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after it had happened; few doubt that he embellished the truth, and even knowingly lied, in what is quite patently a one-sided quest to make the Conquest appear lawful and justified. There are times when consulting William of Poitiers seems as useful as asking the editor of the Soviet Pravda about the inner dealings of the Kremlin, but in the absence of any similarly detailed English account of the same events it is William of Poitiers' story which has been widely accepted as history. He provides us, crucially, with the Norman interpretation of Harold's journey in 1064/5. He tells us that King Edward, nearing the end of his life, sent Earl Harold to Normandy with specific orders to confirm that he had chosen the Norman duke to be his successor as king of England. The Bayeux Tapestry is often interpreted as telling exactly the same Norman story. We shall uncover the clues in the tapestry that subtly tell a very different, and much more plausible, version of Harold's mission.

The earliest written account of the Battle of Hastings is neither English nor Norman. It was written in another part of northern France. What we call France today was then a patchwork of regions over which the French king, beyond his own limited domain, exercised little more than nominal authority, and sometimes none at all. Normandy was a largely autonomous region. It had been founded in 911 when King Charles the Simple, despairing of ever seeing an end to Viking incursions, agreed to sue for peace by ceding land around Rouen to the Viking leader Rollo. Duke William of Normandy was Rollo's great-great-great-grandson. By 1066 the Normans had consolidated their rule over a large territory stretching from the Cherbourg peninsula almost as far as the mouth of the River Somme. To outsiders they appeared thoroughly French in language, custom and religion. They nevertheless retained a distinctive sense of identity, aloof, as Norman rather than 'French' in a more limited sense. The French neighbours of Normandy, on the other hand, had much to fear from the growing power of the duchy and in no sense should they ever be called 'Normans'. To the north and east of Normandy lay the counties of important non-Norman magnates such as Count Guy of Ponthieu and his kinsman Count Eustace II of Boulogne. Both had been enemies of Normandy in the 1050s and in lending support to Duke William's invasion of 1066 they were moved only by their own concerns. It is, therefore, of considerable interest that the earliest surviving account of the Battle of Hastings was written by a non-Norman Frenchman, Bishop Guy of Amiens, who was the uncle of Count Guy of Ponthieu and an uncle or step-uncle of Count Eustace of Boulogne.

Bishop Guy's work is a substantial Latin poem called Carmen de Hastingae Proelio (the Song of the Battle of Hastings).6 Although long known to have existed, his account of the battle was not rediscovered until 1826, when the archivist to the king of Hanover happened to stumble across two twelfth-century copies while researching in the Royal Library in Brussels. It was a fortuitous find. The Carmen was possibly written as early as 1067 and certainly before Bishop Guy died in 1074 or 1075. It gives us a distinctively French, but non-Norman, perspective on the events of 1066, a continental counterpoint to the Norman biases of William of Poitiers. Unlike the Norman sources, but intriguingly like the tapestry, the author of the Carmen portrays Count Eustace II of Boulogne as the hero at Hastings.

As the years went by further writers added their own accounts. An English monk named Eadmer, working at the abbey of Christ Church in Canterbury, wrote the Historia Novorum in Anglia (the History of Recent Events in England) between about 1095 and 1123.7 Usually disregarded in favour of earlier sources, Eadmer's brief account of the Norman Conquest in his History flatly contradicts the Norman background to 1066 and it deserves much greater attention than it has conventionally been given. Other twelfth-century writers followed Eadmer's lead and showed a marked degree of sympathy