Queen of the Conqueror

by Tracy Joanne Borman

  At St.-Valéry, where Duke William had moved his fleet because it was closer to England, he and his troops had to wait for a favorable wind to carry them to England. As the days dragged on, his men had begun to lose faith in the enterprise, and “grumbled in their tents” that their leader was “mad … to take over land rightfully belonging to others; God is against us, for He denies us a wind.”44 Hearing of this, William ordered that the remains of a local saint be brought among them in order to invigorate their prayers for a “favouring breeze.” According to Malmesbury, this worked an immediate effect, and on September 27, the ships’ sails were bolstered by the wind.45 Not wanting to waste a moment, the duke ordered his fleet to embark immediately, even though darkness was fast drawing in. A horn was blown from the Mora and a lantern was lit at her masthead to give the signal. “The fleet thus ready, with a following wind and sails billowing aloft he crossed the sea.”46

  William and his army sailed through the night, and the speed of his flagship was such that at dawn, he and his crew found themselves alone in the middle of the Channel. According to Poitiers, the duke, undaunted, calmly called for breakfast, which he washed down with wine “as if in his chamber at home.”47 This episode may have been employed by William’s apologist for dramatic effect, but the Mora did outstrip the other ships of the fleet, which is perhaps not surprising given its marked superiority. Having waited for his fleet to reconvene, he landed in Pevensey Bay in what is today East Sussex. Pevensey was an ideal landing place; the bay itself offered shelter for William’s fleet, while the extensive walls of the old Roman fort of Anderida (now part of Pevensey Castle) offered a useful base from which to marshal his forces. Having overcome the bad omen symbolized by the lack of favorable winds, however, William faced another as soon as he reached England’s shores. Eager to disembark from his ship, he stumbled upon the ground. While his troops looked on aghast at an incident that seemed to presage grave ill fortune, a quick-thinking knight turned the situation to William’s advantage by crying: “You have England in your hand, duke, and you shall be king!”48

  By the following day William had established himself at Hastings, where, according to the chronicler Wace, eager though he was for battle, he did not forget to pay homage to the divine presence that he claimed was at his side. Turning to his nobles, he declared: “Here I vow, that if it shall please God to give me the victory, that, on whatever spot it shall befall, I will there build a church to be consecrated to the blessed Trinity, and to St. Martin, where perpetual prayers shall be offered for the sins of Edward the Confessor, for my own sins, the sins of Matilda my spouse, and the sins of such as have attended me in this expedition, but more particularly for the sins of such as may fall in the battle.”49

  What followed has become one of the most familiar stories in English history. By October 13, Harold and his army had arrived at Senlac, close to the present-day town of Battle in East Sussex, and some ten miles from where William had first landed at Pevensey. The duke’s forces were quartered about five miles away, around Hastings. It was in William’s interest to bring Harold to battle as quickly as possible, for he realized that the longer he waited, the more time Harold would have to raise troops. He therefore goaded Harold by ravaging what was part of the Saxon’s old earldom. Although it might have been to Harold’s advantage to delay fighting, it seems that the English king was equally keen to confront William.

  Hardrada had been surprised by Harold at Stamford Bridge, but William was not to suffer the same fate: his scouts had spotted Harold’s arrival. His men stood at arms all night, and on the morning of October 14 they moved up from Hastings. In fact, it was Harold who was caught by surprise, and abandoning his plans for an attack, he took up a defensive position on Senlac Ridge and awaited the Norman onslaught.

  The two armies that faced each other were very different. Although many of Harold’s men seem to have traveled on horseback, the English traditionally fought on foot, and they did so at Hastings. Harold’s soldiers formed up in tightly packed ranks behind a wall of shields, the dragon banner of Wessex and the king’s personal standard of a fighting man fluttering above them. The bulk of Harold’s army was probably made up of the fyrd, the local militia of the time, armed with spears, swords, javelins, and throwing axes. The Saxon nobles present at the battle would have brought their household troops, or “housecarls,” with them; some of these well-armed warriors carried the deadly Danish two-handed axes shown being used to such devastating effect in the Bayeux Tapestry.

