See the Norman Conquest Unfold in the Bayeaux Tapestry, Scene by Scene

“Look at me I am well! I am still alive and by the grace of God I shall yet prove victor!"  

His harsh voice rising above the din of battle, William pushes back his helmet and bares his face to retreating troops who thought him slain. "Inflamed by his ardour," exults the warrior's chronicler, William of Poitiers, "the Normans then surrounded ... their pursuers and rapidly cut them down so that not one escaped." 

This episode marked the turning point of a blood-splashed October day just 900 years ago—a day which so changed the course of events that it is impossible to reckon our history without those few furious hours. For when darkness fell on Senlac Hill, near the seaside town of Hastings on the southeast coast of England, William, Duke of Normandy, had earned the lasting sobriquet of "Conqueror." And a flow of concepts began that would influence men's lives for centuries to come. 

William the Conqueror. Resolute and resourceful, avaricious, rarely humorous, always unsentimental, he found life a serious business. He expressed practical ideas in a grinding tone of voice. In the blood-and-iron era of the 11th century, he lived his greatest—and his worst—moments on the battlefield. 

His victory at the Battle of Hastings made England once more a part of Europe, as it had not been since the better days of the Roman Empire. After the Conquest, the Scandinavian influence on England began to give way to the political and cultural ideas of the Latin world. 

Besides feudalism and a new aristocracy, the Normans implanted in England much of their language, law, architecture, and social customs. The island kingdom was thus brought into the mainstream of medieval civilization. Englishmen participated in the Crusades, the reform of church and monastery, and other movements of the time. 

After William's day the universities of Oxford and Cambridge were founded, following the establishment of the first European universities at Bologna and Paris, for he had made it possible for England to share in the intellectual revival of the 12th century. Ultimately the effects of his conquest would be felt in the New World. Such terms as "justice," "liberty," and "sovereign" crossed the Channel with William. Indeed, the Norman Conquest has left its mark forever on the language you are now reading. 

My wife Jay and I waded through meadows that once were part of the battlefield of 1066 and looked up toward the peaceful town of Battle. Maps in hand, we had to struggle against the pastoral calm of the summer morning and the laughter of children to look into the past and envision the momentous carnage that took place here. 

Like Battle, nearby Hastings showed us a pretty face. She was busy with colorful preparations for the summer-long celebration of the 900th anniversary of the event that made her famous. The only armies we could imagine were those that would be assaulting a new domed exhibition hall complete with battlefield—a 288-square-foot model of the original. 

To relive the events of 1066, however, and to sense the thrust of their gore and glory, we had gone first to France—to Bayeux. Jay and I visited that city three times in the unforgettable weeks we followed the footsteps of William the Conqueror. We went there, of course, because the Normans immortalized their conquest in an incomparable work of 11th-century art—the famed Bayeux Tapestry. Stitched shortly after William's victory at Hastings, the Tapestry hangs now in the former Bishop's Palace across from the historic Cathedral of Bayeux. On its 77 yards of embroidered linen, the drama of the Conquest, and of its immortal figures, comes alive. 

The history of the Tapestry excites as much interest as the events it depicts. Miraculously, it survived two 12th-century burnings of the Cathedral of Bayeux, where it was almost certainly kept, as well as the vicissitudes of the Hundred Years' War and the 16th-century Wars of Religion. 

(Inside the secret operation to move the world’s most famous tapestry.)

Eyes scanning every inch of the panoramic work, we walked its length oblivious to the clamor of touring school children. Perhaps it appeared to them as an oversized cartoon strip—which, in fact, it was to the simple folk of the 11th century. 

We saw it as a masterwork of medieval artistry, an epic poem on linen, captivating, ingenuous, concisely edited. All through our journey in Normandy and England, its embroidered figures would flash across our minds again and again. 

Jay and I picked up William's trail at his birthplace, Falaise. To get there, we began by spanning the Atlantic in less time, and obviously with less peril, than he spent crossing the English Channel in 1066. But then, he was engaged in the dangerous business of making history; we were merely writing it. 

There are times when you know you are enjoying life, and we knew it as we drove in spring sunshine through the green fields and pink orchards of Normandy. We knew it when we drove into the sun-searched square of Falaise and William's heroic bronze figure on a spirited horse greeted us. Jay was delighted by his sudden appearance. 

Around the square—the Place Guillaume le Conquérant—almost every building had been flattened or damaged by the intense bombing of 1944. In August of that year, Falaise was the northern hinge of the pincer movement in which much of the German Seventh Army was trapped between Allied forces.

William's statue, thrusting a bannered lance in defiance, came through the storm of bombs unscathed. Rearing in the center of the square, it guards the approach to the ducal castle, which served as an important stronghold from the 10th to the late 16th century. Then time and artillery forced its abandonment. Now the castle is a tourist site. But tourism has done history many a good turn, and because people want to see the castle, some of it has been restored. Actually the oldest parts now visible seem to date from the 12th and 13th centuries—after William's time. 

In the castle of Falaise, however, history is borne on the wings of legend. The guide showed us the window from which the young Duke of Normandy, Robert I "the Magnificent," supposedly first saw the fair Herleve, also known as Arlette, the daughter of a tanner. She was washing clothes in a stream by the castle where visitors still idle. 

