Ok, this is only over a month old, but...
On October 5, I went to a lecture here at Drew called:
"Arrows, Eyes, and Royal Hermits: How Historiography Couldn't Kill Harold Godwinson, the Last Anglo-Saxon King"
by Dr. Martin Kennedy Foys, Hood College.
Foys' disseration project (in English?) was a Digitalization of the
Bayeaux Tapestry. Fascinating stuff. The Digitization is nice and clear, though I'm not sure I trust the color values, and it has the advantage that you can scroll it continuously. For those interested in the Tapestry I think it would be a good buy.
And as Foys worked with the tapestry images, he looked at the figure that is supposed to be Harold getting an arrow in the eye. (immediately followed by Harold getting offed by an armed horseman). He noticed that none of the other sections had Harold more than once, and that even though the name is near the standing arrow-victim, the central figure in that section really seems to be Harold and his horse-riding attacker. Looking at the accounts of Harold's death, he found early accounts had nothing to say about an arrow; but accounts from people who *might* have seen the Tapestry began to incorporate the arrow story later. As a result, he suspects that the depiction of the arrow-victim in the Tapestry may have influenced later historiography. Interesting. (I pointed out, looking at the piece, that to my inexperienced eye, the arrow victim and Harold-getting-killed had different colors/patterns of leg wraps, and that all the figures in that particular section have the same armor, mail, etc. so perhaps the similarities might have something to with the artisan working on that section.)
Foys also discussed the legend that Harold escaped, and lived out his life in a monastery somewhere... I don't remember most of what he said here, but by 1100 there's one monastery claiming he died there, and a later foundation at the SAME monastery (less than 25 years later) claiming he didn't survive, and certainly not at that monastery...
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