The Norman Conquest (2 page)

Precise information about the Tapestry’s creation is entirely lacking, but it is as good as certain that it was made within a decade or so of the events it depicts, and that its place of manufacture was Canterbury (many of its scenes and motifs are based on illustrations in surviving Canterbury manuscripts). We can be almost as certain – despite a host of other far less convincing candidates having been proposed over the years – that its patron was the aforementioned Bishop Odo, who is self-importantly portrayed throughout as being the driving force behind the planning and execution of the invasion.
Odo’s patronage, of course, would explain how the Tapestry came to reside in Bayeux, his episcopal city, and also fits well with its creation in Canterbury, since he was made earl of Kent immediately after the Conquest.
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By any law of averages, the Tapestry ought not to exist. We know that such elaborate wall-hangings, while hardly commonplace in the eleventh century, were popular enough with the elite that could afford them, because we have descriptions in contemporary documents. What we
don’t
have are other surviving examples: all that comes down to us in other cases are a few sorry-looking scraps. That the Tapestry is still with us almost 1,000 years after it was sewn is astonishing, especially when one considers its later history. It first appears in the written record four centuries after its creation, in 1476, when it is described in an inventory of the treasury at Bayeux Cathedral, from which we learn that the clergy were in the habit of hanging it around the nave every year during the first week of July (an annual airing that would have aided its conservation). Its survival through those four medieval centuries, escaping the major hazards of war, fire and flood, as well as the more mundane menaces of rodents, insects and damp, is wondrous enough; that it successfully avoided destruction during the modern era is nothing short of miraculous. When the cathedral’s treasury was looted during the French Revolution, the Tapestry came within a hair’s breadth of being cut up and used to cover military wagons. Carted to Paris for exhibition by Napoleon, it was eventually returned to Bayeux, where for several years during the early nineteenth century it was indifferently stored in the town hall on a giant spindle, so that curious visitors could unroll it (and occasionally cut bits off). During the Second World War it had yet more adventures: taken again to Paris by the Nazis, it narrowly escaped being sent to Berlin, and somehow managed to emerge unscathed from the flames and the bombs. The Tapestry’s post-medieval history is a book in itself— one which, happily, has already been written.
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And yet, wonderful as it is in its own right, the Tapestry is not without its limitations as a historical source. In the first place, despite its remarkable condition, it is sadly incomplete, breaking off abruptly after the death of King Harold. Secondly, as we have already noted, some of its scenes are drawn not from observation but copied from illustrations in older manuscripts, which obviously greatly reduces
their value if we are concerned about recovering historical reality. Thirdly, despite the fact it seems to have been made for a Norman patron, the Tapestry is curiously (and probably deliberately) noncommittal in its portrayal of events; although most of its scenes have captions, these too are for the most part wilfully obscure or ambiguous. Take, for example, the question of when it begins: most historians believe that the story starts in 1064, but the fact that they cannot say for certain is indicative of the wider problem. Lastly, the story that the Tapestry tells is inevitably selective and in places demonstrably inaccurate; some events are left out and others are deliberately distorted. No other source, for example, suggests that Harold swore his famous oath to William at Bayeux, or that it was Odo who heroically turned the tide for the Normans during the Battle of Hastings. The Tapestry, it bears repeating, is really an embroidery.
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We are able to expose such distortions in the Tapestry’s story because, fortunately, we have other sources to help us work out what happened: documentary ones such as chronicles, charters and letters, as well as non-documentary ones in the form of art, architecture and archaeology. Scholars who study the Early Middle Ages (the half-millennium, say, before 1066) will tell you that collectively these sources constitute an immensely rich corpus – and this is true, at least in comparison with other regions of Europe in the eleventh century, and with earlier centuries in England. But then scholars who work in these fields can usually get all their primary source material on a single shelf and still have room for ornaments. To scholars who cut their teeth studying later medieval centuries (or to this one at least) the sources for the Norman Conquest can sometimes seem woefully impoverished.

As an example— one I’ve used in tones of increasing despair while writing this book— consider the evidence base for eleventh-century English kings compared with their thirteenth-century successors. My previous book was about Edward I, who ruled England from 1272 to 1307, a period of thirty-five years. Thanks to a massive number of surviving government documents from that time— literally thousands of closely written parchment rolls— we can say where Edward was for almost every day of his reign: his itinerary, compiled and published in the 1970s, runs to three large volumes of print. Now compare and contrast the itinerary of William the Conqueror, king of England from 1066 to 1087: expressed in
terms of precise dates and places, it runs to a grand total of three printed pages. Most of the time, we simply have no idea where William was; sometimes we cannot even say for certain whether he was in England or Normandy at any given point. This is because, apart from the Domesday Book (the other miraculous survival in this story), government archive from the Conqueror’s reign is nonexistent. Where we have official documents it is because they have been kept or copied by other institutions— chiefly by monasteries that received charters from the king commemorating and confirming grants of land or other privileges. Naturally, at a distance of over 900 years, the survival rate for such documents is not good. And even where such documents have survived, they are rarely dated more precisely than the particular year they were issued, and often not dated at all. The upshot is that, in the case of William the Conqueror – one of the most famous figures in English history, and obviously a major character in this book— we are barely able to say where he was from one year to the next.
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Fortunately, given this dearth of administrative documents, we also have chronicles – again, mostly thanks to the diligence of monks. These contemporary histories can help put considerable amounts of flesh on what would otherwise be very bare bones, providing us with facts, dates, anecdotes and opinions. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, our most important source for the history of England during this period, has much to say about events before and after the Conquest, and without it our understanding would be infinitely poorer. At the same time, the Chronicle can on occasion remain infuriatingly tightlipped. Its entry for the year 1084, for instance, reproduced in full, reads: ‘In this year passed away Wulfwold, abbot of Chertsey, on 19 April.’ For other years— crucial years— it has no entries at all.
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Another major problem with contemporary accounts is their bias. All of the writers in this period are churchmen, and as such are prone to interpreting the turn of events as the unfolding of God’s will. More insuperably, some of these accounts are extremely partisan. The story of the Conquest is full of dramatic reversals of fortune and often quite despicable deeds; in several instances, the key players in the drama sought to justify their actions by commissioning what are essentially propaganda pieces. Some of our most important sources, including the Bayeux Tapestry, fall into this category and have to be handled with extreme caution.

