IN THE WAKE OF WILLIAM’S VICTORY AT HASTINGS, NOBLES who had either escaped the battlefield or not been there in the first place retreated to London. There, in the phrase of Orderic Vitalis, “Stigand, archbishop of Canterbury, the great earls, Edwin and Morcar, and other lords of England elected as their king Edgar Clito, son of Edward king of the Hungarians, son of Edmund called Ironside.” As the grandson of Edmund Ironside, the half-brother of Edward the Confessor, Edgar was the last of Cerdic’s line and the last hope for an Anglo-Saxon succession. Indeed, among all who fought to be king in 1066—Harold Godwineson, his brother Tostig, the Norwegian Harald Hardråda, and Duke William of Normandy—Edgar Æthling was, as the name Æthling denotes, the most “throne-worthy” the one with the most legitimate claim by blood. Leaving aside whatever promise Edward the Confessor may have made to William of Normandy and anything he might have said upon his deathbed, William’s claim to the throne of England was less strong than that of Edgar Æthling: King Edward’s mother, Emma, was William’s great-aunt. Harold’s claim by blood was nonexistent, despite the fact that his sister Edith was married to Edward. “Earl Harold succeeded to the kingdom of England as the king granted it to him and as he was elected thereto,” states the Anglo-Saxon Laud Chronicle for the year 1066. Yet Edgar’s coronation after the Battle of Hastings was the purest folly; the walls of London, which protected his court from the reality of William’s advance through Kent toward the capital, were the walls of an asylum for nobles under the delusion that the realm was still theirs.
William’s progress from Hastings to London was neither easy nor rapid. He waited for five days to rest and for the submission of English nobles. When none was forthcoming, he moved against Dover and advanced upon Canterbury, which surrendered before the end of October. There William’s troops were slowed by the spread of dysentery, and it was not until the end of November that he gained control over most of southeast England. When able to march again, the Normans made a first assault upon London, fighting Edgar Æthling’s troops at the south end of London Bridge before moving to the west and capturing Hampshire and Berkshire. William headed north, crossed the Thames at Wallingford, and isolated the capital. Archbishop Stigand came out of London to surrender at Wallingford, and at Berkhamstead, according to the Anglo-Saxon Worcester Chronicle, William “was met by bishop Ealdred, prince Edgar, earl Edwin, earl Morcar, and all the best men from London, who submitted from force of circumstances, but only when the depredation was complete.”
Thus the conquest of England was hardly over at the end of the day of October 14, 1066. Though Harold was dead, William faced continued resistance not only by the handful of nobles and churchmen grouped around Edgar Æthling in London, but by Scandinavians in areas formerly ruled by men from the North and, ultimately, by Normans and Bretons William had subdued before the Conquest and who sought to escape the Norman yoke in Normandy when conditions seemed ripe. King William managed to suppress the revolt of Erdric the Wild, aided by Welch princes, in Herefordshire and, surprisingly, betrayal by Eustache of Boulogne, who in 1067 occupied briefly the town of Dover, though he had fought with the Normans at Hastings only a year before. At the end of 1067, William was obliged to put down a revolt in the city of Exeter along with a second uprising of Edgar Æthling, King Malcolm of Scotland, and the northern earls Edwin and Morcar, who had faced Harald Hardråda at the Battle of Fulford Gate. On January 28, 1069, William’s representative Robert of Commines, dispatched to quell the trouble in the North, was burned to death in the bishop’s house at Durham. A bitter revolt in Northumbria in the spring of 1080 would again culminate in the massacre of William’s appointed bishop Walcher.
English resistance to Norman occupation was compounded by Scandinavian threats in the area—the Danelaw—with longstanding Scandinavian affinities. In 1069, Danish king Sweyn sent a force of 240 ships under his sons Harold and Cnut, a fleet almost as large as that of Harald Hardråda in 1066. The Danes captured York on September 20, 1069, and the specter of a combined Danish and Anglo-Saxon resistance loose in the land sparked revolts in Dorset, Somerset, Staffordshire, and South Cheshire. In 1070, Sweyn himself crossed to England, where he was joined by a Lincolnshire thane named Hereward. Together they harried the coast of East Anglia, looting Peterborough Abbey, until William bribed the Danes to leave. After Sweyn’s death, his son Cnut II again arrived on the coast of England in 1075 with 200 ships and a host of Danish chiefs.
William’s presence and the use of his military resources to suppress continued resistance in England had the effect of provoking revolt at home against his rule in regions he had subdued before the Conquest. In 1069, he put down a revolt in the town of Le Mans in which Norman rule in Maine was contested; and in Brittany between 1075 and 1077, an alliance between English, French, and Scandinavians threatened for a while to unite his deadliest enemies. The castle of Dol, taken by siege in Tapestry panel 47 by William’s and Harold’s forces combined, fell to William’s opposition in 1076. The revolt of those of Brittany and on the Norman border with Brittany, encouraged by the French king, was compounded by the periodic betrayal of William’s eldest son, Robert “Curthose,” who managed to defeat his father’s forces outside the castle of Gerberoi at the end of 1078—this in addition to the troubles with Odo that led William to imprison his half-brother in 1082. Robert revolted again in 1083, leaving the duchy and serving the French king against William until his father’s death. In the decades following the Norman Conquest, the duchy and kingdom assembled by William were under constant threat of becoming unraveled. Indeed, Orderic Vitalis reports that in the speech delivered on his deathbed, William complains: “If the Normans are disciplined under a just and firm rule, they are men of great valor…. But without such rule they tear each other to pieces and destroy themselves, for they hanker after rebellion, cherish sedition, and are ready for any treachery.” “He had much labour,” observes the poet Robert Wace almost a hundred years later, “and many a war before he could hold the land in peace.”
