The Man Behind the Bayeux Tapestry

by Trevor Rowley

  Odo does not appear to have played a major role in the suppression of the rebellions and invasions that were a major feature of the next few years of William’s rule. The bishop’s role was to facilitate the transfer or ‘delivery’ of land, while maintaining the peace in southern England; uprisings elsewhere within the kingdom were dealt with by others. William fitz Osbern and the king himself put down a northern rising in the autumn of 1068. Odo’s brother Robert of Mortain and Robert of Eu led an army against a force of Danes who had landed at the mouth of the Humber and laid siege to York in 1069. The Danes retreated to the Fens but the Normans ‘pursued them with great slaughter to their very ships’. Bishop Geoffrey of Coutances put down a rising in Dorset and Somerset in 1070, while the king was responsible for the most savage response to any of the disturbances. In 1069–70 William laid waste to large tracts of countryside in northern England, the Pennines and the Welsh borders in the ‘Harrying of the North’, the Conqueror’s version of the ‘final solution’ for the troublesome north, so that it would not be able to support a rebellion again in the foreseeable future. The conventional interpretation of the ‘harrying’, based on the large number of manors in Yorkshire recorded as ‘waste’ in 1086 in Domesday Book, has been questioned. Such ‘waste’ entries may indicate a lack of information rather than estates still valueless almost twenty years after William’s punitive northern expedition (Palliser 1993, 1–27). Yet the chroniclers were in no doubt about the damage caused by the severity of the Normans’ treatment of the north-eastern counties in 1069. Simeon of Durham described how infected corpses were left decaying in houses and how survivors had to eat horses, cats and dogs and sold themselves into slavery. William of Malmesbury, writing of York, observed:

  As for the cities once so famous, the towers whose tops threatened the sky, the fields rich in pasture and watered by rivers, if anyone sees them now, he sighs if he is a stranger, and if he is a native surviving from the past, he does not recognise them.

  (Gesta Regum, i, 506–7)

  Even Orderic Vitalis wrote magisterially about the brutal devastation of northern England. The ‘Harrying of the North’ certainly diminished the chances of a major successful rebellion in the north, but over the next few years the region continued to provide the most convenient route into England for a trickle of invaders from Scotland and Scandinavia.

  When the king was in England, Normandy was under the control of Queen Matilda and their eldest son and heir, Robert, but William made frequent visits to the duchy and was sometimes accompanied by Odo. Normandy too had its share of problems, and in an attempt to solve a succession dispute involving Matilda’s family in Flanders, William’s most trusted colleague, William fitz Osbern, was killed in 1071. Odo’s power and influence were inflated further by fitz Osbern’s death and for a while his position as William’s deputy was unchallenged. It is clear that until the early 1080s William relied heavily on Odo to govern England, and although he must have been aware of the bishop’s weaknesses, he accepted them as a price worth paying, for the time being at least. In 1072 William took a large army across the Channel to Maine to restore Norman authority there. In 1074 the king spent much of the year undertaking regular governmental affairs in Normandy. Bishop Odo accompanied him from at least May to November, when presumably he was concerned with diocesan business, in particular, preparations for the consecration of his new cathedral in Bayeux which was now nearing completion. It was during this visit that William gave the cathedral the large estate of Le Plessis-Grimoult, confiscated from a rebel baron after the Battle of Val-ès-Dunes (1047), which Odo used to create prebendal estates for canons at Bayeux Cathedral.

  In 1075 there was another serious rebellion, known as the Earls’ Revolt, which took place against the background of growing threats from France and Denmark. Roger, Earl of Hereford; Ralph, Earl of Norfolk, who held land in Brittany; and Waltheof conspired against William but were put down by royal armies. John of Worcester reported that, ‘Odo of Bayeux and Geoffrey of Coutances led a vast host … to attack the Earl of Norfolk’, but other chroniclers do not mention Odo playing any role in the campaign. It is perhaps significant that it was Lanfranc and not Odo that was in charge of England at this point.

