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Post by Kriyaban on Mar 12, 2022 12:34:21 GMT
Arhont Архонт Вселената 💎 Орден Орунбая 💎 Harold is Grosglockner God 🦢 of Francia Broceliande Avalonia Harold Land in Bretagne Alone Harold Took That Bridge Harold Took that Cambra Sefiroth 🦜 Maciavean Concentrates Harold Took that Vienna Lichtenstein Blagogoveina Harold Swan Swam in that Bridge Harold Save the Two Carpathian Mink from Plavazhti Pyasatsu Harold Took That Norman Nobility Rouen Alone Bec Abbeys Sacred Relics Support Samurai Futamigaura Fukuoka Prefecture Divine Endertard Umbar Silvan Wizard Elfi Feeri
Alone avec Bec Mistress of Bronze Broceliande
derwandelndegeist
Harold Took Carpathea and Ispaneya Too Pyrhi
Enees Abbeys Sacred Fire Harold Took that Thor 💖 Chrysagon Macht Harold Разперушини Der Schwandelnde Knecht 🦢 Elkultur Diamond Blue Lotuses Excalibur ⛩️ Orchideyas Thor 💖
Avatar Harold Yahu Paradaiza Yahuu Harold Has Two Carpathen Tghree Four Force 🦢 ⚜️ ❄️ Armei Harold Разперфушини North Carthagen Force 🦢 Harold Smart
Avatar Erenald Turold the Dwarf Fox
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Post by Kriyaban on Mar 12, 2022 12:50:24 GMT
The Fox and the Crow
There appears in the tapestry's lower border, at the point where Harold and his men were embarking aboard their ship at Bosham, a seemingly irrelevant illustration of a fox, a crow and a piece of cheese. This is an old fable. Sitting on a branch, there was once a foolish crow with some cheese in his mouth, which he had just carried off from a window. The crow was about to eat the tasty morsel when a fox, fancying it for himself, looked up and spoke the following artful words: 'My dear crow, how shiny and beautiful your feathers are! And your face and figure, how graceful they are too! If only you had a voice, you would be the finest of all birds.' Pleased by this flattery but taken aback by the insinuation that he could not sing, the crow opened his mouth to prove otherwise. The cheese, of course, dropped to the ground and was promptly snapped up by the cunning fox. The moral of the tale: he who takes delight in treacherous flattery will usually end up paying a hefty price.
The fable of the fox and the crow is as old as Aesop, the celebrated teller of animal tales in ancient Greece; it was known in classical Latin times through adaptations by Phaedrus and Babrius; and in Anglo-Saxon England the Aesop fables had become popular through translations from the Latin made, so it was said, by King Alfred the Great. The artist of the tapestry included several animal fables in the borders, touching on themes of deceit, dishonesty and possession, but this one he seems to have considered particularly apt, for he included it three times.1 There is surely art in this. It is hard to believe that the fable of the fox and the crow was not deliberately included as an ironic commentary on the unfolding drama, but the crucial question is this: who is the fox and who the crow? Once more the artist courts danger by teasing his public with double meaning. Norman observers, in the aftermath of the Conquest, would immediately see Harold as the fox, scheming with cunning words to take the crown of England from under the nose of its rightful heir, Duke William of Normandy. Yet if the threaded drama is more closely observed it becomes increasingly possible to interpret the fable in exactly the opposite way, with Harold the cheated one and the treacherous and deceitful fox William of Normandy. It is in the crafty guise of a rescuer, a knight, in brightly stitched chain mail, that William of Normandy will make a dramatic entrance on to the linen stage.
Harold is a prisoner on that strand of Ponthieu, but his nerves must shortly have begun to calm. It has become clear that Count Guy will treat him honourably. 'By the ancient law of my land, you are now my captive, Earl Harold, but rest assured - I will not treat you badly.' Some such words were presumably spoken to the Englishman, for they are implied by the tapestry's pictures. In this, once more, the woven story differs markedly from the written account of William of Poitiers. It seems that the latter's evocation of the dire imprisonment that awaited Harold in Ponthieu was an exaggeration, designed, no doubt, to cast Duke William'simpending intervention in the most favourable light. For its part the tapestry ennobles Guy with a certain nascent chivalry. He is intent on getting what he can from Harold, but this is an honourable captivity. Harold is neither shackled nor bound;he sits proudly on his horse as together he and Guy ride along the country paths of Picardy to one of Guy's castles [scene 7]. At the rear of the party two hunting dogs, dodging the gnarled tree which separates this scene from the last, run after their English lord, panting with canine enthusiasm, and both Harold and Guy ride with hawks at hand. Were it not for the armed guard, which discreetly follows, one might think this the picture of a friendly day's chase. There can be no doubt, however, that Harold is effectively a prisoner. The inescapable truth is underlined by a prosaic inscription. HIC APPREHENDIT WIDO HAROLDUM ET DUXIT EUM AD BELREM ET IBI EUM TENUIT (Here Guy seized Harold and led him to Beaurain and held him there).
Beaurain lies by the mellow, slow-flowing River Canche, nine miles from the Channel coast. Today it is an inconspicuous hamlet, lost amidst the fields of Picardy half way between Montreuil and Hesdin, but in those days Guy's castle at Beaurain must have been an impressive fortress. It is represented three times in the tapestry (which is more than any other structure) and if we pause to observe closely, and not ignore what is often taken to be another child-like or conventional representation, we can see how cleverly its essentials were tricked out of the threads [scene 13].2 They must have taken Harold first to an outer stone wall, with battlements and towers, and then through a great arched gate to the large enclosure (the bailey) within. Dominating the enclosure, at the back, was a steeply-sided earthen mound (the motte), rising perhaps seventy feet into the air. Now within the bailey Harold would have creaked up his neck at the impregnable centrepiece, a gleaming stone keep standing proudly on top of the mound and itself crowned by a remarkable domed roof. Today a little village still bears the name Château-Beaurain; but nothing is left of the eponymous motte-and-bailey castle or even of any later stronghold on the same site. The last of its stones were whistled away by masons in 1822 in order to be recycled in the construction of a new watercourse. Only an overgrown hillock, obscured by trees, stands where the motte once stood. There is now nothing in this windswept place that we can touch, nothing tangible to remind us of the clank of armour, the rustle of hoofs, the shouts of men or the squeaky pulling of gates as Harold and Guy arrived that day. Only their woollen counterparts live on to re-enact the tale.
Now Harold is taken to the door of Guy's hall; he is surrounded by no less than six guards, one of whom holds his confiscated sword [scene 7]. Harold enters, slowly, and with trepidation. A fellow Englishman from his party encourages him forward with a push in the back. Under the domed roof, captive and captor now converse, man to man, eye to eye, noble to noble, sizing each other up with sly glances, but just as in the tapestry's opening scene, when Harold met Edward, we do not know exactly what passes between them. UBI HAROLD ET WIDO PARABOLANT (Where Harold and Guy confer) is all that the inscription says. Do the discussions range over Harold's wealth? Are they talking of how much gold Harold is willing to hand over for his freedom?For the moment (for the picture, as it were) Harold has been handed back his unbelted sword. He stands throughout the meeting, whereas Guy makes a point of sitting on his comital throne, raised higher than Harold; the seated position is always indicative of authority in the tapestry. It is a dapper, ambitious young Frenchman, still in his twenties, whom Harold can see before him, now with his arm raised, pointing directly at his captive - 'I have you under my complete custody and control,' he seems to be saying. Guy's sword is held upright by the blade, like a sceptre, and his feet are resting on a cushioned footstool. His face is clean-shaven and his hair is worn in the northern French style, which is to say shorn very short at the back. This contrasts with the English who, like Harold, are in the habit of wearing their fair locks thick and long around the nape of the neck and a little stitch of a moustache underlining the nose. The count's dark cape lies over his shoulders like the wings of a mantling hawk; it is neatly buttoned in front with a large brooch. Guy's tunic is something like a long, unbelted dress, with folds and creases forming around his waist and uplifted knees; he wears a fine hose that has been carefully embroidered in horizontal black and brown stripes. His throne, scarcely less noble than a king's, has carved claw feet and its arms are made into sculptured animal heads. This is a man with a taste for luxury, but clearly someone who must be taken seriously within the boundaries of his own county. A contemporary monk at the monastery of Saint Riquier, the chief monastic centre in Ponthieu, described him as pitiless, haughty and corrupted by greed: 'only gold would satisfy him', he said.3 In the next century William of Malmes-bury wrote that Count Guy was effeminate.4
If Guy seemed vaguely familiar to Harold, it was because he had met him, or at least seen him, once before. Harold had not often travelled to the continent but during a visit to Flanders, some eight years earlier, he had been called upon by Count Baldwin of Flanders to lend his name as a witness to a local charter.5 It was the practice for nobles and officials to attest legal transactions in order to give them greater authority, and Harold duly obliged. The young Guy was presumably visiting Baldwin's court too, for the two names 'Duke Harold'and 'Count Guy' appear side by side in the same document, among twenty-eight other witnesses. The surviving diploma, subscribed at the Flemish town of St-Omer, bears the date 13 November 1056. To what extent they conversed in 1056 is unknown, but there was presumably ample opportunity for the assembled nobles gathered at Baldwin's court to mingle and to indulge in feasting and entertainment. Under the late autumnal skies Harold and Guy would have been able to partake in their shared passion for falconry.
To those who were there at that noble Flemish gathering in 1056, Count Guy probably seemed a bitter and resentful youth. He had himself only recently emerged from two years'imprisonment and his jailer was none other than his powerful enemy Duke William of Normandy. Guy knew what it was like to be a helpless prisoner; and he had personal experience of the wrath of the Norman duke. It is one of the ironies of history that nowadays Guy of Ponthieu, like his cousin Count Eustace II of Boulogne, is often erroneously referred to as a 'Norman'. Ponthieu (still less Boulogne) had never been part of the lands ceded to the Vikings in 911 and it had never been part of Normandy. Its culture, history and ruling class were all quite separate from the much larger land of Normandy, lying just to the south and west. The people of Ponthieu were proud of their past. They sang heroic tales of how they had once resisted the pagans and they would have considered themselves as belonging to an older Gallic culture, one which was Christian hundreds of years before any Norseman had abandoned the religion of Odin and Thor.6 Guy of Ponthieu and Eustace of Boulogne were French, but on no account were they Normans.7
These were not merely matters of abstract nuance; they reflected a real hostility on the ground. The smaller territories of northern France had much to fear from the growing power of Normandy under its indomitable and headstrong duke. William had inherited the duchy of Normandy in 1035 while only a boy, but he outlived those who had idly scoffed at him and he had grown into a powerful and violent man. In Norman accounts 'France' is often distinguished from Normandy and the 'French' are portrayed as the natural enemies of the Normans. Together with lands such as Boulogne and Mantes, great Anjou to the south, and for much of the 1050s the French king himself, Ponthieu formed a block of powers hostile to Normandy. Duke William was a strong and fearless opponent;he also had luck on his side. He survived all attempts to depose him, both from within and without his duchy, and emerged with his authority not only intact but enhanced. In October 1053 Guy's elder brother, Count Enguerrand of Ponthieu, famous for his nobility and beauty, was killed fighting the Normans at Saint-Aubin-sur-Scie. Guy, as yet still in his teens, inherited the county but was himself captured by Normans in February 1054 when engaged in a similar venture at the town of Mortemer. It was in these circumstances that Count Guy of Ponthieu became Duke William's prisoner.
William did not kill Count Guy: instead he wanted to teach him a lesson, and in the process reduce Ponthieu to the status of a client state. For two years he held Guy in captivity at Bayeux.8 At long last he was released, in 1056, but only after he had sworn a humiliating oath of loyalty to his Norman enemy and in particular to provide the annual service of 100 knights. This did not make Guy a Norman; but it certainly curtailed his freedom of action. The oath was a primary bond in the society in which these men lived. It bound the swearer both in sanctity and honour. To break such an oath was to incur the wrath of God and, which was no less certain, though possibly more immediate, the wrath of William. Now more than eight years had passed, eight years during which Guy had kept out of harm's way and had been able once again to enjoy the kind of luxury that befitted the ruler of a small but prosperous French county. He stood to gain much from capturing Earl Harold, but if there was one person in the world that he feared, one person that he did not want to see flexing his muscles just now, one person that he would rather not pay him a visit at his castle at this particular, rather delicate juncture, it was Duke William of Normandy.
Guy feels a little tap at his elbow. One of his soldiers, standing by his throne, alerts him to the fact that two Norman knights have just arrived at the castle gate and wish to speak to him as a matter of urgency in the next scene. What can they know? What on earth do they want? What has brought them in such haste to the northerly castle of Beaurain, which is just about as far from Normandy as Guy could have taken Harold within his own territory? In an obscure corner of the hall, hiding behind a pillar, a sly fellow in a jagged-edged tunic has been watching the proceedings all along - a jester perhaps, or a spy, or both.
The meeting with Harold is over. Guy has moved outside his castle in order to speak with the two Norman knights [scene 9]. They have dismounted their horses and are standing upright. Tall, lanky, aggressive men, each is armed with a lance and sword. What they lack in number is more than compensated by their unquestioned authority as the emissaries of the Duke of Normandy. UBI NUNTII WILLELMI DUCIS VENERUNT AD WIDONE[M], says the inscription (Where Duke William's messengers came to Guy). 'It is no use trying to be clever,' they seem to be saying. 'Our lord William knows very well that you are holding the Englishman Harold here. He requires you to hand him over forthwith and without question.' As this tense scene unfolds, Guy's dwarf 'TUROLD' grips the reins of the Normans' horses, an incongruous little figure holding the two hot animals, freshly ridden across the border from Normandy and through the forests of Ponthieu to the riverside castle [scene 10; plate 1]. A mere fifteen people are named in the tapestry; most of them are more or less familiar players on the stage of history. Turold the dwarf is the first of four highly obscure figures whose names have been stitched in for us. Although the dwarf is often passed over without comment, his identity and significance will be of the highest interest.
