various landholdings similar to those held by tenants of Odo (not only in Kent but elsewhere as well) carried with them the feudal duty to supply knights to defend Dover Castle. One of the most important of these landholdings was known in the thirteenth century as the barony of Arsic; Arsic corresponds to the core of the lands held by Wadard at the time of Domesday. The coincidence is slavish and must have been administratively very cumbersome. The implication is that the thirteenth-century arrangements simply followed, and can be used as evidence for the defence of Dover Castle established by Odo. Manors which were held by Wadard from Odo at the time of the Domesday Book in counties as far apart as Surrey, Dorset, Essex, Kent, Oxfordshire, Warwickshire, Wiltshire and Lincolnshire are all found to owe a duty of garrisoning Dover Castle in the thirteenth century, despite their geographical distance from the fortress. The Domesday Book does not generally deal with military service, but there are two entries regarding Wadard that particularly stand out: his lands held from Odo at Combe (in Kent) and at Thames Ditton (in Surrey) are both listed as owing 'the service of one knight'. It is not specified where or for what purpose the knight was owed. But in the later records both Combe and Thames Ditton owed one knight to the Arsic ward for the defence of Dover Castle.
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This does not, of course, prove that Wadard, and still less Vital, defended Dover Castle against Eustace's attack in 1067. What we have suggested is merely an interesting speculation. There is one further point, however, that can be made. It will be recalled that both Wadard and Vital carry lances in the tapestry. The tip of Wadard's lance points rather markedly at one particular letter in his name, a letter which is strangely detached from the rest: the letter 'D'. Vital, too, points to the letter 'D' in the inscription which runs above him. Could 'D' stand for Dover ('Dovere' in Latin documents) and thus be an allusion to their joint defence of Dover Castle?

The hypothesis suggested above offers, for the first time, the prospect of a precise reason for the inclusion of Wadard and Vital in the Bayeux Tapestry and an unexpected glimpse through the fog of history at the events of that autumn morning in 1067 when Count Eustace attacked Dover. Unfortunately, however, it is a hypothesis that can be taken only so far and no further. Like so much of eleventh-century history, we quickly run up against complete silence in the sources and a general paucity of evidence. There are some further known facts about Wadard and Vital, and these provide an alternative line of enquiry.

In the Domesday Book Wadard stands out clearly as a tenant of Bishop Odo of Bayeux, from whose patronage he benefited largely. For his loyalty and obedience to Odo, he was granted land in eight different English counties. One of the largest of Wadard's holdings was at Fringford, which lies just off the modern A421 between Oxford and Buckingham. Wadard was assessed by the Domesday officials as holding ten and a half 'hides' here, which is about 1,260 acres. It is recorded that there were eighteen villagers at Fringford, twelve smallholders, four slaves and two mills. Something is known, too, about Wadard's family. In the Oxfordshire records of the Domesday Book there is mention of one Rainald Wadard, evidently one of Wadard's sons who accompanied him to England in the years after 1066. Rainald held two estates from Odo at Somerton and Fritwell, adjoining his father's estate at Fringford, and one holding each from the monastery of St Mary of Abingdon and Roger of Ivry respectively. It is also known that Wadard had two other sons who are mentioned in the cartulary of Preaux in Normandy, Martin and Simon.

In Wiltshire among Wadard's own holdings, courtesy again of Odo, was part of a larger area known as 'Swinedune', or 'Pig Hill'. Wadard's holding here was assessed at five 'hides', which is about 600 acres. There were five villagers, two smallholders with two ploughs, a mill, a meadow and some pasture land. Before the Battle of Hastings Wadard's Swine­dune estate had been in the hands of an Anglo-Saxon thane named Leofgeat. At that time it was worth £2 annually. By the time of the Domesday survey of 1086 it seems that Wadard had been able to extract £4 per year from the English folk who toiled his land. Not that Wadard would recognise Swinedune today, for his little hamlet worth £4 has since grown and merged into the populous town of Swindon.

