The Norman Conquest (32 page)

Historians have always had huge problems with this story, and still tend to reject it outright. One of the foremost experts of the last century, Professor R. Allen Brown, found it impossible to believe that William had been personally involved in Harold’s death; not because the duke was uninvolved in the fighting, for everyone accepts that fact. Rather, his objection was that, had William really been
involved so directly in Harold’s death, ‘the feat of arms would have been bruited abroad in every court and
chanson
in Latin Christendom and beyond’.
⁴²

This argument, however, assumes that everyone in Christendom would have regarded the premeditated butchery of a crowned king as acceptable behaviour, which was not necessarily the case. The
Carmen
insists that Harold’s killers acted ‘in accordance with the rules of war’, a statement which by itself suggests that others may have felt that these rules had been broken. One person who may have thought as much was William of Poitiers. In general he is not afraid to contest points of detail with the
Carmen
and offer his own version of what happened. When it comes to Harold’s gory end, however, he offers no denial and no alternative scenario: he simply lapses into silence. With most writers, their silence on a particular point would be a poor foundation on which to build an argument. But with a writer as erudite as William of Poitiers, we can reasonably read more into it. Poitiers wanted to present the duke as measured, merciful and just in all his dealings, and in particular in his pursuit of England’s throne. He did not want to show his hero, whose mission had been sanctioned by the pope, hacking his opponent into pieces. The suspicion that Poitiers tried to suppress the
Carmen’
s version of Harold’s death is reinforced by his similar failure to include the episode involving Taillefer the juggler. Perhaps he thought it unreliable; more likely he considered it shameful – a piece of bloodthirsty barbarism that cast the Normans in a bad light. More pertinent still is the fact we have caught Poitiers at this kind of
suppressio veri
once before, in his account of the taking of the town of Alençon. His source, William of Jumièges, tells us that the duke mutilated the town’s defenders by lopping off their hands and feet, but Poitiers omits all mention of this from his own account. In the case of Harold’s death, therefore, the silence of William of Poitiers, far from undermining our faith in the
Carmen’s
version, could instead be considered to strengthen its credibility. That credibility is also enhanced by the fact that the poem’s author, Guy of Amiens, had close connections with the men he tells us were William’s accomplices.
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Of course, we cannot say for certain how Harold died. Our sources, as ever, are contradictory, and each of them can be regarded as in some way compromised (because they are based on biblical or
classical motifs; because they are inherently biased; because they are better regarded as imaginative works of art rather than sober reportage). We know that at various points in the battle the Normans showered the English with arrows and crossbow bolts, so it is not unlikely that Harold was hit, perhaps fatally, perhaps in the eye. At the same time, we cannot lightly disregard the
Carmen
(as historians have usually done) when it tells us that Harold died in a very different way, deliberately cut down by his enemies. Apart from anything else, a deliberate killing accords well with William’s assumed war-aim. He had risked everything to get an army to England and to bring Harold to battle. After a long day’s fighting, with the autumn light starting to fade, it would have been quite possible for the English king to withdraw, enabling him to fight another day. William could not take that risk; for him it was imperative that his opponent should die before the day was out. Given this fact, it would not be at all surprising if the duke, in the closing stages of the conflict, decided to risk all and lead just the kind of death squad that the
Carmen
describes. By the same token, with the deed accomplished, it would be equally unsurprising if the Normans in general, like William of Poitiers in particular, sought to keep these details quiet. An anonymous arrow in the eye accorded better with the idea that, in the final analysis, Harold’s death had been down to the judgement of God.

