1066 - Andrew Bridgeford [58]
What may have incensed Harold was that his ancestral homeland in the south was being cruelly ravaged by the invaders; and this is exactly what the tapestry now shows [scene 43]. The invaders are setting a large house on fire, from which a woman and child flee in panic. HIC DOMUS INCENDITUR (Here a house is burned). William of Poitiers himself notes that Harold 'was hastening his march all the more because he had heard that the lands near the Norman camp were being laid to waste'. The woman and child shown in the tapestry are usually regarded as representative figures, and it is tempting to see them as standing generally for the innocent victims of war. It is just as possible, however, that they are meant to stand for actual people. There are only two other women depicted in the work - the named but mysterious Ælfgyva and the unnamed but identifiable Queen Edith - and it would certainly be consistent for the third woman, who also wears aristocratic clothes, to be a real and identifiable person. If so, one wonders whether she might possibly be Harold's mistress Edith Swan-Neck and the child perhaps one of the sons she had borne to Harold. He could be a boy called Ulf who at the time when the tapestry was being made had become, like Harold's brother Wulfnoth, a hostage of William the Conqueror.11 Whether this is so cannot, of course, be proven; it would have to be established that they were either in the vicinity at the time or else that the tapestry is alluding to an earlier flight before the Normans arrived. At some point after 1063 Harold had also entered into a strategic marriage with Ealdgyth, the sister of Earls Edwin and Morcar and the widow of King Gruffydd of Wales.
William's scorched earth policy was probably premeditated. He would have calculated that reports of men, women and children suffering on Harold's own land, people whom Harold knew and was duty bound to protect, would incense his enemy and it was to William's advantage that Harold should be provoked into a decisive early encounter. The path of the Norman rampage may still be traced in the Domesday Book of 1086, where it is noted that a succession of lands to the north and south of present-day Battle - at Crowhurst, What-lington, Netherfield and Broomham - had been devastated and laid waste. Yet although this devastation may have played a part in Harold's decision, he had a tactical reason, too, to advance swiftly and pin William down by the coast, where the isolated invaders would eventually run out of supplies. By the evening of 13 October Harold's army had assembled only a few miles from the point at Hastings where William's forces were encamped.
It is the tense morning of Saturday, 14 October 1066 [scene 44]. William has put on his armour. He stands proudly in his full-length chain mail; he wears a helmet with tassels at the rear; his sword has been placed in his belt and his lance has been planted in the ground; a little banner tied to the top flutters in the wind. His prized warhorse is now led to him by a squire, a virile stallion which (if we are to believe later twelfth-century evidence) had