At Farningham in Kent Wadard's possession of the manor in 1086 is remembered by the Wadard Morris Men, a troop of traditional English country dancers founded in 1977. They remember Wadard as a knight of the Bayeux Tapestry and as 'the first lord of the manor of Farningham'. In a sense, this is rather unjust to the many previous holders of the land at Farningham under Anglo-Saxon custom long before Wadard arrived in 1066. The name of the last of them, ousted by Wadard, is known, for he is mentioned in the Domesday Book: he was called Alstan. At any rate our Wadard, a battle-scarred veteran of Hastings, would be pleased to learn that his name lives on in the twenty-first century, not only in the Bayeux Tapestry, but in and around the country pubs of west Kent attached to the bells and colourful costumes of the hopping and dancing Wadard Morris Men. In total, Wadard's annual English income, as evidenced by the Domesday Book, was about £130. This sort of wealth, the spoil of conquest, made Wadard a rich man within the ranks of Norman knights. He must have been pleased with the way he had risen in the world. No longer an insignificant knight, he was a man of property who had acquired unaccustomed wealth.

So far we have only spoken of Wadard's holdings granted to him by Bishop Odo. This is natural enough for he was first and foremost, as the Lincolnshire entries tell us, 'Bishop Odo's man'. It was quite common, however, for a knight to hold lands from more than one lord. In the case of Wadard it has often been overlooked that he held additional land in Kent as a tenant of St Augustine's Abbey of Canterbury. This is of interest, of course, since the artistic evidence strongly connects the Bayeux Tapestry with St Augustine's Abbey. Wadard is recorded in the Domesday Book as holding two estates from St Augustine's. The first, assessed at some 300 acres, was at Northbourne, a few miles north of Dover; the second was a similar holding at nearby Mongeham. The Domesday Book records that Wadard needed to render no services to the abbot of St Augustine's for this land. Instead, he paid him 30 shillings (£1.50) annual rent, a sum which was considerably less than that merited by the value of the property (£9). William Thorne, a fourteenth-century chronicler of St Augustine's who had access to older material which is now lost, gives us slightly more information.
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He tells us that Abbot Scolland, the Norman abbot who headed St Augustine's Abbey between 1070 and 1087, granted to a knight called Wadard certain land in Northbourne for life, on condition that he pay every year on the feast of Pentecost the sum of 30 shillings, together with a tenth part of everything he derived from the land. On Wadard's death the estate was to revert to the domain of St Augustine's. Exactly what lay behind this arrangement is lost to history. However, in the context of our quest to uncover the secrets of the Bayeux Tapestry, Wadard's overlooked connection with St Augustine's Abbey may be just as important as his connection with Odo. It raises the question whether Vital was also connected in some way with St Augustine's. Here chance has decreed that rather more evidence has survived.

Once again, because of the fixation with Bishop Odo, Vital's connections with St Augustine's have long been overlooked. Vital's lands as a whole were neither as valuable nor as widespread as those of his companion Wadard; but in addition to holding various estates from Odo in Kent, and also from Lanfranc, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Vital is recorded in the Domesday Book, like Wadard, as holding a small amount of land as a vassal of St Augustine's Abbey. The land in question was at the village of Preston near Canterbury. This, as it turns out, is merely a hint of the substantial ties that existed between Vital, Canterbury and St Augustine's Abbey, ties which by chance are discoverable in other surviving documents.
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In a survey of St Augustine's Abbey, preliminary to the Domesday Book, Vital is actually referred to as 'Vitalis of Canterbury' and is said to have possessed jointly with Ranulf of Colombieres as many as forty-five houses in Canterbury, as a tenant of Bishop Odo, although for purposes of the Domesday survey only twenty-nine of these houses were acknowledged by them. Vital was also remembered as a benefactor of the church in his adopted city. For all his aggression, the typical Norman knight usually subscribed to a God-fearing piety and the weight of guilt for what he had done at Hastings may have soon begun to weigh heavily on Vital's mind. Early in William's reign, the papal legate, Bishop Erminfrid of Sion, had sought to cleanse the Church of guilt for supporting the slaughter at Hastings and had issued a series of regulations prescribing the penances that had to be undergone by those who had inflicted death or injury. Thus a knight was supposed to do a year's penance, of an unspecified nature, for each person he had slain. Where he had inflicted death and injury but was unsure of the exact number of his hapless victims, the regulations obliged him to do penance for one day per week for the rest of his life, or else to build a church. In the mayhem of Hastings, we can well imagine that Vital was unsure quite how many Englishmen he had injured or killed, with that lance and sword we see embroidered in the tapestry, for not long after 1066 we find that he established a church dedicated to St Edmund the Martyr at Ridingate in Canterbury. It is possible that this was in fulfilment of Bishop Ermin-frid's ordinance. At any rate, Vital's choice of an English saint as the patron of his church seems to reveal a surprising degree of assimilation into the world of his new homeland. St Edmund was an Anglo-Saxon king martyred by Danish Vikings in 870, Danes who were distant kinsmen of Normans such as Vital himself. There were perhaps complexities in Vital's character that are not evident from his two-dimensional image in the embroidery.