Another version of the story relates that Robert met her while returning from the hunt. But there can be no doubt what happened next. A stone chamber in the castle is pointed out as the place where the girl spent her first night with Robert. William was the child of their union.

Another version of the story relates that Robert met her while returning from the hunt. But there can be no doubt what happened next. A stone chamber in the castle is pointed out as the place where the gril spent her first night with Robert. William was the child of their union.

After William's birth, Herleve-Arlette was married off to a petty viscount, to whom she bore two famous sons—Bishop Odo of Bayeux, who fought beside his half brother in the Norman Conquest, and Count Robert of Mortain, who became one of the richest landholders in England. 

Sometimes we suspect that Clio, the Muse of history, tries her hand at roulette. We can hardly do otherwise when we reflect that the illegitimate son of a tanner's daughter left an impress on England, and much of Europe, that has lasted to this day.

An anonymous monk of Caen described William in adulthood as "... great in body and strong, tall in stature but not ungainly. He was also temperate in eating and drinking.... After his meal he rarely drank more than thrice. In speech he was fluent and persuasive, being skilled at all times in making clear his will. If his voice was harsh, what he said was always suited to the occasion..." 

William began his reign in 1035, at about the age of 7, when his father Robert I died in Asia Minor while returning from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Before his departure, Robert had prudently secured William's succession to the ducal throne. But in that turbulent age it was one thing to be recognized, another to rule; even in peaceful times a boy was subject to vagaries of guardianship.

In William's day the church, not the state, wielded the most powerful sanctions, and a wise ruler got along well with the church. Invading Vikings, the Normans' own ancestors, had destroyed the monasteries in the ninth and early tenth centuries. Now the Dukes of Normandy were restoring them.

William, constantly surrounded by monks, emerged as a champion of the church. In return, ecclesiastics helped him, after the Conquest, to organize his new kingdom of England. 

A number of important abbeys or nunneries stood in Normandy when William became duke, three of them in the capital city of Rouen, others at Jumièges, Fécamp, Montivilliers, Bernay, Cerisy la Forêt, St. Wandrille, and Mont St. Michel. 

We visited every site, but time destroys the past as history seeks to preserve it. Today William would recognize few besides the churches at Bernay and Cerisy la Forêt. 

William's grandmother, Judith of Brittany, began the abbey church at Bernay. He knew it well. It is all that is left of the old Norman establishment. The other abbey buildings, rebuilt much later, now house the town hall. 

I parked our rented Renault in the square before the church at Bernay just as workmen were going inside. The foreman began to close the door as we approached. 

"May we see the church?" I asked. 

"It is closed. We are restoring it." 

"But we have come a long way." 

"Are you English?" 

"Americans." 

"Ah, then you have come a long way!" 

He let us in and we spent an exciting hour exploring. Many 11th-century columns with their capitals still survive, as well as bits of bright floor tiling, pieces of delicate stone tracery, and the like. Numerous skeletons have been exhumed from the floor of the nave, but there is no way of identifying them. The most important personages were buried closest to the altar. 

The foreman kept the remains in a locked box. He held fragments of sculpture with loving care as he showed them to us, and handled with equal care the bones of the long dead. They deserve our respect, he said—both the stones and the bones.

At Cerisy la Forêt we found the magnificent abbey church, one of Europe's finest examples of Norman Romanesque architecture. William's father, Duke Robert, began the church about 1030; its hemicycle of three-storied windows forms an apse that combines beauty and solidity with breath-taking perfection. William himself finished the church. Workmen are now doing a thorough job of restoration.

Unfortunately, in 1811 the west facade and four bays of the nave were demolished to sell the stones and thus pay for the repair of the central tower, which had been struck by lightning. I do not know who proposed this extraordinary way to raise money, but when idiocy reaches the sublime it must—like the church itself—command an incredulous awe. 

In Rouen we found little that William knew. He rebuilt its cathedral, but that has long since disappeared. The present Cathedral of Notre Dame, one of the glories of Gothic architecture, dates largely from the 13th to the 16th centuries.

The first decade of young William's rule in Normandy was tumultuous. In 1046, as he approached his majority, his cousin Guy of Burgundy, who aspired to become Duke of Normandy, led a large-scale revolt against the ducal authority. In desperate plight, William appealed to his overlord, King Henry I of France—little more than the region around Paris at that time—who came to his young vassal's aid early the following year. In the hard-fought battle at Val ès Dunes, to the southeast of Caen, William first proved himself one of the century's greatest warriors.

"Hurling himself upon his enemies," noted William of Poitiers, "he terrified them with slaughter..." So many of the rebels were pushed into the River Orne that "the mills at Borbillon were stopped with corpses."

We set out to find the battlefield, a study of the map sending us along the road from Bellengreville to Garcelles-Secqueville. It was a superb day in June. The sun sparkled in a cloudless sky. But while the battle sites of World War II are unhappily easy to find in Normandy, you need luck as well as maps to locate an 11th-century battlefield.

"William must have sent the rebels spinning somewhere around here," I observed to Jay, "but how can we find the place?"