Guy hears what William's henchmen are saying. His dark hair, though shaved at the back, is combed across his forehead so that it almost flops into his eyes. On this occasion he wears an extravagant knee-length tunic, represented in embroidery in a manner that suggests overlapping leaves of leather; his over-cloak is long and buttoned at the side. His right hand rests quaintly on his hip, while gripped firmly in his left is an upright axe, a great English-style fighting axe with a handle almost as tall as himself. This last gesture is nicely symbolic of the fact that he currently holds in his custody England's foremost earl. But for how much longer? This is an uncomfortable encounter, more confrontation than meeting. Guy does not sit authoritatively on his throne; he cannot lean back comfortably on the seat of his power while those who speak with him are lorded over and left shuffling foot to foot in embarrassment. These Normans are the emissaries of Duke William, the man to whom he had been forced to swear his allegiance, so Guy must meet them standing upright, on his own two feet.
Perhaps Guy is thinking now, biting his lip, wondering whether he might just be able to defy Duke William and get away with it. He remembers his long captivity at Bayeux. He remembers the oath of allegiance he has sworn. He remembers that God is his witness and that William has a fiery temper, which no one in their right mind would wish to rekindle. If he disobeyed now, the Norman duke might invade Ponthieu and have him killed, and then take over the whole of the county, as he had done only recently in Maine. Other accounts (though not the tapestry) reveal that William sweetened the pill with promises. In particular, it is said that William offered Guy a stretch of land by the River Aulne if he would cooperate in handing over Harold.9 Threatened and bribed, the choice turns out to be surprisingly easy. It is agreed. Harold is to be passed, like a football, from one to the other, from Ponthieu to Normandy - from a covetous jailer to a duplicitous rescuer.
At this moment in the story the Bayeux Tapestry clarifies (up to a point) how Duke William discovered so quickly that Harold had been taken prisoner in Ponthieu. This intriguing sub-plot unfolds like a flashback, in a right-to-left direction;the thread of history is momentarily reversed. The two Norman knights, whom we have already seen at Beaurain, are now riding towards there [scene 11]. Their mission, as we suspected, was urgent for the horses gallop at full tilt. Hoofs rumble past us at great speed; the hair of the riders flows like streamers in the wind. Each carries his couched lance in the latest military style and a wing-shaped shield embroidered with a dragon motif. Evidently there was no time to be lost;William desperately wanted to ensnare Harold before he escaped. It is a strange thought, but had these two knights been riding slower, and Earl Harold been able to negotiate his release, the whole history of England might have been different. But there are many such moments in the Bayeux Tapestry, such is the pivotal nature of each passing episode in its story. Now we venture further back in time. We are shown where the two Normans have come from. This must be outside William's ducal palace at Rouen [scene 12]. Here, in flashback, we catch our first glimpse of the majestic Duke of Normandy, a large, imposing figure, sword in hand, seated on his carved throne. It has been estimated, on the basis of the surviving bones found in his grave at Caen, that William was about 5 feet 10 inches tall, which would have made him impressively tall for the eleventh century.10 Here he is being pleaded with by an Englishman who is on the point of falling to his knees. The giveaway is the thick mop of hair and the pencil-thin moustache: this man is certainly English. Somehow a member of Harold's party must have escaped or evaded capture in Ponthieu, secretly crossed into Normandy and hurried to Duke William in order to plead for his help in rescuing Harold. The tapestry does not tell us how. The reverse order of these scenes distracts us from pondering the question too long. Perhaps the furtive fellow whom, a little while ago, we saw hiding behind a pillar at Guy's castle had some clandestine hand in the plot.
Harold has evidently turned to Duke William of Normandy for help. This might seem to support the Norman case - that Harold had been sent to the continent specifically to give William news that he would be the next king of England. It is certainly consistent with the Norman story, but the Canterbury monk Eadmer, like the tapestry, tells us that Harold implored William's help in a bid to evade further detention in Ponthieu. Eadmer, it will be recalled, reported that Harold'spurpose in crossing the Channel had nothing to do with the English succession but rather it was to secure the release of his nephew and brother from Duke William's custody. In Eadmer's version it was one of the common folk of Ponthieu (not an Englishman) who, having been bribed by Earl Harold, carried the secret call for help to William.11 Whether the messenger was English or French, Harold must have weighed matters in the balance and concluded that incurring a debt of honour to William was preferable to remaining shamefully in the custody of Count Guy. This was not a wise move. In fact, it was one of the gravest political miscalculations ever made. Earl Harold, it seems, was still blissfully unaware quite how seriously the Norman duke took his claim to the English throne.
The flashback over, we pick up again the thread of the embroidered story. We are shown the formal handover of Harold as it takes place on open ground at a prearranged spot [scene 14]. HIC WIDO ADDUXIT HAROLDUM AD WILGELMUM NORRMANORUM DUCEM (Here Guy brought Harold to William, Duke of the Normans); this is all that the tapestry says on the matter, but the place of rendezvous is independently identified in the chronicle of William of Poitiers as the Norman border castle at Eu. Guy approaches from the left. He is riding a smaller, prick-eared mount rather than a warhorse, this in order, presumably, to symbolise his submission to Duke William. He is closely followed by Harold who is seated on a more worthy steed; each of them still has a hawk on his wrist. Behind them we see a group of Guy's knights. Now the Norman side rides in from the right. The duke appears first, wearing a great red cloak, two tassels trailing from his neck; behind him follows a handful of his own mounted knights. These Normans are aggressive, bent-forward soldiers, much more eager than Guy's, but at least they hold their lances pointing backwards in an effort to offset the impression of immediate hostility. One of them carries a shield threaded with the same dragon motif that we saw borne by the knights who rode to Ponthieu. The Norman at the back of the party points to the next embroidered scene, into the heart of Normandy, where Harold must be taken.
Harold now accompanies Duke William into Norman territory. They are heading for William's great ducal palace HIC DUX WILGELM CUM HAROLDO VENIT AD PALATIU[M] SUU[M] (Here Duke William comes to his palace with Harold). The English earl rides at the head of the party; he has no weapon and the Normans at his back keep him under constant watch. Evidently he is told to ride first so that he cannot turn tail and escape. His hawk has gone too;William has it on his wrist. The party arrives at what is probably Duke William's palace at Rouen, where a guard manning the watchtower greeets them with a smile. We are now inside the hall, a long and impressive stone building, with an arcaded upper level, like the clerestory of a church, consisting of eighteen embroidered arches [plate 2; scene 16]. William and Harold are deep in animated conversation. It is the first formal meeting of the two men and if, as we hear so often, the Bayeux Tapestry tells the story 'strictly from the Norman point of view', it is surely here that we would expect the inscription to make clear, beyond any measure of doubt, that Harold is fulfilling the supposed purpose of his journey - that he is confirming to Duke William his status as the next king of England. Instead the meeting is depicted in total silence; there is no inscription at all. It thus behoves us to look closely at what the embroidered picture itself reveals, what it covertly tells us of that distant meeting of the two men who, within as many years, would be the most famous of mortal enemies on the battlefield of Hastings. Each detail at this meeting is potentially telling. There are secrets here.
William, as we would expect, is seated authoritatively on his throne, with its dragon-headed arms, fine cushion and attendant blue footstool; for he is the Duke of Normandy and this is his palace. Harold stands, but unlike each previous encounter with a figure of authority, where the standing person is drawn artificially small, Harold is depicted as sufficiently large to look William straight in the eye [scene 16]. The artist, it seems, wishes to portray these two men as equals; there is no sense in which Harold is belittled, as he is so often by William of Poitiers. Observe, now, how Harold, while busy talking to William, points at the armed and bearded man standing to his left, and how this man reciprocates the gesture. Evidently this man is the subject of Harold's conversation with William. Behind him are three Norman knights. Each listens eagerly to the proceedings; each is also armed with a lance and shield; but closer inspection reveals two curious and unexplained anomalies: the three Norman knights have four shields between them and only five legs. Whatever the reason for that, it is clear that the mysterious man to whom Harold is pointing is different from the three Normans. Crucially, his hair is long at the back; he also has a thick growth of beard;12 his posture and bearing are quite distinct, too. In the iconography of the tapestry, long or facial hair is the trademark of the English. The man's shield also bears a design that is very similar to the one later borne by Harold at Hastings. The bearded man in William's hall is clearly English, but who can he be? Why does he bear arms in the incongruous company of these Norman knights within the close confines of William's ducal palace?
There is only one obvious answer. He is one of Harold's kinsmen who had been detained in Normandy since the early 1050s and whose return to England, according to Eadmer's later story, Harold had come specifically to secure.13 In the circumstances the artist has probably chosen to depict the more senior of the two, Harold's brother Wulfnoth. This would carry a certain poignancy, for Wulfnoth remained a hostage even when the tapestry was made, indeed he was never freed, and the woollen Harold would thus still be pleading for his brother's release long after Harold himself had died. Since William and Harold are not yet at war the hostage has evidently been allowed a measure of freedom and serves as a soldier in the Norman army. The implication of the tapestry's imagery is profound. At the first opportunity, Harold is portrayed seeking Wulfnoth's and Hakon's release, not conveying any supposed message about the English succession at all. Edward, it seems, had not sent Harold to Normandy as his ambassador; and he had changed his mind about William succeeding him. If this mysterious Englishman is Wulfnoth, he is not the only brother of Harold to be seen in the Tapestry. Later we will see his named brothers Gyrth and Leofwine fighting loyally by his side at Hastings. Harold's sister Queen Edith, though unnamed, also appears in the work.
This deftly drawn, wordless meeting of William and Harold is usually passed over with little comment, and the bearded Englishman is unnoticed or forgotten, but the silent allusion in these threads to the Canterbury tale later told by Eadmer, far from supporting the Norman case, substantially undermines it. It is an allusion which the artist must have made at considerable risk to himself, perhaps to his life, certainly to his career, and we should pause and listen to his brave witness, at a time when all others were drowned out by the noise of Norman propaganda.
Immediately after this meeting, there occurs an even more intriguing scene, one of the most curious in the whole tapestry, for it seems to bear no relation to what comes before or after. There is this mysterious lady called ÆLFGYVA, which is an aristocratic Anglo-Saxon name; she is the only named woman in the whole work [scene 17; plate 3]. Æfgyva is standing in an ornate wooden doorway, elaborately carved in apparently Norse style; the doorposts are topped by dragons' heads that sprout long, flicking tongues. Into this scene intrudes a tonsured priest wearing a green cloak; he leans across from an adjacent tower, thrusts his hand into the doorway and touches or caresses Ælfgyva on the cheek. The meaning of this gesture is obscure. It is certainly not elucidated by the inscription, which is teasingly short, omits any verb and leaves us still wondering exactly what the lady and the priest are up to. UBI UNUS CLERICUS ET AELFGYVA (Where a priest and Ælfgyva) is all that it says. Many have read a hint of sexual scandal into the mock coyness of this brief and abruptly curtailed sentence. The tower and the doorway are themselves erotically suggestive, at least in our post-Freudian age. So, too, is the appearance of the naked man in the lower border; he seems lewdly to be mimicking the priest and gesturing up Æfgyva's skirt. Was there, perhaps, a scandalous liaison between a lady and a priest, well known at the time, and that had some bearing on what we see in the tapestry? Does this scene reflect an aspect of William and Harold's discussions at Rouen? Like Turold the dwarf, the Lady Ælfgyva is one of the four mysterious figures named in the Bayeux Tapestry. We must return later to the enigma of Ælfgyva.
Harold's attempt to secure the release of his kinsmen is not going well. This is hardly surprising for in truth the whole idea had been unwise from the start. King Edward, in his dotage, had much the clearer picture of William. Cunning, implacable, supremely ambitious, with a cruel edge, he was the last person to bow down and release such valuable hostages without gaining something extraordinarily important in return. William knows that Earl Harold holds the keys to England; he can hardly believe how foolish the Earl of Wessex has been in allowing himself to fall uninvited into his grasp. For the moment, however, the Duke of Normandy is keeping his plans to himself. According to the written sources, he received Harold in Normandy as an honoured guest.14 The English party were fed and clothed and given every Norman hospitality; we can imagine them hunting by day and passing torch-lit evenings entertained by the likes of musicians, dancers, jugglers and acrobats in a lively ducal household. Harold should simply be grateful, the Norman sources imply, that William has taken such pains to rescue him from Ponthieu. By now, of course, he may realise that William's display of friendship is entirely false and that he has merely exchanged one kind of imprisonment for another, but he must wait and see what fate William has in store for him. There is no question that he can return to England yet. The coastline of Normandy might as well be enclosed behind iron bars.
It so happens, at this time, that there is trouble brewing in Brittany. We learn from William of Poitiers that Duke Conan of Brittany had presumptuously announced a date on which he intended to invade Normandy and it seems he was already threatening to attack one of William's Breton allies, Rivallon of Dol. In response to this provocation, William decided to take his army into Brittany and to subdue Conan once and for all. He has asked Earl Harold to accompany him, an offer that Harold, of course, could hardly refuse, for a warrior such as he has his honour at stake. For William it meant something more; a war in Brittany would incidentally provide a chance to test Harold's mettle, to kit him out in the best of Norman arms and armour and then see if he is half the warrior men say he is. Slyly he could observe the Englishman, and overawe him with a display of Norman fighting prowess.
So it is that we leave behind the strange enigma of Ædfgyva and see Duke William and his army passing into Breton territory at the mouth of the River Couesnon [scene 18; plate 4]. There they are: men and horses making steady progress across the open-mouthed estuary at low tide. In the distance, a mile offshore, the island abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel rises dreamily into an empty sky. In these parts the tidal range is vast, and each day the sea draws itself like a great curtain across the bay, sweeping across miles of hazardous sand, curling and swirling its way around the island-hill on which the famous abbey stands. William and his men are crossing here, within sight of the semi-diurnal island; now they are wading towards Brittany through limpid shallows, shields lifted above heads in order to protect the metal from the salty water. Today the abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel is famous for its pyramidal shape;each level rises taller and narrower than the last, until it reaches its apex with a skyward spire surmounted by a golden statue of St Michael himself. It is almost as if the whole assemblage of buildings was once entirely flat but was then pulled up by the spire and stretched reluctantly out of the sand. In the 1060s Mont-Saint-Michel had a different aspect, one which gives the lie to any such fantasy. Stripped of its Gothic and later accretions, the church that Harold can make out in the hazy distance is a long, cruciform, roof-tiled building, poised upon the rocky island 75 yards above the visiting sea, stranded there, at the very top of the mount, as if it were some great ship that had been left behind by an exceptionally high tide.