  Nevertheless Odo was in charge from the latter part of 1077 to 1080, when William was preoccupied with the revolt of his eldest son, Robert, in Normandy. Robert, who had effectively been governing the duchy when William was in England, was in his late 20s and believed that he had the right to formally be recognised as Duke of Normandy. Robert quarrelled with his younger brothers as well as William, leading to an estrangement which developed into open rebellion, aided at times by the French king, Philippe I. Several eminent emissaries attempted to heal the rift, including Pope Gregory VII, but Robert and William were not reconciled until Easter 1080 (12 April) when they attended a great assembly together in Rouen.

  35 William the Conqueror, his wife Matilda and their two eldest sons William Rufus and Robert Curthose, from a thirteenth-century fresco in a chapel of St Stephen in Caen, which was destroyed in 1700. Ducarel, 1767

  Almost immediately trouble broke out in England when the Earl of Northumbria, Bishop Walcher of Durham was murdered in a massacre at Gateshead on 14 May 1080. William’s response was savage and intended permanently to emasculate the Northumbrians. There are no detailed descriptions of the campaign, but Odo, who led an expedition north to deal with the rebels, employed tactics similar to those used by the king in the ‘Harrying of the North’, creating areas where now, according to the monk Simeon of Durham, little grew except wolves and outlaws. The Normans slaughtered both the guilty and the innocent, laying waste the area to the north of the Tees and reducing the population and economic activity in the region for a generation or more. Odo weakened the local nobility by killing or driving many of them into exile, and ‘there would be no more native revolts above the Tees, because in 1080 the Northumbrian nobility had joined the nobles of York’ (Kapelle 1978, 142). Odo was accused of stealing treasures from churches, including ‘a pastoral staff of rare workmanship’ from Durham Cathedral. The staff was said to be sapphire encrusted and taken to the castle under guard of the soldiers, but soon disappeared; another source says that it found its way to Bayeux Cathedral (Aird 1998, 101, 4). William’s son Robert, now fully absolved, then led an inconclusive campaign against the Scottish king, Malcolm, who himself had plundered Northumbria the previous year. It was as a result of this campaign that Robert built a castle on the Tyne, opposite Gateshead, and Newcastle was founded. This was to be the last expedition that Odo led on behalf of the Crown; thereafter he was to be part of the problem himself, engineering treasonable plots against two kings of England – his half-brother William I and his nephew William II.

  • The Fruits of Victory •

  After the Conquest, Odo became the wealthiest of the Norman tenants-in-chief in England. In Domesday Book he is credited with estates, chiefly concentrated in the south-east, valued at about £3,050. His lands far exceeded those of any other Norman’s holdings; with 456 manors spread over twenty-two English counties. In all, these manors amounted to almost 1,700 hides, roughly the equivalent of 200,000 acres. Odo would have been delighted with an accolade he received in 2000 when The Sunday Times placed him fourth in a Rich List of non-royal Britons during the last millennium, with a fortune estimated at £43.2 billion (in 2000) – a dubious honour dubiously calculated. He would have been less pleased that curiously both his brother, Robert of Mortain and William of Warenne came in above him. Indeed, three out of the top four in the list were men who had accompanied William to England in 1066 (Bridgeford 2004, 209–10).

  Odo appears to have acquired the bulk of his land in the five years after Hastings, but continued to accumulate assets right up to his fall from grace in 1082. He received his Kentish estates first of all. In terms of value he held almost half the land of Kent, more than that of the Archbishop of Canterbury. He then acquired his estates in Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Surrey,
Hertfordshire and Essex, areas where he was active in the post-Conquest period. There was a direct link between his Kentish estates and those to the north of London. Wealthy tenants in Kent often held outlying estates in the second zone of acquisition. For example, Odo’s richest tenant in Kent, Ralph fitz Turold, also held blocks of land in Essex, Hertfordshire and Oxfordshire, while another major Kentish landholder, Ansgot of Rochester had land straddling the Buckinghamshire–Bedfordshire border. The land Odo acquired in East Anglia (1068–70 and after 1075) and Lincolnshire (after 1075) he distributed to tenants who were prepared to take part in the colonisation of those counties. Men close to Odo, such as Wadard, had three bites of the cherry and gained land in Kent (valued at £42 16d in 1086) immediately after Hastings, in Oxfordshire (valued at £55 5s) in the late ten-sixties and in Lincolnshire (valued at £30 1s 4d) in the mid-ten-seventies (Tsurushima 2011).

