Note 1055 — Chapter XV · THE NORMAN INVASION AND THE CAMPAIGN OF HASTINGS.[1055]

Throughout this Chapter, the Norman and English accounts have carefully to be compared, but it is from the Norman authorities that we have to draw most of our details. The English writers seem to have shrunk from dwelling at length on the great “memory of sorrow,” so that all their accounts are comparatively meagre. At this point also we lose the Abingdon Chronicle altogether, which ends with the Battle of Stamfordbridge. Among the Norman accounts, the first places belong to the Tapestry and to William of Poitiers. The Tapestry, which gave us no help during the period of negotiation, begins to be most minute as soon as we get to the beginning of actual military preparations, and it continues to be of primary importance down to the end of the Battle of Senlac. The high authority of William of Poitiers, as a contemporary and seemingly an eyewitness, is somewhat balanced by his constant strain of panegyric on William and by his no less constant sacrifice of chronological order to the demands of his rhetoric. Wace, the honest and painstaking inquirer of the next century, has been valuable before, and he becomes still more valuable now. We are now also reinforced by another important narrative on the Norman side, the “Carmen de Bello Hastingensi” by Guy, Bishop of Amiens (see above, p. 136), printed in Giles’ Scriptores Rerum Gestarum Willelmi Conquestoris, in the Chroniques Anglo-Normandes, and in the Monumenta Historica Britannica. This poem is referred to, and coupled with William of Poitiers, by William of Jumièges, or rather by his continuator (vii. 44); “Si quis verò pleniùs illa nôsse desiderat, librum Willelmi Pictavensis, Luxoviorum Archidiaconi, eadem gesta, sicut copiosè, ita eloquenti sermone affatim continentem, legat. Edidit præterea de eâdem materiâ opus non contemnendum Guido Episcopus Ambianensis, heroico metro exaratum.” Guy’s work is useful for the details of the voyage and the battle, and for some of the events after the battle. With these Norman accounts we have of course to compare the short narratives in our own Chronicles and in Florence; some particular facts of importance may also be gleaned from William of Malmesbury, from the Waltham writer De Inventione, and from others of the subsidiary authors.