It must have been an awesome sight. It must have drawn the gaze from far across the sands just as magnetically as it does today. Only the point where the nave crosses the transept actually touches the summit; the sloping shoulders of the mount were built up in order to support the rest of the church, a structural feat which is clearly symbolised in the tapestry. The abbey of the Archangel Michael, whose legend is often associated with the highest promontories, had been founded on the island in 708 by one Aubert, in response to his strange thoughts and dreams. In 966 Duke Richard I of Normandy established a colony of Benedictine monks at the place. A new spate of building began in 1023 under the patronage Duke Richard II, William's uncle; it was now continuing apace under the direction of Abbot Ranulphe, a former monk from Bayeux. Nothing in the tapestry, or any other source, indicates that William and Harold halted their travels that day, crossed by ferry or foot to the island and ascended the rocky mount in order to pray at the church of St Michael, although it would not be surprising if they did. It was a popular place of pilgrimage and St Michael himself had become a favoured saint among the Normans. In 1066 Duke William's half-brother, Robert of Mortain, fought at Hastings (and no doubt shed much blood) while dutifully holding aloft a banner embroidered with an emblem of the saintly Michael.15
In the upper border adjacent to Mont-Saint-Michel there appears quite unexpectedly, out of thin air as it were, a small, seated man pointing at the abbey. Over the years many guesses have been made as to who he is, this mysterious 'Norman'gesturing at the abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel. The visionary Aubert, perhaps, Duke Richard I, Duke Richard II, Abbot Ranulphe from Bayeux, or Abbot Scollandus, a former monk here, promoted by William to be the head of St Augustine's Abbey in Canterbury after the Conquest.16None of these guesses has found universal favour. There is another more intriguing possibility; and it is one which accentuates the growing sense of Englishness about the tapestry. As we have seen, the seated position always represents high rank and authority;thus far, the seats in the tapestry have been reserved for a king, a count and a duke. Clearly observable, too, though rarely noticed, is the fact that the seated figure has long hair at the back of his neck, a hallmark of the English. Evidently, this is a high-rankingEnglishman, not a Frenchman. From the picture he is not an old man; he is probably an adult in the prime of his life. Equally it should not be overlooked how cleverly (and uniquely) the abbey is drawn. It is both a picture in the main frieze and simultaneously a device in the upper border; the floor of the church is identical to the line which separates the main frieze from the border. Moreover, the seated figure's connection with Mont-Saint-Michel must truly be a remarkable one for he has the privilege of sharing the same border compartment as the fabulous abbey itself.
It so happens that one man, a secular figure, fits all these clues rather well. In the early 1030s Edward the Confessor, while still exiled in Normandy, appears to have made a formal gift of certain English lands to Mont-Saint-Michel.17 The gift included the eerily similar island off the Cornish coast known as St Michael's Mount where Edward hoped would be established a subordinate house of Benedictine monks. Intriguingly, Prince Edward describes himself in this charter as 'I, Edward, by the grace of God King of the English . . .' King he was not;it was the best part of another ten years before the exiled prince returned to England and became king. The gift was made more in hope than reality; but it shows that, even then, at the height of Canute's power, Edward's hopes of returning to rule over his native land had not entirely died - and neither were they discouraged by his Norman hosts. In due course (by the grace of God and St Michael, it would have seemed) he did return and peaceably ascend the English throne. Could it be that his munificence towards the abbey of Mont-Saint Michel was now being remembered by the artist of the tapestry?
Suddenly two men, their backs turned to the distant abbey, have become mired in quicksand and they are in danger of sinking within minutes to a wet death [scene 18; plate 4]. A horse has also stumbled into a gully. Did they not tell Harold that this is a dangerous place? The exposed bay is awash with hidden pools of quicksand, quicksand that will open up like a toothless mouth and suck a man up with pursed lips into a terrible, slippery grave. What is more, when the tide rises it bears down on the unwary (so men say) with all the speed and venom of a charging horse. Cries of alarm must have shot into the air. Arms must have waved in panic and fear. Harold has leant down and grabbed one of the men by the wrist; the second has managed to climb on to his back. The first is Norman, the second English. Still holding his shield, Harold drags both of them to safety using all his remarkable strength. HIC HAROLD DUX TRAHEBAT EOS DE ARENA (Here Duke Harold pulled them out of the sand). This episode, recorded in the tapestry though omitted in every other source, does Harold much credit. Not only is he brave and strong, he has also shown himself to be selfless and noble towards Norman and Englishman alike.
William's army has now penetrated deep into the coastal plains of eastern Brittany. Intelligence has apparently been received that Duke Conan is holed up within the wooden fortress at the town of Dol. There is little time to prepare. As quickly as possible a group of mounted Norman knights launches a surprise attack [scene 19]. It has caught the Normans, as much as the Bretons, unawares, for none of the attackers has had the time to put on his chain mail and only one has a helmet. As they attack one side of the castle, Conan makes a hurried escape - he is slipping down a rope at the back in order to disappear out of sight. Now the Norman knights have advanced deeper into Breton territory. For some reason they have reached the hilltop castle at Rennes [scene 20]. There is no sign of Conan here; so they backtrack northwards, 35 miles to Dinan. Conan has already reached Dinan. He is determined to hold out, but William's knights have prepared themselves for a full-scale assault. They have put on their chain mail and conical helmets. They have placed silvery swords in hilts. They have mounted their warhorses and kicked them with spurs. They are charging the castle at speed. Fingers of the left hand tightly grip the strap of a kite-shaped shield as well as the horse's reins, fingers of the right are curled around a vicious lance held at the ready.
The Bretons have gathered at the highest point of the castle. Protected by similar armour, they defend the place on foot as vigorously as it is attacked and they return as many spears as arrive. It is a hard-fought battle. What they do not know is that two Normans, bearing flaming torches, have scurried to the base of the wooden structure [scene 21]. At this very moment they are setting it ablaze with dancing, menacing flames. Smoke must have risen around Conan's eyes and curled into his throat, and choked his desire to continue; for he has signalled his surrender. From the top of the motte he proffers the keys to Dinan at the end of a long lance. He holds the lance outstretched with both hands. The Normans proffer one of their own lances and now the great iron keys to the town are slipping from one lance to the other. Evidently the two sides are still keeping a safe distance, but evidently, too, the victory is William's.
The noise of action has abated. Away from any residual smoke, Duke William has strutted over to Harold [scene 22]. The Earl of Wessex is standing there; he is clothed in full Norman armour and the great lance he has planted in the ground is topped with a fluttering Norman banner, or gonfanon. The slithery iron rings of chain mail that he can feel against his body were forged in Normandy and he can smell Norman leather on the inside of his helmet.18 Although his armour is much the same as English armour, there is still something incongruous about this little picture of Harold, the most famous of Anglo-Saxon kings, standing there in Norman garb, dressed like a little schoolboy in the wrong uniform. He is an awkward, out-of-place figure, this Harold, as his eyes look downwards in an attempt to avoid William's gaze.
Harold may have thought that William had strutted up to him in order to offer his congratulations at the end of the Battle of Dinan. But the Duke of Normandy is now placing one hand on Harold's helmet and with the other he is fixing something symbolic to his chest. HIC WILLELM DEDIT HAROLDO ARMA (Here William gave arms to Harold). The giving of arms, a sort of knighthood, was a redolent gesture. It carried with it heavy, if indefinite, overtones of vassalage and loyalty. In Anglo-Saxon England there were bonds, too, that bound the warrior to his lord. This was another of William's cunning plans. It must have been clear to Harold, by now at least, that he was being stitched up. But what was he to do? If he backed off and refused the honour of a Norman knighthood, a poisoned chalice if ever there was one, what were his chances of ever persuading William to release his brother and nephew? What were his own chances of ever returning to England alive?
It is time to pause and look back at what may have been missed since that distant appearance of Mont-Saint-Michel. The Breton war is over. It has proceeded in the tapestry's threads with its own internal logic; but there is much that merits a second look. From the beginning it is attended by strange and redolent border imagery. Beneath the shallows at Mont-Saint-Michel there were two fishes swimming in opposite directions but joined at the mouth by a cord. This is clearly an image of the astrological sign of Pisces, an indication, perhaps, of the time of year - 19 February to 20 March - when the crossing into Brittany was made (but whether the year in question is 1064 or 1065 is not known). There follows a school of wriggling eels and then, beneath the passage from Mont-Saint-Michel to Dol, yet more astrological signs; in fact, a strange series of joined-up constellations that have been identified by various authors as Serpens, Perseus (or Orion or Bootes), Ursa Major (or Canis Major), Aquila, Lupus and Centaurus [scene 18].19 The meaning of this has never been deciphered. The campaign itself is distinctly odd. Our only other source of information comes from the work of William of Poitiers.20 In his account, Conan was besieging Dol, not holed up in it. He immediately retreated when he heard that William was advancing to Dol, fled quickly and was never subdued by the Normans. Poitiers mentions no sliding down a rope, and no circular movement by William's men, southwards from Dol to Rennes, then northwards from Rennes to Dinan; indeed he mentions no action at Rennes or Dinan at all. The reason why the tapestry's tale should differ so much is obscure. We are left to wonder how much of the truth has been embroidered and whether there is rather more to this strange vision of Duke William's Breton campaign than at first meets the eye?
Now William's men have returned to Normandy and they have made their way to Bayeux. HIC WILLELM VENIT BAGIAS (Here William came to Bayeux). The town of Bayeux is represented by an elaborate castle standing on a tall mound. This, no doubt, is the castle of William's older half-brother Odo, the bishop of Bayeux, but its exact location in the modern town can only be guessed at. Strangely, Bayeux Cathedral, which was then being built under Odo's direction, is nowhere to be seen. Nor is Odo himself, although he will later become an important figure as the story progresses. We have moved outside, or beyond, Bayeux on to a patch of open ground. If Harold's purpose was to convey a message from King Edward that William should expect to be the next king, the tapestry has still not illustrated him doing so. Instead, it is William who takes the initiative. Once more we are reminded of the story told by Eadmer rather than the Norman sources.
According to Eadmer, Duke William at last took Harold aside and told him what was on his mind. William said that when King Edward was an exile in Normandy, and both of them were much younger, he had once 'promised him and pledged his faith that if he should ever be king of England he would make over to William the right to succeed him as his heir'. William looked at Harold and, in the words reported by Eadmer, made the following astonishing proposal:
If you, for your part, undertake that you will support me in this project; that you will make a stronghold at Dover for my use, which should include a well of water; that you will, at a future time agreed between us, send your sister to me so that I can give her in marriage to one of my nobles;and that you will take my daughter to be your wife; if you undertake to do all these things, then you can have your nephew straight away and your brother will be delivered to you safe and sound when I come to England to be king. And if I am ever, with your support, established there as king, I promise that you shall have everything you ask of me, provided that it can reasonably be granted.21
Eadmer tells us that this elaborate proposal was the first indication Harold had that William seriously intended to be king of England. There was danger in this, whichever way Harold turned. It was bad enough being vaguely bound by the grant of Norman arms. Now he was being asked to give his support, in the clearest possible terms, to the Norman claim to the English throne, a pretension which hitherto he had discounted in his own mind - and which he knew would have no support in the country. But what was he to do? To refuse would be to throw himself, and his men, at the mercy of Duke William. Eadmer tells us that Harold could see no way of avoiding that fate without at least feigning to agree what William asked. He would keep up (we may imagine him thinking) this silly pretence of friendship between the two of them and then make his excuses later. An agreement extracted under such circumstances could hardly be considered binding and, besides, Harold could argue that in reality the decision was the king's. He had no authority to overrule the king's latest wish, which, almost certainly, was that young Edgar should succeed. What was William going to do about it?Invade England?
But William wanted more than a mere agreement: he was about to raise the stakes even higher. He and his advisers were busy weaving an intricate web around Harold, a web of obligation, both secular and religious, from which the Englishman would find it impossible ever to disentangle himself. At this very spot, visible to all upon the open ground, William has had gathered together the bones of some of the holiest saints in Normandy [scene 23; plate 5]. They have been placed in two great reliquary chests. One of the chests is surmounted by a precious crystal known as the Bull's Eye.22 The design of the other brings to mind the holiest chest of all, the portable Ark of the Convenant in which the Ten Commandments were once placed by Moses.23 What possible objection can Harold have to taking the next step? He must swear an oath upon the bones of these holy saints. He must swear before God what he has already agreed before William. What he has already agreed by the law of man will become the law of God.
William's throne has been carried to the place so that he can witness the event. Now the duke is sitting there, smug and haughty. He is holding his ceremonial sword in one hand and with the other he is pointing at Harold. His whole posture smacks of command rather than gratitude. Harold is standing with his arms outstretched, fingers touching the two holy boxes placed on either side of him. His brow is furrowed; his eyes, narrowed to the width of a stitch, are fixed upon the first reliquary chest in fear. This is turning into a dreadful moment. The very atmosphere seems to have been pulled taut. William is pointing to Harold, commanding that he swear the oath. Like all men of his day Harold must surely believe, with all the conviction of his heart, that those who break a sacred oath will have to answer before God. On the awful Day of Judgement, or quite possibly sooner, the guilty will be mocked by monsters; they will be poked and prodded by an army of hideous devils; their lying tongues will be wrenched from their throats; or their eyes will be taken out by divine writ, which will sear like a blazing arrow from the angry heavens; and then they will be thrown for all eternity into the flames of Hell. Harold hears William commanding him to make the oath. Surely he has no other choice. How else will he and his nephew, let alone the rest of his men, ever return to their waiting homes and long-forsaken loved ones? Once he is back in England, he can probably do what he likes. Harold's fingers are touching the two holy boxes. He will take his chance;the words are uttered. UBI HAROLD SACRAMENTUM FECIT WILLELMO DUCI (Where Harold swore a sacred oath to William). This was how Harold of Wessex gambled the kingdom of England for his freedom.