Vital died soon after the Domesday Survey of 1086. Other documents reveal that his English lands were inherited by a son named Haimo. Like his father, Haimo was remembered as a pious benefactor, for he founded the church of St Mary's Bredin in Canterbury. Vital had another son who became a monk at Rochester and a daughter named Matilda, who married one William Calvellus. At an unknown date before 1086, this William founded a small nunnery dedicated to St Sepulchre just outside the city of Canterbury. Interestingly enough, the land on which the nunnery stood belonged to St Augustine's Abbey and the nuns, though only four in number, appear as the abbey's tenants in the Domesday Book. Theirs was a landholding of only four acres, for which they paid the abbot 'two shillings and one packload of flour'.
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It is conceivable that it was here, at the nunnery founded by Vital's son-in-law, that the Bayeux Tapestry was embroidered, by and under the direction of these nuns, although there is, of course, no proof and the nunnery may have been established after the Tapestry was made.

These clues seem to bring Vital more to life; with each piece of new information, a little part of the fog of history clears. It is only by chance that by far the most intriguing information about Vital was recorded and has survived. We owe this to a monk named Goscelin. Some years before 1066 Goscelin left the Flemish monastery of Saint-Bertin in St-Omer, not far from Boulogne, and settled in England. At first he was attached to the household of Bishop Hermann of Sherborne, but after Hermann died in 1078 Goscelin decided to become an itinerant monk, journeying around the south of England from monastery to monastery, undertaking commissions to write the lives of English saints for the places he visited and winning renown as a talented musician. Finally, in the last decade of the century, he settled at Canterbury in St Augustine's Abbey where he died some time after 1107.
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Being not a Norman, but rather Flemish by origin and English by adoption, Goscelin was able to see the human tragedy of the Norman Conquest for what it was. Thus, around 1080, he wrote to a friend at Angers describing sadly how 'the sons of kings and nobles and proud ones of the land are fettered with manacles and irons . . . How many have lost their lives by the sword or disease, or have been deprived of their eyes, so that when released from prison the common light of the world is a prison for them!' Whilst he was at St Augustine's Goscelin turned his hand to writing an account of the miracles attributed to Saint Augustine himself
(De Miraculis Sancti Augustini).
Coincidentally he reveals in this work some further striking information about Vital. This is in connection with the rebuilding of the abbey, which had been begun in the early 1070s under the incoming Norman abbot Scolland.
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Everywhere the lordly Normans were tearing down old Anglo-Saxon churches and abbeys and rebuilding them in the grander continental style known as Romanesque. The new Norman abbott regarded the existing English buildings at St Augustine's as clumsy and inadequate. He journeyed to Rome in late 1071 and obtained Pope Alexander IPs approval for his plans to rebuild St Augustine's. On his return, these plans were put into practice. The master mason was called Blitherus. Nothing is known of Blitherus (though the name suggests that he came from continental Europe and was perhaps Flemish or Lotharingian).
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Goscelin describes Blitherus as 'the most eminent master of the craftsmen, the remarkable inaugurator of the church'. Large supplies of building material were, of course, required. The Normans favoured the malleable white limestone from the region of Caen, which is evident to this day in the White Tower at the Tower of London. Goscelin informs us that one Vital, who is surely the same man as the knight in the Bayeux Tapestry, was acting as King William's superintendent for the shipping of Caen stone to Westminster where the king's palace was being rebuilt. We also learn from Goscelin that this Vital's piety and efficiency were well known to Abbot Scolland and the monks of St Augustine's at Canterbury. What is more, at some stage, possibly later, Vital took the bold step of joining the confraternity of the abbey as a lay brother. At any rate, when Scolland needed to employ someone to arrange the shipment of Caen stone required at St Augustine's, he turned to Vital.