The Man Behind the Bayeux Tapestry

by Trevor Rowley

  Illegitimacy did not carry a social stigma in this context and in the Scandinavian world the child of a concubine was recognised as eligible to inherit. William’s birth status was never disguised, although contemporary hagiographers tended to overlook it, and of the Norman chroniclers only the later writers Orderic Vitalis and Wace of Bayeux record a negative, but factually suspect, story about William’s illegitimacy. When Roger of Tosny returned from fighting against the Muslims in Spain and heard that William had succeeded as duke, he ‘arrogantly refused to serve him, saying that as a bastard William should not rule him and other Normans’, and added that ‘as a bastard [he] was despised by the native nobility’. Roger died in 1040 in a private war with his neighbours before William was in a position to avenge the insult (OV). It was only in contemporary non-Norman accounts that William was regularly described as bastardus. William of Jumièges records a well-known incident that reflected the humble status of the Conqueror’s mother rather than his illegitimacy: while Duke William was besieging Alençon in 1050/51, the inhabitants waved hides and skins over the battlements and ‘beat pelts and furs in order to insult the duke and despisingly called him a pelterer’. In response to this insult, William cut off the hands and feet of thirty-two of his tormentors. The reprisal was sufficiently horrific to persuade the nearby town of Domfront to surrender without a fight and presumably also sufficient to inhibit anyone else repeating the insult, at least publicly.

  • The de Conteville Family •

  Some scholars have recently suggested that Herleva’s low birth status might have been exaggerated. They point to her brothers being readily assimilated into the ducal court and that sometime after William’s birth Herleva being married to Herluin, a petty lord of the Lieuvin (a region to the east of Lisieux), who was probably already an established supporter of Duke Robert. Herluin was a man of modest fortune, but after his marriage he was made vicomte, based at Conteville on the southern bank of the Seine estuary. After William became duke, Herluin’s estates throughout Normandy increased significantly and he became a member of the ‘newly enriched’ aristocracy of William’s reign (Bates and Gazeau 1990, 22). There were two sons from this union, Odo and Robert, and the date of the marriage is central in determining the vexed question of Odo’s birthday. Douglas had very little doubt ‘that the marriage took place very soon after the birth of the Conqueror; and that Odo … was born about 1030’ (Douglas 1964, 369). On the other hand, Bates argues that it was later in the 1030s, ‘a little before he [Duke Robert] set off on his fatal pilgrimage to Jerusalem in January 1035’ (Bates 2001, 34). A more recent study of the Norman bishops mediates and places Odo’s birth in 1032/33 (Allen 2009, 120). Apart from uncertainty about Odo’s birth date, it is unclear which of the brothers was senior. On their father Herluin’s death (in 1066) it was Robert that succeeded to his lands, which might indicate that he was the elder, although by this time Odo, as Bishop of Bayeux, was already a wealthy man.

  Although Odo was five or six years younger than William, his early education probably ran along corresponding lines to that of the young duke. He may well have had a hard childhood and even removed from the care of his parents (Bates 1975, 5). William of Poitiers implies that Odo was educated in the ducal household and was possibly being groomed for a senior role in government from an early age. Odo and his brother Robert would have enjoyed a similar military training to William’s, which served both well as they were later to be involved in military action on several occasions. Unlike William, however, Odo was literate and it is possible that he did receive some form of clerical education, even to the extent of learning Roman and canon law, which was normal for young French clerics at the time. Sometime before his election to bishop he was ordained a deacon at Fécamp by his second cousin Hugh d’Eu, Bishop of Lisieux. This ceremony may have taken place immediately before Odo’s ordination as bishop, but it is also possible that he spent some time at Fécamp between 1046 and 1049. If so, he may well have been taught by the renowned ecclesiastic scholar John of Ravenna, Abbot of Fécamp (Allen, 120–1). John was a long-serving abbot of Fécamp renowned for his spiritual writings, but also associated with the extension of Fécamp’s influence into Lower Normandy in the 1050s.