The oath is made and Harold and his men are immediately shown aboard their embroidered ship as it departs towards England [scene 23]. A pair of Englishmen provide the link between the two scenes. They are looking back at Harold's oath and at the same moment they are moving impatiently towards the ship; one of them has his foot already in the water. This link, temporal and narrative, is another clue. In the written Norman accounts, Harold's oath is described in detail and it is supposed to have been given 'clearly and of his own free will'.24 The oath is a key part of the Norman claim, but it takes place much earlier, before the Breton war (though the accounts differ as to the precise location). By reversing the order and placing Harold's oath after the Breton war and immediately before he departs for home, the tapestry's artist has accentuated the impression of duress. With pictures rather than words, he is telling us that Harold was a helpless prisoner and that he was permitted to return only because he swore the oath demanded of him.
At last Harold's ship threads a homeward course through the lapping linen waves. There are eight men to be seen on board, unnamed men, hopeful men, busy men, testing the wind, pulling up the sail, tending the rudder, longing for home. One of them must be Hakon, Harold's nephew, for even William of Poitiers confirms that Hakon was released by Duke William and allowed to return home with his uncle after more than ten years as a hostage in Normandy. Perhaps Hakon is the smallest figure; he can be seen barely above the line of shields that are laid out along the side of the boat; now he is looking up wistfully at the billowing curve of worsted rail that has caught the homeward breeze. Harold's brother Wulfnoth is not on board; he did not fare so well. It is known that he remained a prisoner of the Normans. Even after King William's death in 1087, when his son William Rufus became king, it was still considered expedient to keep Harold's last surviving brother in custody. Rufus did take Wulfnoth to Winchester, where he probably treated him reasonably well; but Wulfnoth Godwinson remained a captive until he died around 1094. By then he had been a prisoner for more than forty years. Geoffrey of Cambrai, prior of Winchester Cathedral, composed a moving epitaph for him:
Exile, prison, darkness, inclosure, chains Receive the boy and forsake the old man. Caught up in human bonds he bore them patiently Bound even more closely in service to God.25
On the southern coast, the English are eagerly looking out for Harold's ship. Four men peer from the windows of a coastal watchtower, necks craned in anticipation. A fifth is standing on a raised platform; his hand is cupped over his eyes as he looks out towards Harold's vessel looming ever nearer across the wavy sea. HIC HAROLD DUX REVER-SUS EST AD ANGLICAM TERRAM (Here Earl Harold returned to English soil). Now Harold is riding a horse along the bumpy road that is taking him back to King Edward. The first thing he must do is give the king an account of all that has happened. ET VENIT AD EDWARDUM REGEM (and came to King Edward). These five, simple words tell us very little, but the picture of the new encounter between the two men speaks a thousand more [scene 24]. Harold, here, is the epitome of apology. His posture alone shows that he is utterly crestfallen and subdued. Clothed under the myriad folds of a great green cape, he is standing with his arms outstretched in Edward's direction, as if begging forgiveness from the king;his head is not so much lowered, his whole neck has been bent over and stretched forward so that it is almost horizontal to the body. 'I have done a terrible thing,' he seems to be saying. Edward, seated on his throne, is pointing at Harold and he is clearly admonishing him with his long index finger. We do not know how long Earl Harold has been away, but in the embroidered interim the king has aged notably. His face is haggard; his fingers are gnarled and spindly; and across his lap rests the long stick he now uses to help him walk. The moment when he will die is surely nearer.
If the Norman account of the purpose of Harold's mission is true, why is Harold so apologetic on his return? Why is Edward admonishing him in this manner? By promising his support to William, Harold has surely done no more than fulfil his supposed mission. He should be congratulated, not criticised. Again we are reminded of the Canterbury tale told by Eadmer. 'On being questioned by the King,' says Eadmer, 'Harold told him what had happened and what he had done. The King exclaimed: "Did I not tell you that I knew William well and that your going there might bring untold calamity upon this kingdom?'"26
These words could almost be an English subtitle to the tapestry's silent scene. Once more, close observation of the Bayeux Tapestry reveals that it is not the work of Norman propaganda that popular myth would have us believe, but a covert, subtle and substantial record of the English version of events, one whose true meaning has been largely lost for well-nigh a thousand years. It is nevertheless so cleverly designed that observers who expect to see a perfidious Harold have always seen what they expect to see. Many Normans would probably have seen little to quarrel with. They might have breezed up and down the length of the work, smirking here, laughing there, glowing everywhere with the haughty satisfaction of conquerors. They would have seen what they wanted to see: but the pictorial clues tell a different story. The subtle subtext lies silently within the pictures rather than the words. Drawing on a similar or identical source, it tells much the same story that Eadmer was to record more explicitly in writing forty or fifty years later. In the process the tapestry adds considerable weight to Eadmer's already plausible story. The tapestry is much earlier than Eadmer, being almost contemporary with the events themselves, but unlike William of Poitiers, who wrote his Norman biography of Duke William at around the same time, the tapestry's artist had no motive to dissemble the facts, if he could get away with recording them, and he had no reason to spread propaganda. What we see in these threads is, therefore, very likely true.
Thus it appears that by the early 1060s King Edward no longer supported Duke William's claim. Harold, however, had been foolish enough to travel to Normandy on his own business and had fallen into a trap. He had been caught in a tragic dilemma from which he could only extricate himself by swearing a sacred oath to support the Norman claim. It is unlikely, even then, that Earl Harold had any intention of fulfilling that undertaking. He had escaped from Count Guy into the hands of Duke William and he had escaped from Duke William only by placing himself in the hands and at the mercy of his God. His journey back to Edward is accompanied by yet another border image of the ancient fable of the fox and the crow. Can there be any doubt that William is the greedy fox and that Harold is the naive and foolish crow?King Edward is frail and old; his time will soon be over and the moment when his successor must be chosen will surely arrive before the cornfields are golden again. The Bayeux Tapestry is appearing less and less as a triumphal monument. It is more with the rhythm and pathos of a Greek tragedy that the story is moving, stitch by stitch, towards its deadly climax.
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Post by Kriyaban on Mar 12, 2022 14:21:46 GMT
The English Decision
As late as the summer of 1065 King Edward was still well enough for Harold to invite him hunting in south Wales, but as the days grew colder, and the barren winter blew sharply across the land, the health of the old man deteriorated rapidly. His grand projet, his last great offering to his God, his great legacy upon which he had lavished a large fortune, was to be a new church at the abbey of Westminster, close to his riverside palace. Westminster was then situated on a little island, known as Thorney Island; it was bounded on three sides not, as now, by roads and queuing traffic, but by the slow-flowing waters of a tributary of the Thames and to the east by the Thames itself. The king's palace was situated on land where the Houses of Parliament now stand, the abbey on the site that it still occupies. From the palace you could make out the city of London, a busy agglomeration that was home to some 25,000 people. You would have seen smoke rising from its little houses, clustered around a bend of the Thames, whilst merchants' vessels with sails aloft eased their way upriver with cargoes, so the author of the Life of King Edward tells us, 'of every kind for sale from the whole world to the town on its banks'.1 The ambitious church that Edward was building at Westminster, in honour of St Peter, was to be larger than any in Christendom. It was still years from completion but the ceremony of consecration was advanced to 28 December 1065 so that the old man, supported by his walking stick or carried by servants, would be able to make the short journey from the palace and attend the moment of dedication. On Christmas Eve, however, he fell gravely ill. He recovered sufficiently to attend Christmas service in the abbey, and to be present at the banquet that followed, but on Boxing Day he was again too frail to leave his bedchamber. On the day fixed for the consecration the king's condition was found to be no better and though a great concourse 'from the whole of Britain'2 had assembled to witness a joyous occasion, the service of dedication had to proceed more solemnly in his absence. The life of the bedridden old man was edging away.
In the Bayeux Tapestry we move directly from the scene of Earl Harold's reprimand to an exterior view of the magnificent church [scene 25]. It is as if an implicit contrast is being made between Harold's well-meant foolishness and Edward's prodigious piety. At the eastern end, a workman has climbed on to the roof in order to put a weathercock in its place. Above the nave the very hand of God has descended from the heavens in a gesture of benediction. How carefully the hand of God is drawn, how skilfully the spirit of the divine has been made material. There is no room for error in the illustration of perfection. This great church is depicted as still unfinished, but it is nevertheless by far the largest building in the whole of the tapestry. It bears little relation to the Westminster Abbey known today. In the thirteenth century Edward the Confessor's elegant building was pulled down and replaced by a Gothic structure that was similar in size but more in keeping with the times. Of course, the latter-day Westminster Abbey is itself a medieval masterpiece, itself over 700 years old. In those 700 years so much intervening history has echoed around its vaulted chambers, the royal throne, the poets'corner and the tomb of the unknown soldier are symbols of so much British heritage, that the thought that there was once an earlier church on same site, matching it in size and grandeur, is strangely disconcerting. The earlier church seems to belong to a past which is almost unreachable now. Once more the extraordinary survival of the Bayeux Tapestry is thrown into sharp relief. The great church of solid stone that Edward the Confessor built as his lasting monument has long disappeared. It is the church of threads that survives.
From the tapestry, and a contemporary description in the Life of King Edward, we can make out the appearance of the building.3 The last architectural achievement of the Anglo Saxon age was a grand imitation of French style. It looked to the future, not the past. The Romanesque style, with its characteristic round-topped arches and clean, elegant lines, had spread north from Burgundy into Normandy and after the Conquest it was to dominate the ecclesiastical landscape of Norman England. During his long exile on the continent Edward must have visited many of the great churches of northern France and it was only natural that his own great project should be an imitation of them. The closest parallel seems to have been the monumental Norman church at the abbey of Jumieges, part of whose roofless shell still survives, but Westminster church was even longer and even more impressive. Five bays of the nave are shown as completed, represented by a series of round-topped arches stitched in wools of three different colours; the bases and capitals of the columns can clearly be seen. A line of clerestory windows runs above. To the east there is a large apse; and from here an enigmatic series of steps descends into the floor, as if indicating the presence of a crypt. The church is dominated at the centre by a monumental tower, borne aloft by a great arch and surrounded by a cluster of smaller turrets. It was the central tower which most struck the imagination of the anonymous author of the Life of King Edward. 'It rises simply at first with a low and sturdy vault, swells with many a stair spiralling up in artistic profusion, but then with a plain wall climbs to the wooden roof which is carefully covered with lead.'
At some point during the long, sombre night of 4/5 January 1066 King Edward the Confessor breathed his last breath and died. Now we can see his coffin being borne slowly towards the church [scene 25]. HIC PORTATUR CORPUS EAD-WARDI REGIS AD ECCLESIAM S[AN]C[T]I PETRI AP[OSTO]LI (Here King Edward's corpse is borne to the church of St Peter the Apostle). The corpse is solemnly carried on an open-topped bier, over which a richly embroidered cloth has been carefully laid. The king's body, completely wrapped in a dark green binding, lies on its side, as lifeless as an empty vessel. Eight men are shouldering the poles; two other figures ring hand bells at the sides. The solemn, metallic chime of bells is accompanied by a dirge chanted out by a group of tonsured clerics at the rear of the funeral procession; two of the priests are holding open prayer books to their breasts.'They bore his holy remains from his palace home into the house of God,' the Life of King Edward tells us, 'and offered up prayers and sighs and psalms all that day and the following night.'4
There was genuine lamenting at King Edward's passing. On the whole he seemed to have been dignified, dutiful and pious and he belonged to the most ancient lineage in England; but was he truly wise? Beneath that pious exterior, behind that lily-white beard and wistful gaze, was Edward the Confessor as much of an enigma to his contemporaries as he appears to us? He has been seen as the archetypical weak and ineffectual king, forever under the domination of powerful nobles; and yet now and then he acted with decision, if not always with effect. In truth, it was probably his position, more than his character, that was inherently weak. Viewed in this way, Edward's acceptance of the power of the Godwins after 1052 can be seen as positive and pragmatic. Certainly, after the dust of war had settled, and the Normans dominated the land, many people were to look back upon the days of King Edward with fondness and nostalgia. Compared to the Danish maelstrom that came before, and the Norman disaster that ensued, it seemed that Edward's reign had brought England over twenty years of relative peace and prosperity. But there was a terrible price to pay. As far as may now be judged (though there is no hint of this in the tapestry) the king seems to have been using his childlessness as a diplomatic tool. In the course of his life, Edward dangled the prospect of the succession in front of far too many people - the King of Denmark, the Duke of Normandy, Edward the Exile and his son Edgar, and at the last moment Harold himself. This, of course, kept various would-be warriors friendly while he lived, but it was storing up immeasurable problems for the future. Duke William, for one, had indicated that he was deadly serious. It mattered not that many years had passed since Edward foolishly raised his hopes, nor that the King of England had since changed his mind. To make matters worse, William had outfoxed Harold into giving him that unlikely promise of support.
