1000 Years of Annoying the French

by Stephen Clarke

  Unluckily for Wido, his superior in the feudal system, William, heard about the windfall and decreed that the hostage was his. Which was true – as Duke of Normandy, William’s rights included ownership of anything that washed up on the beach, including numerous whale carcasses, which were a valuable source of oils and ivory.*

  As a prisoner of his Norman rival, Harold might well have feared for his life, but he was probably in little danger of receiving a sword stroke as a welcoming gift. William didn’t usually kill his well-born enemies unless they were no longer useful to him or made a joke about the leather industry. He preferred to make them swear an oath of feudal fealty, which meant that they were obliged, on pain of death and/or eternal barbecuing in the fires of hell, to give him a percentage of everything they earned and help him defend his territory should the need arise. In short, he butchered the poor enemies and milked the rich ones.

  With Harold, there was even more to be won – an oath of allegiance would sideline the Godwin family as contenders for the English Crown, because they would have to step aside for their superior, William. In the tapestry, you can almost hear the Norman chuckling as an abashed Harold swears eternal loyalty to William. According to Saxon sources, Harold didn’t know as he gave his oath that holy relics were hidden under the table, turning the simple promise into a sacred vow. But to William and the Normans, Harold’s ignorance wouldn’t have mattered. People were very literal about their religion in those days. If you swore on a saint’s funny bone that you would do something, you had to do it, otherwise a plague of monster fleas would crawl inside your army’s chainmail. In Norman eyes, Harold’s oath was binding, with God as a witness.

  William tightened the screws even further by betrothing Harold to his daughter Aélis, even though she was already formally engaged to a local nobleman – thus proving that all Norman oaths were binding, but some were more binding than others.

  With Harold now inextricably bound over to submit to William’s claim to the English throne, he was finally allowed to sail home to England. The tapestry shows Harold hunched apologetically as he tells his tale to King Edward, who points at him accusingly, as if to say, ‘What, you went to Normandy and you didn’t bring me any Camembert?’

  The audio commentary talks about Harold’s ‘humiliation’, but if Harold’s mission really was to tell William he was going to be king, where is the humiliation? He had delivered his message and even sworn allegiance to the future King William. The trip took a bit longer than expected, and he forgot to bring presents, but it went exactly as planned.

  On the other hand, Harold had every reason to be bowed if he had failed in his mission to fetch his relatives – not only had he returned alone, he’d also got himself tricked into swearing homage to William when Edward was grooming him, Harold, as successor to the throne.

  We will never know the truth, but one thing is certain – when Edward the Confessor died on 5 January 1066, Harold accepted the Witangemot’s nomination and became the legally appointed King of England. Across the Channel, William’s self-congratulatory chuckles turned into threats of legal action. Harold had sworn allegiance, in front of witnesses and on a saint’s funny bone, and could not therefore claim the throne ahead of him. The Normans immediately began to accuse the new King of oath-breaking, feudalism’s most heinous crime.

  Harold didn’t need to hire expensive lawyers to dream up a credible defence, though – what hostage is going to refuse to take an oath to a man who is holding him hostage? And what jurisdiction did this Norman foreigner have in England?

  Sensing perhaps that Harold might have a case, Duke William of Normandy even went so far as to plead for support from the Holy Church. (Yes, the same Holy Church whose ruling he had ignored when he wanted to marry his cousin.) As a reward for this newfound piety, the Pope sent William a consecrated banner that figures prominently in the tapestry, much like a sponsor’s logo on a Formula One racer’s overalls: ‘This invasion is brought to you by God’, or a message to that effect.

  Also very visible in the tapestry is what looks like a kite in the shape of a fried egg. This is Halley’s Comet, which appeared at the end of April 1066, and was of course claimed by the Normans as a sign from God that Harold was an evil oath-breaker and had to be ousted by the righteous, God-fearing William, who was, as it happened, just setting off to do the ousting.

