The Man Behind the Bayeux Tapestry Read online

  • Contents •

  Title Page

  Foreword

  Acknowledgements

  1 Odo de Conteville

  2 Duke Robert ‘the Magnificent’

  3 The Boy Bishop and Bayeux

  4 The Duke Becomes a King

  5 Bishop Odo and the Bayeux Tapestry

  6 ‘A Second King in England’

  7 Odo the Pontiff – A Step Too Far

  8 ‘The Bishop Abandoned the Dignity That He Had in This Land’

  9 ‘God Wills It’ – Odo’s Last Expedition

  Bibliography

  Plate Section

  Copyright

  • Foreword •

  Odo of Conteville was a larger than life character, who is best known for his dashing appearance on the Bayeux Tapestry as a mounted cleric waving a baton at the height of the Battle of Hastings. In older text books the bishop is frequently characterised in terms of illegally obtaining land from English monastic houses and of rebelling against the king. Generally he is portrayed as a not so loveable rogue, who typified the worst excesses of the Norman conquerors. In recent decades the work of David Bates and others has done much to redress the balance of opinion about Odo amongst historians, but the popular impression of William the Conqueror’s half-brother still remains largely a narrow and negative one.

  I have spent most of my life working within extra-mural departments, whose task was to make scholarship generated largely within universities, accessible to the world outside. The aim of this book is just that, to try to make Bishop Odo’s extraordinary life-story known to a wider audience. In the past I could have anticipated that my book would find its way into the book boxes of the lifelong-learning classes held in towns and villages throughout the country. Sadly such commendable educational activity now appears somewhat archaic and is indeed itself largely historical in character. It would be preposterous for me to try to enlist Odo as a prescient supporter of the great extra-mural tradition, but it should be remembered that he was far from being a loutish philistine. The bishop recognised the value of education and the arts and amongst his less well-known activities was his generous patronage of both.

  Trevor Rowley

  Appleton (one of Bishop Odo’s estates recorded in Domesday Book), Oxfordshire, 30 November 2012

  • Acknowledgements •

  Thanks are due to those many people who encouraged me to write this book and have helped with information, ideas, typing, translating, editing and drawing. Notably Richard Allen, Pat Combs, Susannah Dyer, Linda Kent, Francoise Laval, Tony Morris, Richard Rowley, Lindsey Smith, Alison Wilkinson snd my wife Jane Rowley.

  Thanks are also due to the following individuals and organisations for their kind permission to reproduce illustrations: English Heritage (colour plates 11, 23 and 25, and figure 42), Francoise Laval (colour plate 10), and Alison Wilkinson (figures 4, 11, 22, 36, 41 and 51).

  1

  • Odo de Conteville •

  The name of Odo is one which will be found constantly recurring in this history, from the day when his bishop’s staff and warrior’s mace were so successfully wielded against the defenders of England, till the day when he went forth to wield the same weapons against the misbelievers in the East and found in his road a tomb, far from the heavy pillars and massive arches of his own Bayeux, among the light and gorgeous enrichments with which the conquered Saracen knew how to adorn the palaces and churches of the Norman lords of Palermo.

  So wrote the venerable Victorian historian, Edward Augustus Freeman in his magisterial account of the History of the Norman Conquest (1874–78, 210).

  Odo de Conteville, whose name also appears in the form of Odon, Eudo and Eudes, was born in around 1030 in Normandy. He was the half-brother of William the Conqueror and, as Freeman proclaims, Odo’s name reverberates throughout the narrative of Anglo-Norman history in the eleventh century. He became Bishop of Bayeux while still in his teens, a position he was to hold until his death. He helped plan the invasion and participated in the Battle of Hastings and the subsequent Conquest of England. He became Earl of Kent with responsibility for the defence of south-east England; he was regent to King William from time to time on the king’s frequent visits to Normandy. Odo gained land legally and illegally after the Conquest and his English estates and wealth were second only to the Conqueror’s. He was responsible for the building and consecration of a new cathedral at Bayeux. He developed a powerful cathedral chapter which nurtured many leading figures among the Anglo-French clergy. He sponsored artists, musicians and poets and is widely believed to have been responsible for the making of the Bayeux Tapestry. In 1082 he raised a private army in England with the intention of acquiring the papacy, for which he was arrested and imprisoned for four years by King William. On his release he almost immediately rebelled against the new king, William Rufus, and as a consequence was permanently banished from England. In 1096 he joined Duke Robert Curthose’s contingent leaving Normandy on the First Crusade and died a natural death in Palermo, Sicily, early in 1097. These are the compelling headlines for a life that touched on almost every aspect of the Anglo-Norman story in the eleventh century.