"You just drove by a marker that says 'Bataille...' of something or other," she replied. "We were going too fast for me to see it." 

"Just a memento of the last war." 

"Well," she said, "I'd like to be sure."  

So I turned the car around, and a few minutes later we reached the spot. Jay had seen a marker all right. A white stone insert on a triangular concrete pillar bore in eloquent capitals the simple words: "Bataille du Val ès Dunes, 1047." 

We got out of the car and stood by the roadside. A great plain sloped gently to the south, green with risen oats swaying in a cooling breeze. Jay picked a single oat-laden stem; it lies before me on the desk as I write.

We left the field of Val ès Dunes almost as triumphantly as William himself. He had left it more than ever the Duke of Normandy. The days of his minority had ended, but his future was to be filled with unremitting struggle.

For more than a dozen years following the victory of Val ès Dunes, William fought with Count Geoffrey Martel of Anjou. Early in the contest William seized the city of Alençon in a murderous night attack and, through the winter of 1051-52, laid siege to the towering fortress of Domfront. Today Alençon has little to interest anyone pursuing William, so we took the road westward to Domfront.

The ruins of the fortress perch on a high rocky ridge. Extensive reaches of medieval wall still stand, and one huge corner of the Norman keep, or donjon, also remains. The walls and outworks are enclosed in a tree-shaded park. From the castle heights, we commanded lovely vistas of the green countryside dotted with pear orchards.

Below the castle, in the valley of the River Varenne, the 11th-century Church of Notre Dame sur lEau—Our Lady on the Water—stands by a little bridge. William heard Mass in the church during the siege of Domfront. In 1836 road builders laid siege to the building itself, ruthlessly stripping away the side aisles and shortening the nave. Now, however, the fine Romanesque tower over the transept crossing has been restored as William knew it.

After Domfront, William found himself embroiled with King Henry, who saw in the growth of the ducal power a threat to French suzerainty over Normandy. Now began a century and a half of warfare between the Dukes of Normandy (who were also, after 1066, the Kings of England) and the Capetian Kings of France. 

In February, 1054, Normans defeated a pillaging, undisciplined French army of invasion near the castle of Mortemer in northeastern Normandy, snatching William from disaster.

For almost thirty years I had wondered what Mortemer might be like, and at six o'clock one rainy dawn we set out from Rouen and headed northeast for Neufchâtel en Bray. Mortemer lies only a few miles farther. A foreboding fog enveloped the area. Cows stood motionless in meadows bordered with trees. 

We stopped at the town's single roadside cafe for a cup of coffee and chatted with the proprietress. She had never heard of the Battle of Mortemer. 

Beyond the town the road rose to a fair height which gave us a long view, even in the fog, of rolling green farmland. In the sunshine it would have been a pretty scene, but a grim cold lay over the landscape. Here was indeed a fitting place for battle. 

Maybe there is a marker at Mortemer. We did not look for one. A discouraging rain renewed its steady patter on the windshield. 

We headed southeast toward Gerberoy. There in 1079 William besieged a group of young rebels led by his disloyal son Robert Curthose (short-hose), who troubled William for years. To break the siege, the rebels issued in force from the castle of Gerberoy and carried the field against William, who was wounded and almost killed in the fray. That was one of the blacker days in William's life.

It was not our day either. The rain continued. We got lost. We met no one on the roads who might give us directions. We stopped at a farmhouse here and a little store there to ask the way. We wondered how William had ever found the place. But he had—and so, eventually, did we.

Little seems to have happened at Gerberoy since William's siege of Robert Curthose. A charming little town where huge roses climb over brick and timbered houses, it has now become an artists' colony.

We lunched before the raised fireplace in the Hostellerie du Vieux Logis. The fire felt good on this surprisingly cold day in early June. On our table a vase of flowers was inscribed with the encouraging sentiment, "On voit plus de vieux ivrognes que de vieux médecins"—"One sees more old drunks than old physicians." We had a steak and drank to William's memory in a robust red wine. Then and there we decided to leave the battlefields and, like William himself on many an occasion, to seek the peace of monasteries.

What is left of the abbey church of Jumièges lies 17 miles by road west of Rouen. William knew the place well. It underwent much rebuilding in the 10th and 11th centuries, and during William's lifetime handsome structures rose in the Romanesque style. 

As we walked under shade trees amid the ruins of Jumièges, we seemed to step back into the quiet past of medieval monasticism. Two vast Romanesque towers flank the entrance to the majestic nave. Gothic arches lie beyond, framing what were chapels long centuries ago. Our glance fell upon the remains of stone tracery, broken by the destructive forces of man and now being withered by those of nature. Here the famous abbots and monks of Jumièges led their lives in affluent detachment from the outer world. 

But time itself envied their tranquility, and princes envied their wealth. From the 15th century the abbey began to decline. Today, no monks walk in its shaded cloister or raise their voices in evensong. Only history dwells there now.

By 1066, twenty or more new monastic houses had been established in Normandy, most of them by the vigorous new aristocracy which was to aid William in the invasion of England and give the English church some twenty-two abbots and five bishops. Norman monasticism, solid and well organized, helped to unify the duchy and set the tone of its social life. The abbots and bishops often proved to be great builders and excellent administrators.