  William was lucky in having two half-brothers on his mother’s side. Among the Frankish princely class, family rivalry was common, and brothers, in particularly in Normandy, often posed a threat to ducal power. William’s own father, Robert, was challenged for the succession by a half-brother, William of Arques. However, amicable relations were more common in ducal families where there was a shared mother. Maternal half-brothers were less likely to make a direct claim for the dukedom and, as happened in William’s case, his half-brothers could be relied upon for support and rewarded with powerful positions within the duchy. It was a successful policy and one consequence was that by 1066 ‘Normandy had established itself as one of the most stable and successful principalities in France’ (van Houts 2000, 56).

  Odo was deemed to be brighter than his brother Robert, who William of Malmesbury dismissed unkindly as being of a stupid, dull disposition, but admitted that ‘he had the courage of his race’ and ‘no foul crimes are laid to his charge’. We learn more about Robert from an account written by Vital of Savigny, one of Odo’s protégés, who became his chaplain. Vital records how he had to intervene to stop Robert beating and abusing his wife, saying that he would have to dissolve the marriage unless the count mended his ways. The picture that Vital paints of Robert suggests a headstrong character given to rages and exaggerated remorse. These rather tepid assessments of Robert’s character might have led to his qualities being underestimated, in any case his half-brother William had sufficient confidence in his abilities to delegate important tasks to him both before and after the Conquest of England. Robert appears to have had a shrewd business mind; he established markets with monopolies close to his many castles on his estates in Normandy and England. He seems to have founded new towns adjacent to his castles at places such as Berkhamsted, Montacute and Pevensey as well as in Mortain itself. Orderic Vitalis noted that Robert was the most important of the Conqueror’s followers and he did provide the most ships of all the Norman lords for the Norman invasion fleet (Golding 1991). His loyalty to his family and his generosity to the church may have made him something of a ‘grand seigneur’ in his later years (Bates 1975, 5).

  Odo also had a sister called Muriel, who married a Cotentin lord called Odo au Chapel. This Odo founded an abbey at Lessay (c. 1056) along with his father, and appears as an adviser to William the Conqueror at the council held in early 1066 to consider the response to Harold Godwinson’s seizure of the English crown. He might also be one of the men depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry at the feast at Hastings before the battle. It has been suggested that Muriel might have been the Norman woman of that name, who was educated in the school for young noblewomen at Wilton Abbey, before the Conquest and who eventually became a respected poet. While at Wilton, she was curiously advised by the poet/canon of Bayeux, Serlo, ‘Far better to remain a virgin in your nunnery than have to take a lover.’ (Stephenson 2011, 71–4).

  Odo’s father, Herluin, went on to marry a second wife, Frescendis, by whom he had two more sons, Ralph and John, about whom little is known. A Ralph de Conteville, who appears in Domesday Book holding lands in Somerset and Devon, is not thought to have been related to Herluin. Odo’s father died around 1066 and almost the entirety of his lands went to Robert. Odo received only a small estate; this apparent favouritism may have been because Odo was already in possession of extensive diocesan estates.

  • Notre-Dame de Grestain •

  Odo’s mother, Herleva, died around 1050 and was almost certainly buried at the Abbaye Notre-Dame de Grestain, founded by her husband, Herluin, and their son Robert on the south bank of the Seine estuary in the same year (Gazeau 2007, 24). It seems probable that the abbey was founded as an appropriate burial place for Herleva. In addition to Odo’s mother, his father, Herluin, and his
brother Robert were also buried here. The abbey was endowed with extensive estates and maritime rights. The pre-Revolutionary parish boundaries show that Grestain was carved out of the two neighbouring parishes of Fatouville and Berville, and given a long stretch of land along the bank of the Seine estuary as it then was, presumably for mooring and fishing purposes. After 1066 Grestain acquired estates in England including a house in London and twenty-nine estates spread over seven counties from Robert’s wife, Matilda de Montgomery. Roger de Montgomery gave lands in Sussex at Wilmington, Firle and Beddingham; he also gave the abbey a house in the nearby port of Pevensey to facilitate movement of goods across the Channel (Gardiner 2000). Grestain established Wilmington Priory as a non-conventual cell in the twelfth century, from where the abbey’s English lands were administered. Grestain had a bumpy history in the late twelfth century and the Bishop of Lisieux complained to Pope Alexander III that the monks’ behaviour was scandalous and that the abbot was a ‘dissolute liar’. The abbey was finally dissolved in 1757.

