Re-Viewing the Battle of Hastings on the Bayeux Embroidery

The Bayeux Embroidery assigns a prodigious amount of space to the Battle of Hastings, which was fought on 14 October 1066 between the armies of Duke William of Normandy and King Harold II of England. Almost a quarter of the textile vividly dramatizes the fighting, the killing, and the dying at Hastings (W57–73; Figs 29–36). More than a quarter of it is entirely devoted to the preparations of the duke’s forces for the battle, starting at the point where he orders that ships be built for the invasion of England (W34–5; Fig. 18) and ending with his army of horsemen and archers attacking the English army (W57; Fig. 29). Scenes showing the battle and the preparations for it thus make up over half of the embroidery in its extant form, so that if it were displayed as it presumably was in a place where viewers could take in all of it, the battle would have assumed enormous importance.

Although there is no doubt that “What truly dominates the work [is] war … and, in particular, the battle of Hastings,” the sections of the textile devoted to the battle and preparations for it have received far less attention than the ones showing Harold’s visit to the Continent and return to England, King Edward’s death and burial, Harold’s accession as king, the sighting of the comet and Harold receiving news of it, and William’s decision to have ships built for the sea invasion of England. The reason for the relative neglect of the second half of it in the embroidery literature is that there seems to be little to debate or discuss, except for the question of whether it shows Harold being shot in the eye with an arrow. There has long been a consensus that aside from a scene that was adjusted to give special prominence to Bishop Odo of Bayeux, the textile’s pictorial narrative of the battle closely matches the highly detailed written one included by William of Poitiers (c. 1020-post 1087) in his Gesta Guillelmi (c. 1073–74), which modern historians of the battle take to be by far the best available source for it and have repeatedly used as a reference point for interpreting the textile’s battle sequence.