Battle of Hastings, The (17 page)

The closeness of the assumptions and theories that underpinned the first Crusade to those that supported the conquest is uncanny. As the Pope launched the Crusade, so, we are told, he blessed
the conquest. Where those who preached the Crusade declared that infidels were untrustworthy and unfit to rule Christians, so William maintained that Harold was forsworn and, as a usurper, unfit to
rule over England. As Crusaders were promised God’s aid and absolution for past sins and the wealth of the conquered
infidels, so were the soldiers of fortune who
enlisted in William’s army (indeed, William pointed out to his mercenary recruits that whereas he had the power to promise Harold’s lands and wealth to his followers, Harold had no
power to give anything of William’s to his men). As the main objective of the Crusade was to rescue the holy places of the east and the Christians who worshipped in them, so one of the main
objectives of the conquest was to be the reform of the English Church.

There was, in fact, little wrong with the English Church. For centuries, indeed, there had been a particularly close relationship between the English Church and the papacy. Since before the time
of Alfred Rome had been regarded as the mother church by Anglo-Saxon England. The origin of the voluntary tax paid to the Pope (known variously as Peter’s pence, Rome-Scot, hearth-scot) by
England is unknown, but it is thought to have started in the reign of Alfred; no other Christian country paid it. Most of the English payment was appropriated by the reigning Pope, though part is
thought to have gone to the Church in the English quarter in Rome, known by the English as their
burh
or borough, a name supposedly perpetuated in the present Roman
Borgo
. Alfred had
secured exemption from taxation for this area, and Pope Leo IX had acknowledged its right to bury all Englishmen who came and died there. During the two waves of Viking raids, contact with Rome had
become more spasmodic than before, but between them, during the tenth century, it had resumed its previous regularity. Alfred’s successors had been hailed by the Vatican as Christian kings;
Edgar in particular had played a prominent part in the monastic revival headed by the three great monastic saints, Dunstan, Oswald and Æthelwold, and had founded many monasteries. But
Edgar’s death and the second wave of
Viking raids ended this, and by the time Edward succeeded to the throne, the English Church was still recovering the energy it had
lost during half a century of war and turmoil. Unfortunately, this coincided with the beginning of the reform movement in the Vatican in the 1040s, and by 1066 this was in full flood.

Under normal circumstances, the urgency of the Vatican to raise ecclesiastical standards, to stamp out simony and plurality, and to enforce a celibate clergy, and the slightly exhausted state of
the English Church could have been reconciled over time. England was not the only Christian state that found difficulty in accepting immediately the new principles such as the celibacy of the
clergy that were being formulated in Rome, and the papacy itself was not immaculate by the new standards; many of the highest ranking clergy there held in plurality. The situation in England was
complicated by one particular problem: the status of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

As we have seen, when Robert of Jumièges, appointed and consecrated archbishop in 1051, fled in 1052, Stigand, then Bishop of Winchester, was appointed in his place without reference to
Rome. Since Robert had never been canonically removed, this, in the eyes of the Pope, constituted an illegal intrusion, and Stigand was never recognised by the Vatican as validly appointed, and was
never accorded the pallium
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by which the Pope conferred his authority on archbishops. Stigand survived the conquest and, indeed, the first few
years of William’s reign, the latter having presumably found him too useful to discard immediately; but he was deposed at a legatine council in 1070, on grounds that included the accusations
that he had retained his bishopric of Winchester and thus held in plurality and that he had been summoned and excommunicated by four Popes. It is
true that Stigand’s
relations with Rome had caused problems and that, while he was archbishop, no English bishop had accepted consecration at his hands except for one, who later pleaded rather improbably that he did
not know that Stigand was under interdict. Harold had clearly taken care that his new church at Waltham should not be consecrated by Stigand, and, if Florence of Worcester is to be believed,
Stigand did not crown him either. None the less, the accusations made against him in 1070 are hard to square with the facts that, in other respects, Stigand exercised his functions as archbishop
normally from 1052 to 1070 and was in no way shunned by either clergy or laity, English or foreign. The papal envoys who visited the English Church in 1062 made no criticism of him although they
did criticize Ealdred for holding the archbishopric of York and the bishopric of Worcester in plurality. Irregular as his position might be, it could hardly be compared, for example, with the
scandal of the appointment of William’s half-brother, Odo, to the bishopric of Bayeux at the uncanonically early age of thirteen. It seems, however, that, as far as Rome was concerned,
Stigand’s presence cast a taint over the whole English Church, and presented William and the reformers in the Vatican with a very convenient stick with which to beat the English. William of
Poitiers takes pains to assure us that the duke’s intention was ‘not so much to increase his own power and glory as to reform Christian observance in those regions’.

When Gilbert of Lisieux arrived in Rome in 1066, therefore, he had a very strong case to present. His master had been promised the succession by the recently deceased king, Harold had sworn to
uphold his claim and was now forsworn and perjured by usurping the crown himself; and, most persuasively, Vatican support in placing William on the throne that was his due would be repaid by a
cleansing of the Augean stables of the English
Church by a man who had proved himself effective in implementing every aspect of the papal reform agenda in Normandy. No record
of the council in which he presented his case has survived; all that is known is that there was no English presence to represent the other side, and, as far as we know, no request was made for an
English reply to the allegations made by Gilbert. There was, of course, no reason why there should have been a reply; the election of the king of the English was a matter for the English alone and
had never been subject to Vatican approval. The only clue we have is a letter written many years later to William by Hildebrand, by then Pope Gregory VII, that indicates fairly clearly the part he
had taken in the proceedings and places it in the context of the Hildebrandine policy of attempting to persuade the temporal rulers of Christendom to swear fealty to the Holy See. His letter was
the preliminary to his making his demand for fealty to William (which in fact came the following month – and was refused). On 24 April 1080, he wrote:

