1066 - Andrew Bridgeford [36]
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