Authors: Andrew Bridgeford
The Bayeux Tapestry gives us only a snapshot of the colourful life of Bishop Odo of Bayeux.
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It is a mere cross-section of a long career, lived out by a flawed man, on a grand scale, a career that encompassed everything from the heights of power to the loneliness and disgrace of imprisonment. The key to this turbulent life was the patronage of Duke William of Normandy and the key to that patronage was the fact that Odo and William shared the same mother, a lowborn woman called Herleva. Herleva was the daughter of Fulbert, a tanner (some say undertaker) of Falaise. At the age of about seventeen she became the lover of Robert of Hiesmois, brother of the then reigning Duke of Normandy. William was the illegitimate son of this union; Odo and his brother Robert were the offspring of Herleva's subsequent marriage to Herluin of Conteville.
The story of Herleva's beauty and of her first meeting with Robert of Hiesmois is a captivating tale that has long passed into legend.
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According to the most well-known version, Robert first set eyes on Herleva when he returned to his castle at the end of a day's hunting. He happened to look down from within his keep and caught sight of the beautiful young Herleva, her lily-white legs exposed to the sun as she washed linen in a nearby stream. At length Robert persuaded Fulbert to allow his daughter to pay him a secret visit at his castle but she, in turn, insisted on arriving in broad daylight and on a fine horse, which she rode proudly, for all to see, through the main gates of the building. Inside the castle, the poets of the twelfth century continued the tale with relish. Within the privacy of the comital bedchamber the lowly maiden was at once more erotic and yet strangely more demure. Herleva, so it was said, ripped open her underskirt, tearing it from top to bottom, so that her torn and unworthy clothes lay open and her pure white skin was revealed in the flickering candlelight. She had done this, so the story goes, so that her lowly garment would need to be lifted up towards Robert's face or mouth. We are then told by the poet Wace that the two of them remained awake for some time ('for I do not wish to say anything more,' he explained, 'about the way a man disports himself with his beloved'). In the fullness of time Herleva fell asleep; but as she lay beside Robert, sleeping, her body suddenly began to shudder uncontrollably before once again resuming a state of peaceful slumber. On awakening at dawn, Herleva explained that she had had a strange dream. She had dreamt that her womb had suddenly begun to grow - it had grown out of her body, she said, like an enormous tree, becoming bigger and bigger until it was eventually so vast that the whole of Normandy and the whole of England lay under its incredible shade.
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Such, according to the old stories, were the portentous circumstances in which William the Bastard, the future Duke of Normandy and King of England, was conceived one night by his parents.
This story is, of course, almost entirely legendary. There is no contemporary account of the meeting of Robert and Herleva; and during William's lifetime the subject of his illegitimacy remained strictly taboo. It was the poets of the twelfth century who invented these tales, giving them an aura of romance and mystical, divine approval, in order to please a courtly Plantagenet audience who were then the inheritors of William's achievements. The essential facts remain: in the late 1020s Robert formed a non-marital liaison with Herleva, the daughter of Fulbert, a tanner or undertaker of Falaise, and that William was the child of this union. Robert seems to have treated Herleva well, but presumably wishing at some stage to make a more advantageous match he found her a suitable husband, Herluin of Conteville, a minor lord with some land on the south bank of the estuary of the River Seine. The bastard William was to remain distinctly touchy on the subject of his birth. It was a matter which could be broached with him only circumspectly, indeed if at all. Many years later, when as Duke of Normandy he was besieging the town of Alencon, a number of the townsmen thought it would be a good idea to string out animal hides in order to taunt him about the low birth of his mother. Once in control of the place, he had the culprits rounded up.
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He then had their limbs cut off and their eyes put out. It is not recorded that the jest was ever repeated.
Not long after William was born, Duke Richard III of Normandy died and Robert of Hiesmois inherited the duchy. It was rumoured that Richard had been poisoned by Robert. At this distance in time a charge of fratricide can neither be sustained nor rebutted, although Robert certainly had the motive, and presumably the opportunity, to do away with his brother. His own rule of Normandy was short and unsettled. It came to an abrupt end in July 1035 when he died in Nicea, in modern-day Turkey, on the journey home from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Thus it was that one of the most turbulent territories in Europe fell to the rule of his only son, an illegitimate boy of some seven or eight years.