  The site occupied the bottom of a slope descending into the Seine estuary. There is evidence of extensive terracing to accommodate the abbey buildings. A spring which fed a pool within the abbey complex was probably the site of an earlier, possibly pre-Christian, sacred site. The only surviving buildings are a heavily built late medieval undercroft, a chapel by the gate and part of the perimeter circuit running parallel to the former channel of the Seine. The building materials used include Caen stone, tufa from a local source and flint blocks from the chalk deposits of Upper Normandy. Today, the site is occupied by a few half-timbered cottages, a house built on to the main surviving section of abbey, the former chapel and the perimeter wall. A shady apple orchard covers the earthworks of the former abbey, giving it a quiet, almost mystical atmosphere, appropriate for the semi-legendary status of those who rest permanently here.

  7 Part of the surviving medieval remains of Grestain Abbey, forming the lower part of a later residence.

  • Duke Robert’s Pilgrimage and Death •

  Duke Robert’s short rule is generally judged to have been a troubled one, but by 1034 he appears to have secured and strengthened his ducal authority, which makes his decision to go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem at that point difficult to understand. Despite the inherent dangers of the long journey to visit the Christian sites in Jerusalem and Palestine, pilgrimage to the Holy Land was becoming increasingly popular in western Christendom. Pilgrimage was energetically promoted by the monks of Cluny in Burgundy, who used their far-flung network of contacts and their organisational skills both to urge men to go on pilgrimage and to provide facilities along the way for those that did.

  According to Ralph Glaber, around AD 1000 an ‘immeasurable multitude’ of nobles and common folk took to the pilgrimage road. They were inspired by stories from the Book of Revelation, which foretold the Second Coming of Jesus Christ which would be in Jerusalem at the End of Days (widely interpreted as the Millennium). Although the Second Coming did not materialise, thousands of pilgrims gathered in Jerusalem and interest in the Holy City in the West was greatly enhanced. Attention then turned to 1033, another important date, marking a thousand years after Christ’s crucifixion, when there was another major pilgrimage, which anticipated the Second Coming. Glaber tells of how peasants, merchants and nobles began ‘to stream towards the Saviour’s Tomb in Jerusalem’. The pattern was developing of a large pilgrimage from western Christendom to Jerusalem every thirty-three years or so – there was one in 1064 and at the end of the eleventh century the First Crusade (1095–99) was proclaimed.

  At the time of the 1033 pilgrimage Jerusalem had yet to recover fully from the ravages of the Egyptian Fatimid caliph Al-Hakim, who in 1009 had ordered the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and other sacred sites in the city. The site of Christ’s tomb had been largely destroyed and only the lower part of the cave structure survived. Al-Hakim had subsequently ordered the tearing down of all the Christian churches and convents in the whole of Palestine as well as the forced conversion to Islam of Christians living in lands under his control. Although later in his reign Al-Hakim turned his destructive attention to his fellow Muslims and became more tolerant of Christians, conditions in the Holy Land remained highly volatile. In the 1020s Bedouin tribes revolted against the Fatimids, seized control of the roads and systematically laid waste the Palestine countryside. Order was not fully restored until 1030 and only then did work begin on the restoration of Christian sacred places associated with the life and death of Jesus Christ (Armstrong 1996, 258–60).

  8 A portrait of Duke Robert ‘the Magnificent’ on the right, and his father Duke Richard II on the left. Robert appears to be wearing a Phrygian cap; headwear which was later associated with the French Revolution and liberty, but originated in antiquity and was depicted in Romanesque sculpture at places such as Kilpeck, Herefordshire. Cartulary of Mont-Saint-Michel, Avranches

  The Normans were enthusiastic pilgrims and an entry for 1017 in Amatus’ Chronicle of Monte Cassino recounts:

  Forty Normans dressed as pilgrims, on their return from Jerusalem, disembarked at Salerno. These were men of considerable bearing, impressive-looking, men of the greatest experience in warfare. They found the city besieged by the Saracens. Their souls were inflamed with a call to God. They demanded arms and horses … and threw themselves ferociously upon the enemy. They killed and captured many and put the rest to flight, achieving a miraculous victory with the help of God. They swore that they had done all this only out of love of God and of the Christian faith; they refused any reward and refused to remain in Salerno.

