The King of England and the French president visited the British Museum this week to see the Bayeux Tapestry, now being shown in the UK for the first time since it was stitched in Kent by a team of British needlewomen nearly 1,000 years ago.
Stretching 230ft, the embroidered frieze recounts the Battle of Hastings through a remarkable cast of 626 figures — just six of them women — alongside 190 horses, 37 ships and 33 buildings.
More than a work of art, the tapestry remains one of the most important visual records of the conflict, preserving details of a battle that might otherwise have slipped into legend or been lost altogether.
Yet the story it tells has never been beyond challenge. Generations of historians have questioned key scenes and uncovered rival accounts. Here, the author of Harold The King: The Story Of The Battle Of Hastings gives a blow-by-blow account of 1066 — the year that transformed Britain for ever.
January 5, 1066
As the English king Edward the Confessor lies dying, his nearest and dearest flock to his bedside, including his wife Edyth.
During the night, Archbishop Stigand of Canterbury asks Edward, who has failed to produce an heir, who he would like to succeed him. As he slips in and out of a coma, Edward indicates the throne should go to his wife’s brother Harold Godwinson, the Earl of Wessex’s son.
The death of King Harold as depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry
James Norton as King Harold in the BBC drama King and Conqueror
January 6
A meeting of the Witan – the council of nobles and churchmen who advised the Anglo-Saxon kings – is convened at the newly completed Westminster Abbey to rubber stamp Edward’s choice. That afternoon, the abbey hosts a funeral and a coronation, with Edward buried at the church he commissioned and his successor Harold crowned king.
But his throne is not without its pretenders. King Harald Hardrada of Norway claims that King Magnus I – the man with whom he had shared the Norwegian crown until his death 19 years earlier – had struck a deal with Harthacnut, Edward’s half-brother and predecessor as king, that if either died without an heir the other would succeed him.
Over the Channel in France, Duke William of Normandy is stewing, too. He was related to Edward via the English king’s mother, Emma of Normandy, and only the previous year had extracted a solemn oath from Harold, sworn over sacred relics, that William’s right to the succession would be upheld.
February
Conscious of the threat from Norway, Harold rides to the north of England to confront the two most powerful noblemen in the region, the brothers Edwin, Earl of Mercia, and Morcar, Earl of Northumbria. Despite the fact that he had at least six children by his common-law wife, Edith Swanneck, Harold secures their loyalty by agreeing to marry their sister, another Edith.
With his northern flank secured, Harold turns his attention to recruiting a large army in the south to confront the even more potent threat from Normandy.
The Bayeux Tapestry on display at the British Museum which opens to the public on September 10
Edward the Confessor as depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry. The King died on January 5 1066
An image on the Bayeux Tapestry which shows William of Normandy rewarding Harold Godwinson Earl of Wessex with arms and knights him
March
Within weeks, Harold has assembled a force of several thousand men on the Isle of Wight. William embarks on a mammoth ship- building programme, aiming to creating a navy of 700 Viking-style longships at the port of Dives-sur-Mer to carry his invading force of 7,000 men and 2,000 horses.
His knights are protected by pointed metal helmets with nose guards and the hauberk, a knee-length chainmail shirt weighing about 30lbs. They carry formidable weapons, such as axes and broadswords, which can cause catastrophic wounds, scattering brain matter, severed limbs and spilled entrails across the battlefield.
Late April
As Harold and William ready themselves for war, a ‘long-haired star’ is sighted in the skies over Europe. It shines brightly for more than a week as it passes close to the Earth but prompts very different emotions on each side of the Channel.
In England, King Harold and his people see the shooting star, now known to be Halley’s Comet, as a terrifying omen which signals doom for the ruling regime. But William of Normandy interprets it as a divine endorsement of his upcoming invasion.
September 8
With William’s invasion stymied by bad weather, provisions running out and his militiamen agitating to return home to harvest their crops, Harold disbands his army and returns to London.
On the very same day, Harald Hardrada – egged on by Harold’s exiled brother Tostig, who is hell-bent on revenge for being exiled to Norway – makes landfall at the mouth of the River Tyne in a fleet of more than 300 ships carrying a massive force of 15,000 men.
