Harold in Normandy: History and Romance

Summary

The year 1066 is certainly the most famous date in English history. And with good reason. Duke William of Normandy's victory over King Harold at Hastings on October 14th led to fundamental changes which shifted England's geo-political orientation and lay culture from Scandinavia to the Continent, revolutionised its social structure by entirely supplanting the ruling class, and sharply altered the development of its language. These traumatic consequences of the Norman Conquest led to profound and prolonged national reflection; the progressive reshaping of its memory supplied England with its most durable national political myth, the “Norman Yoke,” according to which William's victory had subjected a nation of free Englishmen, “to the combined forces of Popery and Absolutism!” Few military actions have such immediate, deep and such long-lasting consequences as the Battle of Hastings, and the impact of its memory has been further shaped and intensified by the astounding survival of a unique artefact, the Bayeux Tapestry. There is no comparable medieval event for which we possess an almost cinematic, contemporary record which is capable of transforming us into time-travelers, direct witnesses to dramatic scenes of life and death almost 1000 years ago.

Indeed, in the age of such older film epics as “El Cid” and now “Gladiator” it is something of a puzzle why no modern filmmaker has taken up the challenge to retell the Tapestry's deceptively simple story. However, by way of compensation, we have (at least) six historical novels which narrate the fatal tale of William and Harold:

(1) The earliest novel is, itself, now a kind of historical artefact, Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Harold, the Last of the Saxon Kings, first published in 1848 to enormous success and subsequently re-issued in numerous editions (both authorised and “un-”). Bulwer (1803–1873) was already an experienced writer of historical fiction having published The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), Rienzi (1835) and The Last of the Barons (1843). However, as we shall see, with Harold the highly-didactic “New Seriousness” practiced by Bulwer in his historical novels was aimed in a particularly urgent way at immediate political relevance.

(2) Bulwer's impact is probably also measured by the fact that the next novel (Isabelle) Hope Muntz's The Golden Warrior, did not appear until precisely one hundred years later in 1948 (London: Chatto & Windus; New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1949).