Locating Harold’s Oath and Narrating Harold’s Journey

The scene on the Bayeux Embroidery showing Harold, duke of the English, taking an oath to William, duke of the Normans after William and his followers arrive in Bayeux (W26; Plate X; Fig. 13) is the high point of the first part of the pictorial narrative, which depicts a journey that Harold made, according to the Norman Story but not the English one, from England to the Continent and back at an unspecified date usually identifed by modern historians as 1064 or 1065. Although there has been much debate about what the textile’s pictorial narrative of this journey was intended to convey about it to contemporary viewers, most scholars agree that it shows Harold swearing an oath to William at Bayeux on the relics of Bayeux Cathedral. Many also believe that the decision to set the oath-swearing scene at Bayeux and not at Bonneville, where William of Poitiers situates it in his Gesta Guillelmi, marks a rare deviation from the Norman story of the conquest, which the embroidery usually tells; and further, that this deviation confirms the hypothesis examined from several different perspectives in this volume that Odo of Bayeux commissioned the monks of St Augustine’s, Canterbury to create a pictorial narrative that would glorify his own role in the Norman Conquest in addition to justifying the conquest itself. This hypothesis has long provided part of the rationale for arguing that when considered together with several other scenes discussed in Chapter 6, the scene depicting Harold’s oath emphasizes and even exaggerates the bishop’s role in events leading up to the Norman conquest of England, on the grounds that none of these scenes has any parallel in written accounts of the conquest, including versions of the Norman Story taken to be the source or sources that the embroidery’s designer followed. Recent commentators have therefore interpreted the oath-swearing scene as, for example, emphasizing “[Odo’s] right to be actively involved in Harold’s come-uppance, [by] championing and upholding the relics of his foundation”; “[pulling him] into the ranks of the earl’s victims, lending further weight to [his] role in the Conquest”; demonstrating “the efficacy of [those] relics”; and giving them a “starring” role in the conquest.