1066 - Andrew Bridgeford [105]
1 Turold
2 The meeting between
Duke William and
Earl Harold
3 'Where a priest
and Ælfgyva'
4 Mont-Saint-Michel and the crossing of the sands
5 Harold's oath to Duke William
6 King Edward's
last bequest
7 Bishop Odo of Bayeux
presides over a banquet
8 Wadard
9 Vital
10 Bishop Odo encourages the young knights at the Battle of Hastings
11 Count Eustace II of Boulogne points out Duke William
12 The death of King Harold
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 French Chanson 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