About 1051 William of Normandy married Matilda of Flanders. To remove the ecclesiastical ban which fell upon their marriage, possibly because they were distant cousins, William and Matilda built in Caen the Abbaye aux Hommes, dedicated to St. Étienne, and the Abbaye aux Dames, dedicated to La Trinité. In later years they embellished the abbey churches with some of the spoils of the Conquest. 

Caen, William's favorite residence, owes its first importance entirely to him. For he made it, as it has always remained, the capital of lower Normandy. 

In 1944 bombing destroyed three-fourths of the city, and more than 1,500 persons took shelter in the great abbey church of St. Étienne. A marble slab set in the pavement before its high altar records in Latin, "Here the invincible William the Conqueror is buried, Duke of Normandy and King of England, founder of this church, who died in the year 1087.” 

But William is not there. 

His body lay undisturbed until 1522, when his tomb was opened and resealed, but 40 years later, during the uprisings of the Reformation, Huguenots destroyed the tomb and scattered William's remains, except for one thigh bone. That, too, may have gone when another tomb built for him was destroyed by French revolutionaries in 1793. 

The same violent social upheavals disturbed Matilda's slumber. But her bones were saved and today lie beneath the pavement in the choir of Caen's La Trinité.

Disinterred in 1961, Matilda's remains showed her to have been only about fifty inches tall. William's thigh bone indicated his height was about five feet, ten inches. They must have been a picturesque couple as they sat side by side on state occasions; bulky William filling his throne, little Matilda's feet not even touching the floor. 

After he wed, William's power grew rapidly. In 1063-64 he conquered the rich county of Maine, securing his southwest border.

If his prestige and security were of recent origin, so were the wealth and position of the men around him who would join in the Conquest. Most of the great families of Normandy had risen to prominence in the half century or less before 1066. Norman society was still largely unstratified, mobile, adventurous. 

Across the English Channel, too, events were moving, unpredictably but inexorably, toward the climax of Hastings. 

King Edward the Confessor, who stemmed from the royal West-Saxon line, was pro-Norman, being related through his mother to the Norman duke. Edward found himself opposed by the powerful Saxon earl, Godwin of Wessex, who with his several sons controlled most of southern England.

One of these sons was Harold, whose sister (Godwin's daughter Edith) had married the Confessor. But in 1051, when Earl Godwin and his sons revolted unsuccessfully, King Edward banished them from England. At about this time, he named William of Normandy his heir, with the assent of various magnates of the realm.

The following year, however, the rebels returned to England and drove many of Edward's Norman adherents into exile. Now Edward's rule became largely nominal, and after the death of Earl Godwin, in 1053, Englishmen felt the power of Harold, who began to dream of succeeding his childless brother-in-law as king. 

When Edward died, who would wear his crown, Harold or William? One of the most notable combats in history lay ahead. To the victor would go a kingdom.

Earl Harold Godwinson crossed the Channel, probably in 1064, from Bosham in Sussex to the Continent. Edward the Confessor, according to chroniclers, sent him to confirm the Norman duke's right of succession to the English crown. For reasons of his own, Harold thought it politic to go.

A strong wind, however, carried Harold to the coast of Ponthieu, whose count cast him into prison. William demanded and easily secured Harold's release. He took him to Rouen, "and there," states William of Poitiers, "William sumptuously refreshed Harold with splendid hospitality after all the hardships of his journey." 

Now the earl had to swear an oath of fealty to the duke and promise to "employ all his influence and wealth to ensure that after the death of King Edward the kingdom of England should be confirmed in the possession of the duke." A scene in the Bayeux Tapestry shows Harold taking this oath, a grave impediment to his own royal aspirations.

At this time William took Harold with him in a campaign against Brittany. The Bayeux Tapestry shows Harold rescuing two Norman soldiers from the treacherous sands at the mouth of the River Couesnon near the famous monastery of Mont St. Michel.

(How is France moving the Bayeux Tapestry? Very carefully.)

Although Jay and I rescued no one, I did save our car from a dunking. Not allowed to park on the causeway connecting Mont St. Michel with the mainland because of the many tourist buses already there, we had to park on the beach below. Violent winds lashed an infuriated sea, but the attendants assured us that our car, together with some thirty others on the beach, would be safe.

We had just started dinner at the hotel when the head waitress informed us that the sea was rising rapidly under the impact of the winds. Now it would be all right to park on the causeway! 

The wind blew so hard I could hardly stay on my feet. But, inspired by Harold's exploit, I reached the car, with the rising water scarcely six feet away. The gallant little Renault started, although drenched with salt spray, and I drove through almost a foot of water now covering the only approach to the road above. It was just in time. Twenty minutes later we watched four cars helplessly awash at the foot of the causeway.

Edward the Confessor died on January 5, 1066. "The next day," says the chronicler known as Florence of Worcester, "he was buried in kingly style amid the bitter lamentations of all present." 

There were by now three prime contenders for the English throne—Duke William of Normandy, Earl Harold of Wessex, and King Harold Hardraada of Norway, whose ambitions symbolized the close connections which had bound Normandy, England, and Scandinavia together for generations.