The man who later in the same letter expressed the Church’s policy in the words, ‘Cursed be the man that keepeth back his sword from
blood’ was certainly not the man to have been distressed by the carnage of Hastings. The promise of root and branch ecclesiastical reform in England was a cause in which Hildebrand would have
regarded any amount of bloodshed as justifiable, impelled, as he says he was, by his conviction that it was his duty ‘to cry aloud and spare not’; but if it had not been for the low
esteem in which the English Church was then held in Rome and, in particular, the scandal of Stigand’s situation, it is doubtful whether even he could have persuaded his brethren to support
the unprovoked invasion of a peaceful and law-abiding nation, close for many centuries to the Vatican, by a foreign adventurer in search of a crown. As it was, the Hildebrandine arguments
ultimately prevailed, William was apparently sent, along with the blessing of Pope Alexander II, a papal banner as witness to the justice of his cause, and the invasion took on the complexion of a
holy war. It was, in words that have since been used to describe the first Crusade, ‘a monstrous exercise in hypocrisy in which the religious motive [was] used merely as the thinnest of
disguises for unashamed imperialism’.
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With his objectives achieved, William only had to complete his preparations and wait for a
suitable wind. After waiting long for this, as William of Poitiers tells us, he transferred his forces to St Valéry, either to take advantage of a shorter crossing to England or, according
to William of Poitiers, blown there by a prevailing west wind.

There is, however, an alternative scenario. The whole business of William’s appeal to the Pope rests on the unsupported evidence of William of Poitiers. Catherine Morton has examined the
evidence for the episode and rejects it for a variety of reasons,
among them that no other contemporary chronicler mentions it, that there was no more wrong with the state of
the English Church than with the Norman, that the Pope’s own legates had sat in council with Stigand in 1062 without complaint, and that the Normans of southern Italy were unlikely to concern
themselves particularly with the diplomatic niceties of their former duke’s proposed activities.
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Primarily, she rejects it on the
grounds that William of Poitiers was demonstrably a liar who did not even take the trouble to make his lies fit together. Harold’s biographer, therefore, on the basis of Morton’s
research and a realistic assessment of the probabilities, suspects that no papal support was in fact provided for William’s invasion. He points out that William of Jumièges, the only
other contemporary Norman chronicler of William’s deeds, makes no mention of any such support for William, which would be a curious omission for a churchman if it had been made public –
and the duke would have had to make it public to benefit from it in recruiting. He guesses that what William of Poitiers describes in his account is ‘a later retrospective sanction by the
Papal court for the
fait accompli
represented by William’s conquest’.
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This solution would clarify a lot of matters. Papal
legates were sent to England in 1070, and it was as a result of their visit that Stigand was formally deposed, William was crowned (again) and a penance was imposed by Bishop Ermenfrid (who was one
of the legates) on the Normans (not the English) who had fought at Hastings and had killed Englishmen after it. This would be very strange if the battle had been fought with papal sanction. It can
only be explained by the assumption that William’s invasion was not seen by the Vatican as a just war but, even in 1070, as one of aggression, though one that by that time it was obliged to
accept and ratify.

This explanation of a retrospective sanction would explain the events of 1070 very convincingly; not only the penance imposed on the Norman troops by the papal legates,
but also the second coronation of William during their visit (surely unnecessary after his coronation by Ealdred in Westminster Abbey in 1066 except as a papal endorsement of a
fait
accompli
). It is tempting also to see this legatine council as the cause of William’s foundation of Battle Abbey on the site of the English defence, as his own personal part of the Norman
penance.
^lxxx
Battle Abbey was not completed and dedicated until 1094; the legend, originated and maintained by the monks of Battle that William had
vowed a monastery on the site of the battle before it had ever taken place, has now been demolished. The council, in short, could be seen as a general ratification of the fact of conquest and
clearing up of unfinished business.

Given the absence of any other corroborating documentation in the Vatican than Hildebrand’s letter, the whole truth will probably never be known. Most historians of the period have
accepted the fact that the duke’s appeal to the Pope was made, and that the papal blessing and a papal banner were given. Although William of Poitiers states that the banner was carried
before the duke during the battle, nothing that could possibly be interpreted as a banner of such significance can be identified on the Bayeux Tapestry, which would seem strange if, as is generally
assumed, the Tapestry was commissioned by Odo, Bishop of Bayeux. There is the corroborating fact that Pope Alexander is known to have bestowed such a banner on Roger de Hauteville, younger brother
of Robert Guiscard, together with absolution for all who fought with him against the heathen of Sicily.

The truth of the story of the banner, like that of the papal blessing, has usually been accepted by subsequent historians and
is now part of the fable of the conquest.
There may or may not have been such a banner. There may, or may not have been papal sanction of the conquest. On the other hand, it is difficult to make sense of Hildebrand’s letter of 1080
to William except on the assumption that some very categorical sign of approval and blessing had been sent by the Pope in 1066 at the urging of Hildebrand, and that both Hildebrand and William were
aware of the fact. The balance of probability is that there must have been some expression of support from the Vatican, from the Pope or possibly just from Hildebrand (which would not preclude the
necessity for a regularization of the situation in 1070), but it is fair to point out the arguments against this conclusion.

In the meantime, in England, Tostig had made his first contribution to the English defeat. The preliminary skirmish in May had convinced Harold that his brother was acting in league with William
and that his descent upon the south coast was the preliminary to the full-scale invasion he was expecting. He called out the fyrd, and mobilized the navy. On this occasion he may well have called
out the general fyrd, for the Chronicle tells us that he gathered a greater land and ship army than any king had ever raised before, but it telescopes events here, for it passes straight on from
this remark to events later in the year. Florence of Worcester gives a fuller account: