The Norman Conquest

by Marc Morris

  The scene then shifts to Normandy, where somehow news of Harold’s arrival has reached the ears of Duke William. Possibly Harold himself managed to send the duke a message: the Tapestry, in a section that seems somewhat confused, shows a messenger whose moustache suggests he is an Englishman; in a later chronicle version, the earl gets word out by bribing one of his guards. However it came to pass, once William was aware of Harold’s predicament he immediately sent messengers to Ponthieu to demand his release. William of Jumièges states that Count Guy was put under pressure, which seems entirely credible: the count had been captured at the Battle of Mortemer in 1054, and freed only after swearing fealty to the Norman duke. William of Poitiers, who evidently had a copy of Jumièges’ chronicle in front of him, insists that Guy co-operated willingly, in return for which he received gifts of land and money. Bullied or bribed, the count brought Harold to the Norman border at Eu and handed him over to William, who escorted the earl and his men to the comforts of his palace at Rouen.9

  During Harold’s stay in Normandy, which by all accounts lasted some time, two significant things happened. Firstly, William fought a short and not particularly successful campaign in Brittany, described in detail by William of Poitiers and depicted at length on the Bayeux Tapestry. Harold accompanied his host on this mission, and the Tapestry shows him heroically rescuing some of William’s men from the quicksands near Mont St Michel. Secondly, and more importantly, Harold at some point swore an oath to uphold the duke’s claim to the English throne. According to William of Poitiers this happened at a specially convened council in the town of Bonneville-sur-Touques.10 The Tapestry shows the earl touching holy relics as the oath is sworn.11

  Such is the story of Harold’s visit as told by our various sources. Although they differ over certain small details – where Harold swore his oath, for instance, or whether he swore it before or after the Brittany campaign – both the chroniclers and the Tapestry agree that this was how it happened.12 Where they disagree totally, however, is why it happened.

  According to Norman writers, the swearing of the oath had been the whole point of the exercise: Harold crossed the Channel because he had been sent by Edward the Confessor to confirm William’s claim to the English throne. William of Jumièges, for instance, says that:

  Edward, king of the English, by the will of God having no heir, had in the past sent Robert, the archbishop of Canterbury, to appoint him heir to the kingdom given to him by God. But he also, at a later date, sent to him Harold, the greatest of all the earls in his realm in wealth, honour and power, that he should swear fealty to the duke concerning his crown and, according to Christian tradition, pledge it with oaths.13

  William of Poitiers, who follows Jumièges’ account, naturally endorses this statement, to the extent that he even copies bits of it word for word: Harold had been sent to protect William’s position as Edward’s heir. And so too do all later Norman chroniclers. ‘The truth was’, said Orderic Vitalis in the 1120s, ‘that Edward had declared his intention of transmitting the whole kingdom to his kinsman, Duke William of Normandy, and had with the consent of the English made him heir to all his rights.’14

  But the English themselves begged to differ. At the time, it is true, they seem to have preferred to stand on their silence. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle carries no entries for the year 1064, and begins its discussion of 1065 with events that took place in August. The Life of King Edward also fails to make any reference to Harold’s trip explicitly, although its author does make two comments which might be taken to allude to it. Later generations, however, were not so tight-lipped, and set out to deny the Norman claim directly. According to William of Malmesbury, for example, some Englishmen in the early twelfth century maintained that the earl had never intended to visit the Continent at all, but had been accidentally blown across the Channel having set out on a fishing trip.15

  An altogether more credible alternative is offered by an early twelfth-century monk of Canterbury named Eadmer. According to Eadmer, Harold had set out for Normandy, but had done so on his own initiative, his purpose being to obtain the release of two relatives who were being held hostage at William’s court. Here we are on much firmer ground, because this was indeed the case – even William of Poitiers admits to the hostages’ existence. At some point during the crisis of 1051―2, the Godwines had handed over two of their number to Edward the Confessor: Eadmer names them as Wulfnoth, who was one of Harold’s younger brothers, and Hakon, a son of Harold’s older brother, the unlamented Earl Swein. Most likely they were surrendered in September 1051, when the family’s power was collapsing and Swein was still an active participant in the drama. At some point in the year that followed they were evidently transferred to Normandy, the likeliest scenario being that they were taken back by William himself after his visit to England.16

  Which, then, is more credible: Harold being sent to Normandy to confirm Edward’s earlier promise, or the earl embarking on a mission of his own, trying to secure the liberation of his long-detained kinsmen? Do we prefer the testimony of William of Poitiers or that of Eadmer? Taken on their own merits there is little to help us decide between the two authors. William of Poitiers is more closely contemporary and provides a very detailed account of Harold’s visit. He is seemingly well informed about the oath-taking ceremony, supplying not only its likeliest location but also the terms of the promises that the earl allegedly made. According to Poitiers, Harold swore firstly that he would act as William’s advocate at Edward’s court and, secondly, that when the king died he would use his wealth and influence to ensure the duke’s succession. Thirdly, says Poitiers, the earl pledged to strengthen and garrison Dover Castle at his own expense for William’s use and, fourthly, that he would similarly fortify and provision various other places in England as the duke directed.17

  But then Eadmer, despite the fact he wrote a generation later, is also an apparently well-informed witness. He alone supplies us with the names of the two Godwine hostages, and contributes other convincing details (he knows, for example, the name of the estuary in Ponthieu where Harold made his landing). Eadmer, too, offers a detailed description of the earl’s oath, mentioning both the pledge of personal support for William’s claim and the fortification of Dover, and contributing the additional suggestion that the agreement was to be sealed by a marriage alliance, by which Harold’s sister would marry a leading Norman magnate and the earl himself would wed one of the duke’s daughters.18

  At the same time, both Poitiers and Eadmer are evidently giving us biased accounts. Poitiers very obviously wants to do all he can to strengthen the Norman claim. Harold, he insists, swore his oath ‘clearly and of his own free will’, ‘as the most truthful and distinguished men who were there as witnesses have told’. Such emphatic assurances from the pen of this particular chronicler immediately make us suspicious, and incline us to listen to Eadmer, who says that Harold realized that he was in a dangerous predicament, and effectively made his promises under duress: ‘He could not see any way of escape without agreeing to all that William wished.’19

  Eadmer, however, is an equally partisan informant. Like most Englishmen who lived through the experience, he regarded the Conquest as a terrible tragedy, and was as anxious to deny the Norman claim as Poitiers was to defend it.20 In setting out his version of events he strains to avoid any mention of Edward’s promise of 1051. Thus the cause of the king’s quarrel with the Godwines that year goes unexplained, and the hostages are improbably handed over in 1052 once the Godwines are back in power. The effect of these suppressions and alterations is to absolve Harold of any blame. In Eadmer’s account, the first the earl hears of the Norman claim to the English throne is after his arrival in Normandy, when William reveals that Edward promised him the succession during his exile.

  All things being equal, it would be impossible to decide between two such manipulative writers. But when we consider their accounts in light of the wider context, it becomes obvious that we ought to reject Poitiers’ expl
anation and accept that of Eadmer. Put simply, Eadmer’s version of events accords far more convincingly with what we know about the political reality in England. By 1064, Harold and his brothers reigned supreme, whereas the authority of Edward the Confessor had been eroded to virtually nothing. It stretches credibility beyond its elastic limit to believe that the king, aged and powerless as he was, could have commanded the earl to do anything detrimental to his own interests, let alone to help resuscitate a scheme for the succession to which he and his family had always been vehemently opposed.21

  By contrast, it seems perfectly reasonable to suppose that Harold, at the very height of his powers, would have been acutely embarrassed by the continued detention of two of his close relatives, and at the same time optimistic that he could use his influence to secure their release. Since they were being held to guarantee Edward’s promise of 1051, the earl must have anticipated he would have to discuss the Norman claim, but must have felt confident that he could persuade William to drop it, either by tricking him or by paying him off. This is strongly implied in Eadmer’s account, when Harold informs Edward that he intends to get the hostages back. ‘I know that the duke is not so simple as to give them up to you,’ cautions the king, ‘unless he foresees some great advantage to himself.’ But the earl disregards this advice and goes to Normandy anyway, taking with him a large amount of gold, silver and costly goods.22

