100 YEARS OLD AND STILL PEDDLING OLD FAKE NEWS...
THE long-awaited release of classified files concerning the assassination of King Harold Godwinson which allegedly took place at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 has revealed a web of intrigue surrounding the King’s death but still leaves many questions unanswered. We discuss the main topics:
The location: Until now, it has been generally assumed that the Battle of Hastings took place in Hastings but this has now been shown to be an elaborate piece of deception by the court of King William I, as the papers reveal that the assassination in fact took place in the nearby town of Battle. This is widely seen as an attempt to obscure details of the regicide.
The evidence: details of the events of 1066 were suppressed until around 1077 when the so-called “Bayeux Tapestry” was completed. This is now revealed not to be a tapestry at all but an embroidery which throws further doubt about the authenticity of the events it portrays.
How many assassins were there? The figure on the embroidery of a man with an arrow in his eye beneath the words “Harold Rex” (King Harold) has long been taken as a claim that the King was slain by a lone archer, yet many suggestions have been made that there were several Frenchman shooting arrows at the King. The absence of other arrows in the King’s head or body have been cited in favour of the lone assassin theory but conspiracy theorists have long maintained that there may have been many arrows on the ground not seen in the embroidery or perhaps not depicted by the embroiderers who may have seen the not-fatal arrows as irrelevant.
Furthermore, the words “interfectus est” (he is killed), appearing after “Harold Rex”, are directly above a picture of a man, who is wielding an axe, being killed by a swordsman on a horse. This has, of course, fuelled speculation that the swordsman may have been part of a conspiracy including the archer (or archers) who fired the arrow (or arrows) at the King. Another theory is that the axe-wielder was in fact the King’s assassin, who was murdered immediately afterwards by the swordsman in order to suppress the true details of the killing.
The arrow: There is a considerable mystery surrounding this which is not cleared up by the release of the new files. As has been known for some time, forensic analysis has shown that the arrow in the eye of the character supposed to be the King was a later addition to the embroidery, possibly made as part of a repair but needle holes in the original suggest that something was originally embroidered there. This has been taken by conspiracy theorists as evidence that the original embroidery included an arrow which contained evidence of the identity of the archer and was later unpicked and replaced by an unmarked arrow to suppress the evidence.
These documents have been released under the 950-year rule but are a year late because many are in Norman French and it took time to find a man named Norman who speaks French.