  These same omen-seekers conveniently ignored the storm that blew the Norman invasion fleet back to France and forced them to take refuge for two weeks before attempting another Channel crossing. And when the fleet finally landed in Hastings on 28 September 1066, there was another potentially bad omen – as William strode to shore, he fell flat on his face, and had to calm his superstitious troops’ fear by saying, ‘I have seized England in my two hands.’

  The tapestry is curiously anti-Norman when it describes the landing. A gang of builders spend as much time brawling as they do constructing William’s first stockade. There are also poignant depictions of Norman pillaging – soldiers rustle cattle, a shepherd boy tries to fend off huge knights who are stealing his sheep, and a house burns as a woman pleads for mercy.

  Knowing a little about William the Conqueror, it is hard to believe he ever saw these images on the tapestry. But perhaps he simply skipped the first half of the story, because the battle scenes were just about to begin …

  Step 3: Bring out the weapons of mass destruction

  Never let it be said that the English are bad losers, or that we offer feeble excuses to explain away our defeats. When we lost to Argentina in the 1986 World Cup, for example, it really was because Maradona cheated by scoring a goal with his fist. The TV pictures prove it, otherwise we would never complain.

  However, the Battle of Hastings, on 14 October 1066, is a bit of an exception, because the Normans would never have won if Harold had been able to field a full-strength team. He had so many star performers out of action, either wounded or dead, that it was always going to be an uphill battle.*

  In the two weeks prior to Hastings, Harold had marched his army from London to Yorkshire to face the invasion force of another rival to the throne, the ferocious Viking Harald Hardrada.

  Harold met Harald at Stamford Bridge on 25 September by the river Derwent near York. The battle, it is said, got off to a bad start for the English when a single Viking stubbornly blocked the entrance to the bridge, killing forty or so of Harold’s troops as they tried to cross. Eventually, an English soldier paddled downriver in a barrel, stopped under the bridge, and, thrusting his spear upwards between the planks, spiked the Viking in the groin. Not very sporting, perhaps, but technically the guy was holding up play.

  The ensuing battle was horrifically bloody, and cost the lives of many of Harold’s best men, but at the end of it, he had effectively smashed the enemy once and for all. Chroniclers record that the fleeing Viking survivors filled only two dozen of the 300 longships that they had arrived in.

  After all this exertion, Harold’s remaining troops then had to march south again – yet another week’s hard slog – to face William, who was living the good life, robbing helpless Sussex peasants and having beach barbecues with the fruits of his pillaging, as well as the meat and vegetables.

  The Normans had another advantage over Harold’s exhausted army. The Bayeux Tapestry devotes about a quarter of its 70 metres to pictures of Norman knights charging around the Hastings district on their horses. Harold’s soldiers fought on foot. The only horses they possessed were little Shetland-type ponies used as beasts of burden, which would have been no use in battle except to distract an enemy by making him laugh. The Normans, on the other hand, were trained in cavalry warfare, and arrived with shiploads of sleek battle horses that had had plenty of time to get over their seasickness.

  The tapestry also makes much of the shower of arrows that hailed down on Harold, one of them eventually finding its mark and killing him. A frieze covering the best part of four panels shows a long line of Norman archers supporting the cavalry wit
h their fire, while small groups of brave Anglo-Saxons, sometimes without armour or shields, defend their hilltop. The Anglo-Saxons didn’t generally use archers en masse – they believed in the concept of man against man, axe against axe, two warriors face to face in mortal combat.* William would have none of this – it was much less tiring and risky to pincushion the Anglo-Saxons with arrows and then trample the survivors under the hooves of his cavalry.

  In short, the Battle of Hastings was like two boxers meeting to contest the European Heavyweight crown, when one of them has just been forced to run a marathon and go fifteen rounds with the World Champion while the other was lounging about at the pool and doing some light sparring against schoolboys. And no sooner have the boxers climbed into the ring than one of them pulls out a grenade launcher and blows his opponent to smithereens.

  Not, of course, that one would want to use all this as an excuse for an English defeat.

  As it was, against all the odds, Harold came astonishingly close to winning the battle. His men may have been tired, but they were determined to kick these new invaders off their land. The Norman chronicler Wace says that when the fighting began, the Normans called out, ‘God be with us!’ to which the Saxons replied, ‘Get out!’ Though, being Anglo-Saxons, their actual words were probably a lot more colourful.