Harold swears an oath to William of Normandy
James Norton as Harold. King Harold’s coronation took place on January 6 1066
September 12
In a move that represents a nightmare pincer movement for Harold, William, who has been keeping a beady eye on the weathercock on the spire of
the local church, orders his fleet to set sail from Normandy.
Fortunately for the Englishman, the Duke of Normandy loses a number of his boats to fierce storms and the rest of his fleet is forced to take shelter at Saint-Valery-sur-Somme, where it waits for the winds to change.
September 20
To Harold’s horror, Edwin and Morcar lose a hard-fought confrontation with the Viking invaders two miles south of York, now known as the Battle of Fulford.
They send an urgent plea for help and Harold leads a forced march north with his elite force, the Housecarls, and calls up ordinary fighting men as they pass through Essex, Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire.
September 25
By marching night and day, with few stops for rest, Harold’s army reaches Yorkshire in four days, taking the Norwegians by surprise.
What follows is a rout which has gone down in history as the Battle of Stamford Bridge. Both Harald and Tostig are killed and the invaders suffer such huge losses only 24 of the original 300 ships are required for survivors. It proves to be the last Viking incursion on to English soil.
September 28
Three days after Stamford Bridge, William makes his belated arrival in his would-be kingdom at Pevensey on the East Sussex coast, 11 miles west of Hastings.
There, he immediately sets to work building a motte-and-bailey castle – a medieval structure of a wooden keep on a raised earth mound (a motte), with an enclosed courtyard (a bailey) surrounded by a ditch and palisade.
A scene from the Bayeux Tapestry showing the invading Normans on horseback charging the Anglo-Saxon soldiers
King Charles and French Preisdent Emmanuel Macron join others to view the Bayuex Tapestry in London
October 1
King Harold and his men are still in York, and in a pitiful state, when word comes that the Normans have landed. A third of Harold’s men had died at Stamford Bridge. Another third were then lost during the 240-mile march south, unable to keep up because of injury and exhaustion.
Harold adds to his army using the ‘fyrd’, a system under which working men could be called up to serve king and country. But, while they boost Harold’s army to roughly 7,000, they are not fully trained soldiers and are distinctly inferior to the men he had left behind en route.
What’s more, his force is composed almost entirely of foot soldiers, with negligible cavalry and only a handful of archers.
William, in contrast, heads a formidable fighting force, in which cavalrymen and archers accounted for half of the headcount.
October 11
Harold leaves London and orders his troops to muster at the Hoar Apple Tree, a well-known landmark located on a hill seven miles from Hastings.
October 13
The English make camp. More and more soldiers arrive by the hour, weary but eager. During the night, someone makes the far-sighted decision to dam the small stream which runs along the valley at the bottom of the steep hill where Battle Abbey now stands.
This makes the ground sodden and boggy, with the result that the enemy will be faced by impenetrable marsh on one side and thick woodland on the other, leaving them only one way out: up the hill.
Saturday, October 14
Harold knows the area well. He deploys his men seven, eight or nine deep on a half-mile stretch along the top of the ridge in a formation known as a ‘shield wall’.
Their orders are to stand firm. No matter what, stand firm.
He and his guards take the left flank, looking down the hill. Harold’s brothers, Gyrth and Leofwine, and nephew Hakon, the middle and right. The right flank, being made up of less experienced men, will be the most vulnerable.
The Bayeux Tapestry depicts Harold being shot in the eye which perpetuates a myth that this is how the England’s King was slain
9am
Both sides rise at sunrise to hear Mass then battle commences to ‘the terrible sound of trumpets’. The Normans attack the hill, their battle cry ‘Holy Cross’ a reference to the fact the Pope had sent William a papal banner. The Saxons respond with shouts of ‘Ut! Ut! Ut!’ – ‘Out! Out! Out!’
Flights of arrows are sent upward by the Normans but to little effect. The Saxons beat them off with their shields and the French soon run out of ammunition.