Because of the shortcomings of the source material, it is often difficult, and sometimes impossible, to say exactly what happened— which, of course, makes it tough if you are trying to construct a narrative history. For this reason, many books about the Conquest concentrate on a discussion of the sources themselves, examining them from every angle, and explaining how different historians have arrived at different interpretations. Some of these books are excellent, but others are a bewildering mix of analysis and opinion, some strictly contemporary, some slightly later, some drawn from earlier scholarship and some the author’s own, the overall effect of which is to leave the reader confused and exhausted, unsure about who or what to believe. The alternative approach is to tell the story in an entirely straightforward fashion, banishing all debate and controversy to the back of the book. Such was the method of Edward Augustus Freeman, who wrote a giant history of the Norman Conquest in the late nineteenth century. As he explained in a letter to a friend, serious academic discussion was strictly for the appendices: ‘I have to make my text a narrative which I hope may be intelligible to girls and curates.’
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Not wanting to baffle the uninitiated, but equally anxious not to offend female readers or members of the lower clergy, I have tried to steer a middle course between these two extremes, and create what might be called a justified narrative. Rather than discuss all the source material separately at the end of the book, I have introduced each source as the story progresses – without, I hope, sacrificing too much forward momentum.

Readers can rest assured I haven’t left out the juicy bits. I say this because there are some who assume that historians seek to keep these bits to themselves, like the best silver, to be brought out only in academic seminars. If I had a pound for every time I’ve heard a comment along the lines of ‘I would have liked to know more about his wife/children/private life/emotional state’, I might not be a rich man, but I would probably be able to go out for a nice meal. We would
all
like to know more about these topics, but for the most part they remain closed to us. One of the frustrations of travelling back almost a millennium into the past is precisely that many of the characters we encounter are two-dimensional. Often they are no more than names on a page— shadows cast by a single, flickering flame. There are
kings
in this story for whom we do not possess a
reliable contemporary description – not even so much as an adjective. Any attempt to discuss their personalities would be idle speculation. As William of Poitiers, our most important Norman source, explains at one point, poets are allowed to amplify their knowledge in any way they like by roaming through the fields of fiction. So too are the historical novelists of our own day, and goodness knows there are enough of them if such invented detail is desired. In this respect alone I sympathize with Professor Freeman (an otherwise deeply unsympathetic character) who, having completed his massive six-volume history of the Conquest, received an enquiry from a painter, wanting to know what the weather had been like on the day of the Battle of Hastings. ‘What odd things people do ask!’ he exclaimed in a letter to a friend. ‘As if I should not have put it into my story if I had known.’
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So I’ve put in the good stuff where it is known. I have also tried to be as fair and balanced as possible. There is still a widespread assumption with the Norman Conquest that the Normans are ‘them’ and the English are ‘us’. The Normans, it goes without saying, are the villains of the piece, responsible for introducing into England bad things like feudalism and the class system. The notion persists that pre-Conquest England had been a much nicer place – freer, more liberal, with representative institutions and better rights for women. Thus the Conquest is still regarded in many quarters a national tragedy.
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But almost all of this is myth. It arises not from contemporary evidence, but from opinions passed on the Conquest in later centuries. In the case of the status of women, it arose as recently as the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when it was argued that before the coming of the Normans women had better legal rights, allowing them to control their own property and to have a say in whom they married. The period before 1066 was imagined as a golden age, when women and men rubbed shoulders in rough and ready equality, only to be ended by the coming of the nasty Normans. Latterly, however, these arguments have been comprehensively discredited. The reality is that women were no worse off under the Normans than they had been under the Anglo-Saxons; they simply had a bad time both before and after 1066.
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Certainly, Englishmen at the time were extremely sore about being conquered by the Normans. ‘They built castles far and wide
throughout the land, oppressing the unhappy people, and things went ever from bad to worse,’ wept the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in 1067. ‘When God wills may the end be good!’ But, as we shall see, the English had largely overcome these feelings by the end of the twelfth century. The notion that the Conquest ushered in new and enduring forms of oppression for Englishmen is the work of writers and propagandists working in later periods. It began to develop as early as the thirteenth century, when Normandy and England were once again ruled by different dynasties, after which time the English began to develop a hatred of France that lasted for the rest of the Middle Ages and beyond. It was given a further twist in the seventeenth century, in the struggle between Parliament and Crown, when Parliamentarians went looking for a golden age of English liberties, found it in the Anglo-Saxon era, and declared the absolutism of the Crown to be a Norman creation. Although this view was challenged at the time, Parliament’s triumph ensured that it remained the dominant one for the next two centuries. It was championed by Freeman who, like many men of his day and age, despised everything French and Norman and considered all things German and Anglo-Saxon to be pure and virtuous. Freeman’s
History of the Norman Conquest
was, indeed, so obviously biased in favour of the English that it provoked instant reaction from other academics, most notably John Horace Round, who spoke up in defence of the Normans.
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Since then scholars have tended to support one side or the other, Saxon or Norman, even to the extent of declaring which side they would have fought on had they been present at Hastings.
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