Would the disputed kingdom be ruled by a native dynasty, leaving England to her insularity? Would she be linked to the Germanic north, detached from the main currents of European civilization? Or would she fall to the ruler of Latinized Normandy and be nourished by a cultural renascence? 

Momentous questions these, and men did well to ponder the celestial meaning—if they could only interpret it aright—of a "star with hair" which suddenly appeared in the skies. 

"On April 24 in this year [1066]," says Florence of Worcester, "a comet was seen not only in England but, it is said, all over the world, and it shone for seven days with an exceeding brightness." This was what we now know as Halley's comet—a once-in-75-years visitor due to return again in 1986. 

The Bayeux Tapestry portrays it with the Latin caption: "These men wonder at the star." According to the Norman chronicler William of Jumièges, "many thought that this portended a great change in some kingdom." Of course, they were right. 

On the very day the priests buried Edward the Confessor, Harold was crowned King of England in the new Abbey of Westminster, which had been consecrated only nine days before. His decisiveness reveals premeditation. Whether by a change of mind or under duress, Edward in the end, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, designated Harold as his heir. 

The quickness of Harold's act must have taken William by surprise, but the great feudal lords of Normandy soon pledged their support for an invasion of England to help their duke secure the throne. He lost no time in preparing for the tasks ahead.

"It would be tedious to tell in detail," says the chronicler William of Poitiers, "how by his prudent acts ships were made, arms and troops, provisions and other equipment assembled for war, and how the enthusiasm of the whole of Normandy was directed towards this enterprise."

William addressed an appeal to Rome, and the Pope sent him the "gift of a banner as a pledge of the support of St. Peter." William recruited his feudal levies from Normandy and his mercenaries from all parts of France, Flanders, and the Norman territories in southern Italy. He built a fleet.

By August the ships had assembled at the mouth of the River Dives. In early September they sailed to St. Valéry at the mouth of the Somme, whence an easterly wind could carry them across the Channel to the south coast of England 

In St. Valéry sur Somme, as in so many European cities, the street names of today preserve the history of long-dead yesterdays. The Quai du Romerel, for example, running part way through St. Valéry, derives its name from Rome Relais, meaning "the place where pilgrims stopped on the road to Rome." It once marked the water's edge.

On this street our hotel, a converted villa called the Relais Guillaume de Normandie, stands more or less where William moored his ships. From our window we watched sheep grazing on marshland that also lay under water in William's day. 

On the upper façade of an old warehouse facing the bay, we found a metal plaque that reads: "From this port in 1066 William of Normandy set out at the head of a fleet of 400 sail for the conquest of England."  

Another plaque on a nearby casino, where we had lunch, shows three fierce, helmeted figures in the prow of a ship bound for England.

Now we too were bound for England. For some three weeks we had pursued William into almost every nook and cranny of Normandy. At Le Touquet, where we were to catch our plane, we watched a violent sea churning the sands below our hotel window. Had we planned, like William, to cross the Channel by boat, we too would have had to wait.

While the north winds held the anxious William at St. Valéry, and Harold Godwinson kept watch in London, the startling news came that the Norwegian King Harold Hardraada had launched an invasion of northern England. Pushing up the Humber and the Ouse, he defeated the northern earls at Fulford near York on September 20, 1066. Hardraada occupied York, where the townfolk received him almost as a deliverer.

With extraordinary suddenness, Harold Godwinson marched north to meet this last Viking invasion of England. On September 25, 1066, he surprised and overwhelmed the Norwegian king, who lost his life in the Battle of Stamford Bridge on the Derwent. It was a stunning victory, incredible in its completeness. The world had known Hardraada from Palestine to Perth as one of the boldest warriors of the time.

But the encounter with the Norwegians had weakened the English forces. Now came a new and greater foe. The winds over the English Channel had shifted from north to easterly. Two days after Harold's victory at Stamford Bridge, the Norman fleet set sail.

"Thus with a favourable wind," says William of Poitiers, "they all reached Pevensey, and there without opposition they freely disembarked." It was September 28. 

When we crossed the Channel, the winds were less favorable; our plane arrived on time at Lydd, in Kent, in a dark drizzle. But the weather's gloom was quickly dispelled by Group Captain Ralph Ward and his friend Air Marshal Sir David Lee, who met us. 

Ralph Ward is in charge of the Nine Hundredth Anniversary Celebrations for the County Borough of Hastings. He drove us through Rye and beautifully kept little Winchelsea to his 600-year-old home, Stonelynk Farm, in Fairlight, just outside Hastings. We spent the night with Ralph and his wife Constance. Next morning they produced a car for us, and we set out to follow William around England.

After landing at Pevensey, William constructed a fortification, doubtless within the Roman walls, which then sat much closer to the sea than they do today. The Norman Conquest begins the medieval history of Pevensey Castle, which was fortified in 1587 against the Spanish Armada and again in 1940 against the Germans. The castle has yielded more than once to siege but never to assault. 

Jay and I climbed around its Roman walls and Norman keep, then drove down to the bay where William's ships first anchored. It was easy to find a parking area on the shore. I paid the required fee, and without looking at the yellow ticket I received in return, I handed it to Jay. She gave it back to me with a happy smile. It read, "William the Conqueror's Car Park, Pevensey Bay, Parking 2/-."