We have seen Edward's corpse being borne in all solemnity from the palace to the church of Westminster, but what were his final wishes? For reasons that will become apparent, the tapestry now turns the clock back to the king's last moments, just a few hours earlier. In the upper part of a split scene, we find ourselves transported into Edward's bedchamber somewhere within the turreted palace of Westminster [scene 26;plate 6]. The billowing curtain, which would normally enclose the bed, has been pulled open and tied back so that we can observe the proceedings within. Edward is still living though he is barely alive. Here he is on his deathbed, a wearisome, weakening old man, waiting for death. Death comes to kings as it does to all men. The dying king is surrounded by four attentive, though unnamed, followers. One of them supports his back with a cushion so that he can sit up and speak. A veiled and sombre woman - the second of only three women depicted in the tapestry - is seated at the foot of the bed. The third figure is a tonsured cleric who is seen leaning over in order to catch the king's words. The cleric's unshaven face is dotted with stubble, for he has been attending at the royal bedside for many hours. The fourth witness, seated or kneeling at the front, is a noble follower; his fingers are touching the king's fingers. It is to this fourth figure that Edward is evidently addressing himself in particular. HIC EADWARDUS REX IN LECTO ALLO-QUIT[ UR] FIDELES (Here King Edward in his bed addresses his faithful followers). In the lower part of the scene time has moved on, and we are at the point when all life has left the old man - ET HIC DEFUNCTUS EST (and here he has died). His corpse is tightly wrapped in green cloth. Only his linen-grey face is exposed to view; and this has been angled towards the viewer. For the first time, the gaze of one of the tapestry's figures meets the onlooker in the eye, but this is the chilling, lifeless gaze of death.
None of the four followers, gathered like chess pieces closely around their king, is given a name in the tapestry. Nor are the king's last words, faintly uttered from his own thin lips, recorded in the brief inscription. The words tell us little; the picture reveals the truth. A contemporary written account of Edward's last hours survives, and elucidates what we see in the tapestry. It is to be found in the Life of King Edward, the work commissioned by Queen Edith shortly after the old king died, though it was not completed until after Duke William's victory at Hastings. The author was a Flemish monk; he was clearly on good terms with the queen, and no friend of the Normans, although his name is not known. It can be deduced that some years earlier he had come to England from the monastery of Saint-Bertin at Stomer, not far from Boulogne. By chance the Life survives in an early, fragile, mutilated copy dating from around 1100, neatly copied out in a Canterbury style of writing. The deathbed scene conjured up in the Life of King Edward is so similar to what we see in the tapestry that it is highly probable that the artist held one of the first copies in his own hands and used it as his source. It can hardly be irrelevant that, at this key moment, the artist of the tapestry was using another source from southern England, one which, moreover, was closely connected to Harold's family. According to the Life, the following witnesses were present at the king's deathbed and heard his last wishes: '. . . the queen, who was sitting on the floor warming his feet in her lap, her full brother Earl Harold, and Rodbert, the steward of the royal palace . . . also Archbishop Stigand and a few more whom the blessed king when roused from his sleep had ordered to be summoned'.5
The four persons named in the Life of King Edward can be matched without difficulty to the four who appear in the tapestry. These, then, are not merely representative manikins. They are not merely woollen figurines, illustrative of a deathbed scene in some generic way. They are the real people who were there at that decisive moment, the real witnesses of the king's last will and testament during the night of 4/5 January 1066. The veiled lady at the foot of the bed, by Edward's feet, must be Queen Edith. The unshaven cleric is Archbishop Stigand of Canterbury. The man at the king's back is Robert fitz Wimarch, the French-born royal steward, and the one towards the front, touching fingers with the king in such a redolent, complicit gesture, must be Earl Harold himself. The finger-touching gesture is identical to the one seen when Edward met Harold at the beginning of the tapestry. Harold is thus identifiable, here at the king's deathbed, as one of the FIDELES (the faithful) who are now being addressed by their dying king.
For days he had been drifting in and out of consciousness. Like a pale winter sun appearing now and again behind sombre clouds, old Edward would awaken briefly, mumble something unintelligible and then fall once more under the shadow of a long deep sleep. At one point, however, he started and then he spoke up (the author of the Life tells us) in a clear and healthy voice. He told the assembled group about a dream that he had just had. Edward, in his delirium, had dreamt that two long-dead monks, whom he had known in Normandy, had come to him bearing a terrible message from God. They told him that the holders of the highest offices in England all 'the earls, bishops and abbots and all those in holy orders'- were not what they seemed to be. They were not the servants of God; they were in league with the devil. Within a year and a day of Edward's death, the monks told him, God would punish the whole of England by delivering it into 'the hands of the enemy' and that 'devils shall come through all this land with fire and sword and the havoc of war'. Only when a green tree was cut in half at the middle of its trunk and the upper part transported three furlongs away, and the two parts joined themselves together without the slightest human intervention, and the conjoined tree then sprouted a profusion of leaves and bore fresh fruit, only then would the sins of the people be forgiven and England find respite from its suffering.6
The story of this strange dream owes much, of course, to the fact that the author of the Life was writing after the Battle of Hastings. With the benefit of hindsight he knew the subsequent course of events. The dream-story, and its implicit likening of the Normans to 'devils' sent by God, is revealing nonetheless. It shows how the Norman Conquest appeared to the English, as they tried to comprehend the totality of their defeat. It also shows how the Conquest sometimes appeared to continentals from beyond the borders of Normandy, men like the anonymous Flemish author of theLife of King Edward. In this view, Duke William did not have a lawful claim to the English throne. He was an unwanted pretender, but after he had won the sheer fact of his victory was undeniable. God, the author of all things, must surely have caused that victory. He cannot have done so because William was right, but rather in order to punish the English. It followed that prior to 1066 the English must have been sinful - and sinfulness is never particularly hard to find once you start looking for it in earnest. In the world-view of the time this seemed to be the lesson to be learnt from the Bible. When David sinned, the author of the Life notes, God's vengeance fell from the heavens upon the whole people of Israel.7 Was this not (the people asked themselves) what had really happened to England in 1066?
The little company gathered around Edward's bed 'were sore afraid' and 'stupefied and silent from the effect of terror'when they heard him speak of this dire prophecy. The author of the Life now points his finger explicitly at Archbishop Stigand, whose embroidered counterpart is seen leaning over the king's bed, with his eyes fixed intently on the king. 'He ought to have been the first to be afraid . . . [but] with folly in his heart he whispered in the ear of [Earl Harold] that the King was broken with age and disease and knew not what he said.' Stigand was a great survivor. He was a man with a dubious past and an even more dubious present.8 A cleric of enormous wealth, he had risen to prominence in the days of King Canute and in the course of a long life he contrived to remain in high office under six very different kings. He had been made Archbishop of Canterbury in 1052 when his Norman predecessor, Robert of Jumieges, fled the country in haste as the Godwins returned in force. Stigand's appointment in such circumstances was regarded by Rome as null and void and although in 1058 he did obtain recognition by Pope Benedict X, Benedict was deposed a year later and was spoken of as an 'anti-pope'. Stigand's position was also dubious in that he remained the Bishop of Winchester although such pluralism was frowned upon. As a consequence he had been excommunicated by five popes and the sentence of anathema still clung to him like a nasty cold. Yet he used his wily skills and long experience to remain in office. In the aftermath of the Norman Conquest, and especially after Stigand's replacement by Lan-franc in 1070 and his death in 1072, it was easy to find a scapegoat in Archbishop Stigand and to portray him as symbolic of all that was wrong with the English Church. With a man like that occupying the ancient see of Canterbury, it was hardly surprising in this religious-minded age that it appeared God's sleeping anger had been roused. To contemporaries it seemed that God had punished the whole nation for the sins of its leaders.
As King Edward lay dying, the question whether Earl Harold might yet adhere to the sacred oath he had given to Duke William was still hanging on a knife-edge. The Life of King Edward makes no reference to the oath, nor to Duke William's claim at all, but it does describe Edward's dying bequest.9 This must be the very moment, the very gesture, that we can see in the Bayeux Tapestry [scene 26; plate 6]. 'And stretching forth his hand to [Harold], he said: "I commend [Queen Edith] and all the kingdom to your protection."' These words, reported by the author of the Life of King Edward and illustrated in the Bayeux Tapestry, still seem to hang in the air with an eerie ambiguity. Is Edward bequeathing the kingdom to Harold? Or is he saying that Harold should act as protector and regent, perhaps for the young Edgar? If anything like these words were truly spoken, the king's voice fell silent and he faltered and died on that very bed before he could make himself clearer. The living were left to decipher what he meant. The general view seems to have been that Harold, at the last moment, had been nominated as king. The E version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, written at St Augustine's Abbey in Canterbury, also states in the clearest possible terms that Edward bequeathed the kingdom to Harold ('And Earl Harold succeeded to the kingdom of England just as the king granted it to him . . .'). Even William of Poitiers, the arch-propagandist of the Normans, admits that Edward on his deathbed nominated Harold.10 This, no doubt, was an inconvenience for the Normans; but the testimony of witnesses such as Queen Edith and Robert fitz Wimarch could hardly be impugned. Poitiers deals with the point by arguing that, whatever had happened at Edward's deathbed, William already had the better claim: Harold had quite simply disqualified himself by swearing to be William's man. In any event it seems that under Norman law Edward's earlier choice of William (as a post obitum gift) would have been regarded as final and irrevocable. In England the custom was different. Since time immemorial ('ever since St Augustine came to these parts') a gift made by an Englishman at the point of death (verba novissima) was regarded as valid and binding.11 Whereas to modern eyes it might seem that a dying person's mental faculties would be at their most questionable, to the Anglo-Saxons a person's thoughts were then at their most lucid and close to God. If this is the true nature of the legal dispute between Harold and William, it has no obvious solution, for it is a dispute between the laws of Normandy and the laws of England. In the absence of an agreed system of supranational law to determine which nation's law should apply, the dispute between two such proud and determined warriors as William and Harold could only be resolved by war.
It remained for the king's nominee to be elected by the Witan, the council of the great in the land, who were already in attendance in large number at Westminster. Accordingly, in the next scene, we see two nobles offering the crown to Harold, one of whom points back at the previous image of King Edward's dying bequest [scene 27]. HIC DEDERUNT HAROLDO CORONA[M] REGIS (Here they gave Harold the king's crown). This, evidently, is the reason why the tapestry depicts Edward's funeral and death in reverse chronological order. The inscription alone tells us very little, but a visual link is clearly being made between the king's last words and the offer of the crown to Harold. If events had been portrayed in their natural sequence, the men offering the crown would have been pointing at Edward's funeral, and not his dying wishes. By pointing to the dying king, the thrust of what they are saying to Harold becomes immediately clear. 'Here is the crown,' the English nobles are telling him. 'It was Edward's last wish that you should have it and we urge you to accept.'
Once again, the story is not being told 'from the Norman point of view'. The tapestry makes not the slightest reference to Duke William's claim to the throne, which was founded upon his earlier designation by Edward, but it does show Harold's own nomination as entirely lawful under English custom. There is no sense in which Harold is a usurper, a man who, in the words of William of Poitiers, 'seized' the crown with the connivance of a few and who was 'the enemy of the good and the just'. Yet although Harold has been duly nominated by the last king he still seems reluctant to accept the highest office. He does not thrust out his arm and seize the crown of threads; he keeps his hand firmly upon his hip. This is a hesitant, pensive man; he is wondering what to do next. Without doubt, the young Edgar Ætheling had a superior blood claim to the throne, but Edgar was barely a teenager and it must have appeared to those who mattered in the Anglo-Saxon state that Earl Harold, an experienced warrior, was truly the man for the moment. Archbishop Stigand, it seems, was one of them; and it may have been his worldly-wise voice that won the doubters over. At the forefront of Harold's mind there was bound to be the memory of the oath he had sworn to William. By now he must have been convinced (by Stigand, perhaps) that the oath was involuntary and invalid - not only in the eyes of man but in those of God as well.
No one, in truth, wanted Duke William as king. Even King Edward had long since changed his mind. In any event the Normans were hardly the sort of people whom you would expect to invade England. Who did this William think he was? Harold, we may imagine, was still smarting at how foolish he had been in Normandy, at the way he had been cornered into swearing an oath. This was his chance to show the Norman duke just how much he was scared. He would brazen the matter out; and he would do so in the most robust manner possible. Harold would be King of England. He would accept the crown himself, just as it seemed the old king had wished, and the blood of the Godwins would now occupy the highest, most glorious office in the land.
So we see King Harold seated in majesty [scene 28]. He sits on his throne, wearing his crown, proudly holding the royal orb and sceptre for everyone to see. HIC RESIDET HAROLD REX ANGLORUM (Here sits upon the throne Harold, king of the English). In the post-Conquest period, the full implications of the tendentious Norman case against 'the usurper' Harold were gradually worked out. If Harold had no right to accept the throne, he had never been king at all. The Normans therefore airbrushed the reign of Harold II out of constitutional history. Quite simply, in legal terms, it had never happened and all those who had supported him were guilty of treason and liable to confiscation and banishment. William of Poitiers, writing in the 1070s, is generally careful never to refer to Harold as 'King Harold', though he drops his guard once or twice. By the time of the Domesday Book, in 1086, Harold is always referred to as earl, never as king. By contrast, the tapestry's Harold is a truly regal figure. He is without doubt HAROLD REX, every inch the King of the English, as he stares at us without commentary in that full frontal pose, inviting our judgement upon his actions, sitting there on a royal throne which was scarcely cold from the departure of its previous occupant.
