1066 - Andrew Bridgeford [66]
The death of King Harold is the decisive moment. The morale of the English, an already exhausted and depleted force, has been cruelly sapped by the loss of their leader. The fighting seems to continue for a short while, but it is not long before any further resistance becomes futile. The last straggling remnant of Harold's worsted army is now pursued off the field of battle. Duke William has won, his enemy is dead and he can look forward to wearing the crown that he covets. Even as battle is still raging, looters have arrived in the lower border, hoping to retrieve anything of value from the littered dead. One man bundles more swords into his arms than he can possibly hope to carry. Two more quarrel over a shield, pulling it greedily between them as if it were a Christmas cracker. Others are slipping chain-mail suits off the sprawled white corpses of the dead, nonchalantly removing armour from fallen warriors as if they were doing no more than help the wearer undress. One of the looted corpses may even be Harold's, for William of Poitiers notes in his own account that Harold's body was 'despoiled of all signs of status'.20
Eadmer summed up the Battle of Hastings and all the death, turmoil and suffering it caused in a way that made sense to his fellow countrymen: 'although fickle fortune veered from one side to the other, so great was the slaughter that the victory they gained is truly and without doubt to be ascribed to the miraculous intervention of God who by punishing the evil crime of Harold's perjury in this way showed that He is not God that countenances iniquity'.21 This, too, is the most basic underlying meaning of the Bayeux Tapestry, and as such it would not have displeased the Normans. We have seen, however, how the story is told in an enormously subtle way, one that secretly undermines the Norman claim to the throne and records the English version of the succession, long before Eadmer was able to put that version in writing. Ultimately the tapestry seems to add its own twist by covertly turning the French under Count Eustace II of Boulogne into the true champions of divine will.
When evening fell on 14 October 1066 a large part of England's warring classes lay lifeless with their king on the field of Hastings. The body and face of Harold are said by William of Poitiers to have been so horribly mutilated that no one could be sure which corpse was his. Thus, according to one later story, his mistress, Edith Swan-Neck, was brought on to the scene of carnage and, picking her way over the corpses, was able to identify her lover - not by his face but by marks on his body known only to her.22 William of Poitiers tells us that Duke William took charge of the corpse. Harold's mother, Gytha, then approached him and pleaded to have custody of her beloved son so that she could give him a fitting burial. She even offered Harold's weight in gold in return for his body. William refused. In his view, Harold was a faithless perjurer; he had opposed God's will and his army had fought for an unjust cause. Had not the result proved William right?William of Poitiers tells us that the duke ordered that the mass dead of the English should be left where they fell, unburied and unremembered, and that Harold's body should be taken away and placed unceremoniously under a simple cairn of stones at the seaside. There, the Normans joked, he could continue to guard the coast that he had sought in vain to defend. It has recently been suggested that the