King Harold died at Hastings on 14 October 1066, and William the Conqueror's own chaplain says he was recognised by certain marks, by no means by his face. The woman famous for reading those marks, Edith Swan-neck, isn't placed beside the body by any source until about 110 years later.
That chaplain, William of Poitiers, wrote within about a decade of the battle and names nobody. The first writer to hand the marks to a woman was a canon of Waltham Holy Cross, the church claiming Harold's bones, and he wrote after Henry II threw him out in 1177. His Edith, called Swanneshals, walks the heaps of the dead and points the king out. Nobody ever wrote down what the marks were.
The oldest account, the Carmen de Hastingae Proelio, has no arrow and no Edith. Four men cut Harold apart, on Frank Barlow's reading the duke among them, and one of them carries off his coxa, which Professor James Campbell took for something worse than a thigh. The arrow turns up later and wanders round his head: William of Malmesbury puts it in the brain in the 1120s, Henry of Huntingdon in the eye around 1130. On the Bayeux Tapestry, Brooks and Walker concluded that the arrow and most of the arrow man's body are restoration, and Clarisse Chavanne's team at the Sorbonne found methyl violet, on sale from 1866, in the Victorian repair threads.
Then the Vita Haroldi, which entered the Waltham tradition around 1205, has Edith carry off a stranger's corpse while Harold survives as a veiled hermit at Chester. The graves are no better: a cairn on the Sussex shore, a memorial stone at Battle Abbey that English Heritage moved about six metres in 2016, and a headless man in a Saxon coffin of Horsham stone at Bosham, where the Chichester consistory court refused a DNA test in 2003.
The embroidery is at the British Museum until 11 July 2027. Nobody can show you the body. The stone at Waltham that reads Harold King of England went down in the 1960s, where Thomas Fuller wrote around 1655 that the Earl of Carlisle kept a lead fountain in his garden.
📍 TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 The king only his mistress could identify
0:53 Hastings, 14 October 1066: the king falls at twilight
1:47 The Waltham canons search the dead
3:20 Edith Swan-neck is sent for
4:23 Who wrote it: a canon expelled in 1177
5:02 The Carmen: four knights and the coxa
7:06 Gytha's gold and the cairn by the sea
8:01 William of Poitiers: by certain marks, not his face
9:36 Freeman's tally stick and the unkinging of Harold
11:45 How the arrow moved around Harold's head
14:08 The Bayeux Tapestry: which one is Harold?
14:45 Stothard's arrow and the Victorian dyes
17:27 Who was Edith Swan-neck?
19:46 The Vita Haroldi: Harold the hermit of Chester
23:00 Where is King Harold buried?
25:26 Bosham: a headless man in a Saxon coffin
26:59 The 2003 court case and the DNA test
29:11 Back in England, and still no body
📚 SOURCES & FURTHER READING:
https://archive.org/details/foundationofwalt00waltuofthttps://archive.org/details/vitaharoldiroman00britialahttps://archive.org/details/historynormanco26freegooghttps://archive.org/details/scriptoresrerumg00gilehttps://www.dot-domesday.me.uk/arrow.htm📋 ABOUT THIS VIDEO:
This video is about the death, identification and burial of King Harold at the Battle of Hastings on Saturday 14 October 1066 (20 October 1066 in the modern calendar), and the Waltham Holy Cross story that Edith Swan-neck, Edith Swanneshals, Harold's mistress, identified his body by secret marks. Sources in order: William of Poitiers (c.1071 to 1077), the Carmen de Hastingae Proelio of Guy, bishop of Amiens, the Waltham chronicle after 1177, William of Malmesbury (1120s), Henry of Huntingdon (c.1130), Wace (1160s), Gerald of Wales (1190s) and the Vita Haroldi (c.1205). Also the arrow in the eye on the Bayeux Tapestry and its Victorian restorations of 1842 and the 1860s, burial claims at Waltham, Battle Abbey and Bosham in Sussex, the Bosham coffin opened in 1954, and the 2003 Chichester consistory court DNA case. Anglo-Saxon England, the Norman Conquest, the 11th century.
#Hastings1066 #KingHarold #BayeuxTapestry #NormanConquest #MedievalHistory #EdithSwanNeck