  There is one final piece of evidence which might be taken to support Eadmer’s story, and that is the Bayeux Tapestry. The Tapestry is undoubtedly our most interesting source for the Norman Conquest, and also one of the most difficult to interpret. For the most part it appears to be a piece of Norman triumphalism, but the fact that it was created by English embroiderers seems to have affected its telling of the story. At critical moments where it could give us a decisive opinion on the Norman claim, the Tapestry is carefully ambiguous. To say this much is not to argue that it contains some hidden English code; simply that, as a piece of public art created very soon after the Conquest, the Tapestry seems to be trying deliberately to steer clear of controversy. In the opening scene, for example, we see Edward the Confessor talking to a figure whom we take to be Harold, but we are told nothing about the topic of their conversation. Norman observers would assume the king was ordering the earl to confirm William’s succession. English observers could imagine that the discussion concerned Harold’s plan to recover the hostages.

  When it comes to depict the earl’s return, however, the Tapestry seems rather less ambiguous. Both Eadmer and William of Poitiers tell us that Harold recrossed the Channel accompanied by his nephew, Hakon; his brother Wulfnoth remained in Norman custody. Had his objective been to free both hostages, therefore, his trip had been only a partial success. If, on the other hand, he had been charged with confirming William’s position as Edward’s heir, then the mission had been accomplished. Indeed, he ought to have been given a jubilant reception.23

  Yet the Tapestry appears to show a different scene. ‘Here Harold returns to England and comes to King Edward’, says the caption, blankly, but the picture below shows the earl advancing towards the king with his head visibly bowed and his arms outstretched – a posture that looks very much like an act of supplication or apology. Edward himself, moreover, is no longer the genial figure he seemed at the start, but larger, sterner, and raising his index finger as if to admonish.

  ‘Seems’;‘looks very much like’;‘appears’;‘as if. This is of course a speculative reading of a single scene, which some historians would argue is as ambiguous as any other.24 But Eadmer, who belonged to the same Canterbury tradition as the Tapestry’s designer, was in no doubt about the nature of Harold’s reception when he explained to the king what had happened. ‘Did I not tell you that I knew William,’ exclaims an exasperated Edward, ‘and that your going might bring untold calamity upon this kingdom?’25

  8

  Northern Uproar

  Harold had returned from Normandy by the summer of 1065 at the latest, for at that point the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle breaks its silence to inform us about his activities in south Wales. Before the start of August, we are told, the earl commissioned some building work at Portskewett, now a nondescript village on the Severn Estuary, a few miles south of Chepstow. His intention was apparently to invite Edward the Confessor there for a spot of hunting, to which end ‘he got together there many goods’. Was this an attempt, one wonders, to curry recently lost favour?

  If so, it was unsuccessful, for Harold’s luck had not improved. On 24 August, when all the necessaries had been assembled and the building work was approaching completion, his new hunting lodge was attacked by the Welsh, still smarting from the earl’s invasion of their country two years earlier. Almost all the people working on site were killed and all the carefully stockpiled provisions were carried off. ‘We do not know’, says the D version of the Chronicle, ‘who first suggested this mischief’, not for the first time infuriating us by hinting that there was some wider conspiracy at work, but failing to divulge anything in the way of details. As it happens, we know that there was indeed an anti-Godwine conspiracy underway in the summer of 1065. Its target, however, was not Harold, but his younger brother, the earl of Northumbria.1

  Eleventh-century Northumbria was a lot bigger than its modern namesake. A former Anglo-Saxon kingdom, it originally extended, as its appellation suggests, north from the River Humber, and as such embraced all of Yorkshire and County Durham, as well as the region to the far north that now has exclusive ownership of the name. Once, in its glory days in the seventh century, Northumbria had extended even further still, to include the part of the Scottish lowlands known as Lothian, and as far west as the Irish Sea, to include all of modern Lancashire and Cumbria. During the tenth century, however, these outlying areas had been lost, or at least rendered highly debatable, thanks to the ambitions of rival rulers in Scotland and Strathclyde.

