Harold Godwinson

• 1. Introduction

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  Harold Godwinson died on the 14th of October 1066, and with him died Anglo-Saxon England. He had been king for less than ten months, crowned on the 6th of January and killed in battle before the year was out. No other English monarch has held the throne for so brief and so violent a reign. What makes his story worth examining is not just the brevity but the improbability: Harold was not born to be king, was never formally designated an heir, and spent most of his life accumulating power in someone else's shadow. Yet in the final year of his life he fought two separate invasion forces, won a stunning victory in the north, and died facing a third enemy in the south. How a man climbs so high, so fast, and falls so completely in a single calendar year is the question this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. The Godwin Dynasty

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  Harold's father Godwin started from modest origins, the son of a man named Wulfnoth who was probably a thegn from Sussex. By backing the right king at the right moment, Godwin rose to become Earl of Wessex under King Cnut around 1018, and he never surrendered that position. He was one of only two earls to survive the entirety of Cnut's reign, a feat that required extraordinary political agility, including a willingness to switch allegiances when necessary.

  That agility had a dark side. In 1036, Godwin became entangled in the murder of Alfred Aetheling, half-brother of the future King Edward the Confessor. When Edward's predecessor Harthacnut came to the throne in 1040, Godwin's role in that killing put his position in danger. He secured his safety through an oath and a large gift to the new king. Two years later, when Harthacnut died in 1042, Godwin appears to have played a role as kingmaker, helping smooth Edward the Confessor onto the English throne.

  In 1045, Godwin reached the peak of his influence when Edward married Godwin's daughter Edith. It was around this same time that Harold, then about twenty-five years old, was appointed Earl of East Anglia, inheriting his father's gift for turning royal proximity into personal power. The family seat was the manor of Bosham on the South coast of England, a property Godwin had originally acquired from the Archbishop of Canterbury and which appears twice in the Bayeux Tapestry as Harold's residence.

• 3. Earl, Soldier, Rival

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  Harold's tenure as Earl of East Anglia drew him almost immediately into the complicated business of defending and extending Godwin family interests. Around the time of his appointment, he began a relationship with Edith the Fair, a woman who appears to have been the heiress to lands in Cambridgeshire, Suffolk, and Essex, all within his new earldom. The union was conducted in the form known as More danico, meaning "in the Danish manner," a type of marriage not sanctioned by the Church but accepted by most English laypeople. Any children born of such a union were considered legitimate under this custom, and Harold and Edith the Fair remained together for approximately twenty years.

  His elder brother Sweyn's removal from the picture in 1047, after Sweyn abducted the abbess of Leominster and was exiled, gave Harold more room. Sweyn's lands were divided between Harold and a cousin named Beorn. The following year, when Sweyn returned seeking a pardon, Harold and Beorn refused to restore any of those lands. Sweyn responded by taking Beorn hostage and killing him.

  In 1055, Harold led a military response against Welsh forces that had burned Hereford. By 1058, he was also named Earl of Hereford. His campaigns between 1062 and 1063 against Gruffydd ap Llywelyn, king of Wales, ended with Gruffydd's defeat and death. Harold was also growing into the role his father had held: the leading English opponent of Norman influence in the court of Edward the Confessor, a king who had spent more than twenty-five years in exile in Normandy before taking the throne.

• 4. The Journey to Normandy

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  In 1064, Harold was apparently shipwrecked at Ponthieu, in northern France, under circumstances that have never been fully resolved. Norman sources from the years immediately after the conquest claim Edward had already sent Robert of Jumièges, the Archbishop of Canterbury, to offer the succession to Duke William II of Normandy, and that Harold's voyage was made to swear fealty on the king's behalf. English and later Norman sources offer entirely different explanations: that Harold was trying to secure the release of family members held hostage since Godwin's exile in 1051, or that a storm simply blew him off course during a fishing and hunting trip along the English coast.

  What is generally agreed is that he left from Bosham, was blown across the English Channel, and was captured by Count Guy I of Ponthieu. The count took him as a hostage to the castle at Beaurain, 24.5 km up the River Canche from its mouth near what is now Le Touquet. William then arrived and ordered Guy to hand Harold over.

  Harold accompanied William on a campaign against Conan II, Duke of Brittany. Crossing past the abbey of Mont Saint-Michel, he is recorded as rescuing two of William's soldiers from quicksand. They chased Conan from Dol-de-Bretagne to Rennes, and finally to Dinan, where Conan surrendered the fortress keys at the point of a lance. William knighted Harold and presented him with weapons. Norman sources, including the Bayeux Tapestry, then record that Harold swore an oath on sacred relics to support William's claim to the English throne. The chronicler Orderic Vitalis described Harold as distinguished by his great size, strength, polished manners, and command of words, before adding a pointed question about what such gifts were worth without good faith.

• 5. Nine Days and a Crown

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  At the end of 1065, King Edward the Confessor fell into a coma without naming a successor. He died on the 5th of January 1066, according to the Vita Ædwardi Regis, having briefly regained consciousness and commended his widow and the kingdom to Harold's "protection." The exact meaning of that word was immediately contested. The Bayeux Tapestry, which Norman embroiderers made to tell the story in their favour, shows Edward simply pointing at a figure thought to represent Harold. The image is deliberately ambiguous.

  When the Witan, the council of English nobles, gathered the next day, they chose Harold as king. His coronation followed on the 6th of January 1066, most likely in Westminster Abbey, making him probably the first English monarch to be crowned there. The speed of the ceremony struck later Norman commentators as suspicious, evidence of a rushed usurpation. A more neutral explanation exists: all the great nobles of England were already assembled at Westminster for the feast of Epiphany.