  William’s army was more varied: it deployed with archers and cross-bowmen to the front, armored infantry behind them and mounted knights in mail with lances and kite-shaped shields bringing up the rear. This diversity was to work in favor of the Normans, for while all the English could do was to stand there and take whatever their enemies threw at them, William had a range of tactical options. He could use his archers to unleash a barrage of arrows on the static English lines, then attack with his infantry while his knights probed for a weakness in the English shield wall. As a result, although the English had the advantage of occupying a strong defensive position on the top of a hill, and drove back attack after attack, they were gradually eroded by the relentless Norman pressure.

  Even so, the contest was very finely balanced. Each side fought with extraordinary tenacity, and the battle lasted for most of the day, resulting in “great slaughter on either side.”50 According to William of Poitiers, who was admittedly writing to extol William’s virtues, the Norman leader played a crucial role throughout—not just directing his troops from a distance, but leading by example and fighting with great ferocity in the thick of the action. When a rumor that he had been killed spread panic in his army, he was said to have taken his helmet off and ridden among his men crying: “Look at me. I am alive, and with God’s help I will conquer.”51 Malmesbury records how the duke “encouraged his men by his shouts and by his presence, leading the charge in person and plunging into the thick of the enemy; so that while he carried rage and fury everywhere, three splendid horses were cut down under him.”52

  William’s cunning matched his courage. When the battle seemed to be going against him, he gave the order to retreat. In fact, this was a clever ploy to break up the Saxon ranks, some of whom charged in pursuit of what they thought was a beaten and retreating enemy. Without warning, the Normans turned on them and a bloodbath ensued.53 Although they had been “undone by a trick,” the English fought on: “repeatedly they made a stand, and piled the bodies of their pursuers in great heaps of slaughter.”54 The decisive moment came late in the day, when the English king was slain. Legend has it he was killed by an arrow in the eye, but other sources suggest he was cut down by a group of knights, possibly after having been wounded by the arrow.55

  Realizing that the battle was lost, scores of Harold’s beleaguered men turned on their heels and tried to escape, running into the woods so that their enemy might lose sight of them. Some turned and faced their pursuers at a ravine that is sometimes called the Malfosse, or “evil ditch.” But it was to no avail. “The Normans, though strangers to the district, pursued them relentlessly, slashing their guilty backs and putting the last touches to the victory.”56 Their leader, William, Duke of Normandy, would henceforth be known as William the Conqueror.

  Hastings, as decisive as it was, marked the start, not the end, of William’s campaign to conquer England. It would be nearly five years before he was finally able to establish full control over the country. Even so, it was at this battle that the English lost not only their most effective leader, but also their best chance of turning back the Norman invader.

  This was something that Englishmen of the time were all too well aware of, and the half-English William of Malmesbury later described the “day of destiny” as “a fatal disaster for our dear country as she exchanged old masters for new.”1 The chroniclers estimate that as many as fifteen thousand men perished in the battle. While this figure was again almost certainly an exaggeration, it had clear
ly been one of the bloodiest and hardest-fought conflicts that England had ever seen.2 “The fields were covered with corpses, and all around the only colour to meet the gaze was blood-red. It looked from afar as if rivulets of blood, flowing down from all sides, had filled the valleys, just like a river.”3 The battle had wiped out much of the English ruling elite: “The mangled bodies that had been the flower of the English nobility and youth covered the ground as far as the eye could see.”4 As well as Harold, his brothers Leofwine and Gyrth had been killed, and “many good men.”5 The victorious duke of Normandy ordered the burial of all his fallen men, but he left the English dead unburied, “to be eaten by worms and wolves, by birds and dogs.”6 He defended this apparently callous action on the grounds that they had supported a tyrant and did not therefore deserve a Christian burial. Neither did he accede to a request by Harold’s grieving mother that she might be given her son’s body so that she could arrange a fitting burial. According to Orderic, even when she offered him “Harold’s weight in gold for his body,” William angrily refused.7

  A rash of Norman accounts appeared soon after the battle, praising William as a magnificent warrior and justifying the cruelty of his actions. The size of the English army grew with each telling, so that the feat of the Normans appeared all the more remarkable. Tales of cowardice and disorganization among Harold’s men were contrasted with Norman bravery and tactical brilliance. Writing almost sixty years later, Malmesbury decried the bias with which the story of the battle had been told: “Those men seem to me wrong who exaggerate the number of the English and diminish their courage, thus bringing discredit on the Normans whom they mean to praise. A mighty commendation indeed! That a most warlike nation should conquer a set of people who were disorganised because of their numbers, and fearful through cowardice! On the contrary, they were few in number and brave in the extreme, who disregarded the love of their own bodies and laid down their lives for their country.”8

  The reports that were sent back to Normandy in the immediate aftermath of the battle were no less biased than those of which Malmesbury complained. Among the first to hear the news was Matilda. She was in the Benedictine priory of Nôtre Dame du Pré, a small chapel that she had founded in 1060 on the banks of the river Seine near Rouen, praying for William’s safety, when a messenger arrived with the news. Upon hearing it, she joyfully proclaimed that the priory should henceforth be known as Nôtre Dame de Bonnes Nouvelles (Our Lady of Good News).9 She had good reason to rejoice, for she was now queen of England—an honor that she could not possibly have hoped for when she had agreed to become the wife of “William the Bastard” some fifteen years earlier.

  Determined to celebrate her husband’s success and revel in her exalted new status, Matilda embarked upon a series of well-planned public gestures. She made a number of high-profile—and extremely generous—religious bequests, giving thanks to God for her husband’s victory. Orderic Vitalis wrote admiringly: “The alms which this princess daily distributed with such zeal brought more succour than I can express to her husband, struggling on the field of battle.”10 It might have been at Matilda’s command that in 1068 her chaplain,11 Guy, bishop of Amiens, composed an epic poem—Carmen de Hastingae Praelio—“praising and exalting William” and “abusing and condemning Harold.”12 The theme that ran throughout this piece of blatant Norman propaganda was that the duke had only taken what was rightfully his. The prologue declares: “For manfully he recovered a kingdom of which he had been deprived, and by his victory extended the boundaries of his ancestral lands across the sea—a deed worthy to be remembered forever.”13 Throughout the poem, William is hailed as a triumphant leader, comparable to Caesar, whose nobility and virtue excelled those of all his contemporaries.14 It is a straightforward tale of hero versus villain, usurper versus rightful king.

  According to popular legend, Matilda’s most powerful and iconic commemoration of the Battle of Hastings was the Bayeux Tapestry, which told the story of the battle from a Norman perspective and reinforced the justice of William’s claim to the English throne. For many years, it was assumed that it was the work of the duchess and her ladies, an idea recorded by the Benedictine historian Bernard de Montfaucon, who discovered the Bayeux Tapestry in the late 1720s. He subsequently published a reproduction of it in his Monuments de la monarchie française, in which he reported: “The common opinion in Bayeux is that Queen Matilda, wife of William the Conqueror, had the tapestry made. This opinion passes for a tradition in the region. It seems highly probable.”15 His theory was soon widely accepted, and gained greater currency when it was reiterated—and embellished—by the prolific nineteenth-century historian Agnes Strickland in her Queens of England series.16 It has since proved remarkably enduring, to the extent that most French people today know the work not as “La Tapisserie de Bayeux” but “La Tapisserie de la Reine Mathilde.” Indeed, a modern-day visitor to Bayeux will encounter numerous references to Matilda as being the orchestrator of the work—from the Hotel Reine Mathilde to a plaque outside the museum that houses the tapestry bearing her name.

  That Matilda was responsible for the Bayeux Tapestry is in many respects a natural assumption to make. It was customary for queens and noble ladies to embroider hangings for churches or monasteries depicting the glorious successes of their families. Bertha, wife of Matilda’s grandfather, Robert the Pious of France, commissioned just such a hanging for the abbey of St.-Denis. Meanwhile, Duchess Gunnor, wife of Duke Richard I of Normandy, presented an exquisite embroidery in silk and linen to the church of Nôtre-Dame in Rouen.