William himself did not park at Pevensey very long. He pushed quickly on to the port of Hastings and built another fort. The Bayeux Tapestry tells the story. His men dug a deep ditch and threw up a mound on the fortress hill. They planted a wooden palisade on the mound, making a castle of the motte-and-bailey" type—a mound and court. It was later rebuilt in stone. 

Jay and I spent a few days roaming around Hastings, a pleasant seaside resort. Our favorite spot was the high plateau of the castle grounds, more than half of which has fallen into the sea since the 11th century. Mayor D. W. Wilshin of Hastings pointed out a stone, mounted in the castle wall in 1961, that came from Falaise, William's birthplace. The citizens of Hastings had sent a stone to Falaise the year before to be set into a wall of the castle there, thus replacing the enmity of 900 years ago with the friendship of today.

William pillaged the countryside around Hastings to encourage Harold to attack him, for the Normans lacked adequate reserves and supplies for a long campaign in hostile country. He could ill afford to let weeks pass without a trial of arms.

Learning of the Norman invasion, Harold returned south with almost the speed of his northward march, arriving in London about October 6 and setting out for Hastings on the 11th. He would have done well to avoid contact with William's forces as long as he could. Time was his ally. But Harold, inspired by the success of his tactics at Stamford Bridge, wanted to surprise William and detach him from the Norman fleet at Hastings.

By forced marches, Harold drove his tired men the approximately 65 miles from Londo to the Sussex Downs in three days. He reached the ridge of Senlac, seven miles from Hastings, on Friday night, October 13. 

William of Poitiers notes that the English thus secured a position on higher ground than the Normans could possibly command in the area. But Harold's men were exhausted, and William's scouts were too vigilant for the invaders to be taken by surprise.

In the early-morning hours of Saturday, October 14, William rode out of Hastings with the Norman army and made for the top of Telham Hill. Across the valley, on the nearby height of Senlac, were massed the troops of Harold. Each side numbered some 7,000 men.

The fate of England hung in the balance as, in William of Poitiers' words, "the terrible sound of trumpets on both sides signalled the beginning of the battle."

The chronicler, a soldier-turned-priest who became the Conqueror's chaplain, supplies the best contemporary account of the battle other than the Bayeux Tapestry.

William "advanced in good order with the papal banner... borne aloft at the head of his troops. In the van he placed foot-soldiers equipped with arrows and bows; in the second rank came the more heavily armed infantry clad in hauberks; and finally came the squadrons of knights in the midst of whom he rode himself...."

Harold's soldiers "drew themselves up on foot," forming a wall of shields about 600 yards in length atop the ridge. The standard of the Wessex Golden Dragon and Harold's personal banner of the Fighting Man, emblazoned with a golden warrior, rose proudly above his soldiers, massed 10 to 12 deep.

William's infantry "provoked the English by raining death and wounds upon them with their missiles." Harold's soldiers "hurled back spears and javelins and weapons of all kinds together with axes and stones fastened to pieces of wood.... The shouts both of the Normans and of the barbarians were drowned in the clash of arms and by the cries of the dying, and for a long time the battle raged with the utmost fury." 

William's army had to advance uphill, over rough ground. The Breton knights and infantry, forming the left wing, struck the Saxon line first, flinging spears and stones. Then the Norman knights moved in with flashing swords. But they couldn't break the shield wall. The Saxons stood their ground, and "their weapons found easy passage through the shields and armour of their enemies." 

When the Breton ranks broke into disordered retreat, they exposed the Norman flank and endangered the whole army. The rumor spread that William had been killed. 

Seeing his forces disintegrate under the English attack, he rode down from his command post on Telham Hill into the battle, threw off his helmet, and rallied his forces. 

William's knights, inspired anew, turned and slashed at their disorganized pursuers. Others tore into the main body of Harold's army. Still the shield wall held, men so closely packed that the dead had no space to fall. 

William of Poitiers says that the duke's forces twice feigned retreat, and each time wheeled their horses around "and cut down their pursuers so that not one was left alive."  

At last the weary English line showed signs of breaking as the Normans "threw and struck and pierced."

The chronicler of Poitiers makes William the hero of the day: "Thrice his horse fell under him; thrice he leapt upon the ground; and thrice he quickly avenged the death of his steed... His sharp sword pierced shields, helmets and armour, and not a few felt the weight of his shield." 

William directed his archers to shoot high from a distance, so that the arrows would plummet down upon the heads of the English. At this point, apparently, Harold fell. A scene in the Bayeux Tapestry shows a warrior drawing an arrow from his eye and another, now usually identified as Harold, being struck down as a battle-ax falls from his hand. Harold, "stripped of all badges of honour," notes William of Poitiers, "could not be identified by his face, but only by certain marks on his body."

It was four o'clock in the afternoon. "The bloodstained battleground was covered with the flower of the youth and nobility of England." Harold lay dead among his housecarls. Fortune had favored William of Normandy; he had all but conquered England. 

William built Battle Abbey on the site of his victory. His church has long since disappeared, and the buildings now there, even those in ruins, all were built after his time. But the place is hallowed by one of the great events in history, and our minds and hearts were stirred as we walked over the grounds.

