[...]... He was so because this was what his audience wanted to see The fullest accounts of the battle are therefore to a considerable degree works of art, as is the slightly later claim that the Norman forces advanced into battle reciting a medieval heroic poem, the Song of Roland All that is clear about the battle of Hastings is that it was decisive for the Norman attempt to contest Harold II’s accession as... to calm his jittery crew—an episode probably inspired by Aeneas doing something similar when shipwrecked on the African coast The Tapestry portrays the banquet as having taken place on land, as Aeneas’ had, and records that Odo, bishop of Bayeux, the duke’s half-brother, blessed the food and wine The designer’s point here was not to draw a parallel between the duke and Aeneas, but to emphasize the. .. Homer and 2 Xenophon, he was already, a decade after the event, recasting the campaign of 1066 as an heroic triumph in the mould of antique epic The Conqueror was not just compared to the first Roman conqueror of Britain; he was Achilles or Agamemnon or Aeneas redivivus The authors of the Thebaid or the Aeneid, who in their books sing of great events, and by the law of poetry render them greater, could... William] being crowned as their lord They all shouted their joyful assent without any hesitation, as if heaven had granted them a single mind and a single voice The Normans most readily re-echoed the wish of the English, after the bishop of Coutances had inquired as to their opinion But others who had been posted as an armed, mounted guard around the monastery, on hearing the loud clamour in an unknown... continuity there was A tenurial transformation of this magnitude, effected in the name of maintaining the status quo, necessarily entailed other massive changes Law is perhaps the most obvious case, for, as J C Holt argues, if ‘Legitimacy became beautiful in [the Normans’] sight’, then it must be established by law Because this was true of the king’s claim to the kingdom, it was also true of 7 Introduction. .. metaphor) the ‘chain’ which had been broken at Bede’s death, and to re-connect Norman England with what had preceded it Their achievement was to make the second quarter of the 12th century one of the great periods of English historical writing about England The archival research and the overall framework established by William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon—whose analysis was more straightforward and therefore... central role of Odo, for whom the Tapestry seems to have been made The echo was scriptural—of the Last Supper—not classical That the Tapestry was commissioned by a very important participant in the Conquest, who is depicted as having played a key part in the battle, and that it is now thought 3 Introduction Whoever designed the Bayeux Tapestry, which also attempts to tell the whole story of the Conquest, ... throne King Edward the Confessor, regarded by the Normans as the last Old English king, had nominated William as such There had been no change at all Even the fact that William had conquered England by defeating Edward’s immediate successor, King Harold II, the former earl of Wessex—deemed a usurper by the Normans—was progressively excised from the historical record Second, the elaboration of this fiction... conception of what Old England had really been like That is the scale and character of the ‘regime change’ imposed on the kingdom of England in 1066 18 Chapter 1 William’s coronation On the day fixed for the coronation, the archbishop of York, a great lover of justice and a man of mature years, wise, good, and eloquent, addressed the English, and asked them in a fitting address whether they would consent... force, amassed from all over western Francia, at the end of September 1066, in order to contest Harold II’s recent accession as king of England Four days before the Norman landings at Pevensey, King Harold 1 The Norman Conquest had repulsed another, Norwegian-backed, invasion in the North, at the battle of Stamford Bridge The victorious but insecure king had then rushed south to deal with the Norman incursion . Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great. probably inspired by Aeneas doing something similar when shipwrecked on the African coast. The Tapestry portrays the banquet as having taken place on land, as Aeneas’ had, and records that. later claim that the Norman forces advanced into battle reciting a medieval heroic poem, the Song of Roland. All that is clear about the battle of Hastings is that it was decisive for the Norman