  It would therefore have been entirely commensurate with Matilda’s role as a dutiful wife to the Conqueror, eager to promote his successes, that she should have commissioned the Bayeux Tapestry. The image of the new queen of England and her ladies assiduously working on the tapestry during their idle hours while their husbands completed the obliteration of the Saxon kingdom fits neatly with the conventional view of women’s role in society. Moreover, Matilda certainly was an accomplished seamstress, having been taught the art of embroidery as a young woman in her parents’ household, and she bequeathed some fine needlework in her will.

  Beguiling though the image conjured up by Montfaucon and Strickland is, however, it is fundamentally flawed. There is no doubt that Matilda had been a dutiful wife up until this point, and she was shrewd enough to realize the importance of justifying William’s tenuous claim to the English throne. But in the aftermath of his victory, she was fully preoccupied with the regency of Normandy, so the notion that she was able to idle away countless hours sewing with her ladies is questionable in the extreme. At best, she might have commissioned the tapestry and set her female attendants to work on it, providing only occasional supervision.

  However, as early as the nineteenth century, historians were questioning whether Matilda was involved in the making of the Bayeux Tapestry at all. One of them claimed that the tapestry was produced after her death, attributing it instead to her granddaughter and namesake, the empress Matilda.17 Other historians of the period began to voice doubts that any royal woman could have been responsible. Their reasoning says much about the age in which they were writing. The tapestry contains some overtly sexual images in its borders, and it was felt that neither queen could possibly have been involved in such a shockingly crude piece of work.

  More important in understanding the provenance of the tapestry are recent painstaking investigations providing compelling evidence that it was in fact made not in Normandy, but in the conquered land, England. The style of decoration mirrors that found in English manuscripts, and some of the Latin names are spelled the English rather than the Norman way. Moreover, Anglo-Saxon women were renowned for their skill at embroidery, and many of them were employed in this profession. William of Poitiers, who was hostile toward the English, admitted that “the women are very skilled at needlework and weaving gold thread.”18 The late King Harold’s sister, Edith, was among them, and it is possible that if any royal lady had a hand in the wo
rk, it was she rather than Matilda.

  The case for the tapestry’s having been made in England rather than Normandy is also supported by a fresh interpretation of the story it tells. One recent historian has argued convincingly that it was not the great statement of Norman triumphalism that it appears, but a subversive work loaded with hidden meaning. For example, the images depicted in the tapestry imply that Edward the Confessor did not support William’s claim to the English throne, as the Norman chroniclers would have us believe. Furthermore, the scenes in which the Battle of Hastings is played out suggest that it was the French, not the Norman troops, who assumed the starring role. These troops were under the command of Count Eustace II of Boulogne (which was then part of Flanders), who although nominally on William’s side in the battle was otherwise one of the duke’s most troublesome northern French rivals. In fact, Eustace is one of only three Normans who are singled out in the tapestry as being present at Hastings (the others being Bishop Odo and William himself), which again suggests that this was hardly a work celebrating that duchy’s triumph.19

  That the artist was a supporter of Eustace adds weight to the notion that the Bayeux Tapestry was a subversive work, and it may also be possible that Eustace himself had commissioned it.20 But the more commonly accepted view is that its patron was Matilda’s brother-in-law, Bishop Odo. In 1824, a French antiquarian, Honoré François Delauney, one of those nineteenth-century historians who did not believe that Matilda was responsible for the tapestry, put forward the theory that it could have been given to Bayeux Cathedral by an immoral cleric.21 Bishop Odo perfectly fitted the bill. His lax morality was notorious, and he made little secret of the fact that he had a mistress and a son. The fact that Odo was bishop of the cathedral in which the tapestry was discovered might seem to strengthen the case for his being its originator, but it was his connections in Kent that have proved more significant. Soon after the Battle of Hastings, William made him earl of that region. Canterbury was its principal town, a thriving artistic center. Any patron intending to commission an embroidery on such a grand scale would naturally have turned to the artisans of this city.