In the weeks that followed Hastings, William occupied Romney and Dover, Canterbury and Winchester. By the end of November he had received the submission of Sussex, Kent, and southern Hampshire.

Around London he cut a wide swath of devastation. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that at Berkhamsted "he was met by Archbishop Aldred [of York]... and all the chief men from London. And they submitted out of necessity after most damage had been done-and it was a great piece of folly that they had not done it earlier, since God would not make things better because of our sins."

William now entered London, apparently without difficulty. On Christmas Day, 1066, Archbishop Aldred "set the royal crown upon the duke's head," says William of Poitiers, "and led him to the throne in the presence of a great company of bishops and abbots assembled in the church of St. Peter the Apostle, which is graced with the tomb of King Edward." In the church of St. Peter—Westminster Abbey—the diminutive Matilda 17 months later also received her crown. 

William's coronation filled our thoughts as we entered Westminster Abbey. The church of William's time has been replaced by the beautiful structure we know today, abode of dead royalty and departed genius. Inside, the insistent voices of determined shepherds kept flocks of tourists on the move in a babel of English and foreign languages.

The scene reminded us of that Christmas Day nine centuries ago when those present were asked, according to custom, whether they would accept William as their king. Such a clamor of "yeas" broke out in English and French that the Norman cavalry stationed outside believed the English were assaulting William. Rashly loyal, they thought to draw off the supposed attackers by setting fire to the surrounding houses. Poor William, almost beside himself, lost his audience and was crowned in an empty church while chaos reigned outside. 

The Norman aristocracy displaced the Anglo-Saxon nobility, but the various grades of peasantry—free villagers, villeins, cottagers, slaves—survived apparently unchanged, working their weary way through life.

The chronicler William of Malmesbury cast a critical eye on both vanquished and victors. Some sixty years after the Conquest he looked back to that "fatal day for England" and drew these portraits: 

"The English at that time wore short garments, reaching to the mid-knee; they had their hair cropped, their beards shaven, their arms laden with gold bracelets, their skin adorned with punctured designs; they were wont to eat until they became surfeited and to drink until they were sick. These latter qualities they imparted to their conquerors....

"The Normans—that I may speak of them also—were at that time, as they are now, exceedingly particular in their dress, and delicate in their food, but not to excess. They are a race inured to war, and can hardly live without it, fierce in attacking their enemies, and when force fails, ready to use guile or to corrupt by bribery... They weigh treason by its chance of success, and change their opinions for money." 

With the Conquest, the use of English declined. Latin and French, serving church, state, and high society, influenced the English spoken in kitchen and countryside. But English, the language of a conquered people, would someday subdue the conquerors. There would always be an England. 

In London William constructed a wooden "castle." About eleven years later, in much the same place, the White Tower, first structure of the Tower of London, began to rise under the guidance of Bishop Gundulf of Rochester, one of the great builders of the age. Although time has effected many changes in the Tower, William is not entirely lost in its cavernous chambers. Jay and I sat for half an hour in the Chapel of St. John, which is still exactly as it was about 1080. The stone to build it was brought from Caen in Normandy. 

Much remained to be done after occupying London, and in time William would do it. He spent most of 1067 in Normandy but returned to England in December to continue the subjection of his newly won kingdom.

After an 18-day siege, the reluctant citizens of Exeter surrendered their red fortress on the volcanic hill of Rougemont, and William also gained Gloucester and Bristol. He marched north in 1068 and secured Warwick, Nottingham, and York, then swerved south to occupy Lincoln, Huntingdon, and Cambridge. But he had to go north again to suppress revolt in Durham and York. Until the day he died, William got little rest.

Raiding Danes and hostile Yorkshiremen did their best to destroy the Norman establishment north of the Humber in 1069. The Scots tried to help them. William's response was swift and terrible. His "harrying of the north" left famine and devastation behind him. Even the Norman writer Ordericus Vitalis could only regard the expedition of 1069-70 as a "barbarous homicide." 

We followed William's first northward march from Exeter to York, where we found ample reminders of the Conquest. The York "Shambles," the medieval butchers' quarter and now a street of shops, is mentioned in William's time. The western part of the cathedral crypt is early Norman.

At York William threw up two mottes, or mounds, on either side of the River Ouse. They still stand at each end of the modern Skeldergate Bridge. One of them is known as Baile Hill; built in eight days, it has lasted nine centuries. Clifford's Tower, built in the 13th century, stands on the other. 

As we looked at the row of houses along Baile Hill Terrace, facing William's motte and the medieval city wall, we wondered what the mound meant to the people who were spending their lives beside it.

Three of the local residents did not know what it was. The fourth, a piano tuner, was in harmony with history; he identified it.

Year after year William the Conqueror rushed back and forth across the Channel to meet crises in England and Normandy. He was trying to weld his duchy and kingdom into a single Anglo-Norman state. But enemies encircled him, and they increasingly acted in concert: Scots, Flemings, Angevins, Bretons, and, above all, French. 

When young King Philip I of France reached his majority, he began the basic policy—to last for generations—of assaulting Normandy with aid from Flanders and Anjou. For the last decade of William's life the French generally maintained the advantage over him. 

