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a noted descendant of the Emperor Charlemagne, was the most high-ranking and prestigious of William's foreign allies and he was Duke William's equal as a grand feudatory of the king of France. He had previously been hostile to the duke and he had only recently joined forces with him, perceiving that the risk of leading his Frenchmen in the fight against King Harold was worth taking. What is more, some time in the autumn of 1067 Count Eustace attacked Odo's castle at Dover and embarked on a mysterious, though ineffectual, rebellion against his one-time Norman allies. He may even have been attempting to advance his own rival claim to the English throne. As a result of this abortive invasion, Eustace was disgraced, and lost his share of the spoils, although he was able to contrive a remarkable reconciliation with the Normans during the early 1070s.5

Contrary to popular belief, very few of William the Conqueror's companions at Hastings can be identified with certainty. William of Poitiers names a small roster of men. He singles out for special praise Robert of Beaumont, and names several others whom he viewed as Normans such as William fitzOsbern, Walter Giffard, Hugh of Montfort and William of Warenne.6 None is named in the tapestry. Poitiers also confirms the presence of Count Eustace; but he was writing after Eustace was in disgrace and perhaps because of that describes him as a rank coward. According to William of Poitiers, Eustace's most notable contribution at the battle was to advise the duke to retreat, before receiving a blow between the shoulders and being carried away half-dead by his men, with blood streaming profusely from his nose and mouth. This, then, was the Norman view of Count Eustace II of Boulogne, after his disgrace, and it is quite clearly different from what we see in the Bayeux Tapestry. What is going on?Why, out of a ducal army of thousands, is the artist choosing to highlight the 'rebel' Eustace, of all people, and to ignore so many high-ranking Normans? The date when the Bayeux Tapestry was made is not certain, but whether it was made before or after Eustace's reconciliation with Duke William in the early 1070s, the appearance of such a rival and enemy at the pivotal moment in the embroidery is striking. It deserves much greater attention than it has ordinarily received.

The Bayeux Tapestry's treatment of Count Eustace is more akin to the Carmen de Hastingae Proelio {The Song of the Battle of Hastings) than it is to any Norman source. The Carmen is the very earliest surviving account of the battle. Its author, Bishop Guy of Amiens, was a close kinsman of Count Guy of Ponthieu and Count Eustace II of Boulogne. In the decade after the Battle of Hastings there was a very lively polemic between the Normans and their less numerous French allies as to who had really made the most telling contribution to the victory. The non-Norman French got in first with the Carmen. In the Carmen's account of Hastings, the Normans are hardly mentioned at all; indeed the only Norman mentioned by name is the duke himself. Instead, the stress is placed on the contribution of the non-Norman Frenchmen (Galli orFranci) and, like the tapestry, their leader Count Eustace II of Boulogne. William of Poitiers seems to have written his pro-Norman account shortly after the Carmen. Without doing so in express terms, he set about correcting what he perceived to be an unsavoury downgrading of his fellow Normans by the Bishop of Amiens and especially the latter's heroic portrayal of Count Eustace.7 With more than a hint of exaggeration, he concluded that 'Duke William with the forces of Normandy subjugated all the cities of the English in a single day . . .without much outside help.'8 Since the Carmen was only rediscovered in 1826, and William of Poitiers' work was known, directly or indirectly, to later medieval writers, it is the Norman account that has dominated subsequent historiography and popular myth. In the process it is the Norman account that persists in colouring interpretations of the Bayeux Tapestry and obscuring some of