  • The Making of Normandy •

  The Duchy of Normandy was barely a century old when Odo was born, and its rulers had only called themselves dukes for a few decades. The duchy had been carved out of Neustria, a post-Romano-Gallic territory of fluctuating dimensions lying between and including the Seine and the Loire valleys. Neustria originated in the Merovingian fifth century, but by AD 900 it had been moulded to create a buffer territory of the decaying Western Carolingian Empire. In the mid-ninth century, Charles the Bald, King of the Western Franks had carved Maine and Angers out of Neustria in order to confront the Bretons, who at that time were the most serious threat to the Western Franks. Towards the end of the ninth century it was the Vikings who posed the most danger, and the fertile river estuaries of western France, notably, the Loire, Seine and Somme, provided Viking attackers with ready access to inland regions. Pillage and plunder in the Seine Valley in the late ninth century was followed by permanent Scandinavian settlements and eventually by the acquisition of territory in the tenth. Short-lived Viking enclaves were also established in the estuaries of the Loire and the Rhine, but it was only the Northmanni in the Seine Valley who were able to create a more permanent political entity on mainland Europe.

  Although the detailed history of Normandy’s origins is far from clear, the traditional story is that in 911, Charles the Simple, King of the West Franks ceded an area of the Seine Valley around Rouen to a Viking warlord called Rollo. This territory, which coincided with the old Frankish diocese of Rouen, was granted to the Northmanni in a treaty signed at St-Clair-sur-Epte on the eastern boundary of what was to become Normandy. Reputedly, Rollo converted to Christianity in return for defending the Seine Valley against further Viking attacks. Rollo, known by the title of Count of Rouen, and his son, William Longsword, acquired overlordship of most of the rest of the geographical area that became the Duchy of Normandy during the next thirty years.

  1 Map showing the dates at which land was ceded from the Western Empire to the dukes of Normandy. Ducal authority did not operate fully in the whole of the duchy until the eleventh century. After the Museum of Normandy, Caen

  It is probable that the Franks did not view Normandy as a permanent creation, and when in 921 an attempt by the Western Franks to bring the Normans to heel failed, a network of semi-independent seigneuries was established to act as a buffer, the most notable of which was Bellême, to the south of the duchy. During the later tenth century these territories drifted under Norman influence, although eventually they were to pose serious probl
ems for the Norman dukes (Dunbabin 1985, 66–7). By the early eleventh century the duchy had begun to resemble its neighbours in northern and western France in many ways, but it had still not fully recovered from the physical and cultural damage inflicted by the Vikings and was still in the process of acquiring the military, governmental and artistic features that were to form its most distinguishing characteristics. Odo’s story was an integral part of a larger narrative about a territory that was still in the process of repairing and re-creating itself. Although Normandy was recognised as being under ducal overlordship in the late tenth century, the duke’s authority did not necessarily extend throughout the whole territory. There were semi-autonomous warlords, operating in the west in particular, until the early eleventh century and it was not until the reign of Richard II (996–1026) that Normandy became a largely unified duchy.

  The Duchy of Normandy was a geographically diverse province, covering a land area about a third larger than Wales. Despite this diversity, the administrative organisation and regional system of laws imposed by the Norman dukes gave the duchy considerable coherence and the people of Normandy a sense of distinctiveness (Flatrès 1977, 313). Normandy consists of geological structures that become younger moving from west to east; in this respect, it provides a mirror image of the geology of the southern coastal areas of England. The sandstones, granites and primary schist of the Armorican Massif in the area known as the Cotentin match the geological complexion of south-western England. The Secondary and Tertiary era strata of clays, limestone and chalks which belong to the geological formation of the Paris Basin can be matched in Dorset, Hampshire and Sussex.

