The relationship was a tumultuous one. As we’ve seen, William was famous for flying into sudden furies, and in Mathilde he had apparently met his match, even though many sources say she was only about four feet four inches tall. The couple would often have flaming rows, and it is said that during one of these, William dragged Mathilde through the streets of Caen by her hair to show everyone who was boss. Despite the occasional descent into domestic violence, though, their marriage was deemed a great success. William was pretty well the only ruler of his time who sired no bastards and who was faithful to his wife,3 and during their thirty-year union, the couple had ten children: six girls and four boys.
This devotion to creating a dynasty, coupled with William’s obsession with getting his own way, did not bode well for the Anglo-Saxon rulers who were now sitting pretty in England.
A tapestry of illusions
If we know so much about William’s reasons for invading England and ousting King Harold, it is because the Bayeux Tapestry paints such a detailed picture of historical events.
The 70-metre-long embroidery, with its vivid tableaux recounting events leading up to the Conquest and ending with Harold’s death at Hastings, is a stunningly beautiful work of art, and anyone with the slightest interest in history, culture, needlework or just plain human endeavour should go and see it. Its survival is a miracle – in 1792, during the French Revolution, it was almost cut up to cover ammunition wagons, and in the Second World War Goebbels did his best to steal it. It is the only embroidery of its type and age to have lasted so long.
‘Here they made a meal’ – William the Conqueror’s men land in England, and the first thing they do is have a barbecue. But they weren’t French. Refined eating was just one of the habits these Norsemen had picked up while living on the continent.
Its only failing is that it is definitely not a record of the historical facts.
A modern parallel might be ex-President Bush commissioning a film about Iraq. Make sure, he would say, that it starts with footage of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. What do you mean there never was any footage? Make some! Then we want plenty of tanks and explosions – I like explosions. Torturing prisoners? No, we don’t need any of that depressing stuff. Oh, and at the end, it’s me who catches Saddam, OK?
This, anyhow, is what the Bayeux Tapestry was assumed to be. But what makes it so fascinating is that it didn’t quite turn out that way.
For one thing, the job of putting the Conquest into pictures was given to Anglo-Saxon seamstresses, who were famous throughout Europe for the quality of their embroidery, and seem to have taken the opportunity to add in lots of jokes. To make things even more complicated, the story itself would appear to have been told by someone who wanted to undermine everything William had done.
The best way to get to the root of all this is to try and unpick the tangled threads of the tapestry, and compare the Franco-Norman propaganda that has come down through history with another, perhaps more credible, telling of events. Let’s take things step by step …
Step 1: The Duke who would be King
By the 1050s, William, now Duke of Normandy, had fought off Breton and Frankish invaders and quelled Norman rebels. Possibly inspired by the mistake that his late uncle Richard had made in capturing Falaise Castle and then letting his brother come and murder him, William had developed a simple but effective strategy for dealing with enemies. Instead of bashing down their portcullises, claiming their chateaux as his own, and then going home to be poisoned or otherwise assassinated, William would pursue aggressors or anyone he felt like attacking until he either killed them or seized all their riches and rendered them totally powerless. Pretty soon, word had got round that it was not a good idea to annoy William unless you were sure of being able to take him out, which was a slim possibility given that he had a personal army of highly trained knights and was himself a fearsome fighter.
William was also intensely ambitious, and had long had his eye on England. Under the Anglo-Saxons, it had become a rich, stable country, but things had changed since Alfred the Great’s day: the Scandinavians were raiding again, and the King of England, Edward the Confessor, was weak and under the thumb of warring earls. There was room for a strong man like William to step in and seize power.
Moreover, William knew that he might not have to do much fighting. King Edward was married to the daughter of one of the warring Anglo-Saxon earls, but he had taken a vow of chastity, and he had no direct heir. Edward was William’s father’s cousin, so in theory William had a claim to the English throne. In addition, Edward owed a debt of sorts to Normandy, because he had taken refuge there during the reign of King Cnut.4 And just as Brits who have lived in France come home with a taste for almost-raw steak and unpasteurized cheese, Edward had a fondness for all things Norman, and surrounded himself with Norman courtiers. All in all, it was a situation that the ambitious William couldn’t afford to ignore.
William duly went to visit his royal cousin Edward, and, according to Norman chroniclers, the trip confirmed his feelings about England: ‘When William saw what a green and pleasant land it was, he thought he would very much like to be its king.’ Yes, a cynic might add, green, pleasant and full of treasure, valuable farmland and taxpayers.
It was during this state visit that Edward is supposed to have appointed the young Norman as his official successor to the English throne. And if you go to the vast former monastery in Bayeux that now houses the tapestry, you will be informed categorically that this was the case: William was the only rightful claimant to Edward’s crown, because Edward himself had said so.
This is an opinion that was first recorded in the 1070s by the chronicler William of Poitiers, a friend of the Conqueror whose account of the Conquest is about as reliable as a biography of Genghis Khan published by Mongolians R Us Books. And it is this version of events that the modern-day Normans in Bayeux would still have us believe.
But it’s a false premise, because, according to eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon law, the successor to the English throne had to be approved by a ‘wise men’s council’ of bishops and earls, known as the Witangemot. Edward had no right to pass on his crown. His promise, if it really existed, was probably part of a deal – he no doubt wanted to buy William’s support if he had to go to war to hang on to his crown. Edward, a Norman on his mother’s side, was unpopular with his Anglo-Saxon subjects. As well as his Norman courtiers, he had brought in Norman sheriffs to rule parts of England – foreign noblemen who spoke no Anglo-Saxon and didn’t have a clue about local customs. The Anglo-Saxon earls, who ruled over vast swathes of the English countryside, were in a semi-constant state of rebellion against the presence of these foreign lawmakers, and were also jostling for position to take over the throne.
The most powerful of the earls, Godwin of Wessex, had his eyes set firmly on the seat of power. He had married his daughter Edith to Edward, and was understandably annoyed that the union produced no princes. It was even rumoured that Edward had taken his vow of celibacy just to frustrate Godwin.
Godwin was virulently anti-Norman. In 1051, a group of Normans got into a fight in Dover and – having far less experience than the English of town-centre brawling after the pubs closed – came off worse. Several of the Normans were killed, and King Edward ordered Godwin to go and punish the townsfolk for being so inhospitable to his foreign friends. Godwin not only refused but thought that this Norman-bashing sounded fun, and declared war on Edward’s continental cronies. He marched an army to London, where he received a hero’s welcome from the people, and suddenly it was much less fashionable in England to be a Norman.
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