Historic tapestry is early fake news
The beautiful Bayeux Tapestry, now heading to Britain for the first time, is fake news, French propaganda a thousand years old that gives a false account of the most important episode in 1066.
Every schoolchild knows that King Harold II, the last AngloSaxon monarch, died on the battlefield at Hastings when an arrow struck him in the eye, ushering in the reign of William I. As Sellar and Yeatman wrote in 1066 and All That: ‘‘The Norman Conquest was a Good Thing, as from this time onwards England stopped being conquered and thus was able to become top nation.’’
But that tale is not quite true. Harold was almost certainly hacked to ribbons by a group of Norman knights who had broken through the Anglo-Saxon lines. The arrow-in-the-eye story was cooked up afterwards to lend political and religious legitimacy to the precarious new dynasty, and then stitched into the great tapestry when it was heavily restored in the 19th century.
Just about every aspect of the tapestry is open to historical debate, including when it was made, where and for whom. It was not just a work of art but a political tool intended to reinforce Norman rule: the scene of Harold swearing allegiance to William, for example, is depicted as a formal ceremony with holy relics and numerous witnesses.
Even less subtly, a priapic figure preparing to copulate in the margins sends a message that the supposedly treacherous Harold is about to screw over the Norman pretender by reneging on his promise.
The most significant element of Norman propaganda concerns Harold’s death. The earliest account of the battle, the Song of the Battle of Hastings written by Bishop Guy of Amiens a year or so after the battle, states that Harold was killed by four knights, probably including Duke William himself, and then dismembered. The tapestry was created in the 1070s, but the claim that Harold had died from a single arrow in the eye only emerged later.
The Normans had strong political motives for covering up the true nature of Harold’s grisly death and replacing it with the arrow myth. A single, fateful missile, hurtling out of the sky to strike down the king, could be presented as an act of God, divine punishment for breaking his oath to support William’s claim.
The invading Norman duke needed all the support he could get from the Almighty. Harold had been anointed at his coronation, officially blessed by the Catholic church and papacy. His death, therefore, had to be seen as a thunderbolt from on high, not the brutal battlefield carve-up that it was.
‘‘The new king did not want to be implicated in Harold’s violent end,’’ writes historian Chris Dennis. ‘‘Nor could he afford to undermine the legitimacy of his own accession by admitting responsibility for an anointed king’s death.’’
The divinely directed arrow became the official version of events, and by the 12th century it was embedded in legend.
The main supporting evidence for that account is the most famous panel in the Bayeux Tapestry, which appears to show the king gripping a golden arrow lodged in his eye, below the inscription Harold Rex interfectus est, ‘‘King Harold was killed’’.
But the arrow was almost certainly a later addition, and the apparently mortally wounded figure may not even depict Harold. The king is more likely to be the man lying to the right, being trampled by a charger and diced up by a Norman knight. Etchings of the tapestry made in the 1730s appear to show the man on the left holding a spear, not an arrow. The first sketch of the tapestry with a fletched arrow is dated 1819, suggesting that by that point the tapestry had been updated to bring the pictorial record into line with the accepted myth.
The arrow itself is odd. It bends to fit under the inscription, in a way that indicates a later addition. Measured against the other arrows stuck in his shield, it does not even appear long enough to penetrate his head. The hand holding it is awkwardly bent. But strangest of all is the direction of the missile itself; in order for an arrow, fired high into the air, to enter his eye at that angle, the king would have to have been staring into the sky, or lying on his back.
The supine figure on the right being hacked at by a horseman surely depicts Harold at the point of death. Indeed, one of the earliest accounts describes a Norman knight slashing the king in the thigh, precisely as in the image.
Some historians argue that both figures represent the king’s death, in successive images, like a cartoon, being first wounded in the eye and then mutilated. This is unlikely, since the two men are wearing different stockings: plain on the left, striped on the right. The most plausible account of what really happened is Bishop Guy’s song, composed in the immediate aftermath. Unlike other chroniclers, Guy was independent of the ducal court and had no reason to peddle the official version: he described how William spotted his enemy on the battlefield, summoned three knights to his side and led the posse that then charged at King Harold and chopped him down.
William’s personal role in the barbaric killing of an anointed king was airbrushed from history, either omitted from later accounts or replaced with the divinely ordained arrow. This became accepted fact after the 19th-century needleworkers embroidered the legend into history.
Harold’s remains may lie in Bosham, West Sussex, where he was born, or Waltham Abbey in Essex. So far, all requests to exhume him have been rejected.
The discovery of Richard III in a Leicester car park transformed our view of that king. Digging up Harold might prove, once and for all, that he did not die from a single arrow aimed by God, but under the swords of the French.
That would be a long overdue revision of our national story, and one in the eye for William and his all-conquering propagandists.