Killer Question: How Did Harold Die?

(an extract from my book, The Norman Conquest).

What ultimately decided the battle, everyone agrees, was the death of King Harold. Day was already turning to night, says the Carmen, when the report ‘Harold is dead’ flew throughout the battlefield, causing the English to lose heart. Poitiers concurs: knowing that their king was dead, ‘the English army realized there was no hope of resisting the Normans any longer’. William of Jumièges, in his brief account of the battle, tells us that ‘when the English learned that their king had met his death, they greatly feared for their own lives, and turned at nightfall to seek refuge in flight’. The Bayeux Tapestry puts it in typically telegraphic terms: ‘Here Harold was killed, and the English turned in flight.

But how did Harold die? The established story, as everyone knows, is that the king was felled by an arrow that hit him in the eye. The Tapestry famously shows him gripping a shaft that has lodged in his face, and this depiction is seemingly backed up by several chroniclers. ‘A shaft pierces Harold with deadly doom’, wrote Baudri of Bourgeuil; ‘his brain was pierced by an arrow’, says William of Malmesbury. ‘The whole shower sent by the archers fell around King Harold’, says Henry of Huntingdon, ‘and he himself sank to the ground, struck in the eye.’

 

But there are problems. The Tapestry, as is well known, is debatable, principally for two reasons. First, there is debate over which figure is actually Harold. Is he the upright figure grasping the arrow (whose head, after all, interrupts the word ‘Harold’ in the caption); or is he the falling figure immediately to the right, being hacked down by a horseman, under the words ‘interfectus est’ (‘was killed’)? Some critics solve the riddle by saying that Harold is represented by both these figures, and that the Bayeux Tapestry artist does this kind of thing on numerous other occasions; others have demurred that, if this is really the case, Harold manages the neat trick of losing his shield and acquiring an axe in the act of dying.

Even if, however, we accept that the first figure represents Harold, there is controversy over the arrow itself. The Tapestry was heavily restored in the mid-nineteenth century, and the death of Harold is one of the areas where the restorers may have taken considerable liberties. Some experts contend, from an analysis of the embroidery and an examination of the earliest drawings of the Tapestry in its (apparently) unrestored state, that the first figure is actually holding not an arrow but a spear, ready to hurl at his attackers.

Even if the Tapestry artist did intend to depict an arrow, can we be sure that he was depicting what really happened? On many occasions we can see that the Tapestry includes images which are not truly original, but which have been copied and adapted from other illustrated manuscripts that the artist had to hand, and it looks very much like this process was at work in Harold’s death scene. Immediately before the king dies, we see a Norman soldier about to decapitate an unarmed Englishman. This otherwise inexplicable image seems to have been lifted more or less unaltered from an illustrated version of an Old Testament story, namely the fate of King Zedekiah and his sons, one of whom is shown being beheaded in exactly this manner. This artist may have lighted on this particular image because of the resonance of the story – Zedekiah and his family were punished because he had broken his oath of fealty to his overlord, and Zedekiah’s own punishment was blinding. It could well be, therefore, that the arrow in Harold’s eye is simply a piece of artistic licence based on nothing more than an allusion to this particular Bible story, and that blinding was felt to be a fitting end for a king who was similarly foresworn.

Lastly, we have to consider the fact that the Tapestry is our only contemporary source to suggest that Harold was hit in the face by an arrow. True, a similar report is carried by an Italian chronicler, Amatus of Montecassino, writing about 1080, but his account is compromised by the fact that the Latin original is lost – it survives only in a fourteenth-century French translation, heavily interpolated in places, and hence of negligible worth. These two questionable sources apart, the story that Harold was felled by an arrow occurs in later works (Baudri of Bourgeuil, William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon are all twelfth century). Contemporary accounts, by contrast – the Carmen, William of Poitiers, William of Jumièges and the various versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle – make no mention of it. In the case of the last two, this omission is not very remarkable, given the brevity of their accounts; in the case of William of Poitiers and the Carmen it is altogether more striking. Poitiers offers us the longest and most detailed account of the battle, yet makes no mention of the manner in which Harold died. Possibly this was because he did not know. Alternatively, it may have been because he knew full well, having read the Carmen’s version, and did not care to endorse it.

