Queen of the Conqueror: The Life of Matilda, Wife of William I (20 page)

Hardrada had been surprised by Harold at Stamford Bridge, but William was not to suffer the same fate: his scouts had spotted Harold’s arrival. His men stood at arms all night, and on the morning of October 14 they moved up from Hastings. In fact, it was Harold who was caught by surprise, and abandoning his plans for an attack, he took up a defensive position on Senlac Ridge and awaited the Norman onslaught.

The two armies that faced each other were very different. Although many of Harold’s men seem to have traveled on horseback, the English traditionally fought on foot, and they did so at Hastings. Harold’s soldiers formed up in tightly packed ranks behind a wall of shields, the dragon banner of Wessex and the king’s personal standard of a fighting man fluttering above them. The bulk of Harold’s army was probably made up of the
fyrd
, the local militia of the time, armed with spears, swords, javelins, and throwing axes. The Saxon nobles present at the battle would have brought their household troops, or “housecarls,” with them; some of these well-armed warriors carried the deadly Danish two-handed axes shown being used to such devastating effect in the Bayeux Tapestry.

William’s army was more varied: it deployed with archers and cross-bowmen to the front, armored infantry behind them and mounted knights in mail with lances and kite-shaped shields bringing up the rear. This diversity was to work in favor of the Normans, for while all the English could do was to stand there and take whatever their enemies threw at them, William had a range of tactical options. He could use his archers to unleash a barrage of arrows on the static English lines, then attack with his infantry while his knights probed for a weakness in the English shield wall. As a result, although the English had the advantage of occupying a strong defensive position on the top of a hill, and drove back attack after attack, they were gradually eroded by the relentless Norman pressure.

Even so, the contest was very finely balanced. Each side fought with extraordinary tenacity, and the battle lasted for most of the day, resulting in “great slaughter on either side.”
⁵⁰
According to William of Poitiers,
who was admittedly writing to extol William’s virtues, the Norman leader played a crucial role throughout—not just directing his troops from a distance, but leading by example and fighting with great ferocity in the thick of the action. When a rumor that he had been killed spread panic in his army, he was said to have taken his helmet off and ridden among his men crying: “Look at me. I am alive, and with God’s help I will conquer.”
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Malmesbury records how the duke “encouraged his men by his shouts and by his presence, leading the charge in person and plunging into the thick of the enemy; so that while he carried rage and fury everywhere, three splendid horses were cut down under him.”
⁵²

William’s cunning matched his courage. When the battle seemed to be going against him, he gave the order to retreat. In fact, this was a clever ploy to break up the Saxon ranks, some of whom charged in pursuit of what they thought was a beaten and retreating enemy. Without warning, the Normans turned on them and a bloodbath ensued.
⁵³
Although they had been “undone by a trick,” the English fought on: “repeatedly they made a stand, and piled the bodies of their pursuers in great heaps of slaughter.”
⁵⁴
The decisive moment came late in the day, when the English king was slain. Legend has it he was killed by an arrow in the eye, but other sources suggest he was cut down by a group of knights, possibly after having been wounded by the arrow.
⁵⁵

Realizing that the battle was lost, scores of Harold’s beleaguered men turned on their heels and tried to escape, running into the woods so that their enemy might lose sight of them. Some turned and faced their pursuers at a ravine that is sometimes called the Malfosse, or “evil ditch.” But it was to no avail. “The Normans, though strangers to the district, pursued them relentlessly, slashing their guilty backs and putting the last touches to the victory.”
⁵⁶
Their leader, William, Duke of Normandy, would henceforth be known as William the Conqueror.

H
astings, as decisive as it was, marked the start, not the end, of William’s campaign to conquer England. It would be nearly five years before he was finally able to establish full control over the country. Even so, it was at this battle that the English lost not only their most effective leader, but also their best chance of turning back the Norman invader.

This was something that Englishmen of the time were all too well aware of, and the half-English William of Malmesbury later described the “day of destiny” as “a fatal disaster for our dear country as she exchanged old masters for new.”
¹
The chroniclers estimate that as many as fifteen thousand men perished in the battle. While this figure was again almost certainly an exaggeration, it had clearly been one of the bloodiest and hardest-fought conflicts that England had ever seen.
²
“The fields were covered with corpses, and all around the only colour to meet the gaze was blood-red. It looked from afar as if rivulets of blood, flowing down from all sides, had filled the valleys, just like a river.”
³
The battle had wiped out much of the English ruling elite: “The mangled bodies that had been the flower of the English nobility and youth covered the ground as far as the eye could see.”
⁴
As well as Harold, his brothers Leofwine and Gyrth had been killed, and “many good men.”
⁵
The victorious duke of Normandy ordered the burial of all his fallen men, but he left the English dead unburied, “to be eaten by worms and wolves, by birds
and dogs.”
⁶
He defended this apparently callous action on the grounds that they had supported a tyrant and did not therefore deserve a Christian burial. Neither did he accede to a request by Harold’s grieving mother that she might be given her son’s body so that she could arrange a fitting burial. According to Orderic, even when she offered him “Harold’s weight in gold for his body,” William angrily refused.
⁷