  Others were less charitable than Amatus and the Normans’ aggressive habits earned them an unsavoury reputation. Eventually, in Italy, Norman pilgrims met with such intense local hostility that John, the abbot of Fécamp, complained to Pope Leo IX that they were being robbed, imprisoned or murdered ‘every day’ (Sumption 1975, 118). Thus, Norman pilgrims were obliged to travel in large well-armed bands, and it was from such groups that the Conquest of southern Italy had started. Despite these difficult conditions, in 1026 Robert’s brother Richard III had financed a pilgrimage to the Holy City. The abbot of St Vanne of Verdun led a group of 700 Normans and pilgrims from other parts of northern France and Angoulême. At Antioch the pilgrims met up with Symeon, a Sicilian Greek monk from Mount Sinai, who was journeying in the other direction to Normandy in order to collect the alms which the duke regularly gave to his monastery. Following what had become the convention for the collection of holy souvenirs, while in Jerusalem, Abbot Richard acquired a fragment of the True Cross, which it is said he concealed in a bag hung around his neck.

  The arrival of the news of more peaceful conditions in the Holy Land, brought back by such pilgrims, could have prompted Robert to decide that this was a propitious time to undertake his own pilgrimage. Pilgrimage to the Holy Land by Western rulers was normally linked to penance by men such as the ‘terrible count of Anjou’, Fulk III, who went to Jerusalem on four occasions after 1002 in order to expiate his crimes. Fulk’s journeys were undertaken because of his fear of damnation resulting from all the blood he had shed. By the time of his last visit to Jerusalem when he was an old man, William of Malmesbury claims that Fulk stripped naked and was led by a halter around his neck to the Holy Sepulchre while a servant scourged his back as he called on Christ to accept his penance (Riley-Smith 1997, 28). Count Thierry of Trier, who had killed his archbishop in 1059, was to make the journey for similar reasons. After Robert’s death it was alleged that he wanted to purge himself from the guilt of the death of his brother Richard III, who had died unexpectedly in 1026. Such sudden and unexplained deaths were not uncommon at the time and regularly led to accusations of foul play. In this case, some chroniclers claimed that Richard had been poisoned by his brother, although there is no other evidence to support the accusation. The real motives behind Robert’s pilgrimage were probably more simple; as D.C. Douglas comments, ‘It is not wholly inexplicable that t
he call to Jerusalem should have been answered by a young man who seems always to have combined within himself a violent lack of scruple with a strain of romantic rashness’ (Douglas 1964, 36).

  Prior to departing for Jerusalem, Duke Robert convened a special meeting of his Norman magnates in order to tell them of his planned pilgrimage. Apparently, the lords, led by Archbishop Robert of Rouen, unsuccessfully tried to dissuade him. Then, following Frankish tradition and recognising the possibility that he may never return, the duke persuaded the lords to acknowledge his illegitimate son, 7-year-old William, as his successor. According to the chronicler Wace, the lords agreed to accept William as Robert’s lawful successor and ‘went to the youth and became his vassals; they took many oaths and swore fealty and alliance to him’ (Burgess 2004, 124). He then had the bequest confirmed by his overlord, the French king, Henry I (1031–60). Thus, the stage was set for Robert the Magnificent to embark on his fateful journey.

  Before undertaking a major pilgrimage it was the practice to visit local cult centres in order to enlist the support and prayers of the community for a safe journey; therefore, before Robert left Normandy for Jerusalem he visited the abbey at Fécamp, which was a centre for the veneration of Christ’s blood. From there he appears to have travelled south-eastwards from Normandy, through Paris, Langres and Besançon. He then crossed the Alps by way of the St Bernard Pass into Lombardy. After this the duke followed the route regularly taken by Norman pilgrims making their way to the eastern Mediterranean, through Italy to Rome and on to the Adriatic port of Bari.