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By Root 618 0

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