  Geographically, it has been conventional to divide the duchy into two regions: Upper (Haute) and Lower (Basse) Normandy. Upper Normandy lies to the north-west of the Paris Basin and consists of an elevated Cretaceous chalk plateau lying at an average height of 130m above sea level. The Seine cuts through the chalk, giving characteristically steep cliffs to the north of the river and more gentle undulating escarpments to the south. The valleys of the Seine and its principal Norman tributaries, the Risle and the Epte, have broad alluvial terraces which provided fertile locations for Frankish monasteries such as St Wandrille, Jumièges and St Ouen, founded from the sixth century onwards. Odo essentially belonged to Lower Normandy: he was born there, and while in Normandy spent most of his time there as bishop, only occasionally venturing to Rouen and Upper Normandy on ducal business.

  Lower Normandy lies to the south-west of the Seine, sharing some of the geological and geographical characteristics with neighbouring Brittany. In the east it consists of a narrow band of Jurassic limestone, running from Caen through Falaise to Alençon. This is generically known as Caen stone, which is a versatile and attractive building material used for cathedrals, abbeys, castles and parish churches throughout the duchy; Caen limestone was also imported into England after the Norman Conquest. Beyond this, to the west, are older granites and sandstones making up Armorican Normandy and the Cotentin Peninsula. The southern frontier of Normandy lies to the south of a forest belt which follows a quartzite crest of bocage upland running from Domfront to Avalois.

  The administrative divisions within the Duchy of Normandy incorporated earlier Gallo-Roman and Carolingian elements, particularly in the territorial divisions of the Church. Rouen was the capital and by far the most important town of the province, as its predecessor Rotomagus had been of the Romano-Gallic region of the Veliocasses. It was also the diocesan centre in late Roman times and from the eighth century the seat of an archbishop. Rouen clerics, keepers of the Gallo-Roman tradition, argued that the dukes of Normandy should extend their dominion to the borders of the ecclesiastical province of Rouen, the former Lugdunensis secunda. In the south-east the ducal boundaries extended beyond the diocesan border after they had conquered the lands of the house of Bellême. There are a number of ancient administrative units (pays) in the province of Normandy – Bessin, Cotentin, Hiémois, Lieuvin and Avranchin – which can be traced back through the medieval dioceses to Gallo-Roman civitates and partly survive in the administrative structure of the region today (Flatrès 1977). The area known as the Bessin coincides with the territory of the Badiocassi, which lies between the rivers Orne and Vire in the department of Calvados.

  2 The ecclesiastical province of Rouen in the eleventh century. After Neveux 1995, 16

  • Bayeux and its Diocese •

  By the year AD 1000 each of the seven dioceses of Normandy had a bishop for the first time since the Vikings had disrupted the ecclesiastical organisation of the region. Even then, not all the bishops were able to reside within their own diocese, and although several bishops were appointed, they did not live in Bayeux until the early eleventh century. Odo’s immediate predecessor, Bishop Hugh (1015–49), was the first post-Viking prelate to reside in Bayeux. Even then, the shifting power of Norman barons meant that a constant watch had to be kept on areas of instability. Odo’s appointment at Bayeux was made in order to extend ducal control to the west of the duchy by re-establishing the Church and its institutions as powerful aids to and allies of government, as had been the practice in the Carolingian world.

  3 Pre-1789 parishes around Bayeux. The circular configuration of boundaries around Bayeux probably reflect defence obligations dating from the Carolingian era.

  Bayeux had been a Gallo-Roman town, initially called Augustodurum and later Noviomagus Badiocassium after the local tribe, the Badiocassi. It lay on a road running from Rouen to the northern coastline of the Cotentin Peninsula, and was considered the second town of the duchy, until Duke William developed Caen as an alternative to Rouen. Fortified stone towers were recorded at Bayeux in the twelfth century and evidence of a Romano-Gallic theatre, the praetorium, public and private bathhouses, and a temple on the site of the cathedral have been uncovered (Neveux 1997). Bayeux was the reputed birthplace of several early Frankish saints, notably St Evroul (517–96), St Evremond (d. c. 720), St Marcouf (b. c. 500) and St Aquilinus (d. 695). During Odo’s lifetime, the city was largely contained within the Roman walls, which were in the form of a regular square, following the lines of the original Romano-Gallic castrum. The regular grid pattern of roads had largely been broken up, but the rue St Martin which entered at the St Martin gate in the north-east and exited at the St André gate in the north-west was the main through road. It is still the main east–west road of central Bayeux today.