The Bayeux Tapestry is the aesthetic expression of the wish to hold the kingdom and duchy together, “to hold the land in peace.” A meeting place upon a single visual plane of the diverse parties to the events of 1066 and their aftermath, the Tapestry interweaves elements associated with Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian, and Norman culture. And in this way, the surface of the textile expresses a desire for reconciliation among the principals to a bitter and extended struggle. The story it tells is, of course, that of a great Norman victory, and it tells it in such a visually forceful way that the viewer is compelled to see and to believe that history could not have turned out otherwise. Yet the Tapestry’s visual narrative does not participate in the vindictiveness for which William the Conqueror was famed when he felt that he or his men had been wronged. On the contrary, it is various and inclusive; and the very unresolved nature of understandings of such a complex work of art shows, finally, how wide the spectrum of those who can identify with it, how wide its appeal, really is. That history is written, or embroidered, on the side of the victor is no secret. But the Tapestry does not crushingly espouse one side of the struggle against the other. It is both Anglo-Saxon and Norman, or, in the terms by which nineteenth-century nationalists and historians have judged it, it is both English and French—with a large contribution from Scandinavia. All-embracing, the Tapestry works in a manner similar to that of Orderic Vitalis, when he expresses his own desire to “record without distortion the chances and changes of English and Normans alike…. I look to neither victors nor vanquished,” says Orderic, “for the honour of any reward.”
The Bayeux Tapestry is inclusive, and it leaves important issues such as the reasons for Harold’s trip to Normandy, the nature of his oath, and the specifics of Edward’s deathbed legacy sufficiently undefined as to permit all to identify with their particular point of view. It is the artistic embodiment of a pluralism within the sphere of social relations, giving expression to competing claims to England, while working toward a synthesis by which they might converge at some moment in the future. A suture for the wound of 1066, the Tapestry expresses the will for a weaving together of England and Normandy under the more or less constant threat of coming apart in the decades after the Conquest.
The inclusion of Oriental elements within the mix may be surprising, yet they serve precisely the same unifying purpose by focusing Anglo-Saxon and Norman claims upon a common third term. Relations with Byzantium are inscribed in the Bayeux Tapestry both within and all along its edges as a desire to participate in the prestige of the East and a desire to possess. The Tapestry can be said, as has been claimed more generally of the Crusades, to channel the energies of quarrelsome European knights in the cause of a just war against an enemy from without. In the sermon preached at Clermont in 1095, Pope Urban II, in the phrase of Orderic Vitalis, “urged the nobles of the west and their men and companions to make a lasting peace among themselves,… and as renowned lords, prove the valour of their knighthood against the pagans.” The exotic animals and designs in the margins can be taken as an expansion of the war story contained in the main panels beyond its borders, just as the Crusades can be seen as a continuation of Norman ambitions beyond southern Italy, Sicily, and England. The uniting of Normans from Anglo-Normandy and the South in the undertaking of further conquest is written into the Tapestry some fifteen years before it will become historical fact.
The capacity to reflect and to shape the world around it makes the Bayeux Tapestry a great and enduring work of art— and a singularly medieval one. Like the first Old French epics with which it is roughly contemporaneous and that recount the struggle against the pagans, the Tapestry is a collaborative work, involving Anglo-Saxons and Normans and meant for open display, whether in a great palace, a cathedral, or even outdoors. The Tapestry, unlike, say, an illuminated prayer book or precious piece of jewelry, is a public work of art that gives expression to shared dilemmas and works collectively toward their solution.
The great secular works of art of the High Middle Ages, whether epic songs, the first courtly romances, or the Bayeux Tapestry, are filled with legal issues—scenes of council, disputes over succession, trials, oaths, and vengeful executions. They are intended to encourage loyalty and to condemn betrayal, to foster communal values and vision, to elicit complicity between maker and viewer, and to do so even before such unity becomes embodied in institutions. The Tapestry offers a fine example of art anticipating life, of art making life in times not yet ready for the kind of social and political healing its culturally mixed embroidered surface entails. The Anglo-Norman unity held in place by the economic apparatus of the Exchequer; the judicial institutions of written laws, trial by inquest, and appeal; and the political trappings of an efficiently administrative state will not come about until the reign of William the Conqueror’s son Henry I (ruled 1100–1135) and his grandson Henry II (ruled 1154–1189), for whom the story of the Norman Conquest was, in the phrase of Henry of Huntington, writing around the middle of the twelfth century, “a change in the right hand of God.”
Part of what makes the Tapestry so fascinating is that it rides the cusp of one of the great moments of transformation the West has ever known. Even if we cannot say with certainty who commissioned it, where it was made, by whom, and for what purpose, we can still appreciate at over nine centuries’ remove the ways it both reflects and participates in historical change. Understood as pointing to the future as well as the past, as a window of dreams that will come true because they carry real social and political yearnings, it yields a founding vision of what will become the Anglo-Norman world. The Bayeux Tapestry is simply the best picture we have of the Norman Conquest and of the beginnings of feudalism in the West. In this, it is no different from many great works—the friezes of Nineveh for ancient Assyria, vases for Greece, Trajan’s Column for Rome, Leonardo’s “Vitruvian Man” for the Renaissance, Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon for the modern era—that both chart and define our image of an age.