Harold was crowned the very day of Edward's funeral. Westminster must have been exceptionally busy over that Christmas period, with much backroom politicking and earnest whispering in stony halls. A great assembly of earls, bishops and abbots was alreadyin situ. They had come to attend King Edward's Christmas court and to witness the consecration of the new church; they had stayed for Edward's funeral; now they took part in the election of Harold, or at least they would have been present at his coronation. It is not known for certain where the coronation took place. It is often said that William the Conqueror 'inaugurated' the famous practice of English monarchs being crowned at Westminster Abbey. This is what the abbey's own tourist material states. It would, however, be very surprising if, during the course of that short winter's day, the whole party was made to decamp from Westminster to St Paul's in London. Harold, moreover, lacked the authority of the ancient bloodline of the Wessex kings. His was to be a brave new dynasty. He would have wished, so far as he could, to associate his kingship with that of his predecessor, and what better way to do that than to be crowned in the very church that Edward had built and where he now lay buried? It is therefore much more likely that Harold, not William, was the first English monarch to be crowned at Westminster Abbey.12
The tapestry does not show us the ceremony of coronation that ushered in the brave new age, or rather reign, but standing next to the newly crowned king is none other than STIGANT ARCHIEP[ISCOPU]S (Archbishop Stigand). Like the enthroned Harold, Stigand confronts us in the face, inviting our judgement upon his open pose. William of Poitiers, raising every argument he could think of in order to justify the Norman Conquest, alleges that Harold's coronation was actually carried out by Stigand. It was therefore 'an impious consecration' by a man 'who had been deprived of his priestly office by the just zeal and anathema of the pope'. A later English source, however, maintains that the rite was carried out by Ealdred, the Archbishop of York.13 This is much more likely. Harold would have been as conscious as anyone of Stigand's dubious position. When Harold's own church of Waltham Holy Cross was consecrated in 1060 he used the services of Cynesige, the then Archbishop of York. It can also be shown that the only occasions when Stigand was chosen by the English to consecrate any bishop occurred during the period when he was briefly recognised by Pope Benedict X.14
All that may be so, but the tapestry is still widely interpreted as following the Norman propaganda line - that it was Stigand who anointed Harold and placed the crown on his head. As Archbishop Stigand is named and depicted adjacent to the newly crowned king, and Ealdred of York is nowhere in sight, the work is certainly open to interpretation in the Norman manner. This, however, is only a superficial reading. Any image of the coronation itself has been studiously avoided. Rather, what the tapestry is suggesting is that Stigand, by his very occupation of the see of Canterbury at this time, has sullied the proceedings. He - and corrupt priests like him was about to draw the wrath of God upon the whole country. The Life of King Edward, which the artist certainly knew and used, is evidence of this perspective on events. The Flemish author's criticism of Stigand is scarcely veiled. Stigand was one of those who 'dishonour the Christian religion', one of those who were 'irreparably attracted to the devil by riches and worldly glory'. According to the author of the Life, God'sanger is sometimes roused to such a terrible extent that there is, quite simply, no hope of mercy in this life. 'Under these scourges of the chastising God, many thousands of people are thrown down and the kingdom is ravaged by fire and plunder;and this in times past has been shown to come from the sins of the priests.'15 Thus it seemed that Stigand's sins were so great that a whole people was about to suffer for them.
One moment the people are cheering the new king, the next their heads are tilted upwards at the night sky over Westminster, fingers pointing to the heavens in wonderment and awe [scene 29]. A strange celestial body, a glowing ball of fire with a long hairy tail, has appeared above the dark world. ISTI MIRANT STELLA[M] (These men wonder at the star). In the words of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (C and D), 'throughout all England, a sign, such as men never saw before, was seen in the heavens. Some men declared that it was the star comet, which some men call the "haired" star; and it appeared first on the eve of the Greater Litany, 24 April, and shone thus all week.' What they saw, in fact, was a comet and it was the same comet that was observed in 1682 by the astronomer Edmond Halley, and later named after him. Halley's Comet appears in a regular 76-year cycle, and it so happened that 1066 was one of the years when it was visible. It was last seen in 1986, but in 1066 it would have seemed much brighter to the eye, for on that occasion it passed between the sun and the earth rather than on the other side of the sun. The regular laws governing Halley's Comet were, of course, unknown in this prescientific age, and it is no surprise that people looked upon this strange fiery phenomenon in the night as a divinely ordained portent. It first appeared dimly above England in February, attained maximum brightness in April and was still visible well into May. It was observed elsewhere as well; chroniclers all over Europe reported its appearance and wondered what it might mean.16 In retrospect this became clear to the Normans. In words rhetorically addressed to Harold after his death, William of Poitiers notes coldly: 'The comet, terror of kings, which burned soon after your elevation, foretold your doom.'17
The hand of God has descended benevolently and blessed King Edward's church at Westminster. Now he has fired a warning shot across the heavens. This is the other side of God. This is God in the image of a truculent medieval monarch. His anger, already stirred by Stigand's presumptuous hold on the see of Canterbury, has now been truly roused by Harold's breach of oath. It would have been better for Harold to have chosen exile, imprisonment, slavery or even death in Normandy than to have made a sacred oath that he had no intention of fulfilling, for it now appeared, in retrospect, that in the eyes of God an oath made upon such holy old bones could never be broken, even if it had been made under duress. What else could explain the victory of the Normans in 1066? Harold had been crowned King of England in accordance with all the laws and customs of the land; he may have sat there enthroned, majestically, with all his regalia; but this was as nothing if he did not have the approval of his God.
Perhaps the underlying meaning of the Bayeux Tapestry, this mysterious and many-layered work of genius, is at last becoming clearer. It is not a monument of Norman triumph or celebration. Nor is it a work of Norman propaganda or justification. Rather, at the deepest level, it is beginning to appear as a work of explanation, seen from the tragic English perspective. The artist, working under the domination of the Normans, has succeeded brilliantly in deceiving generation after generation that he is telling the story from the Norman point of view. At another level, however, the Bayeux Tapestry is nothing less than the lost chronicle of the English. It is shot through with what seems to be a true account of what happened - of Harold's journey, the involuntary nature of his oath and Edward's attitude to William - all of which directly contradicts the Norman version of events. In the final analysis, however, it reflects the belief that Duke William was to win at Hastings because Harold, Stigand and the people of England had sinned and because God ordained that the English should be punished. On this account the Normans could be regarded as merely the instruments, and not the champions, of God'swill.
Harold, like everyone else, must have seen that celestial fireball passing so wonderfully across the crisp night sky. Now we see HAROLD again on his throne, only this time he is far from the self-assured, majestic figure who was seated there a moment earlier [scene 30]. He is a changed man, a worried man. His whole demeanour seems unsteady; the crown itself seems about to topple from his head; and he points at it as if to ask: 'How much longer will I be king?' A retainer is secretly explaining something. Perhaps it is the meaning of the comet;perhaps he is conveying some intelligence, recently received, about Duke William's reaction to the turn of events. William, it seems, has not taken the matter quite as philosophically as might have been hoped. Rumour has it that he has ordered the preparation of an enormous invasion force. A ghostly fleet of ships appears in the lower border as if by way of premonition.
This is worrying news. Harold needs to know exactly what William is doing and to that end he has dispatched spies on board a ship bound for Normandy. The ship of spies catches a breath of wind in the curve of its linen sail and, tossed high upon the threaded waves, it steals in secret across a swelling sea[scene 31]. HIC NAVIS ANGLICA VENIT IN TERRAM WILLELMI DUCIS (Here an English ship came to Duke William's land). Landfall is made and now a barelegged Englishman, his tunic hitched up and tucked into his belt, wades sleekly through the shallows and on to an empty Norman beach, bearing a heavy anchor in both hands. Cunningly, he has shaved the back of his neck in order to pass himself off as a Norman. The tapestry leaves the spy's fate unrecorded, but we learn from William of Poitiers that around about the spring of 1066 an English spy was, for all his guile, captured in Normandy and swiftly taken before Duke William. William dispatched him back to Harold with the following instructions:'Take this message from me to Harold: he will have nothing to fear from me and can live the rest of his life secure if, within the space of one year, he has not seen me in the place where he thinks his feet are safest.'18 It was a chilling riposte.
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Post by Kriyaban on Mar 12, 2022 14:22:50 GMT
Guildford Has Retrieved His Wakizashi which Isabella Bronstrup Stole Guildford is Flying Archangel on Орли 🦅 ⛩️ 🦢 Sacred Tengu Relics Fly on Guildford Орели 🦅⛩️ 🦢 Orunbaya Bodhi Bliss
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Post by Kriyaban on Mar 12, 2022 15:16:40 GMT
Turold the Dwarf
Turold the dwarf is perhaps the most captivating of all the figures depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry [scene 10; plate 1]. We see him in the county of Ponthieu, holding the two horses of Duke William's emissaries, who have just arrived at Count Guy's residence on their mission to demand Harold's handover to the Norman duke. There are only fifteen characters named in the whole work; all but four are easily identifiable, known from other sources for the part they played in the drama of 1066. Who is this dwarf engaged in such a menial task, and why has he been singled out so enigmatically by name?
For reasons that must lie at the very heart of the mystery, whoever designed the tapestry has taken pains to point out that the dwarf is called Turold, for the name has been carefully lowered and placed immediately above the dwarf's head. There has been some controversy in the past as to whether the person called Turold is the dwarf or the Norman emissary standing next to him.1 But it is important to note that the word 'Turold' stands alone and does not form part of any sentence. Five other times a person is named in the tapestry by a stand-alone name. Harold (twice), William, Robert and Eustace - all are on occasions designated in this way. In each case the name has been placed above the head of the person in question. So, despite the objections of some, there can really be little doubt that the name 'Turold' refers to the dwarf. It is possible that it refers to the knight as well; we have seen how fond the artist was of teasing us with multiple meanings, and Turold was a common name.2 What can be stated with more probability, however, is that the dwarf is called Turold, and it is the dwarf who provides us with the most compelling mystery.
Turold is a dwarf in the strictest medical sense. Some observers have questioned this, preferring to see his apparently small stature as an attempt at perspective.3 Strangely, however, this debate has proceeded without bringing even minimal medical evidence to bear on the issue. Not only is Turold small. His head is especially large for the rest of his body;indeed his head and neck account for almost a third of his total height. In this, he is unlike any other figure in the tapestry;more normally, the proportion of head and neck to the rest of the body is a fifth or a sixth. It is, of course, unrealistic to expect an anatomically correct portrait. But the disproportionately large head is a key symptom of a type of dwarfism known as achondroplasia. Caused by a random genetic mutation, achondroplasia is the most common form of dwarfism encountered today; its incidence cannot have been any different in medieval times. Thus 'la teste ot grosse' 'the head is large'- was how the twelfth-century poet Beroul described a dwarf named Frocin. Achondroplastic dwarfs have normal intelligence and lifespan. They also tend to be well built. Turold's normal intelligence and upper body strength are shown by his ability to control the two horses. His pointy beard shows that he is not a child. Very short limbs, strong upper body, disproportionately large head, normal intelligence, beard all this goes a long way towards showing that the artist of the tapestry has left us with a portrait of an adult male achondroplastic dwarf.4
But who can this dwarf be? Our quest to answer this question is not helped by the fact that 'Turold' was a common name. Unfortunately for us, many a proud Norman parent chose to call his or her infant son 'Turold' for it was a forceful name, carrying a frisson of the pagan past; it was ultimately derived from the Old Norse personal name Thorvaldr, which literally meant 'the Power of Thor'. Introduced into Normandy by invading Vikings of the ninth century, it became extremely popular in the form of Turold or Thorold (and other variant spellings). Surviving documents represent only the tip of the iceberg but they attest to twenty-eight Turolds living in Normandy before 1066.5 The name was particularly common in the east of the duchy, but it is also found as far west as the Channel Islands. The Domesday Book listed fourteen invaders called Turold who by 1086 had established themselves in England.6 The popularity of the name in medieval times has left its mark in the current surnames of Thorold in England, Torode in Guernsey and Theroude (among others) in France, and in several place names in Normandy as well. On the island of Jersey it is recalled by the district still known as Trodez and by a little lane called Rue de la Fosse Tauraude. What is more, a clutch of medieval Turolds can be found in other parts of France, and elsewhere on the continent as well.
There is, of course, no reason why a dwarf should not be someone of remarkable achievement. One very intriguing theory about Turold, advanced from time to time, is that he was the genius who designed the Bayeux Tapesry.7 Could this be the answer to the enigma of Turold? Did he cast himself in a modest cameo role within his own masterpiece, much as Alfred Hitchcock was to do in our own times? Intriguing as this theory is, it is unlikely to be the case. We must not forget that the evidence suggests that the designer of the tapestry was English, or at least connected with St Augustine's Abbey in Canterbury. Several factors show Turold to be French and to be based in France. The tapestry's Turold is shown in Ponthieu, rather than Normandy, but we should not be overly surprised to find this typically Norman name in a region which lay just over the Norman border. That Turold is French in a broad sense is further confirmed by the fact that the back of his head is shaved. At this point in the tapestry the Normans and other Frenchmen are invariably identified by their shaven napes.
Nor does the general style of eleventh-century self-portraiture lend weight to the hypothesis that Turold was the tapestry's artist. In illuminated manuscripts the artist did sometimes depict himself in small form. But typically the diminutive artist seems to be shown in a position of deference or supplication to a divine or saintly figure, drawn much larger, or to his ecclesiastical or secular superior, similarly illustrated as large.8 This was the whole point of the artist's minimised appearance. Turold, as we have seen, is a dwarf and his diminutive appearance is not to be confused with this modest convention. Moreover, he specifically turns his back on the others depicted in the same scene. Other examples of manuscript self-portrait show the artist in the course of his work or in possession of his tools.9 Once again, there is nothing in the tapestry which would indicate that Turold is a draughtsman or artist. On the contrary, his costume seems to suggest that his profession is specifically something else. What that profession is turns out to be the next important clue.
Turold's unusual costume comprises a pair of short, wide breeches with a pair of 'under-trousers' beneath. In 1966 Rita Lejeune pointed out that from other evidence this curious costume can be identified as that of a 'jongleur' - in other words, an entertainer who might be a jester, acrobat, juggler, minstrel, bard or other performer.10 The dwarf Turold, it seems, is a jongleur. Jongleurs added a sparkle and colour to medieval life that is not often evident from the dry tomes of history.11 Most of the surviving information comes from the centuries that followed 1066, but things cannot have been so very different in Turold's day. The repertoire of a troop of jongleurs was as exciting as it was various. They plied their trade in marketplaces, along the pilgrim routes and in the great baronial castles. Some would juggle with apples, balls or knives. Others sang exciting tales, long heroic sagas told from memory, or showed off their skill at rhyming and repartee. There were jongleurs who could imitate the sound of birds;others performed tricks with dogs, horses and other animals or recounted bawdy jokes. Many were musicians who might be heard playing viols, rotes, lyres, cymbals, tambourines or bells. In fact, jongleurs could be seen doing practically anything that an audience eager for distraction might pay to see. Only one aspect of a jongleur's performance survives in the English word 'juggler'.
