histories and didactic fables, written and recited to entertain french-speaking lords and ladies in their new English castles, all represent important staging posts in the history of French literature itself. Some even believe that the first great work that was composed in the French language, the Chanson de Roland (the Song of Roland), was actually written in conquered England.6 Whether or not this is so, the earliest surviving version of the Song of Roland is certainly a copy that was written down in twelfth-century England.7
For hundreds of years the two languages existed side by side, French for the richer classes, English for those of middling status and the poor. As Sir Walter Scott observed in his novel Ivanhoe, echoes of this social and linguistic division can still be heard in modern English. Many living animals continue to be called by their old English names (sheep, cow, ox, deer) whereas once cooked and served up on the tables of the gentry they acquired names derived from the French (mutton, beef, veal, bacon, venison). Only in 1362 did French cease to be the language of the English parliament. When in 1399 Henry IV succeeded to the throne, he became the first English king since Harold Godwinson whose mother tongue was English rather than French. Even as late as the seventeenth century, English lawyers were using a degenerate form of French in order to report cases in the law courts. The Normans never sought to eradicate English. William the Conqueror is said to have tried to learn the language, but he found it too difficult and quickly gave up. Inevitably, because of the overwhelming preponderance of people speaking English, and endemic wars with France, French slowly died out as a spoken tongue, and by the fifteenth century modern English emerged as the common vernacular of the nation. By this time the French of the Normans and Plantagenets had enriched the language with thousands of new words. The vast number of synonyms in modern English is largely the result of this grafting of French, in the wake of the Norman Conquest, on to older Saxon and Norse roots. If Harold had won the Battle of Hastings, the language this book is written in would have been very different, a much more Germanic tongue.
Travelling around northern France today one can still find echoes of 1066. There are, of course, great Romanesque buildings erected, in part, thanks to money that poured in from conquered England – the completion of Bayeux Cathedral in the 1070s was probably financed by confiscated English wealth. Other reminders are less tangible but no less noticeable. From the hedged-in pastures of the Cherbourg peninsula in the west to the flat expanse of Flanders in the north-east there are many sleepy towns and villages whose names are poignantly redolent of some of the most famous British families. Each place is quintessentially French, each may have its café-bar, its boulangerie, its shuttered houses, its old ladies in blue cardigans who shuffle quietly down the street. It is from places such as these, with names like Cuinchy, Montbrai, Mortemer, La Pommeraye, Sequeville and Ver, that the eponymous aristocratic families of Britain sprang – de Quincy, Mowbray, Mortimer, Pomeroy, Sackville and de Vere.8 It is a testament of the lasting social impact of the Norman Conquest that to British ears these names still bring to mind a succession of plummy-voiced aristocrats. The ancestors of these families (and many others could be cited) were powerful men who settled in England as a result of the Norman Conquest, if not immediately, then in the second and subsequent waves of immigration.
In these varying ways the events depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry had an impact that can still be felt today, like distant ripples in a pond long after the surface has been disturbed by the violent splash of a rock. That more than nine centuries later we can still perceive these effects is not simply a consequence of the Conquest itself. Since then the waters have remained largely undisturbed, for the Norman invasion in 1066 was the last time that England was conquered by a foreign power. No other unwanted invader – neither Philip II of Spain in 1580s, nor the Napoleon in the early 1800s, nor Adolf Hitler in the 1940s – has been able to match the extraordinary achievement of William the Conqueror.
Our quest is to investigate the true origin and meaning of the Bayeux Tapestry, to understand more about the characters who are named in it and with this to gain new insight into some of the darkest events of the Norman Conquest. This, of course, will require the story told in the tapestry’s threads to be closely examined, but we will also need to compare it with the other contemporary accounts of the same events. There are a handful of these. Each has its own limitations; none has any inherent right to be regarded as inviolable truth.1 On the English side of the Channel, two versions of the annals known as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle have accounts of the Norman invasion, whilst a third comes to an abrupt end in 1066 shortly before it took place.2 The fragile surviving manuscripts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle are themselves national treasures. The monks who wrote the Chronicle attempted to distil the important events of each year, as they saw them, into single short paragraphs. Sometimes this can provide us with important information. The treatment of the events of the Conquest is pervaded by a memorable sense of sadness, but as a source for its key events and causes, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is disappointingly brief and superficial. It passes over in complete silence the crucial episode that opens the story in the Bayeux Tapestry: the strange journey that Earl Harold made to the continent in 1064 or 1065. It seems that the authors of the Chronicle either did not know or were unable to reveal the truth behind Harold’s mission.
The Vita Ædwardi Regis (the Life of King Edward) is a work which King Edward’s queen Edith commissioned in the 1060s from a Flemish monk residing at the royal court and it is therefore usually treated as another English source.3 Edith, who died in 1075, was Earl Harold’s sister. She is seen (though not named) in the Bayeux Tapestry as a dutiful wife at King Edward’s deathbed in January 1066 [plate 6]. The Life of King Edward survives in one near-contemporary manuscript copy, written out around 1100 in the small, neat handwriting of a single scribe. The work itself, though begun before 1066, seems to have been mostly written during King Harold’s short reign. The author’s original plan had been to celebrate the deeds of Edith’s family, notably her father Earl Godwin and her brothers King Harold and Earl Tostig. The events of 1066, however, completely overtook this plan. The anonymous scribe, having optimistically begun his work in order to extol Harold’s family, now had to make sense of the disaster that had overcome it. He turned to console the widowed and saddened queen by presenting her late husband Edward as a saint in heaven, and the Life of King Edward thenceforth dissolves into hagiography. Its contemporary character gives it many points of interest, including a dramatic account of Edward’s final hours, but the Life of King Edward is often obscure and the work as a whole seems to provide little that truly enlightens the reader about the key events that led up to the Norman Conquest. Here, too, Harold’s strange journey to the continent is ignored. Even more surprising is the fact that Duke William of Normandy receives not a single direct mention.
In the written sources emanating from the Norman side of the Channel, Duke William cuts, as might be expected, a much larger figure. A Norman monk called William, working at the monastery of Jumièges, covered the period of the Conquest down to about 1070 in a Latin prose history known as the Gesta Normannorum Ducem (the Deeds of the Norman Dukes).4 More detailed is the biography of William the Conqueror written in the 1070s by one of his chaplains, William of Poitiers. His work, the Gesta Guillelmi Ducis (the Deeds of Duke William), survives only through an incomplete version that was printed in the sixteenth century, for the only known manuscript perished in a disastrous fire in 1731.5 It is by far the most detailed contemporary account of the events that concern us and its author was clearly well informed. As such the Deeds of Duke William will always be invaluable; but it is also biased. William of Poitiers was a Norman patriot. At each opportunity he loads praise upon Duke William and odium upon the evil and usurping Harold. His aim was to justify