  Norman disapproval had immediate consequences. William began planning an invasion within days of hearing the news, ordering the construction of roughly 700 warships and transport vessels at Dives-sur-Mer on the Normandy coast. His cause received crucial backing when Pope Alexander II formally declared William the rightful heir, after William argued that Harold had broken the oath sworn on sacred relics. Nobles who had been reluctant now flocked to William's banner. Harold, meanwhile, assembled his own forces on the Isle of Wight and waited for an invasion that did not come. After almost seven months, with provisions exhausted, he disbanded his troops on the 8th of September and returned to London.

• 6. Two Battles in Three Weeks

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  On the same day Harold disbanded his army, the invasion force of Harald Hardrada, King of Norway, accompanied by Harold's own estranged brother Tostig, landed at the mouth of the Tyne. Ten days later, on the 20th of September, Hardrada and Tostig defeated the English earls Edwin of Mercia and Morcar of Northumbria at the Battle of Fulford near York. Harold responded by marching his army north at extraordinary speed, covering the distance from London to Yorkshire in four days.

  On the 25th of September, he caught Hardrada by surprise at the Battle of Stamford Bridge and destroyed the invading force. Hardrada and Tostig were both killed. Before the battle, the chronicler Snorri Sturluson preserved a story, which the historian Edward Freeman called "plainly mythical," of a lone rider approaching the Norwegian force and offering Tostig his earldom back if he would turn against Hardrada. Tostig asked what Harold would give Hardrada in return. The rider replied: "Seven feet of English ground, as he is taller than other men." Tostig recognized the rider as Harold himself.

  William's fleet had sailed from Normandy on the 12th of September, but storms forced it to shelter at Saint-Valery-sur-Somme. On the 27th of September, two days after Stamford Bridge, the Normans set out again and landed the following day at Pevensey on the coast of East Sussex. Harold's army now marched 240 miles south to meet them. At Senlac Hill near Hastings, close to the present town of Battle, the two forces fought for nine hours on the 14th of October 1066. Harold was killed, along with his brothers Gyrth and Leofwine.

• 7. The Death That Would Not Stay Still

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  Harold's death became contested almost as soon as it happened. The Carmen de Hastingae Proelio, a Norman account said to have been written shortly after the battle by Guy, Bishop of Amiens, states that Harold was lanced and his body dismembered by four knights, probably including Duke William himself. Twelfth-century Anglo-Norman histories, including William of Malmesbury's Gesta Regum Anglorum and Henry of Huntingdon's Historia Anglorum, say he died from an arrow wound to the head. A still earlier source, Amatus of Montecassino's L'Ystoire de li Normant, written only twenty years after Hastings, contains the arrow-to-the-eye account, but this passage may be a fourteenth-century addition.

  The Bayeux Tapestry's famous scene, inscribed "Hic Harold Rex Interfectus Est" ("Here King Harold is killed"), shows a figure gripping an arrow in his eye. That depiction may not be original. Etchings made in the 1730s show the same figure holding a different object. Benoît's 1729 sketch records only a dotted line without fletching, while Bernard de Montfaucon's 1730 engraving shows something resembling a spear held overhand. Stitch marks suggesting a removed spear are still visible in the textile. The arrow in its current form first appears in 1816, when Charles Stothard was commissioned by the Society of Antiquaries of London to produce a copy of the tapestry, which had by then been damaged during the French Revolution. Stothard's reproduction filled in damaged sections with his own reconstructions.

  Burial presented its own complications. William of Poitiers records that Harold's body was so stripped of identifying marks it could not be recognized by his face; identification came from marks on his body alone. The contemporary account notes that Harold's mother offered the body's weight in gold for its return, and that William refused both the gold and the request, dismissing it as inappropriate payment for such "merchandise." Harold was said to have been buried by the seashore. His connection to Bosham, and the discovery of an Anglo-Saxon coffin there in 1954, containing the bones of a powerfully built man with traces of arthritis, led to later speculation about whether that was his resting place. A request to exhume the grave was refused by the Diocese of Chichester in December 2003. Legends also associated his burial with Waltham Abbey in Essex, a church he had refounded in 1060.

• 8. What Came After

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  Harold's defeat left his surviving family scattered across England and beyond. His son Ulf was held in prison and not released until 1087, when King William lay dying and freed several of his long-held captives. Ulf was knighted by William's son Robert Curthose and then vanished from the historical record. Two of Harold's other sons, Godwine and Edmund, launched invasions of England in 1068 and 1069 with the support of Diarmait mac Máel na mBó, High King of Ireland, but were defeated at the Battle of Northam in Devon in 1069. In 1068, Diarmait presented another Irish king with Harold's battle standard.

  Harold's church marriage, conducted in about January 1066 to Ealdgyth, daughter of Earl Ælfgar and widow of the Welsh prince Gruffydd ap Llywelyn, whom Harold had killed in battle three years earlier, left its own complicated aftermath. When Harold died at Hastings, Ealdgyth was pregnant. Her brothers, the northern earls Edwin of Mercia and Morcar of Northumbria, collected her from London and took her to Chester. What happened to her afterward is unknown. Stories circulated that Harold himself had not died at Hastings at all, that he had fled, or that he had lived out his days as a hermit at Chester or Canterbury. The Vita Haroldi was among the texts that kept that possibility alive. Whether the stories expressed genuine doubt or something closer to grief is a question those texts do not answer.