There followed a decade of grim disorder, from which the child duke was lucky to escape with his life, let alone with his position intact. William's two half-brothers, Robert, afterwards count of Mortain, and Odo, the future bishop of Bayeux, were born to Herleva and Herluin in the 1030s and also grew up during this period of civil unrest. In theory they could expect to gain substantially from a connection with the duke. In practice the little boy's position was desperately insecure. Rival magnates vied for control; for long periods any authority at all was widely lacking. William's own life seems to have been sorely threatened several times. Four of his guardians were murdered in turn and one of them, Osbern the Seneschal, was stabbed to death in the very room where William slept. Such was the danger that Walter, Herleva'sbrother, had to smuggle the young duke out of his castle at night in order to conceal him for his own safety in poor men's houses. This was a harsh and unsettled upbringing. William's ruthless determination - without which the conquest of England can hardly be imagined - was born out of the brutalising experiences of his youth. The turning point did not come until 1047. In that year, the twentieth of his life, Duke William won a crucial victory over the rebels at the Battle of Val-es-Dunes, near Caen. This had not been achieved without the welcome support of King Henry I of France who had ridden out of Paris at the head of his own army in order to come to his young vassal's aid. Nevertheless the victory at Val-es-Dunes marks the true starting point of Duke William's effective rule over Normandy.
Odo's life and whereabouts during this dark period remain unknown. It is only in about 1049 that we hear of him, at which point it is recorded that William, who was now able to exert his authority more firmly in western Normandy, appointed him as the Bishop of Bayeux. Odo was certainly young for such an important promotion. There is conflicting evidence as to his precise year of birth, but it is quite possible that he was only thirteen years old and at any rate he would have been well below the canonical age of thirty. Despite William's sensitivity on the subject of his bastardy, he remained on close terms with his mother and the preferment of Odo was the first of many favours that he would grant his half-brothers. This is not surprising. Nepotism was a widely accepted practice, and in a dangerous and untrustworthy world reliance on ties of blood cannot be said to be entirely without purpose. William governed Normandy, and afterwards conquered England, with a closely knit network of loyal nobles, often related to the ducal family. Odo's brother Robert was made Count of Mortain around 1055 and so began his own long and rather colourless career of loyal service to William. Odo was made of different stuff: he was too self-important to be a sycophant and his ambitions knew few bounds. Before 1066, however, the evidence of his activities is sparse. The office of bishop that Odo had acquired was as much political as religious. It also promised considerable rewards, something which no doubt stimulated his appetite for further wealth and luxury. He appears as a witness to some of William's charters, attended ecclesiastical councils and would have overseen the establishment of the cathedral school at Bayeux, which later became something of a training ground for Norman bishops and administrators in conquered England. The cathedral itself, so intimately connected with the later history of the Bayeux Tapestry, was at this time steadily being rebuilt on the foundations of an older Carolingian edifice. The construction of the new building, which had already commenced under Bishop Odo's predecessor, continued under his youthful direction.
In about 1051 William married Matilda, the daughter of Count Baldwin of Flanders. Politically, it was a good match and it was achieved despite the initial opposition of the Pope on grounds of consanguinity. William's continued attachment to his lowborn mother is illustrated by the fact that prior to the wedding Matilda, a lady of the noblest blood, was placed in the care of Herleva. Not long afterwards the newly-weds founded two abbeys in Caen and the two abbatial churches still stand there today, proud monuments to their founders, gazing across at each other from opposite sides of the town. So far as is known, William remained faithful to his wife and together they had nine children. They must have made an odd couple, though. William was a large man, increasingly given to corpulence as he grew older, whereas Matilda was unusually small. The lady to whom the Bayeux Tapestry was so often attributed was (on the evidence of the bones discovered in her grave at her church at the Abbaye aux Dames in Caen) only about 4 feet 3 inches tall.