A rash of Norman accounts appeared soon after the battle, praising William as a magnificent warrior and justifying the cruelty of his actions. The size of the English army grew with each telling, so that the feat of the Normans appeared all the more remarkable. Tales of cowardice and disorganization among Harold’s men were contrasted with Norman bravery and tactical brilliance. Writing almost sixty years later, Malmesbury decried the bias with which the story of the battle had been told: “Those men seem to me wrong who exaggerate the number of the English and diminish their courage, thus bringing discredit on the Normans whom they mean to praise. A mighty commendation indeed! That a most warlike nation should conquer a set of people who were disorganised because of their numbers, and fearful through cowardice! On the contrary, they were few in number and brave in the extreme, who disregarded the love of their own bodies and laid down their lives for their country.”
⁸

The reports that were sent back to Normandy in the immediate aftermath of the battle were no less biased than those of which Malmesbury complained. Among the first to hear the news was Matilda. She was in the Benedictine priory of Nôtre Dame du Pré, a small chapel that she had founded in 1060 on the banks of the river Seine near Rouen, praying for William’s safety, when a messenger arrived with the news. Upon hearing it, she joyfully proclaimed that the priory should henceforth be known as Nôtre Dame de Bonnes Nouvelles (Our Lady of Good News).
⁹
She had good reason to rejoice, for she was now queen of England—an honor that she could not possibly have hoped for when she had agreed to become the wife of “William the Bastard” some fifteen years earlier.

Determined to celebrate her husband’s success and revel in her exalted new status, Matilda embarked upon a series of well-planned public gestures. She made a number of high-profile—and extremely generous—religious bequests, giving thanks to God for her husband’s victory. Orderic
Vitalis wrote admiringly: “The alms which this princess daily distributed with such zeal brought more succour than I can express to her husband, struggling on the field of battle.”
¹⁰
It might have been at Matilda’s command that in 1068 her chaplain,
¹¹
Guy, bishop of Amiens, composed an epic poem—
Carmen de Hastingae Praelio
—“praising and exalting William” and “abusing and condemning Harold.”
¹²
The theme that ran throughout this piece of blatant Norman propaganda was that the duke had only taken what was rightfully his. The prologue declares: “For manfully he recovered a kingdom of which he had been deprived, and by his victory extended the boundaries of his ancestral lands across the sea—a deed worthy to be remembered forever.”
¹³
Throughout the poem, William is hailed as a triumphant leader, comparable to Caesar, whose nobility and virtue excelled those of all his contemporaries.
¹⁴
It is a straightforward tale of hero versus villain, usurper versus rightful king.

According to popular legend, Matilda’s most powerful and iconic commemoration of the Battle of Hastings was the Bayeux Tapestry, which told the story of the battle from a Norman perspective and reinforced the justice of William’s claim to the English throne. For many years, it was assumed that it was the work of the duchess and her ladies, an idea recorded by the Benedictine historian Bernard de Montfaucon, who discovered the Bayeux Tapestry in the late 1720s. He subsequently published a reproduction of it in his
Monuments de la monarchie française
, in which he reported: “The common opinion in Bayeux is that Queen Matilda, wife of William the Conqueror, had the tapestry made. This opinion passes for a tradition in the region. It seems highly probable.”
¹⁵
His theory was soon widely accepted, and gained greater currency when it was reiterated—and embellished—by the prolific nineteenth-century historian Agnes Strickland in her Queens of England series.
¹⁶
It has since proved remarkably enduring, to the extent that most French people today know the work not as “La Tapisserie de Bayeux” but “La Tapisserie de la Reine Mathilde.” Indeed, a modern-day visitor to Bayeux will encounter numerous references to Matilda as being the orchestrator of the work—from the Hotel Reine Mathilde to a plaque outside the museum that houses the tapestry bearing her name.

That Matilda was responsible for the Bayeux Tapestry is in many respects a natural assumption to make. It was customary for queens and
noble ladies to embroider hangings for churches or monasteries depicting the glorious successes of their families. Bertha, wife of Matilda’s grandfather, Robert the Pious of France, commissioned just such a hanging for the abbey of St.-Denis. Meanwhile, Duchess Gunnor, wife of Duke Richard I of Normandy, presented an exquisite embroidery in silk and linen to the church of Nôtre-Dame in Rouen.

It would therefore have been entirely commensurate with Matilda’s role as a dutiful wife to the Conqueror, eager to promote his successes, that she should have commissioned the Bayeux Tapestry. The image of the new queen of England and her ladies assiduously working on the tapestry during their idle hours while their husbands completed the obliteration of the Saxon kingdom fits neatly with the conventional view of women’s role in society. Moreover, Matilda certainly was an accomplished seamstress, having been taught the art of embroidery as a young woman in her parents’ household, and she bequeathed some fine needlework in her will.

Beguiling though the image conjured up by Montfaucon and Strickland is, however, it is fundamentally flawed. There is no doubt that Matilda had been a dutiful wife up until this point, and she was shrewd enough to realize the importance of justifying William’s tenuous claim to the English throne. But in the aftermath of his victory, she was fully preoccupied with the regency of Normandy, so the notion that she was able to idle away countless hours sewing with her ladies is questionable in the extreme. At best, she might have commissioned the tapestry and set her female attendants to work on it, providing only occasional supervision.