  At first, things didn’t go William’s way. He had numerical superiority – around 8,000 troops compared to Harold’s 7,500 – but the Anglo-Saxons had secured an advantageous position on a hilltop. The first wave of Norman arrows plunked harmlessly into a wall of shields, and the follow-up infantry attack was bounced back down the hill, suffering horrendous casualties. Even the first cavalry charge failed, with the Norman horses shying away from the howling mob of axe-wielding Anglo-Saxons. William’s own mount was felled under him, and as soon as he got to his feet he had to lift his helmet and show his face to stop his men giving in to panic.

  It was at this point that, according to pro-Norman legend, William pulled off his master-stroke. Seeing that large numbers of Anglo-Saxons had charged down the hill after the retreating cavalrymen, the Norman is said to have staged a fake, full-scale withdrawal, tempting even more of his enemies to break ranks and leave the hilltop. As soon as the Anglo-Saxons were exposed on open ground, the cavalry turned and cut them down.

  There is, however, a slightly more credible explanation for what happened. True, a large number of Harold’s men did career down the hill, hacking away at fleeing Normans, and they did a great deal of damage. One section of William’s army, mostly made up of Bretons, retreated in disarray, forcing their Norman colleagues to withdraw in parallel to stop the Anglo-Saxons wheeling around and surrounding them. And this seems to have given William an idea. With so many Anglo-Saxons running about on the lower ground, the battery of shields on the hilltop was thinner; also, Harold’s personal bodyguard, the formidable housecarls, bunched together behind this front line, were more exposed. So William told his archers to fire higher, over the shields and into the housecarls. He also got his infantry and cavalry to charge again, and this time they broke through. The faithful housecarls were slaughtered to a man, and Harold himself fell, either blinded by an arrow or cut down by Norman swords. Beside the famous picture of the knight with an arrow in the eye, the tapestry informs us that ‘Harold Rex Interfectus Est’ – ‘Harold the King is killed’.

  Which is bizarre. It is highly doubtful that William would have used that wording, or ordered someone else to use it for him. Chroniclers of the time were notoriously partisan – a more likely Norman commentary would have been something along the lines of: ‘The treacherous usurper Harold meets the end he deserves, the Lord thrusting an arrow through his most tender parts as a punishment for trying to rob the noble William of his just title.’ This would have been a bit too long for inclusion in the tapestry, of course, but at the very least, William, who had always considered himself as the rightful king and Harold as a usurper, would have ordered the ‘Rex’ to be omitted or removed.

  Yet more evidence that someone was trying to annoy William personally, or the Normans in general.

  Step 4: The call of booty

  Another feature of the tapestry is that it refers to the invaders not as ‘Normanni’ but as ‘Franci’. This confusion was nothing new. Long before William’s invasion, Earl Godwin had warned that Edward the Confessor’s ‘French’ cronies had too much influence at court. The epithet was, however, both geographically and ethnically misleading, and Godwin and co. were probably just being dismissively vague, rather like the present-day French when they want to moan about something that the English-speaking world has done. Forgetting the existence of Celts, African-Americans and many other branches of the Anglophone world, the French will blame ‘les Anglo-Saxons’ for whatever is irking them.*

  When the tapestry talks about ‘Franci’, though, the name is slightly more accurate, because William’s invading army was not made up entirely of his faithful Norman clansmen. While planning his Conquest, William had sent out the word that there was lots of booty to be had. This promise attracted a mixed band of Normans, Bretons, Boulonnais, Angevins (people from Boulogne and Anjou) and other ‘French’ mercenaries, all thirsty for money and sex with English women – in short, much the same motives that have always brought young Frenchmen over to London.

