The Man Behind the Bayeux Tapestry E-Book

Trevor Rowley

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Odo of Conteville, the younger half-brother of William the Conqueror, was ordained Bishop of Bayeux while still in his teens. A larger than life character, he is best known for commissioning the Bayeaux Tapestry, in which he makes a dashing appearance at the height of the Battle of Hastings. He also played a pivotal role in the planning and implementation of the Conquest of England, after which, as Earl of Kent, he was second only to William in wealth and power. The popular impression of Odo is of a not so loveable rogue, who typified the worst excesses of the Norman conquerors. He was the first Chief Justice of England and on occasion also acted as regent when the king was in Normandy. After allegedly defrauding both Crown and Church, however, Odo was disgraced and his plans to raise an unauthorised army for a campaign in Italy, possibly in order to gain the papacy, saw him imprisoned for five years. He was released by the dying William in 1087, but soon rebelled against the new king, his nephew William Rufus. Yet Odo 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's book is the first full-length biography of Odo, which also seeks to redress this balance and to make Bishop Odo's extraordinary life story known.

Leseprobe

• 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 problems 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.

Much attention has been paid to the apparent incongruity between Odo the bishop and Odo the secular lord. This tension becomes particularly obvious from the Battle of Hastings onwards, when Odo assumes the role of a colonial baron and is often harsh in his dealings with the English. Such apparent conflicts of interest were common during the early medieval period, but those involved had no trouble in operating successfully within both spheres. Characteristically, Odo’s own seal shows him as a bishop in clerical dress on one side and as a mounted earl in battledress on the other (colour fig 1). However, he does not seem to have been particularly pious and spent little time on doctrinal studies. ‘Odo found the early Cistercian and Savignac literal interpretation of the Rule of St Benedict and emphasis on manual work disturbing’ (Bates 1975). Occasionally we find references to his piety, as at St Albans Abbey, where Odo was remembered in the list of benefactors for having returned three hides of land ‘for the sake of his soul’ (Cownie 1998, 98), but this was a standard clause in such documents.

Orderic was living at a time when there was increased emphasis on the spiritual requirements of the religious life and was generally unsympathetic towards churchmen who meddled in politics (Bates 1975, 2). Hence Orderic’s writing combines admiration and censure in his account of Odo’s life. Unfortunately it is the censure that has tended to be amplified over the centuries and which often prompts a negative kneejerk reaction to the very mention of Odo’s name.

As for his personal life, it is known that he kept a mistress and that they had a son, John, who was born in around 1080. Orderic regretted that, ‘Sometimes the spirit triumphed in him [Odo] to good ends, but on other occasions the flesh overcame the spirit with evil consequences. Yielding to the weakness of the flesh he had a son named John’, who served Henry I and ‘is renowned there for his ready speech and great integrity’. We hear of John from an incident where he brought the news of the death of Henry’s nephew William ‘Clito’, Count of Flanders to him in 1128 (OV, iii, 264). Descendants of Odo continued to play an important governmental role in Normandy and Richard du Hommet, Constable of Normandy under Henry 11, was Odo’s great-grandson (Power 2002, 76).

In the eleventh century, clergy, even bishops, were known for keeping mistresses. Orderic Vitalis recorded that Robert; Archbishop of Rouen (d. 1037) had a wife called Herleva, whom the bishop claimed he took in his capacity as count. He was also accused of selling church treasures in order to buy women. Orderic observed that ‘the practice of celibacy among the clergy was so relaxed that not only priests but even bishops freely shared their beds with concubines and openly boasted of their numerous progeny’ (OV, v, 121). Such behaviour became increasingly difficult to defend as the eleventh century progressed and at the Council of Lisieux in 1064 clerical marriages were prohibited in Normandy. Nevertheless, the situation remained unresolved until the Lateran Councils of 1123 and 1139, which ruled definitively against such unions. Part of William’s case for the invasion of England was the need to reform the English Church, which was accused of pluralism, concubinage and simony as well as tolerating worldly prelates. William’s own Church in Normandy as represented by Odo was vulnerable on this issue and the emissaries that went to persuade Pope Alexander II of the validity of the Norman cause had a difficult time. The pope eventually agreed that the campaign against England could be waged as a Holy War, according to William of Poitiers.

In keeping with the times in which he lived, Odo’s brand of Christianity was muscular in nature, with little room for compassion. This was illustrated by an anecdote related by the cleric Lanfranc where Odo had condemned a man, who had killed one of his stags, to wear fetters permanently. The man became exceptionally pious and the sound of his rattling chains became a public symbol of sanctity, until after two years his chains fell off as he prayed prostrate before the altar of the Holy Cross (Cowdrey, 106). Odo along with his fellow Norman bishops is known to have issued anathemas, calling upon God to smite his foes with ‘eternal malediction’ (Tabuteau 1988, 207). It also appears that Odo preached the virtues of the invasion from his pulpit in Bayeux in order to increase the size of his own contingent in the invading force. At Hastings along with other churchmen he exhorted the Norman troops to destroy their English opponents. According to Odo a leader ‘should be gentle as a lamb to good men and to the obedient and humble, but as harsh as a lion to law breakers’ (OV, viii, 151).