At the lower end of the social scale was the jongleur of the ordinary people, a poor, ragamuffin busker, who was seen at markets and fairs and at stopping points along the pilgrim routes. Then there was the jongleur who would travel from castle to castle, knocking on great oak doors and offering his services to the lord and lady. At the announcement of an important event, such as a noble or royal marriage or the dubbing of a knight, jongleurs would converge from far and wide. Sometimes eager and impoverishedjongleurs arrived in such numbers that it was necessary to turn them away.
At the very top of the profession was the jongleur who had become attached to the court of a wealthy patron. The resident jongleur would provide the entertainment at his lord's castle and would accompany him when he visited other important persons. His standard of life would have been immeasurably better than that endured by his itinerant confreres. Indeed, he might even be rewarded with a grant of land, the most important and enduring form of wealth. The names of a few of these eleventh-century stars survive. The Domesday Book of 1086, for example, reveals that a ladyjongleur (or possibly the wife of a jongleur) called Adelina held land in Hampshire under the patronage of Roger of Montgomery, the Earl of Shrewsbury.12 The Domesday survey also tells us William the Conqueror employed a jongleur called Berdic, whom he rewarded after the Conquest with three villages in Wales.13 But of Berdic himself nothing more is known. Nor is William the Conqueror the only person depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry known to have employed a jongleur. His Breton adversary Conan II (1040-66), whom we see in the embroidery escaping down a rope from the town of Dol, retained a singer-harpist named, curiously enough, Norman.14
As for Turold, the fact that he is named and depicted in the tapestry suggests that he was one of these more important jongleurs, a performer who had been patronised by a member of the nobility. And his specific association with Count Guy in the embroidery suggests that he was none other than the count's own jongleur and household dwarf. The tapestry shows Turold only once; his feet are firmly set on the soil of Picardy; and he is depicted in the same scene as the Count of Ponthieu. There is certainly nothing that suggests that the dwarf has, just now, travelled from Normandy, as a companion to Duke William's two knights.15
Count Guy of Ponthieu was a rich man and he wielded significant power within his region. Closely related to the King of France and a cousin of Count Eustace II, he comes across in the sources as greedy, callous and camp; this was, after all, the man who held the marooned Harold for a large ransom.16 The idea that he might have employed a household dwarf as his jongleur certainly does not jar with other reports of his character. If we are right in taking Turold to be a court dwarf, he stands in the line of a long tradition. Dwarfs have found employment in wealthy households in many periods of history, stretching back to ancient Egypt and imperial Rome, and through to Renaissance times and beyond.17 For the medieval period with which we are concerned the evidence for court dwarfs is not abundant but it does exist. Thus in the 1060s Bishop Gunter of Bamberg is recorded as having a dwarf named Askericus.18 In the late twelfth century Count Henry II of Champagne, the King of Jerusalem, possessed a dwarf named Scarlet, who, in a bizarre accident, perished with him as he tried to save his lord and master from falling absentmindedly out of a window.19 The examples can certainly be multiplied as the ages progress. The pages of medieval literature, especially from the twelfth century onwards, are full of additional evidence of the medieval fascination for dwarfs and for the existence of court dwarfs in particular. The golden-haired harpist Cnu Deireoil of Celtic myth played music that was so sweet that his listeners invariably fell asleep. The court dwarf in the German Arthurian poem Wigalois (c. 1200) sang songs so wonderful that they could not be erased from memory. In Chretien de Troyes' poem Erec et Enide (c. 1160) we come across a more sinister dwarf who accompanies his lord and lady on their travels, brandishing a whip and barring the way to innocent strangers. There were also stories of wild dwarfs who dwelt in forests and caves, with magical powers and great hoards of gold, even a whole race of dwarfs with their own king and queen. Wild dwarfs could look up at the night sky and read the stars as if the whole of the heavens were a vast illuminated manuscript, and when the chance beckoned they would cast magic spells on the world asleep.
There is thus sufficient evidence, over an extended period, for the medieval fascination with dwarfs and we should not to be surprised if Turold is a jongleur attached to the noble household of Count Guy of Ponthieu. This certainly remains no more than an implication from what we see in the tapestry;no written evidence supporting it survives. But it seems an entirely reasonable hypothesis on the basis of which to continue our investigation. Let us now consider what kind of jongleur Turold might have been. Some churchmen held jongleurs in very low esteem, regarding them as typically blasphemous, vulgar and drunk. Honorius of Autun (c. 1080-c. 1117) fulminated that they were all the servants of Satan and would end up in hell. The image of a jongleur in hell, in the process of having his tongue torn out by devils, can be seen above the west door of the early twelfth-century church at Conques in central France. In the same vein, Orderic Vitalis, writing around the 1130s, tells the story of a jongleur who, having made an irreverent joke about certain holy relics, was said to have been struck dead by lightning that very night.20
Our Turold was surely no disreputable fellow like this. He was a high-class jongleur. His name has been embroidered proudly in the company of kings and nobles. There were some high-minded clerics who were prepared to tolerate the art of the jongleur,provided that it was put to some useful purpose.Jongleurs could, after all, sing to the people about edifying or uplifting subjects and in a language they could understand. It did not have to be all scandalous songs or idle tricks and dirty jokes. They could sing the lives of saints and moral fables or the famous heroic tales of feudal and Christian valour known as chansons de geste. Above all else, it is in this last role, as performers, and sometimes authors, of chansons de geste that jongleurs are nowadays best remembered.Chansons de geste were the epic poems of Old French literature. They were tales of exciting and heroic deeds, usually set in or around the age of Charlemagne, sung by a jongleur to an audience of lords and courtiers. The great popularity of chansons de geste is testified by the fact that more than 100 survive, dating from the latter part of the eleventh century to the first half of the fourteenth. So is this how we should see Turold? As a performer, and perhaps author, of chansons de geste} Interestingly enough, Gormont et Isembart, the very earliest chanson de geste that survives, albeit in fragmentary form, is known to come from Ponthieu. The monk Hariulf, writing in the 1080s at the monastery of Saint-Riquier, just outside Count Guy's capital of Abbeville, tells us that the story ofGormont et Isembart was 'remembered and sung every day by the people of the land'.21 But there is something more than this, something that is much more intriguing. The very greatest of all thechansons de geste is the Chanson de Roland (the Song of Roland) and it is familiar, if only by name, to every French schoolchild. It is the first great work of French literature, a monumental celebration of Charlemagne and his kin. It occupies a position in French literary history equivalent to the English Beowulf and it may be counted among the world's classics. Scholars have long argued over the authorship, origin and date of the Roland. Mystery surrounds these issues. But in the very last of the 4,002 lines of the earliest extant version of the Chanson de Roland, preserved in the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman manuscript kept in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, we read the following extraordinary clue:
Ci fait la geste que Turoldus declinet
Here ends the story which Turold relates22
At once we must remember that Turold was a very common name. Moreover, the precise meaning of line 4002 of the Chanson de Roland, and in particular the role of 'Turoldus', has remained frustratingly obscure; the Turold mentioned could have been the author of the poem, the performer of the poem, the author of its source material or even the twelfth-century copyist who made the only surviving copy of this version of the tale.23 We are in a grey area; but grey as it is, the possibility is truly intriguing. It is a possibility that is even more intriguing now that we have seen that the dwarf is probably a jongleur and that the tapestry brings to the fore Count Eustace II of Boulogne, the man who had the richest blood of Charlemagne running through his veins and who may even have been the patron of the tapestry itself. Could it be that the dwarf in the tapestry is the forgotten genius who wrote and composed the Chanson de Roland} Was this his claim to fame?
The Chanson de Roland is a masterpiece which was written, so far as historians have deduced, by a Frenchman, from somewhere in the north of what we now call France, or possibly conquered England, during the latter part of the eleventh century. But though its author may justly be called the founding father of French literature, his identity has always remained a mystery. Apart from his possible name, Turold, nothing is known of him. As a topic of study, the Chanson de Roland is matched only by the Bayeux Tapestry in terms of the vast number of scholarly books and articles that medievalists have devoted to it. Yet despite this intense interest, the theory that the two Turolds are identical persons has only very rarely been suggested, and nowadays it is not mentioned at all. As Gerard Moignet wrote in 1972, scholars have 'abandoned all hope of finding the author of theChanson de Roland [in the Bayeux Tapestry]'.24 In all this, however, the intriguing fact that the dwarf in the Bayeux Tapestry seems to be a jongleur has not widely been noted and it has never been truly brought to bear on the issue.
The story of the Chanson de Roland, which is very loosely based on fact, is set in the year 778, during the age of Charlemagne. The manner in which the poem was written or evolved has long been a subject of debate; it probably existed in a variety of earlier forms, now lost, before being reworked in the eleventh century by a single poet for new times and for a new audience. It tells of how the traitor Ganelon betrayed the rearguard of Charlemagne's army to the Muslim Saracens of Spain. As a result Roland (Charlemagne's nephew) and many others, including his companion Olivier and the warrior Archbishop Turpin, come under a devastating attack as they return to France through the Pyrenean pass of Roncevaux. Under Roland's leadership they fight long and heroically. Archbishop Turpin, Olivier and Roland all stand out for their fighting prowess but inevitably they all perish. In due course, however, Charlemagne, aided by God, exacts revenge against the Saracens, swiftly in one battle and then again on a vast scale as the forces of Islam and Christianity face each other in a further epic conflict.25 The traitor Ganelon is finally brought to justice and executed for his crime.
In the figure of Roland medieval Europe found one of its greatest feudal and Christian heroes. He was the epitome of valour, battling for his God and his king, and dying a heroic death. The fame of the poem quickly spread. Versions of it were to be composed in High German, Old Norse, Welsh, Dutch and Middle English. In the fourteenth century both Dante and Chaucer knew the story. In Renaissance Italy stories of Roland continued to inspire Boiardo and Ariosto. Images of Roland and his companion Olivier may be found in art and sculpture from the twelfth century onwards and Roland's horn, which, out of his sense of honour, he refuses to blow to summon help, attained iconic status.
There is, of course, much in the poem that the modern reader finds objectionable; the poet's religiosity is ignorant, racist and violent. But in truth he could not have been otherwise, given where and when he lived. The opposition he sets up between the two great companions-in-arms, the brave but reckless Roland and the wise and cautious Olivier, still succeeds in engaging the reader and in stimulating debate. The poet is also a master at milking the tension. He can dramatically hold up the action, describing the same knife-edge moment in succeeding stanzas with subtly different words. If he was a performer, it shows; he knew how to keep his audience on edge. The scene that recounts Roland's death, in particular, has been described as one of the greatest in world literature.
There are several intriguing parallels between the respective stories told by Chanson de Roland and the Bayeux Tapestry. Many historians have noted in passing that the artist of the tapestry may well have known the Chanson de Roland and that he was perhaps consciously echoing themes found in the poem.26 Harold, for example, reminds us of the traitor Ganelon: both are brothers-in-law of their sovereign; both undertake a dangerous mission in a foreign land; both are brave and noble opponents who are brought down as a result of breaking the bonds of feudal duty; and the penalty of death is the price of their sin, for them and their kinsmen.
Most impressive, however, is the parallel that can be drawn between the fighting Archbishop Turpin and Bishop Odo of Bayeux. Alone among contemporary accounts the tapestry places Odo in the thick of the fighting. It is true that the embroidered Odo carries a mace, not a lance or sword, apparently reflecting a prohibition against those in holy orders shedding blood. The legendary Turpin is a hardened warrior who has no such inhibition. Turpin also dies in battle, a fate certainly not shared by Odo. But the image of the swashbuckling cleric, bravely taking part in the midst of a 'holy' battle, is strikingly shared between the tapestry and the Chanson. There is a passage in the Chanson de Roland that may even have been the direct inspiration for what we see in the embroidery. Surrounded by the enemy, and in the thick of battle, Roland's knights begin to panic and they call upon Roland and Olivier to protect them. Turpin, riding amongst them, steels their resolve:
Lord barons, do not indulge in base thoughts;
In God's name I beg you not to flee,
So that no man of worth can sing a shameful song.
It is far better for us to die fighting.27
The designer of the tapestry sought to flatter Bishop Odo in a variety of ways and it is more than possible that he was here deliberately fawning to him by implying that he was a second Archbishop Turpin [scene 54; plate 10]. At the same time, however, he carefully avoided any implication that Odo was directly involved in the slaughter. The point of comparison was carefully chosen.
If Ganelon is Odo Turpin, who in the embroidered story is the Emperor Charlemagne and who is Roland?Here the messages seem to be mixed. The leader of the invasion is Duke William and it might seem that he should naturally have the starring role and enjoy the implication of being another Charlemagne. Yet the presence of Count Eustace, the emperor's noble descendant, suggests on the contrary that he is the one who stands for the Carolingian bloodline, perhaps Charlemagne and Roland all rolled into one. On this account, William's counterpart in the poem would be a merely secondary figure, the 'Norman' vassal of Charlemagne who is anachronistically identified in the poem as Duke Richard the Old (who was in reality Duke William's great-grandfather). If these parallels with the Chanson de Roland are really there, as they seem to be, we have further evidence that the artist of the tapestry, although working in England and in an English genre, was actually French-speaking.28More than that, we can now well understand that the artist might wish to reinforce the parallels with the story of Roland by a passing depiction of the author of the poem itself, in Ponthieu and in the presence of Count Guy, where he would normally be found.
