1066 - Andrew Bridgeford [75]
We have, then, a work that was probably made by English embroiderers at Canterbury, either to the designs of a long-standing French emigre or to those of an English artist who was working closely with a French colleague. Although at one level the tapestry flatters Bishop Odo of Bayeux, it is also shot through with a succession of subversive viewpoints, all inimical to Norman interests. Despite the widespread modern view that Odo was the patron, there must be a growing sense of doubt that this was ever the case, for a work produced under the directive eye of the Conqueror's half-brother would surely have been a much more straightforward piece of Norman propaganda. The Tapestry also favours, in covert and subtle ways, Count Eustace II of Boulogne. These two men, Odo and Eustace, are the only two companions of the Conqueror who are named by the artist in his very personal depiction of the Battle of Hastings - two men who came into conflict in 1067 when Eustace launched an unsuccessful attack on Dover Castle. This is surely an important clue. The next stage in our quest is to examine the contrasting lives and overlapping careers of Bishop Odo of Bayeux and Count Eustace of Boulogne.
13
The Tanner's Grandsons
The Bayeux Tapestry gives us only a snapshot of the colourful life of Bishop Odo of Bayeux.1 It is a mere cross-section of a long career, lived out by a flawed man, on a grand scale, a career that encompassed everything from the heights of power to the loneliness and disgrace of imprisonment. The key to this turbulent life was the patronage of Duke William of Normandy and the key to that patronage was the fact that Odo and William shared the same mother, a lowborn woman called Herleva. Herleva was the daughter of Fulbert, a tanner (some say undertaker) of Falaise. At the age of about seventeen she became the lover of Robert of Hiesmois, brother of the then reigning Duke of Normandy. William was the illegitimate son of this union; Odo and his brother Robert were the offspring of Herleva's subsequent marriage to Herluin of Conteville.
The story of Herleva's beauty and of her first meeting with Robert of Hiesmois is a captivating tale that has long passed into legend.2 According to the most well-known version, Robert first set eyes on Herleva when he returned to his castle at the end of a day's hunting. He happened to look down from within his keep and caught sight of the beautiful young Herleva, her lily-white legs exposed to the sun as she washed linen in a nearby stream. At length Robert persuaded Fulbert to allow his daughter to pay him a secret visit at his castle but she, in turn, insisted on arriving in broad daylight and on a fine horse, which she rode proudly, for all to see, through the main gates of the building. Inside the castle, the poets of the twelfth century continued the tale with relish. Within the privacy of the comital bedchamber the lowly maiden was at once more erotic and yet strangely more demure. Herleva, so it was said, ripped open her underskirt, tearing it from top to bottom, so that her torn and unworthy clothes lay open and her pure white skin was revealed in the flickering candlelight. She had done this, so the story goes, so that her lowly garment would need to be lifted up towards Robert's face or mouth. We are then told by the poet Wace that the two of them remained awake for some time ('for I do not wish to say anything more,' he explained, 'about the way a man disports himself with his beloved'). In the fullness of time Herleva fell asleep; but as she lay beside Robert, sleeping, her body suddenly began to shudder uncontrollably before once again resuming a state of peaceful slumber. On awakening at dawn, Herleva explained that she had had a strange dream. She had dreamt that her womb had suddenly begun to grow - it had grown out of her body, she said, like an enormous tree, becoming bigger and bigger until it was eventually so vast that the whole of Normandy