• Literary Sources •

The writing of secular history was a relatively new concept in eleventh-century Western Europe. After the Conquest of England several chronicles were written, both in Normandy and in England: some were specifically about King William and the Conquest of England, others were more ambitious historical surveys. It is from these accounts that historians have largely gathered their ideas about and opinions of William, King Harold, Bishop Odo and the other principal players in the Anglo-Norman world of the eleventh century. None of these accounts can be regarded as totally accurate, and none was written with a view to producing objective history.

Perhaps because of his double fall from power there is no contemporary ‘Life of Odo’, and none of his letters survive. There is a laudatory poem, written by Serlo, one of the Bayeux Cathedral canons, that simply expresses pleasure that Odo has been released from prison. One of the earliest surviving sources is the Gesta Guillelmi II ducis Normannorum et regis Anglorum (Deeds of Duke William) by William of Poitiers (c. 1020–90), written in the early 1070s (Davis and Chibnall 1998). William was a native of Normandy who studied in Poitiers before returning to become a chaplain to Duke William and then archdeacon in the diocese of Lisieux. After the Conquest he also became a canon of the church of St Martin in Dover. William’s account is at times cloyingly sycophantic to his hero, William the Conqueror, but is important for the detail it contains, much of it derived from personal experience. It is possible that William of Poitiers and Odo were associated in some way and there is a suggestion that Odo commissioned him to write the Gesta. William depicts Odo as ‘uniquely and most steadfastly loyal to the king, from whom he had received great honours and hoped to get still more’ (GG 166), so it was clearly written before Odo’s fall from grace in 1082.

Another early history was the Gesta Normannorum Ducum by William of Jumièges (1026–70), written about 1070. William was a monk at the abbey of Jumièges; his account was based on an earlier history of the Normans written by Dudo of St Quentin. Dudo’s work, Historia Normannorum (1015–30) was revised and eventually updated to 1070 by William of Jumièges, possibly at the command of William the Conqueror (Christiansen 1998). This Gesta was later expanded again by the twelfth-century chroniclers Orderic Vitalis and Robert of Torigni (Van Houts 1995). William has little more to add about Odo, but his account of the Battle of Hastings is similar in its details to those depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry. Another account, believed by many to be contemporary with the Battle of Hastings, is the Carmen de Hastingae Proelio (Song of the Battle of Hastings) (Barlow 1999). The Proelio is attributed to Bishop Guy of Amiens, uncle to Guy of Ponthieu who figures in the early stages of the Bayeux Tapestry, capturing Harold Godwinson on his arrival on French soil in 1064. Odo does not feature at all in the Proelio, but it is important in his story because this omission contrasts revealingly with the Tapestry, where Odo plays a leading role. The poem is also thought to be one of very few versions to provide a detailed non-Norman version of events.

Two later accounts are of particular interest: the Historia Ecclesiastica (History of the Church) by Orderic Vitalis (Chibnall 1968–80) and the Roman de Rou (History of Rollo) by Wace (Burgess 2004). Orderic was born in Shropshire in 1075 to a Norman father and an English mother; when he was ten he was sent to the monastery of St-Evroul-en-Ouche in Normandy, where he spent the rest of his life. His narrative started off as a history of his monastery, but developed into a general history of his age, which he wrote between around 1110 and 1141. Orderic was well informed and a vivid narrator; the range, variety and volume of his account give his history a particular importance. Orderic’s perceptive, if often slanted, and his graphic character sketch of Odo has remained with him over the centuries. His attitude to Bishop Odo was ambivalent, torn perhaps between the early praise heaped upon him by William of Poitiers and later accounts of his various calumnies, and which would have been in circulation when Orderic was writing and painted Odo in a very different light. On the one hand, he is described as ‘a man of eloquence and statesmanship’; on the other, he was ‘frivolous and ambitious’. Orderic seemed on occasion to despair of his subject, ‘What shall I say of Odo, bishop of Bayeux …? In this man it seems to me, vices were mingled with virtues, but he was given more to worldly affairs than to spiritual contemplation.’

Wace of Bayeux (c. 1115–c. 1183) was a poet, born in Jersey and brought up in Normandy, who ended his career as a canon of Bayeux Cathedral. His history of the dukes of Normandy started with Rollo and ended with Robert Curthose’s defeat at the Battle of Tinchebrai (1106), and appears to have been written between 1160 and the mid-1170s. Wace’s history provides details not available elsewhere, in particular, concerning Odo’s actions during the Battle of Hastings. Like the other chroniclers, Wace used earlier sources to compose his history, one of which seems to have been the Bayeux Tapestry, which he would have known from his time in the cathedral chapter at Bayeux. Like Orderic Vitalis, Wace paints both sides of Odo’s character – as the hero during the Battle of Hastings and as the traitor in 1082.