William then deploys his cavalry, but the hill is steep and the horses nothing like the terrifying stallions of the age of knights to come. At 14 to 15 hands high, they are little more than ponies and no match for the battle- scarred soldiers forming the shield wall, who are armed with lances, swords and axes. Or, in some cases, agricultural implements such as pitchforks.
Harold had the advantage of having seen William direct troops at first hand in Brittany. He knows that the best response to cavalry attacks is to kill the horses – and so he had equipped some of his men with specially designed, long-handled axes which can fell an onrushing steed with one blow.
When William is unhorsed, the cry goes up that he has been killed. But before the rumour can gain currency, he grabs another horse, mounts up, lifts his visor and rides along his line of troops shouting, ‘Look at me! I live, and with God’s help I shall conquer!’.
Unable to break through the shield wall, however, the Normans are forced to pull back. Despite Harold’s instructions to stand firm, the Saxons on the right flank break ranks and tear down the hill in pursuit of the Frenchmen.
This proves to be a fatal error. One of the many lessons William had learned from his years of battlefield experience was a tactic known as the ‘feigned retreat’.
What the English construed as a panic-stricken flight was, in fact, a ruse to break up the shield wall. The ‘retreating’ cavalry wheeled round and cut their pursuers down in their hundreds.
Soon the hillside is slippery with blood and littered with corpses, with the Norman cavalry trampling over the bodies of the dead and injured alike.
Human waste from the wounded and dying, as their bowels and bladders empty, mixes with their blood to turn the soil into a thick, red-brown grease which makes standing or climbing the hill nearly impossible. No wonder William later renamed the site Senlac Hill, the French for ‘blood lake’.
Late Afternoon
Most 11th Century English battles lasted for little more than an hour. But this one, having started in the early morning, is still going on as dusk begins to fall.
By now, Harold’s brothers and nephew are dead. The Shield Wall is fracturing. All it will take is one more charge by the Normans.
A group of William’s men manage to break through the left flank and close in on Harold himself. He is surrounded by Housecarls armed with their double-headed axes but they are outnumbered and swiftly put to death.
Harold himself is hacked down by four of William’s knights. In the words of an account written shortly afterwards: ‘The first, cleaving his breast through the shield with his point, drenched the earth with a gushing torrent of blood; the second smote off his head below the protection of the helmet and the third pierced the inwards of his belly with his lance; the fourth hewed off his thigh and bore away the severed limb.’
In the years following Harold’s death the story took hold – largely due to an image on the Bayeux Tapestry – that our last truly homegrown English king was slain by an arrow in the eye.
But, by the time he died, the Normans had run out of arrows and no experienced soldier looks upward when the arrows start to fly.
Britain’s Prime Minister Andy Burnham, France’s President Emmanuel Macron and Britain’s King Charles III attend a preview event for the Bayeux Tapestry
Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as William the Conqueror in the BBC’s King and Conqueror is coronated King of England marking the begining of modern English history
5pm
William of Normandy or, as we must now call him, William the Conqueror, finds himself bloodied but unbowed. The victor at last.
But it had come at a terrible cost. Historians estimate that about 2,000 Norman invaders and 4,000 Anglo-Saxon defenders died.
October 15
In the midst of his triumph, William is furious. He needs Harold’s corpse to prove that he is dead but how to identify his body given the circumstances of his death?
In the fog of war, no one can say for sure what happened next. Some say that his widow, Edith the Fair, was enrolled in the task of identifying his body, which she did by recognising some private mark known only to her.
Others argue William had the corpse thrown into the sea after refusing to hand it over to his mother, even though she offered him her fallen son’s weight in gold.
Christmas Day
William the Conqueror is crowned King of England in Westminster Abbey, standing before the same altar the man he deposed had used less than a year earlier.
Aftermath
Harold’s sons attempt rebellion but are defeated and flee to Ireland. Edith Swanneck and his mother Gytha flee to what is now Hungary and Ukraine, with Harold’s daughter marrying into the royal family there.
Harold’s Queen was pregnant and bore a son after the battle. She names him Harold.
Helen Hollick is the author of Harold The King: The Story Of The Battle Of Hastings
