1066 - Andrew Bridgeford [91]
As his wealth and power increased, the baronial, worldly-wise side of Odo's character came to the fore and on this side of the Channel he emerges as a fully-fledged secular baron, more at home in his castles and halls than in the quietude of any church. A surviving drawing of Odo's seal revealingly depicts him, on the one side, as a dutiful man of the cloth and, on the other, as a proud knight riding on his horse. When William was absent in Normandy Odo seems to have had wide powers to rule the country in his stead, together with William Fitz-Osbern. It is clear that he used his powers with considerable severity. The English would long remember their sufferings under his rule. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (D), when Odo was left in charge of England in 1067 the people were sorely oppressed: 'Bishop Odo and Earl William [Fitz-Osbern] . . . built castles widely throughout this nation and oppressed the wretched people and afterwards it always grew very much worse. When God wills it, may the end be good.' In the first half of the next century, the half-English, half-Norman Orderic Vitalis also complained that Odo and Fitz-Osbern protected Normans and paid no heed to the legitimate complaints of the English: thus, said Orderic, 'when their men-at-arms were guilty of plunder and rape, they protected them by force, and wreaked their wrath all the more violently upon those who complained of the cruel wrongs they suffered. And so the English groaned aloud for their lost liberty.'4 On another occasion, Orderic wrote that Odo was 'dreaded by Englishmen everywhere'.5 In 1075 Odo was called upon to lead an army against the rebellious Earls Walthe of and Ralf the Staller. Five years later he led a ferocious reprisal against the turbulent north of the country following the murder of Bishop Walcher of Durham.
Wealth poured into Odo's coffers, and it was wealth from England that must have given the final impetus for the completion of Bayeux Cathedral in 1077. Certainly Odo did not forget his episcopal city. He also built a palace there for himself, constructed several houses for canons and funded the education of young clerics. The cathedral, which was served by a body of clergy of unprecedented size, was completed in grand Romanesque style. The edifice he built has, of course, been much altered since 1077; but the two monumental cliff like towers framing the western portal and the crypt beneath the nave remain as reminders of Odo's great building. Orderic Vitalis commented that Odo did both good and evil in the fifty years that he ruled over the see of Bayeux, but the Anglo-Norman monk was evidently impressed by Odo's conventionally pious largesse, ostentatious as it was. Odo, he commented, 'enriched his church in every way with gifts of precious ornaments. There is evidence of this in the buildings he raised and the furnishings - gold and silver vessels and precious vestments - which he lavished on the cathedral and clergy.'6 Another monk who visited Odo's cathedral commented approvingly that he had never seen the like.7 There is, however, no mention of the Bayeux Tapestry in any of these reports, no indication that it was among the ornaments which Odo provided for his cathedral, as is so often stated. All that is known is that the tapestry was at Bayeux Cathedral 400 years later - in 1476 and that at that