Of all the contemporary accounts, it is the Bayeux Tapestry which has had by far the biggest impact on the general perception of Odo and of the Norman Conquest as a whole. The Tapestry provides us with a pictorial depiction of the Norman Conquest, often imparting detailed information not available from any other source. It will probably never be absolutely certain who commissioned the Tapestry, but, despite ingenious arguments for a range of other possible sponsors, Bishop Odo remains the clear front-runner in any wager (for recent research into the Tapestry, see Foys et al. 2009; Lewis et al. 2011).

There are also a number of English accounts of the Norman Conquest which contain information about Odo, most notably, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (Whitelock et al. 1961). The Chronicle often covers events tersely, as in its description of Odo as regent, ‘the foremost man after the King, and he had an earldom in England’; but on other occasions, such as Odo’s revolt in 1088, it provides more details than other accounts. There are several twelfth-century English chronicles, the most relevant of which is that of John of Worcester (d. c. 1140), formerly attributed to the monk Florence of Worcester (Darlington and McGurk 1995 and 1998). John’s account provides a partisan English account of the Conquest, particularly, details of Odo and the 1088 revolt.

Other English sources include William of Malmesbury’s Deeds of the Kings of England (c. 1125–27), which not only includes references to Odo but also provides valuable shrewd observations about the bishop’s contemporaries (Mynors et al. 1998; Winterbottom & Thomson 2002). Eadmer, a monk at Christ Church, Canterbury, wrote a History of Recent Events in England, which covers the period between around 1066 and 1122 and provides a conventional pen portrait of the bishop and a long account of the Penenden Heath trial (Bosanquet 1964), where Odo was accused of purloining monastic estates, particularly those of Christ Church, Canterbury. Henry of Huntingdon (c. 1088–c. 1154), in his History of the English People, again records Odo’s role in the 1088 rebellion (Greenway 1996).

There are numerous documents resulting from Odo’s work as Bishop of Bayeux, Earl of Kent and regent, but these are ‘dry, often difficult to use, and of little intimate significance’ (Bates 1975) and have to be carefully sieved to reveal anything of Odo’s character. Domesday Book (c. 1086) provides a great wealth of information about Odo as a magnate, as a deliverer of English lands to Normans and as an appropriator of English estates, but a definitive account of Odo’s English lands remains to be written.

Surprisingly, there is no modern biography of this extraordinary man, but David Bates has been responsible for the revision of opinions about the bishop. In his doctoral thesis and a series of articles Bates has produced comprehensive accounts of Odo’s life, which have established a much more balanced and sympathetic interpretation of the bishop’s activities (Bates 1970, Bates 1975 and Bates 2004–11).

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• Duke Robert ‘the Magnificent’ •

The story of Odo is inextricably linked to that of his half-brother, William. Without that fraternal relationship he would have probably been a minor lord of Lower Normandy. Odo’s dramatic achievements mirror those of his brother and his principal failure was caused by the breaking of the trust that William had placed in him. Between 1050 and 1082 the two brothers worked together; firstly, to build Normandy and the Norman Church, and after 1066 to conquer, pacify and rule England. For the final four years of William’s life, Odo was imprisoned and it is unlikely that the two men met during that time.

William the Conqueror was born in 1027/28; his father was Duke Robert I, called ‘the Magnificent’, allegedly because of his generosity in dispensing treasures when on pilgrimage. William’s mother was Herleva, the duke’s mistress, who, within a few years of William’s birth, married and had two more sons, one of whom was Odo. William became Duke of Normandy in 1035 on the death of his father and Odo’s trajectory to the summit of Anglo-Norman society had started.

• Duke Robert I and Herleva •

On the death of his father, Duke Richard II (996–1026), Robert’s elder brother, Richard, became duke, while Robert was made Count of Hiémois, a wooded region straddling the dioceses of Bayeux and Séez, as his share of the inheritance. Such divisions of territory echoed the arrangements of the Frankish era, when on the death of a king the empire was divided between all male heirs. Within a year, Duke Richard III died and Robert became duke. There were rumours that Robert had poisoned his elder brother, which resulted in his acquiring an alternative nickname – le Diable (the Devil). Subsequently, Robert’s time as duke (1027–35) was characterised by the extension of the power and land of a number of baronial families, and he also made clerical enemies by plundering Church property. The Burgundian chronicler Hugh of Flavigny claimed that the duchy was ‘debauched with anarchy’ under Robert’s rule (Bates 1982, 100). Nevertheless, Robert did play an inadvertent role in later Anglo–Norman politics; during his reign he continued to give assistance to the exiled brothers Edward and Alfred, sons of the English king, Ethelred the Unready, and his wife, the Norman Emma. William of Jumièges observed that the English princes were treated by the dukes as members of their own family. The friendship between the Norman ducal family and Edward, who later became King of England, as ‘the Confessor’, must have contributed to the credibility of Edward having promised William that he would succeed Edward as king. Regardless of the historical veracity of the promise, the strength of this relationship meant that it was feasible to contemporaries that such a commitment could have been made.