Misfortune now seemed to dog William's every step. His son Robert Curthose revolted more than once, carrying many of the younger generation with him. Witty and charming, vain and shallow, Robert was his mother's favorite. He caused some bickering between William and Matilda; otherwise their marriage seems to have been a happy one. 

William had troubles without end. In 1082 he fell out with his arrogant half brother Bishop Odo, now also Earl of Kent, and imprisoned him for five years in Normandy. 

On November 2, 1083, Queen Matilda died and was buried in Caen. William, "weeping most profusely for many days," says William of Malmesbury, "showed how keenly he felt her loss." 

In 1085 William desperately needed money and assurance of the loyalty of his subjects. The Danes were planning another great invasion of England (which never occurred) with help from continental allies. In the Domesday Book William acquired a detailed description of the landed resources of the kingdom for tax purposes, and in the Salisbury Oath of August, 1086, he received, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the allegiance of "all the people occupying land who were of any account over all England."

In the years that followed the Conquest, fewer than 200 Norman barons seem to have taken over the lands of more than 4,000 Anglo-Saxon lords. Land was the major form of wealth in that era. Let it never be thought that the Conquest was not profitable! 

William spent his happiest hours—and days and weeks—hunting, and in the England of today there is no more picturesque reminder of the Norman Conquest than the New Forest. In Hampshire he found tens of thousands of thinly settled acres which he took as a private hunting preserve. Not satisfied, he "afforested" additional large areas by evicting some 2,000 men, women, and children from about twenty villages and a dozen hamlets. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle states, "He preserved the harts and boars and loved the stags as much as if he were their father."

We joined the fast traffic from Salisbury to Lyndhurst and rode through the New Forest to the ruins of Beaulieu Abbey. Wild ponies ambling along the road brought many a car, including ours, to a stop, giving the drivers no choice but to enjoy. the open countryside.

Toward the end of 1086 William returned to Normandy, where King Philip as usual was brewing trouble. The following summer French troops, setting out from Mantes, invaded Normandy. William, now 60 years old and heavy with fat, launched an ambitious counteroffensive. It was his last campaign.

Taking Mantes by an unexpected assault upon the unwary defenders, William fired the town. As he picked his way through burning debris in the streets, we are told, his horse stumbled, throwing him against the front of his saddle and inflicting a fatal rupture. 

His followers carried him to Rouen. But the noise and heat of the city proved unendurable, so they took him to the priory of St. Gervais on a hill to the west of the city.

Half a century later Ordericus Vitalis represents the dying king as saying on his deathbed: "I tremble, my friends, when I reflect on the grievous sins which burden my conscience....I was bred to arms from my childhood, and am stained with the rivers of blood I have shed.... I direct my treasure to be given to the churches and the poor....I appoint no one my heir to the crown of England, but leave it to the disposal of the eternal Creator.... For I did not attain that high honor by hereditary right, but wrested it from the perjured... Harold in a desperate battle, with much effusion of human blood...."

Although William left the country "to the disposal of the eternal Creator," he took care to see that his second surviving son, William Rufus, succeeded him as king (1087-1100). Robert Curthose inherited the duchy of Normandy, went on the First Crusade, and finally lost his duchy in 1106 to his younger brother Henry, then also King of England. 

William the Conqueror died on Thursday, September 9, 1087, after the great bell in the cathedral church of St. Mary of Rouen had just struck Prime, the hour of sunrise. 

The members of his court quickly went their ways, wrote Ordericus. "The wealthiest of them mounted their horses and departed in haste to secure their property. But the inferior attendants, observing that their masters had disappeared, laid hands on the arms, the plate, the robes, the linen, and all the royal furniture, and leaving the corpse almost naked on the floor...they hastened away!"

Everything continued to go wrong, even at William's funeral. The procession bearing his body into Caen, where he had chosen to be buried in St. Étienne, was interrupted by the outbreak of a fire in the town. Then, when the proceedings were resumed, a certain Ascelin burst into the church, claiming that William had robbed him of the land on which the church stood. Inquiry revealed that Ascelin spoke the truth, and the bishops present bought from him the land in which to bury the royal Duke of Normandy.

The hardships of William's life were over, and so was our journey. Jay had become indefatigably attached to him during our seven weeks of wandering. When I wondered whether a front tire was leaking, she told me sadly that William's last years had been a courageous struggle against adversity. When I was sure we were going to miss the plane for our flight home, she wondered whether William's hair was really russet.

One may wonder much about William. Of his greatness there can be no question. 

Great men, great cities, and great nations supply the themes for great history. But history is the creative construct of the historian; it does not just happen. Where there is no historian, there is little history. 

William the Conqueror had been generous to the church, and in the next century its "clerks" were generous to him. They recorded his accomplishments in chronicles and helped preserve the memory of his deeds. It is as Master Wace reminds us in his rhymed chronicle of the Norman dukes:

All things to nothingness descend,  
Grow old and die and meet their end; 
Man dies, iron rusts, wood goes decayed,  
Towers fall, walls crumble, roses fade.... 
Nor long shall any name resound  
Beyond the grave, unless 't be found  
In some clerk's book; it is the pen  
Gives immortality to men.