The place of origin of the Chanson de Roland has long been debated. On the basis that the twelfth-century Oxford manuscript was copied out in the Anglo-Norman dialect of its day, some have argued that it is a Norman work.29 Others, however, see the original poem as emanating from somewhere else in northern France, perhaps the area around Paris known as the Ile-de-France, or in Champagne, Anjou or Lorraine.30 Chartres, too, has been suggested.31 That it may have been written in Ponthieu is a novel suggestion; but the possibility should not be dismissed out of hand. Count Guy of Ponthieu was a great-great-grandson in the male line of Hugh Capet, the French king who finally ended the rule of the Carolingians in 987. Hugh Capet himself, however, was an indirect kinsman of Carolingian lineage and Guy could presumably trace a descent from the emperor in several female lines. Moreover the links in the region with the age of Charlemagne were as strong as they were anywhere else. It was here that Charlemagne is said to have placed his son-in-law Angilbert (740814) in control of the region. Angilbert was also one of the most celebrated former abbots of the monastery of Saint Riquier, the chief monastic centre of Ponthieu.32 The distinction in the poem between the 'French' and 'Norman'divisions of Charlemagne's army seems to mirror the very same distinction made in the Carmen de Hastingae Proelio when it describes Duke William's invasion force, where the 'French' are (or include) the men of Ponthieu and Boulogne. The Chanson de Roland thus appears to reflect sentiments of 'French' identity that are very similar to those expressed in the Carmen. On the other hand, the notion that the Chanson de Roland is a Norman work is undermined by the fact that it is always the French who are given the greater prestige; the 'Normans' are allotted a merely secondary role and 'Normandy' is merely one of a number of subsidiary territories ruled over by the true 'Frenchman' Charlemagne.33The poem was probably written for a wider audience than just one French region, and no place in Ponthieu is mentioned in the text, but for political, historical and genealogical reasons Ponthieu, or one of its northern French neighbours, can hardly be ruled out as its place of composition or adaptation.
Nor is it impossible that the Roland is more or less contemporary with the Bayeux Tapestry, that is to say probably dating from the period between 1066 and about 1080 and perhaps more specifically from the early to mid-1070s. Various arguments have been advanced in favour of the Rolandbegng significantly later in date than the tapestry, but none is persuasive.34 While the thrust of the Chanson de Roland puts the 'Normans' very much in the shade of the 'French', there are nevertheless some oblique references to Duke William's recent conquest of England. Thus it is mentioned that Charlemagne 'crossed the salty sea to England and won the poll-tax for Rome's own use' and that 'England became his domain'.35 Neither statement is true of Charlemagne but both are true of the Conqueror. For this reason, if nothing else, the poem in its surviving form must date from after 1066. The widespread notion that the Chanson de Roland must, of necessity, have been written after a battle in Spain in 1086 (the Battle of Zlatica) is based on a series of false assumptions.36 Arguably, so is the notion that the Roland reflects the time of the First Crusade (post 1096); there is no reference at all, either implicit or explicit, to the Crusade in the East. Charlemagne Conques through Salty Sea of Bliss in Serene Serendipity England ⚜️
Eustace II de Boulogne Deliver Prince
the Roland reflects is rather the climate of opinion that made the First Crusade possible. This was a time, some twenty or so years earlier, when contingents of French knights were already fighting against the Muslims in Spain, just as we find them in the Roland. Moreover, there may well be a number of oblique references in the Roland to contemporary events in 1071 or 1072, forming a cluster of allusions that suggests that the poet was writing not long afterwards.37There is also no reference to the Norman conquest of Sicily, although the Norman successes in Calabria and Apulia are implicitly referred to. This suggests that the poet was writing before the conquest of Sicily was complete in 1091, and probably before it was substantially complete in the late 1070s. One place in Sicily is mentioned in passing by the poet - Palermo.38Palermo was captured by the Normans in January 1072. For all these reasons a date for the composition or adaptation of the work in the early 1070s seems to be entirely plausible.
Such general considerations are hardly much of an advance on the matter. What we need is some more precise clue that the Chanson de Roland was composed or at least adapted by a poet working in Ponthieu. There is at least one such clue. Among several holy relics mentioned by the poet, one stands out in particular. So important is it that Charlemagne (Charles) has it embedded in the pommel of his sword:
We could speak for a long time about the lance
With which our Lord was wounded on the cross.
Charles has its point, thanks be to God,
Which he has mounted in his golden pommel.39
The reference here is to the lance of the Roman centurion that pierced the side of Jesus as he lay hanging on the cross.40 It is Charlemagne's ownership, 'thanks be to God', of the tip of the Holy Lance that gives his soldiers their assured sense of destiny, that they have a joyous and heavenly future which their unquestioned faith held was open to them as a result of the suffering and death of Jesus on the cross. The point of the Holy Lance is embedded in the sword of Charlemagne;the sword is thus named Joyeuse, 'the Joyful'; and it is from the name of the sword Joyeuse that seems to have been taken the battle cry that the poet puts into the mouths of Charlemagne's knights, Monjoie, 'My Joy'. The Holy Lance thus stands at the centre of a group of related concepts of great mystical significance to the poet.41 And it turns out to be of the greatest interest in our quest to link the tapestry's Turold with the authorship of the poem. We must, therefore, narrow our focus on to this question.
The Chanson de Roland tells us that the point of the Holy Lance belonged to Charlemagne. The only place in the whole of eleventh-century France where a similar story has been found is the abbey of Saint-Riquier, the chief monastic centre of Ponthieu. The abbey of Saint-Riquier, it will be recalled, lies only a few miles from Count Guy's capital of Abbeville, in other words, only a short distance from where the dwarf-jongleur Turold would have composed and sung his songs. The Saint-Riquier story is given to us by Hariulf, the monk who completed his chronicle of Saint-Riquier in large part by 1088. Hariulf's interest in the matter arose because the precious lancepoint had, for several decades during the ninth century, been a prized possession of his own abbey. He tells us that Louis the Pious, son and successor to Charlemagne, gave the abbey a large number of holy relics, the most precious of which was 'the point of the lance with which a soldier pierced the side of that divine Master who died for our salvation (it is this wound which gives rise to the sacraments of the church)'.42
Hariulf did not know how the biblical lancepoint had come into Louis' possession. He merely reported that 'it is said' that Louis had acquired this relic on a visit to Constantinople. However, no such visit is known, and a later account states that Charlemagne himself had given the relic to the abbey of Saint-Riquier. Within some fifty years or so, however, the abbey of Saint-Riquier lost it. Around the year 880, under imminent danger of Viking pillage, it was moved for safe keeping to the town of Sens and it was never returned and has subsequently disappeared.43
Despite this relic being associated by Hariulf with Charle-magne's son Louis, rather than directly with the emperor, Hariulf's story remains of the greatest interest in our quest. There is no other contemporary report which so closely parallels what we read in theRoland. Both speak specifically of the point of the Holy Lance. Both say that the family of Charlemagne owned it. In the words of one scholar who investigated the matter in detail, the tradition found at Saint-Riquier and the similar story in the poem 'can hardly be unrelated'.44 From this it seems distinctly possible that the poet of the Chanson de Roland was working within earshot of the traditions preserved at the abbey of Saint-Riquier and thus that he might well have been working in Abbeville as Count Guy of Ponthieu'sjongleur.
111411544a
1 Turold
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2 The meeting between
Duke William and
Earl Harold
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3 'Where a priest
and Ælfgyva'
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4 Mont-Saint-Michel and the crossing of the sands
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5 Harold's oath
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6 King Edward's
last bequest
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7 Bishop Odo of Bayeux
presides over a banquet
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8 Wadard
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9 Vital
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10 Bishop Odo encourages the young knights at the Battle of Hastings
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11 Count Eustace II of Boulogne points out Duke William
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12 King Harald
There is one further piece of evidence. In 1982 Professor D. D. R. Owen published an article in which he showed that more than a dozen parallels and similarities can be identified between the famous Latin poem about the Battle of Hastings, Carmen de Hastingae Proelio, and the FrenchChanson de Roland.45 Owen argued that these parallels strongly suggest that there is some direct relationship between the Latin and the French poems. He concluded that the poet of the Carmen was deeply familiar with the vernacular Roland, and that he drew upon it, 'deftly garnishing the historical facts as he had received them with epic turns of phrase, accentuating oppositions, adding picturesque touches to both characters and events'. Moreover, it would appear that the version of the Roland with which the Carmen-pott was familiar was more or less the one which has been transmitted down to us.
This conclusion is extremely important, but its importance has been obscured. At the time when Owen published his article it was widely considered that the Carmen was a twelfth-century work and that it could not have been written by Bishop Guy of Amiens. But Guy's authorship of the poem has now been firmly re-established.46 So if Owen is right that the author of the Carmen knew and used the Roland, then the Chanson de Roland must have been composed, in a form not dissimilar to what we know today, before Guy died, which was in either 1074 or 1075.47 This is a dating remarkably consistent with what has been proposed above. Furthermore, if Bishop Guy was familiar with the Chanson de Roland, at a time so close to its presumed date of composition, the two poems could well have originated in broadly the same milieu. This cannot be proved; the Chanson de Roland might quickly have become popular. But the influence of the Chanson de Roland on Bishop Guy would be all the more understandable if he were working not far from where the Roland was composed. We know that when Guy wrote the Carmen he was the Bishop of Amiens. His episcopal seat lay only two dozen miles along the River Somme from Abbeville, where his nephew Count Guy ruled over Ponthieu. In his youth Bishop Guy had even been a student at Saint-Riquier. Once again our hypothesis that the Chanson de Roland might well have been composed in the region of Abbeville and Saint-Riquier, and by none other than Turold, Count Guy of Ponthieu's household jongleur,is remarkably consistent with the evidence. It is consistent, too, with the theory that Count Eustace II of Boulogne was the patron of the Bayeux Tapestry for it was Eustace, the noble heir of Charlemagne, who stood to gain most in prestige from the tapestry's implicit allusions to the Chanson de Roland and its talented author Turold.48
The discussion in this chapter has ranged over a number of matters; no doubt a great deal more could be said. It would certainly be remarkable if we have an embroidered portrait of the author of the first great work of French literature. If that were true, the whole magnificent edifice - from Moliere to Flaubert, from Corneille to Hugo, and all the other luminaries as well - would rest on the shoulders of this enigmatic dwarf. That there is considerable scope for caution is clear. The clues are slender; much mystery remains. But the possibility that the two Turolds are identical is distinctly more interesting than has hitherto been supposed.
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Post by Kriyaban on Mar 12, 2022 15:19:49 GMT
Harold waes Crowned Witch Within These Same Great Walls HIC HAROLD REX IMPERATUS EST Estandert the Third King Knight of England ⚜️ in the Tumultuous Year Lydian ⛩️ Kriya Sanskrit 🦢 Empire
derwandelndegeist
It 🌺 is Destiny Foreoled Discreetly Highlighted Controversial Count Estandert Eustace II de Boulogne Deliver Idylko Swift BloWw Over and Above the Normans Humble Blow Le Batard is Dead Eustace Prince of Andante Andorra and Illyria
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derwandelndegeist
Secret Strike Blow Aureaolly Ornate Knecht 🦢 🕉️ 🌺
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Post by Pathfinder on Mar 12, 2022 18:18:08 GMT
Marco Aurelius is Coming the to Hastings Feeria Kublai Rides Galopira God 🦢 Orfeo Knecht is God Caedmon Akbar Caedmon is Prince of Rome Cabral Constantinople and Kolchida
derwandelndegeist
Christocnicus Bezsmartnikus God Velihoelohai Stotnicus King Chrysagon King of China Cavalry Chivalry Chivalry and Palestina Caedmon Prince of Bliss Orchideya Rejuvating Bliss Avalonia Tervel Kamenov Elohim Princeps Kokachin Kora Korea Kokachina
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derwandelndegeist
Okhotniki Samodevi Samodiva Kokachin North Korea Carthagen in Bliss Caedmont Bliss Fecundicus Tao Te I Ching to Whirlpool of Change Obrazuva Feeria of Bliss I See Stars Kublai Khan Rides Galopira Fetch Karakorum Godwin Paradise 🌸
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Post by Kriyaban on Mar 14, 2022 20:15:53 GMT
कि छैन भन्ने कुरा 👑 छ भने अन्य King Harold And His Small Army must Rush North to Vanquish the Viking Threat while Planning a Mad Dash South Back to Invase the Norman Threat त के कुरा भो र संविधान निर्माण र शान्ति प्रक्रिया र Fair फाँट प्रमुख Fate छ भन्ने कुरा of Anglo-Saxon England Hangs in the Lotus 🌸 🇧🇧 Balance
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Post by Kriyaban on Mar 15, 2022 9:53:25 GMT
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Post by Kriyaban on Mar 15, 2022 10:13:51 GMT
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Post by Kriyaban on Mar 16, 2022 16:32:37 GMT
छर् Chrysagon 🐲 🦢 ⚜️ Dragonets are Overflying 🎭 the Battlefield of 🦇 Hastings
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Post by Kriyaban on Mar 17, 2022 15:46:54 GMT
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भारतीय भूमिमा रहेका Bhagavate र Bhagavan Krishna Emerges on Pandavakshetra पुर् Purna Kshetra for a Reckoning Astra 🇧🇷 Brahmastra on 🦇 Hastings Slope 🇧🇹 Bhagavad Gita on Seven Rila Lotus Lakes Chalet Orthodox Try to Ovuyell Chalet Francesco Will Try Ovuyell That Faery ⛩️ 🦢 Book for His Personal Salvation
Marco Polo is 🇧🇧 Gospodar na 🛎 Silata na BOGA छ 🕌 🇨🇾 ई Сон на 🔆 🌙 Светкавица та Господариу на 🔆 свiтло 🌟 Силата на Светлата 🔆 Светлината Увертура Увертиута Увертиура Улейтай 17 July 1393 Baldwin Lichtung Orden na 🛎
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Post by Pathfinder on Mar 19, 2022 17:48:23 GMT
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Post by Pathfinder on Mar 19, 2022 18:54:51 GMT
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Post by Kriyaban on Mar 19, 2022 19:03:43 GMT
Faye इष्ट iste est Harold Godwinson Sverige Stamford Songe 🦇 Harold Invitare Olaf e Magnus Haraldson Stayen in Engelond with Ransom Faderi Olaf e Magnus Cascadi
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