  36 The distribution of Bishop Odo’s estates in England from Domesday Book. After Tsurushima, 2011

  The precise method used to transfer land from the English to the Normans varied in different parts of the kingdom. In the south and in the Thames Valley the main unit of land transfer seems to have been the Hundred, a subdivision of the Saxon Shire. In Kent, a county with over Sixty Hundreds in the eleventh century, Odo had control of thirty-one of them (Fleming 1987, 98). In Oxfordshire Odo took over a large group of manors to the west of the River Cherwell, lying in Wootton Hundred. Almost half of the bishop’s Oxfordshire holdings were located in Wootton; in all they comprised 161 hides, seventy-nine of which were in demesne, that were held directly by the bishop. It is probable that this nucleated group of manors represented a pre-Conquest estate, but Domesday Book only records a handful of the Saxon owners. Odo’s estates were never organised into baronies as occurred with the estates of other great magnates, probably because the bishop was disgraced before this could be achieved. It does appear that in Wootton we can see a proto-barony based on the valuable manor of Deddington. Odo’s three principal tenants in Wootton were trusted supporters with extensive estates elsewhere. Ilbert de Lacy, Wadard and Adam held more than eighty per cent non-demesne land of Odo’s Wootton estate between them (Ivens 1980).

  Much of the land Odo acquired had previously belonged to the Godwines and other English nobles who had fought at Hastings and accordingly forfeited their estates after 1066. These confiscations allowed Odo to install new tenants and reward his principal Norman followers. Surprisingly, many of these supporters did not belong to the Norman higher aristocracy and men of relatively humble origins became Odo’s English barons. Tenants such as Ilbert de Lacy, Hugh de Port and Roger Bigot held very modest estates in Normandy yet were handsomely rewarded after Hastings and went on to found important English families. Other major English tenants, such as Wadard, Herbert fitz Ivo and Ralph de Courbépine, are not recorded as holding land in Normandy at all. A number of active followers were launched on prestigious careers by Odo; for instance, Adam fitz Hubert was appointed a Domesday commissioner and, significantly, Hugh de Port was one of those responsible for proscribing Odo and the other rebels in 1088 (Bates 1975).

  • The Trial of Penenden Heath •

  Odo gained a reputation for defrauding the Church and others of their lands – a reputation that was deserved – but he probably behaved no more badly than many of his peers. It is true that many of Odo’s acquisitions were gained illegally; he was particularly aggressive in his procurement of land in Surrey where Domesday Book records many complaints, such as, ‘the county states that he [Odo] had no right there’ and ‘he did not have livery or the King’s writ for it’ and ‘the bishop himself seized Rodsell and Farncombe’ (Bates 1970, 190). The Liber Benefactorum of Ramsey Abbey in Cambridgeshire complained that Bishop Odo had ‘lawlessly’ seized the abbey’s lands or rights ‘by violence’. After his death, several chroniclers commented on this avaricious aspect of his character which was embodied in Orderic Vitalis’ account of his life. According to Orderic, Odo was a man of insatiable ambition and ‘the greatest oppressor of the people and the destroyer of monasteries’. Proof of this was apparently provided by a significant event known as the Trial of Penenden Heath, which was probably held between 1075 and 1077. The term ‘trial’ in this context was a judicial examination of rival claims of land tenure, namely between Archbishop Lanfranc and Bishop Odo. The trial was held over three days near to Maidstone in Kent, where the Saxon moot (county assembly) had traditionally been convened. It was this continuity from Saxon to Norman that has made the Penenden Heath case of particular interest to historians, who for long have regarded it as evidence of Norman respect for Anglo-Saxon legal custom. More recently, historians have pointed out that there are several varying records of the trial and no agreement about which should be regarded as the definitive version of events (Le Patourel 1948). Indeed, some historians now argue that the trial demonstrated the undermining of Anglo-Saxon governance by the power of private interests rather than evidence of the continuation of Anglo-Saxon law and custom after the Conquest (Cooper 2001). This is not a universally held view and Bates has argued that Penenden and other pleas constitute evidence of the orderliness of the Norman settlement rather than the reverse, ‘that the conquerors sought to resolve as peacefully as possible the resulting tensions … and that the ten-seventies and eighties in particular were a period of steady adjustment and integration’ (Bates, 1978).