12

The Spoils of Victory

T
he night after Hastings was almost as terrible as the day itself. William of Poitiers paints a vivid picture of the English fleeing from the battlefield, ‘some on horses they had seized, some on foot; some along roads, others through untrodden wastes’. These, he makes clear, were the fortunate ones, the lucky unscathed or the lightly wounded. More pitiful is his description of those who wanted to flee but could not: the men lying helpless in their own blood, the maimed who hauled themselves a short distance only to collapse in the woods, where their corpses blocked the escape of others. The Normans pursued them, says Poitiers, slashing at their backs, galloping over their bodies, ‘putting the last touches to the victory’. Yet even the victors died in large numbers that night, their pursuit turning to disaster when they rushed headlong into an unseen obstacle.’ High grass concealed an ancient rampart’, explains Orderic Vitalis, ‘and as the Normans, fully armed on their horses, rode up against it, they fell, one on top of the other, thus crushing each other to death.’ The chronicler of Battle Abbey records that this pit was afterwards known locally as the Malfosse.
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Thus when the sun came up the next morning it revealed an appalling scene. ‘Far and wide the earth was covered with the flower of the English nobility and youth, drenched in blood’, says Poitiers, noting that among them lay Harold’s two brothers, Leofwine and Gyrth, whose bodies were said to have been found close to the king’s own. Beyond this, however, Poitiers gives us a fairly sanitized account. He says little, for instance, of Norman casualties, which must have been considerable. (The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle speaks
of ‘great slaughter on both sides’.) Similarly, we hear nothing about the routine medieval practice whereby the dead were deprived of their valuables, yet we know from other sources that this had been happening even before the end of the battle. (The Bayeux Tapestry, for example, shows in its margins men being stripped of their expensive mail shirts.) Most interestingly, we see Poitiers implicitly contesting a statement made by the author of the
Carmen
, who says that while William buried his own dead, he left the bodies of the English ‘to be eaten by worms and wolves, by birds and dogs’. Nothing too surprising there, you might think, considering the labour that burying thousands of Englishmen would entail, but Poitiers was determined to depict his master in the best possible moral light, however much it contradicted military common sense. Leaving the dead unburied, we are told, ‘seemed cruel’ to the Conqueror, who accordingly allowed any who wished to recover their relatives’ remains to do so.
²

But not the remains of Harold. As Poitiers and several other sources make plain, the king’s corpse was in a very bad state, stripped of all its valuables, and so hacked about the face that it could be recognized only by ‘certain marks’. According to the twelfth-century tradition at Waltham Abbey, the task of confirming his identity required the presence of Harold’s sometime partner, Edith Swan-Neck, ‘for she had been admitted to a greater intimacy of his person’.
³
In contemporary accounts, by contrast, it is the king’s mother, Gytha, who appears amid the carnage to plead for the return of her son’s body. Despite allegedly offering its weight in gold (a detail provided by the
Carmen
and kept by Poitiers), her request was refused, William angrily replying that it would be inappropriate for Harold to be interred while countless others lay unburied on his account. This directly contradicts the later tradition that the king was buried at Waltham, and both Poitiers and the
Carmen
state that his remains were buried on the summit of a nearby cliff, under a mocking inscription which suggested that he could in this way still guard the seashore. It is not impossible that Harold was removed to Waltham at some later date; but had he been granted a Christian burial in 1066, we can be sure that William of Poitiers in particular would have let us know about it.

So the king was dead; long live the king? The
Carmen
says that, with Harold thus entombed, William ‘renounced the title of duke
[and] assumed the royal style’, but Poitiers once again offers a pointed rebuttal: the victor
could
have gone on immediately to London, placed the crown on his head and rewarded his followers with the booty, slaying Englishmen or driving them into exile;
but
, we are told, ‘he preferred to act more moderately, and rule with greater clemency’. Both comments, of course, are equally nonsensical. There was no rule that said the man who killed a king must automatically replace him, nor was William in any position to march on Westminster. He had won a great victory, and succeeded in what we take to be a deliberate strategy of decapitation. But when Poitiers, even in what is obviously a rhetorical passage, suggests that’ the forces of Normandy had subjugated all the cities of the English in a single day’, the effect is unintentionally comic. The truth was that, apart from Pevensey and Hastings, every town and city in England still remained to be taken.
⁴