  According to tradition, before he became the first duke of Normandy, Rollo is said to have destroyed Bayeux in the 890s and carried off Poppa, daughter of Berenger, the Frankish Count of Bayeux. Despite this, Bayeux was a town which retained its strong links to the early Viking rulers of Normandy – Rollo’s son, William Longsword, was born here and Richard I was declared duke in Bayeux as well as in Rouen. During the tenth century Bayeux had a chequered history, often operating outside the control of the duke based in Rouen. For example, in the 940s the city was under the control of an independent, pagan Viking lord, Harold, and it appears that paganism was still common in the Bessin at that late date (Herrick, 92). Duke Richard I built a castle here in the late tenth century in the south-west corner of the walled town in an attempt to assert his authority. Although it was portrayed as an earth and timber motte and bailey on the Bayeux Tapestry, it was almost certainly built of stone.

  The diocese of Bayeux was made up of the territories of the Baiocasses, centred on Bayeux (Augustodurum), and the Viducasses, based on Araegenua (Vieux-la-Romaine), 5km to the south-west of Caen. The diocesan boundaries were largely defined by rivers and streams or former water channels. To the west, the boundary ran south from the estuary of the River Vire, through Isigny to Vire. It then picked up the Égrenne stream as far as Beauchêne and followed the Halouze stream before cutting north-east to join the Rouvre, a tributary of the River Orne. The border then followed the Laizon to join the River Dives to the north of St-Pierre-sur-Dives, whence it ran northwards following the Dives to its estuary at Dives-sur-Mer. There was a detached
portion of the diocese at Cambremer, which lay within the diocese of Lisieux. Several churches dedicated to St Vigor in this separate unit suggest that it was an area converted by Vigor in the sixth century. A second, larger, detached portion of Bayeux diocese, St-Mère-Église, lay in the Coutances diocese to the west of the River Vire in the Cotentin, to the north of Carentan. Conversely, a detached portion of the diocese of Rouen lay within Bayeux diocese at Laize-la-Ville; while Lisieux held a portion at Nonant on the River Aure, where the abbey of Mondaye was built in the twelfth century. Such detached units may have originated as personal possessions of individual bishops that were incorporated under their administration as diocesan boundaries were established. St-Mère-Église could, however, have also been an outlier of early Christianity during the conversion of the sixth century. There is a spring behind the church at St Mère dedicated to the Celtic saint Mewan or Méon of Brittany. Reputedly, St Méon and his godson St Austell followed St Samson to Brittany in the sixth century (Farmer 1987; Neveux 1995, 13–18).

  4 The Diocese of Bayeux in the eleventh century. After Allen

  • Odo’s Character •

  Odo was an enigma even to near contemporary chroniclers such as Orderic Vitalis, writing a few decades after the bishop’s death. Orderic portrayed Odo as eloquent, generous, courtly and ambitious and ‘a slave to worldly trivialities’. Orderic repeatedly links the phrase ‘the secular’ with Odo – eating, drinking, fighting and loving. He was described as a mixture of virtues and vices and later, it was the vices that were emphasised. Added to the cartoon-like depiction of the battling bishop on the Bayeux Tapestry, this created a somewhat roguish and dissolute image, which was pounced on and amplified by later historians. Two episodes in particular have been used to demonstrate Odo’s reprehensible character, firstly his treatment of the English and their lands after the Conquest and his role in the rebellion against William Rufus. It was not until the later twentieth century that a more balanced account of the bishop and his deeds was written; when it was pointed out that his behaviour was no better and no worse than many of his contemporaries, including fellow churchmen (Bates 1975). ‘He was regarded at Bayeux as a good bishop and his activities in England, while undoubtedly at times oppressive and tyrannical, have sometimes been too severely censured because overmuch attention has been given to the testimony of those that suffered at his hands’ (Bates 2004–11). He spent large sums of money on the patronage of churches and monasteries as well as on the education and training of clerks for secular and religious positions.