For the Carmen – our earliest source for the battle – offers an entirely different account of how Harold met his end. According to the Carmen, the battle was almost won – the French were already seeking spoils of war – when William caught sight of Harold on top of the hill, hacking down his foes. The duke called together a cohort of men, including Count Eustace of Boulogne, Hugh of Ponthieu and a certain ‘Gilfard’ (‘known by his father’s surname’), and set out to kill the king. In this they were successful, and the Carmen gives a graphic description of the injuries each inflicted on Harold, who was pierced with a lance, beheaded with a sword and disembowelled with a spear. His thigh, we are told (possibly a euphemism for his genitalia) was hacked off and carried away some distance.

Historians have always had huge problems with this story, and still tend to reject it outright. One of the foremost experts of the last century, Professor R. Allen Brown, found it impossible to believe that William had been personally involved in Harold’s death; not because the duke was uninvolved in the fighting, for everyone accepts that fact. Rather, his objection was that, had William really been involved so directly in Harold’s death, ‘the feat of arms would have been bruited abroad in every court and chanson in Latin Christendom and beyond’.

This argument, however, assumes that everyone in Christendom would have regarded the premeditated butchery of a crowned king as acceptable behaviour, which was not necessarily the case. The Carmen insists that Harold’s killers acted ‘in accordance with the rules of war’, a statement which by itself suggests that others may have felt that these rules had been broken. One person who may have thought as much was William of Poitiers. In general he is not afraid to contest points of detail with the Carmen and offer his own version of what happened. When it comes to Harold’s gory end, however, he offers no denial and no alternative scenario: he simply lapses into silence. With most writers, their silence on a particular point would be a poor foundation on which to build an argument. But with a writer as erudite as William of Poitiers, we can reasonably read more into it. Poitiers wanted to present the duke as measured, merciful and just in all his dealings, and in particular in his pursuit of England’s throne. He did not want to show his hero, whose mission had been sanctioned by the pope, hacking his opponent into pieces. The suspicion that Poitiers tried to suppress the Carmen’s version of Harold’s death is reinforced by his similar failure to include the episode involving Taillefer the juggler. Perhaps he thought it unreliable; more likely he considered it shameful – a piece of bloodthirsty barbarism that cast the Normans in a bad light. More pertinent still is the fact we have caught Poitiers at this kind of suppressio veri once before, in his account of the taking of the town of Alençon. His source, William of Jumièges, tells us that the duke mutilated the town’s defenders by lobbing off their hands and feet, but Poitiers omits all mention of this from his own account. In the case of Harold’s death, therefore, the silence of William of Poitiers, far from undermining our faith in the Carmen’s version, could instead be considered to strengthen its credibility. That credibility is also enhanced by the fact that the poem’s author, Guy of Amiens, had close connections with the men he tells us were William’s accomplices.

Of course, we cannot say for certain how Harold died. Our sources, as ever, are contradictory, and each of them can be regarded as in some way compromised (because they are based on biblical or classical motifs; because they are inherently biased; because they are better regarded as imaginative works of art rather than sober reportage). We know that at various points in the battle the Normans showered the English with arrows and crossbow bolts, so it is not unlikely that Harold was hit, perhaps fatally, perhaps in the eye. At the same time, we cannot lightly disregard the Carmen (as historians have usually done) when it tells us that Harold died in a very different way, deliberately cut down by his enemies. Apart from anything else, a deliberate killing accords well with William’s assumed war-aim. He had risked everything to get an army to England and to bring Harold to battle. After a long day’s fighting, with the autumn light starting to fade, it would have been quite possible for the English king to withdraw, enabling him to fight another day. William could not take that risk; for him it was imperative that his opponent should die before the day was out. Given this fact, it would not be at all surprising if the duke, in the closing stages of the conflict, decided to risk all and lead just the kind of death squad that the Carmen describes. By the same token, with the deed accomplished, it would be equally unsurprising if the Normans in general, like William of Poitiers in particular, sought to keep these details quiet. An anonymous arrow in the eye accorded better with the idea that, in the final analysis, Harold’s death had been down to the judgement of God.

 

The Norman Conquest, pp. 183-8