  Lanfranc requested an enquiry into the activities of Odo, who he claimed had defrauded the Church and possibly the Crown during his tenure as Earl of Kent. Various eminent figures were present, including Geoffrey, Bishop of Coutances representing the king, Lanfranc representing the Church, Arnost, Bishop of Rochester, and Aethelric II, the former Bishop of Selsey, described as a ‘very old man, very learned in the laws of the land’, who was brought by cart ‘in order to discuss and expound the ancient laws and customs’. There were also present a contingent of English witnesses as experts on ancient laws and customs as well as Norman representation. The trial ended with the partial recovery of properties for the Church from Odo and others; but most of the lands had not been lost to Odo, but to Earl Godwine and his family before the Conquest. Odo had simply succeeded to these encroachments and the conflict between Lanfranc and Odo was a rerun of that between Archbishop Robert of Jumièges and Godwine in 1051–52. One consequence of the trial was the realisation that there was a need to have a definitive record of the ownership and administration of Crown property – a need that was met by the commissioning of Domesday Book a decade later. It is also possible that this trial, which saw the first indictment of Odo, established the precedent for him to be stripped of his English properties entirely just a few years later. Domesday Book records several other disputes over land that Odo is claimed to have acquired illicitly, but also shows evidence of his work in allocating lands to their new owners after the Conquest.

  Despite the Penenden Heath judgment, several of Odo’s tenants were recorded in Domesday Book (c. 1086) as still holding the land that had legally been restored to Christ Church, Canterbury. The start of the often bitter rivalry between Odo and Lanfranc is normally attributed to Penenden Heath, exacerbated by Lanfranc’s role in the arrest and imprisonment of Odo in 1082. It is difficult to disentangle the opinions of later chroniclers such as Orderic Vitalis who emphasised the antagonism between the two men. This may well have been exaggerated, although there is a curious symmetry between their respective roles in the diocese of Bayeux and in Kent. In Normandy, Lanfranc was abbot of St Étienne in Caen, which lay within Odo’s jurisdiction as Bishop of Bayeux, but enjoyed widespread exemptions from episcopal responsibilities; while in England, Lanfranc was Archbishop of Canterbury in the heart of Odo’s secular estates. There seems to be little doubt that Odo took pleasure in devastating Lanfranc’s estates during the Barons’ Revolt of 1088.

  37 Portrait of Archbishop Lanfranc from the opening of his De Corpore et Sanguine Domine, which he wrote in defence of the doctrine of transubstantiation.
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br />   • Bayeux Cathedral •

  Some of the wealth Odo accumulated in England was transferred to Bayeux and the new cathedral benefited greatly from his benefactions. Odo is known to have visited Normandy, sometimes for several months at a time, in 1074, 1077, 1080 and 1082. On 14 July 1077 Odo’s cathedral of the Holy Virgin at Bayeux was consecrated, although it may not have been complete as it was normal practice to consecrate churches before they were finished. The consecration ceremony was led by Archbishop John of Rouen and attended by King William, Queen Matilda and many other Norman notables. There were several other important consecrations in Normandy in 1077: these included the cathedral at Évreux, also dedicated to the Virgin Mary, the Abbaye aux Hommes and the Abbaye aux Dames in Caen, and the abbey church at the highly influential abbey of Bec. The cathedral was burnt and badly damaged by Henry I in 1105, when the poet Serlo records that ‘thousands’ of citizens sought refuge there. It was damaged again by Henry II in 1159 and, as a result, the only surviving sections of Odo’s work are the crypt and the bases of the west towers, which incorporate semi-circular Romanesque windows. Even this section of Odo’s work is concealed by later Gothic porches. The bishop employed the best available masons and sculptors in the construction of his cathedral; although the crypt capitals are mostly decorated with simple foliate designs they are of high quality. Something of the grandeur of Odo’s work can be appreciated through two of the most impressive capitals from the destroyed eleventh-century transepts, which are now displayed in the crypt. One of the capitals has a representation of Christ after the resurrection with St Thomas the Incredulous and St Peter; the other portrays Christ holding a small figure, representing a departed soul, on his knee (Neveux 2007).