In London, for example, the streets were teeming. ‘A crowd of warriors from elsewhere had flocked there’, says Poitiers in a more prosaic mode, ‘and the city, in spite of its great size, could scarcely accommodate them all.’ Some of these men were doubtless the troops summoned by Harold that had not arrived by the time of his premature departure. Others were survivors from Hastings – ‘the obstinate men who had been defeated in battle’, as the
Carmen
calls them. Their collective mood was determined and defiant. The
Carmen
speaks of their ‘hope of being able to live there in freedom for a long time’, while Poitiers goes even further, saying ‘it was indeed their highest wish to have no king who was not a compatriot’.
⁵

With Harold gone, there was only one plausible candidate. ‘Archbishop Ealdred and the citizens of London wished to have Edgar Ætheling as king’, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘as indeed was his right by birth.’ The great-nephew of Edward the Confessor, last of the ancient royal line, Edgar did indeed have a better claim than anybody else. Yet, as events at the start of the year had shown, a teenager with a strong claim could easily be elbowed aside by a powerful man with a weak one. Support from the archbishop of York, who had led the mission to bring Edgar’s father home from Hungary, was useful, as was the allegiance of the Londoners. But for the boy to have any hope of success he would need friends with more muscle.

The only individuals in London that autumn in a position to
lend such strength were Eadwine and Morcar, the brother earls of Mercia and Northumbria, last seen losing the battle of Fulford several weeks earlier. What they had been doing in the meantime is frustratingly unclear: contemporary sources make no mention of them until this point, and later ones are contradictory. Orderic Vitalis, for example, states categorically that they had not fought at Hastings, whereas John of Worcester implies that they had, but withdrew before its bloody conclusion. On reaching London their first thought was reportedly to get Harold’s widow, Ealdgyth – their sister – out of harm’s way, to which end they sent her north to Chester; but they also gave their backing to Edgar Ætheling. ‘Eadwine and Morcar promised they would fight for him’, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
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None of this, of course, can have been known to William in the days immediately after the battle. Having buried his own dead, the duke had withdrawn to Hastings, where he waited, in the words of the Chronicle, ‘to see if there would be any surrender’. According to the
Carmen
he stayed there for a fortnight, but no surrender came. ‘When he realized that none were willing to come to him’, says the Chronicle, ‘he marched inland with what was left of his host.’

William began his march by heading east along the coast. His first stop was the town of Romney, where, says Poitiers, ‘he inflicted such punishment as he thought fit for the slaughter of his men who had landed there by mistake’ – an interesting, belated indication of the dangers the Normans had risked by crossing the Channel at night. Presumably leaving the charred remains of Romney behind him, the duke proceeded further along the coast to Dover. ‘A great multitude had gathered there’, says Poitiers, ‘because the place seemed impregnable’, and both he and the
Carmen
devote several lines to describing the defensive advantages of the rocky headland on which Dover Castle now stands. As the Normans approached, though, the defenders lost heart and surrendered. More burning followed when the town was occupied, which Poitiers insists was accidental, and blames on the lower ranks of the duke’s army, greedy for plunder.

William remained at Dover for some time: a month according to the
Carmen
, though Poitiers, perhaps more credibly, implies it might have been just over a week. One reason was his reported desire to strengthen the site’s existing defences (some historians would date the origins of Dover Castle from this point); another may have been
the need to wait for the ‘reinforcements from overseas’ referred to by the D Chronicle. Despite the losses suffered at Hastings, William’s army was clearly still formidably large. Too large, perhaps: during their stay at Dover, some of his men resorted to drinking water and eating freshly killed meat, which led to an outbreak of dysentery and in due course many deaths. Their high-risk diet indicates that supplies of more suitable foodstuffs must have run short, and reminds us of a fundamental point: the Normans were living off the land, and needed to keep foraging and ravaging in order to remain alive. A short time later, Poitiers tells us, William himself fell ill, but despite the concern of those close to him he pushed on, ‘lest the army should suffer from a shortage of supplies’.
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