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Despite this astute marriage, the early 1050s were a time of considerable danger for William. There was nothing certain about his hold on the duchy, still less was his rise to preeminence in northern France inevitable. To the leaders of neighbouring territories his growing power was an increasing threat and they readily joined attempts to depose him. In 1053 Duke William's uncle, William of Arques, plotted to usurp the duchy for himself and to this end assembled a coalition of neighbouring rulers hostile to William. To make mattersworse, King Henry dramatically reversed his earlier policy and in alliance with Count Geoffrey of Anjou launched an invasion of the duchy as well. The duke swiftly besieged and defeated William of Arques; amongst the latter's supporters, Count Enguerrand of Ponthieu, brother of the tapestry's Guy, was killed in action. King Henry retreated for the moment but he and Count Geoffrey were soon back, in the early part of 1054, and this time they had a much larger force that contained warriors from many regions of France. William split his own army into two parts. The first blocked Henry's advance towards Rouen; the second launched a surprise attack against the French at Mortemer, where they had been enjoying the spoils of plunder. So great was the rout at Mortemer that upon hearing the news the French king hastily retreated to Paris. The victory was significant, not least in the way it pacified Normandy's easterly borders. In particular Count Guy of PonÂthieu was captured and imprisoned at Bayeux, an experience he would remember. By the time Guy was released two years later Ponthieu had been reduced to the status of a client state.
King Henry's last invasion of Normandy was defeated by Duke William at Varaville in 1057. The political circumstances of northern France now became remarkably favourable to Normandy. In 1060 William's principal enemies on the continent, King Henry of France and Count Geoffrey of Anjou, both died in quick succession. The new French king, Philip I, was a minor whose regent was Count Baldwin of Flanders, William's compliant father-in-law. A peace treaty with the king of France was shortly agreed; Anjou succumbed to a decade of weak rule and disputed succession. In 1063 William's position was further enhanced by his conquest of Maine, a smaller territory lying to the south of Normandy.William's pretence for invading Maine, following the death of the reigning count, appears to have been extremely slender. His main rival, Count Walter of Maine, soon surrendered and both Walter and his wife Biota died shortly afterwards in mysterious circumstances in William's custody. Walter was Edward the Confessor's last surviving nephew and might have been considered a contender for the English throne in 1066.William's show of force into Brittany in 1064 or 1065, depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry, was sufficiently effective to complete 'the curtain of friendly or acquiescent powers around the Norman duchy's borders'.
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The way had been cleared for what was to come. By strong rule, astute generalship and good fortune, William had transformed beyond all recognition the precarious position in which he began his reign thirty years earlier.
William must never have abandoned the hope that he might one day succeed to the English throne. Edward's tantalising words of encouragement, apparently first heard when William was a boy, before Edward's return to England, and later, it seems, confirmed in 1051, had not been forgotten. It mattered not a jot that Edward had since changed his mind. When Earl Harold of Wessex unexpectedly fell into his lap, William seized the opportunity and exploited his luck superbly. Now, with the invasion of England, Bishop Odo of Bayeux comes out of the shadows and moves into the centre stage of history. It was a major turning point in his career, just as it was, in different ways, for Count Eustace II of Boulogne.
The maternal ancestry of Count Eustace II of Boulogne could hardly be more different to the lowly origins of the mother of William, Odo and Robert, for in Eustace's veins ran some of the noblest blood in Christendom.
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His mother, Matilda of Louvain, was a granddaughter of Charles of Lorraine, the last lineal male descendant of the Emperor Charlemagne (747-814). A contemporary genealogy traces Eustace's maternal ancestry even further, beyond the Carolingians to the earlier Merovingian kings of France, whose dynasty began in the fifth century AD, and through them to mythical beginnings with Priam of Troy. Count Eustace's father, too, could trace his ancestry to Charlemagne, through the ninth-century union of Judith, the emperor's great-granddaughter, with Count Baldwin I of Flanders.
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How Eustace must have looked down upon Duke William of Normandy, the grandson of an artisan, and a bastard descended in the male line only from a tenth-century pagan, Rollo. Above all, in the eleventh century, it was the blood of Charlemagne that was prized most. Eustace's dual Carolingian bloodline was the richest of any of his eleventh-century contemporaries and it gave him a lustre that was widely recognised. Even William of Poitiers begrudgingly notes near the end of his work that Eustace was 'illustrious in many ways and a distinguished count'. The
Carmen
refers to him as 'the scion of a noble dynasty', while Orderic Vitalis calls him 'a man of the very highest birth, sprung from the stock of Charlemagne, most renowned king of the Franks'.
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Throughout the Middle Ages the name of Charlemagne was held in awe and mystique. As King of the Franks from 768 to 814, Charlemagne had conquered Lombardy, subdued Saxony, annexed Bavaria, campaigned in Spain and Hungary, and he held the war banner of Christianity aloft against the pagans on many fronts. Allying himself with the papacy, he created a papal state in central Italy and in 800 was crowned by Pope Leo III as the Emperor of the West. At the height of his power Charlemagne ruled over a veritable superstate comprising practically all the lands of Western Christendom, with the exception only of the Asturias in Spain, southern Italy and the British Isles. After his death, however, this agglomeration quickly splintered into rival and warring territories. It is not surprising that, in retrospect, people looked upon the age of Charlemagne as a golden era, a time when Christendom was led by the true prototype of the Christian king and warrior. Stories of Charlemagne were told and retold in castles and halls and along the pilgrim routes; his achievements were celebrated, magnified and mythologised. Two and a half centuries after Charlemagne's death some of these stories took shape in the
Chanson de Roland
(the
Song of Roland),
the first great work of French literature. The origin and authorship of this poem remain mysterious but the story it tells, of the death of Charlemagne's nephew Roland fighting against the Muslims in the Pyrenees and of Charlemagne's subsequent revenge, was undoubtedly circulating in the France of the second half of the eleventh century. Charlemagne, as he appears in the
Chanson de Roland,
is a impossibly old figure in a flowing white beard, an indomitable and ceaseless warrior, a wise ruler with the aura of an Old Testament prophet, a man singularly favoured by God and palpably in touch with the divine. To have the blood of Charlemagne running through your veins was prestige indeed.
Prestige, however, was not enough; Charlemagne's dynasty had long ceased to reign over France. In the ninth century a series of weak and divided kings resulted in the kingship passing out of the Carolingian lineage. The heirs of Charlemagne regained the title sporadically from 893 but their reign finally came to an end in 987 with the death of the childless King Louis V. Hugh Capet, the duke of the Franks, supported by Archbishop Adalbero of Rheims, persuaded the magnates of France that the kingship was elective rather than hereditary and that Louis' uncle Charles of Lorraine was unfit to rule. Hugh was thus elected king. The subsequent attempts of Charles of Lorraine to wrest the crown from Hugh Capet came to naught. He was captured and imprisoned in 991 and died shortly afterwards. Although the Carolingian lineage continued to flourish in the noble families of Lorraine, Verman-dois, Blois, Flanders and Boulogne, never again was it to assume the royal title of France.
As Count of Boulogne and neighbouring Therouanne, Eustace was a vassal of the Capetian kings of his day. From 1054 he was also the Count of Lens, which he held from the Count of Flanders, himself a vassal of the French king. Such ties were limited in effect. Within his own territories Eustace, like William of Normandy, was virtually a sovereign prince, with power of life and death over his subjects and the ability to build castles, mint money and pursue his own independent policies. Though small by comparison to Normandy or Flanders, Boulogne was a prosperous county. Its geographical position, as the gateway between England and the continent, had long been a source of wealth. We have a description of Wissant, the chief port of Eustace's county, in 1068, from which we learn that it could be a bustling place, full of noisy merchants and pilgrims waiting for their ships to leave.
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The commerce of Boulogne was certainly active enough for the county to mint its own coins. Boulogne also attracted pilgrims. In the seventh century, in the days of King Dagobert, the Virgin Mary was believed to have arrived miraculously on an unmanned boat at the harbour of Boulogne and she made an apparition to the inhabitants while they were at prayer in their little hilltop chapel. The story made Boulogne one of the most important centres of pilgrimage in France throughout the Middle Ages. But it was still a small county, surrounded by powerful neighbours. Eustace had to strive hard to maintain his independence, in particular from Norman interests to the south and Flanders to the north. He had everything to fear from a powerful Normandy and much of his early policy was inimical to the interests of the Norman duke. Equally, although his links with Flanders were strong, his relations with the Count of Flanders were not always cordial. Eustace was always his own man and of necessity he was a schemer. He needed to construct deft alliances and to shift with the times in order to steer his lands through the turmoil of the age. It also seems quite likely that he harboured a secret hope that one day the House of Boulogne would occupy a throne worthy of its bloodline. Eventually it would.
There are no surviving chronicles written from the perspective of Boulogne, and Count Eustace, for the most part, is a shadowy figure. Despite the obvious respect that chroniclers held for his noble ancestry, Eustace generally appears only briefly in the chronicles of other lands, only fleetingly in stories whose central concern is someone else. It is only recently that historians have begun to put the spotlight more closely on Boulogne, to unpick the evidence and rediscover something of the importance that he once had in the contemporary world of northern France and Flanders.
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It was probably in about 1036 that Eustace's father, Count Eustace I of Boulogne, arranged that he should marry Godgifu, the sister of the two English princes, Edward and Alfred, who were then living in exile in Normandy as England lay under Danish rule. The first consequence of this English alliance was to entangle Boulogne in the cruel tragedy of Alfred's murder. Alfred had been lured back to England during the period of confusion that followed the death of King Canute.
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Refusing aid from Flanders, he came instead with a bodyguard of knights from Boulogne. Once in England, however, the party was deceived and disarmed by Earl Godwin, who then delivered them all into the hands Harold Harefoot, Canute's illegitimate son; in this period of confusion Harefoot was attempting to impose his own rule over England and, suspicious and disreputable by nature, he perceived them as a threat. The Boulonnais knights were shackled and many were promptly slaughtered in cold blood; others were sold into slavery. Alfred was cruelly tortured and he subsequently died of his wounds in the care of the monks of Ely. This episode, one of the darkest in English history, cannot fail to have made a deep impression on the young Eustace, who was perhaps then around twenty years of age. Alfred was the brother of his new wife and he must have known - and perhaps even grew up with - many of the knights of Boulogne who were so cruelly murdered. Though Godwin later insisted that he had played no active part in the murders, and that he was only obeying Harefoot's orders, many thought otherwise. The tragic events of 1036 must have left Count Eustace, like Edward the Confessor, nursing an abiding grudge against Earl Godwin - a grudge that could easily be transferred against Godwin's son, the future King Harold.
This was hardly an auspicious start to Eustace's alliance with England's exiled royal family, but the gamble soon paid off. In 1042 Edward became King of England. By then the surviving sons of Canute - the bastard Harold Harefoot and the legitimate Harthacanute - had both died young, after reigning only for short periods, and the way was open for Edward's peaceable succession. Eustace was now the brother-in-law of the reigning English monarch. By 1047 he had also inherited the county of Boulogne from his father, Eustace I. How different the fate of England might have been if Count Eustace and Godgifu had produced children, who, as nephews of Edward the Confessor, might have stood to inherit the crown in 1066. It seems, however, that their union was entirely without issue and, as best as may be judged from the evidence, Godgifu died before 1049.
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By her previous marriage to Drogo, Count of the Vexin, she left two children who became Eustace's stepsons, Ralf, whom King Edward made Earl of Hereford, and Walter, Count of Maine. Eustace next married Ida of Lorraine, who, like himself, was a descendant of Charlemagne; she was to provide him with three sons. As with Duke William's marriage with Matilda, there was papal opposition on the grounds that Eustace and Ida were too closely related, and Eustace was excommunicated in 1049. It was an obstacle that must have been shortly overcome and the new marriage added to Eustace's prestige as well as increasing his network of alliances.
In 1051 Count Eustace visited England.
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The purpose of this visit seems to have been a secret even to his contemporaries and it remains mysterious to this day. The
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
(E) tells us merely that the Count of Boulogne spoke with King Edward 'about what he wanted, and then turned homeward'. Eustace would have been concerned at the prospect of Duke William's marriage with Matilda of Flanders, for it was an alliance of the two great powers on either side of his county and as such a potential threat to his interests. Uppermost in his mind may have been the need to reiterate his ties with Edward. Whatever the true purpose of the visit, its result is clear. Eustace unwittingly became the catalyst for some of the most dramatic events in Edward's reign and once more he came into conflict with the Godwin family. According to the E version of the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,
which may be the best informed, Count Eustace was returning from his meeting with the king and was on his way through Kent to the port of Dover. Perhaps with the events of 1036 fresh in mind, he and his men took the precaution of putting on their chain mail some way before they had reached the town. Once there they highhandedly set about seeking the best private lodgings they could find. One of Eustace's men demanded quarters at the house of a certain townsman, and this Englishman, valuing his privacy above providing hospitality at the point of a sword, refused to let the man cross his threshold. In the ensuing scuffle the householder was wounded. He promptly retaliated and on the spot killed his Boulonnais assailant. Eustace was enraged. He and his men mounted their horses and riding straight to the house in question they swiftly dispatched the townsman on his own hearth. More Englishmen then joined in the riot. Twenty or so were killed on each side, many were wounded by the sword, others by horses' hoofs, before Eustace was able to escape from Dover with his men and hurried back to King Edward. Naturally enough he gave the king his own version of events. The king, believing that the men of Dover were entirely at fault, ordered Earl Godwin to harry the town as punishment. It was Godwin's refusal to harry his own people that led, unexpectedly, to the dramatic showdown between Godwin and Edward. Ultimately, civil war was only prevented by Godwin's flight to Flanders. It seems to have been during the brief period of freedom from Godwin's influence that King Edward felt able to confirm to Duke William of Normandy his then intention that William should succeed him. The following year the Godwins returned in force and Edward, unable to resist, was obliged to reinstate them.
The outcome of these events was hardly in Eustace's interests. He was no friend of the Godwins and he was no friend of Duke William. At the same time a feud had also developed between his stepson Ralf, the Earl of Hereford, and Swein, the most violent and irresponsible of Godwin's sons, whose lands were in the same region. The response of Eustace and his allies to the growing threat posed by Duke William was to support the rebellion of William's uncle, William of Arques. When this came to naught in 1053, Eustace provided the Count of Arques and his wife with exile in Boulogne and thereafter it appears that the Normans made a retaliatory raid into Eustace's county.
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In 1056 we find Eustace at the court of Count Baldwin of Flanders at the same time as Earl Harold was also visiting. Eustace, too, was a witness to the charter dated 13 November 1056 along with his cousin Count Guy of Ponthieu and Earl Harold. History unfortunately does not record whether Eustace and Harold spoke on this occasion or what they thought of each other. Their relations on this occasion were probably cold but correct.
In the year 1066, when Harold had succeeded to the English throne and an angry Duke William was laying his plans to invade, Eustace made the fateful decision to throw in his lot with the Normans. It was certainly not any sense of loyalty to William that moved him to take this course. Nor can he have been impressed by William's invasion of Maine three years earlier and the subsequent deaths of Eustace's stepson Count Walter of Maine and Countess Biota in Norman custody. Eustace must have weighed matters in the balance and concluded that his best chance of advancement was, for the time being, to reverse his policy of hostility towards Normandy and ally himself with Duke William's plans. Rich rewards were no doubt promised should the invasion succeed. It has even been suggested that Duke William proposed, if victorious, to share the whole kingdom of England with Count Eustace II of Boulogne, but there is really nothing to support this claim.
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Perhaps what tipped the balance in his mind was the chance to gain revenge on the Godwins.