  This does not mean, however, that it was a ‘French’ invasion. For a start, neither the Normans nor the Bretons were Franks – they were Vikings and Celts. William’s reputation as a provider of booty (and bootie) was so solid that fighters even came from as far away as the Norman colony in Italy to join him. And, most importantly, it was not the King of the Franks (then Philippe I) who launched the Norman Conquest. The Duke of Normandy was, in strict feudal terms, Philippe I’s vassal, meaning that William owed allegiance to him. But William was very much his own man and the attack on England was, politically, a purely Norman one, aimed at extending William’s personal power across the Channel and grabbing land for himself and his kinsmen. Close associates of his provided ships and soldiers in exchange for promises of land, and some of the funding came from Norman bishops and abbots, who realized that, should William succeed, there might be the odd silk cassock and/or brand-new cathedral in it for them. Every successful sword stroke at Hastings would have sounded to William’s backers like a loud ‘ker-ching’.

  After the battle, as the plunderers moved around the battlefield chopping off limbs and heads so that they could strip the dead (and the not-quite-dead-until-someone-chopped-their-head-off) of their valuable chainmail, Normans and non-Normans alike knew that the fun was only just beginning. Before them lay the whole ‘green and pleasant land’ that William had salivated over all those years before, waiting to be picked clean.

  The first thing the victorious William did was ride a few miles east to the port of Romney. One of his ships had blown off course and landed there, and the Norman invaders had all been killed, so William thought it only fair to massacre the townspeople.

  He then headed inland to Winchester (King Alfred’s old capital) to loot the royal treasury, before turning north, to Berkhamsted, presumably just to give that town the only bit of excitement that it would ever experience. It was here that William took the surrender of the teenage Anglo-Saxon pretender to the throne, Edgar the Atheling (meaning noble). Sadly for Berkhamsted, though, William declined to accept the crown there, and demanded to be enthroned in London.

  All the while, William’s men were plundering as they went, plunging the south of England into a chaos that it had forgotten since before Alfred the Great’s day. This was partly revenge on Harold’s old homeland of Wessex, but also a show of strength for the Anglo-Saxon earls in London, who were wondering how to react. Should they try to raise an army and resist, or swear allegiance to William and hang on to at least some of their possessions?

  When William reached the outskirts of London, the locals demonstrated to the earls what they thought should be done – the men of Southwark attacked the in
vaders, annoying William so much that he burned the whole town and went off to ravage the surrounding countryside, destroying the recently harvested crops, killing peasants, and depriving Londoners of their main source of food.

  William’s show of force seems to have shown the Anglo-Saxon earls which side their bread was buttered on (in fact, Normandy was now their only source of butter), and they voted to recognize William’s claim to the throne.

  The new King of England was crowned on Christmas Day 1066, in Westminster Abbey. The venue was a political choice – the church had been built by Edward the Confessor, and it was here that the usurper Harold had been crowned just months before.

  The ceremony must have been a bit like a shotgun wedding, with William surrounded by his soldiers while the gloomy Anglo-Saxons were forced to look on and witness the solemn handover of power. And as the crown was placed on William’s head, it was somehow inevitable that violence should break out. Not from rebels trying to break up the celebrations, though; when the new King received a congratulatory cheer from his followers, the Norman guards outside the abbey heard the raised voices and assumed that there was a riot going on. They began a pre-emptive attack on the crowd that had gathered in the abbey grounds, and before they realized their mistake, many Londoners were killed and several buildings were burnt. It was just a taste of things to come for England.

  Astutely detecting an air of instability in his new realm, William built the Tower of London – first a wooden stockade and then, when the famous white Caen stone arrived, the basis of the present castle. One can imagine the Anglo-Saxon bitterness when William refused to use English materials, despite the reassurances of London builders that ‘if you want a white castle, you can’t do better than this Dover chalk, mate. Look at them cliffs – solid as, well, rock, innit?’

  As well as building his stronghold in London, William sent his army on a tour of England, not to get themselves acquainted with the local folk dances, but to let the Anglo-Saxons know that they now had new masters. This the Normans did by building castles in pretty well every major town in the country, usually demolishing whole neighbourhoods to make room for fortresses within the town walls. In Lincoln, for example, 166 houses were destroyed, in Cambridge 27, Gloucester 16, and so on. There is no record of William applying for planning permission.