  The kingdom of Northumbria, like all the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms except Wessex, had been brought to an end by the arrival of the Vikings. In the last third of the ninth century the Danes had conquered and colonized a large area of what is now northern and eastern England – a region referred to in later centuries as ‘the Danelaw’. Yorkshire was extensively colonized by the invaders, and York itself became their capital. The former kings of Northumbria, meanwhile, continued to rule its northern rump – the far less productive territory north of the River Tees – from their ancient seat at Bamburgh, a rocky fastness surrounded by sea.2

  The Viking kingdom of York did not last very long, falling in the middle of the tenth century to the all-conquering kings of Wessex, but the effects of the Danish invasion continued to be felt for generations beyond. Because of Viking settlement, Yorkshire was ethnically and culturally very different from the other parts of the newly forged kingdom of England. Its inhabitants, for example, persisted in using a Scandinavian counting system for their money, and commissioned tombs and memorial crosses of an unmistakably Nordic design. More significant still, they spoke a language that was barely intelligible to their southern neighbours, littered with Scandinavian loan words. In Yorkshire place names we commonly encounter the distinctive Danish ‘-by’ (Grimsby, Kirkby). Elsewhere in England shires were divided into subdivisions called hundreds, and hundreds into hides; Yorkshire was divided into ridings, wapentakes and carucates. Even today, the major streets in York are designated by the Danish word ‘gate’ (Coppergate, Swinegate).3

  As a result the north of England was politically divided. The Anglo-Danish magnates of Yorkshire naturally resented being ruled by their conquerors from Wessex. The members of the former royal dynasty based at Bamburgh, by contrast, although now reduced to the status of earls, were quite happy with the new situation. The exchange of a Viking ruler in nearby York for an extremely distant overlord in southern England meant that they were essentially left to look after their own affairs beyond the Tees, and more often than not appointed to govern Yorkshire as well. They were less happy (and their ne
ighbours in Yorkshire correspondingly well pleased) when the Vikings returned to conquer England in 1016. After Cnut’s takeover Yorkshire received its own Scandinavian earls, first Erik, then Siward, who became bitter enemies with the house of Bamburgh. Siward eventually ended the conflict in 1041 by arranging the murder of his northern rival and extending his authority across the whole of Northumbria.4

  Such was the situation in northern England at the time of Siward’s death in 1055. Divided culturally and politically, it was at the same time largely left to its own devices, for the good reason that it was a long way away and hard to reach. Thanks to the wide Humber Estuary and the bogs and swamps of Yorkshire and Cheshire, only a few roads linked the north to the south, and none of them were good: the 200-mile journey from London to York usually took a fortnight or more, assuming the roads were passable and that no robbers were encountered en route; by far the quickest and safest way to reach York from southern England was by ship. For this reason Northumbria was only subject to the lightest of royal supervision. The king of England had very little land in Yorkshire; coins were minted in York bearing his face and name, but he himself was never seen there. Beyond the Tees, meanwhile, there was no permanent royal presence at all: no royal estates, no mints, no burhs, no shires. For most people in southern England, including the king, the north was a faraway country, where they did things differently, about which they knew and understood very little.5

  This was one of the reasons that the appointment of Tostig Godwineson as Siward’s successor had come as such a shock. As we have seen, Tostig’s promotion in the spring of 1055 had caused a bitter rift in England south of the Humber, apparently provoking a showdown between the Godwine family and their rivals in Mercia. But within Northumbria itself his advancement must have caused equal if not greater consternation. In the century since the region had been absorbed into the kingdom of England, its earls had been either members of the house of Bamburgh or else Danes appointed by King Cnut. Only once, around the turn of the millennium, had the pattern been broken, when the earldom of York had gone to a Mercian named Ælfhelm, and his rule had not been a success. Yet in 1055 the Northumbrians were presented with Tostig, a twenty-something son of the late earl of Wessex, whose name was the only Danish thing about him. By birth, upbringing and political experience, Tostig was a southerner, and it showed.6