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By Root 624 0

Conquest. This, of course, will require the story told in the tapestry's threads to be closely examined, but we will also need to compare it with the other contemporary accounts of the same events. There are a handful of these. Each has its own limitations; none has any inherent right to be regarded as inviolable truth.1 On the English side of the Channel, two versions of the annals known as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle have accounts of the Norman invasion, whilst a third comes to an abrupt end in 1066 shortly before it took place.2 The fragile surviving manuscripts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle are themselves national treasures. The monks who wrote the Chronicle attempted to distil the important events of each year, as they saw them, into single short paragraphs. Sometimes this can provide us with important information. The treatment of the events of the Conquest is pervaded by a memorable sense of sadness, but as a source for its key events and causes, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is disappointingly brief and superficial. It passes over in complete silence the crucial episode that opens the story in the Bayeux Tapestry: the strange journey that Earl Harold made to the continent in 1064 or 1065. It seems that the authors of the Chronicle either did not know or were unable to reveal the truth behind Harold's mission.

The Vita Ædwardi Regis (the Life of King Edward) is a work which King Edward's queen Edith commissioned in the 1060s from a Flemish monk residing at the royal court and it is therefore usually treated as another English source.3 Edith, who died in 1075, was Earl Harold's sister. She is seen (though not named) in the Bayeux Tapestry as a dutiful wife at King Edward's deathbed in January 1066 [plate 6]. The Life of King Edward survives in one near-contemporary manuscript copy, written out around 1100 in the small, neat handwriting of a single scribe. The work itself, though begun before 1066, seems to have been mostly written during King Harold's short reign. The author's original plan had been to celebrate the deeds of Edith's family, notably her father Earl Godwin and her brothers King Harold and Earl Tostig. The events of 1066, however, completely overtook this plan. The anonymous scribe, having optimistically begun his work in order to extol Harold's family, now had to make sense of the disaster that had overcome it. He turned to console the widowed and saddened queen by presenting her late husband Edward as a saint in heaven, and the Life of King Edward thenceforth dissolves into hagiography. Its contemporary character gives it many points of interest, including a dramatic account of Edward'sfinal hours, but the Life of King Edward is often obscure and the work as a whole seems to provide little that truly enlightens the reader about the key events that led up to the Norman Conquest. Here, too, Harold's strange journey to the continent is ignored. Even more surprising is the fact that Duke William of Normandy receives not a single direct mention.

In the written sources emanating from the Norman side of the Channel, Duke William cuts, as might be expected, a much larger figure. A Norman monk called William, working at the monastery of Jumieges, covered the period of the Conquest down to about 1070 in a Latin prose history known as the Gesta Normannorum Ducem (the Deeds of the Norman Dukes).4 More detailed is the biography of William the Conqueror written in the 1070s by one of his chaplains, William of Poitiers. His work, the Gesta Guillelmi Ducis (the Deeds of Duke William), survives only through an incomplete version that was printed in the sixteenth century, for the only known manuscript perished in a disastrous fire in 1731.5 It is by far the most detailed contemporary account of the events that concern us and its author was clearly well informed. As such the Deeds of Duke William will always be invaluable; but it is also biased. William of Poitiers was a Norman patriot. At each opportunity he loads praise upon Duke William and odium upon the evil and usurping Harold. His aim was to justify the Norman invasion,