The ''Carmen de Hastingae Proelio'' (''Song of the Battle of Hastings'') is a 20th-century name for the ''Carmen Widonis'', the earliest history of the
Norman invasion
The Norman Conquest (or the Conquest) was the 11th-century invasion and occupation of England by an army made up of thousands of Normans, Norman, Duchy of Brittany, Breton, County of Flanders, Flemish, and Kingdom of France, French troops, ...
of
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...
from September to December 1066, in
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...
. It is attributed to
Bishop Guy of Amiens
Guy, Bishop of Amiens (d.1075) was an eleventh-century churchman, in what is now the north-east of France.
Although the genealogy of early Ponthieu and Boulogne-sur-Mer, Boulogne is scanty (and the 12th century versions unreliable, because of thei ...
, a noble of Ponthieu and monastically-trained bishop and administrator close to the French court, who eventually served as a chaplain for
Matilda of Flanders
Matilda of Flanders (french: link=no, Mathilde; nl, Machteld) ( 1031 – 2 November 1083) was Queen of England and Duchess of Normandy by marriage to William the Conqueror, and regent of Normandy during his absences from the duchy. She was t ...
,
William the Conqueror
William I; ang, WillelmI (Bates ''William the Conqueror'' p. 33– 9 September 1087), usually known as William the Conqueror and sometimes William the Bastard, was the first House of Normandy, Norman List of English monarchs#House of Norman ...
's queen. Guy was an uncle to
Count Guy of Ponthieu, who figures rather prominently in the
Bayeux Tapestry as the vassal of
Duke William of Normandy who captured
Harold Godwinson
Harold Godwinson ( – 14 October 1066), also called Harold II, was the last crowned Anglo-Saxon English king. Harold reigned from 6 January 1066 until his death at the Battle of Hastings, fighting the Norman invaders led by William the C ...
, later to become King Harold II of England, in 1064.
History and background
The ''
Carmen
''Carmen'' () is an opera in four acts by the French composer Georges Bizet. The libretto was written by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, based on the Carmen (novella), novella of the same title by Prosper Mérimée. The opera was first perfo ...
'' is generally accepted as the earliest surviving written account of the
Norman Conquest
The Norman Conquest (or the Conquest) was the 11th-century invasion and occupation of England by an army made up of thousands of Norman, Breton, Flemish, and French troops, all led by the Duke of Normandy, later styled William the Conque ...
. It focuses on the
Battle of Hastings
The Battle of Hastings nrf, Batâle dé Hastings was fought on 14 October 1066 between the Norman-French army of William the Conqueror, William, the Duke of Normandy, and an English army under the Anglo-Saxons, Anglo-Saxon King Harold Godw ...
and its immediate aftermath, although it also offers insights into navigation, urban administration, the siege of London, and ecclesiastical culture. It is in poetic form, 835 lines of
hexameter
Hexameter is a metrical line of verses consisting of six feet (a "foot" here is the pulse, or major accent, of words in an English line of poetry; in Greek and Latin a "foot" is not an accent, but describes various combinations of syllables). It w ...
s and
elegiac couplet
The elegiac couplet is a poetic form used by Greek lyric poets for a variety of themes usually of smaller scale than the epic. Roman poets, particularly Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid, adopted the same form in Latin many years later. ...
s, and is preserved only in two twelfth-century copies from
St Eucharius-Matthias in
Trier
Trier ( , ; lb, Tréier ), formerly known in English as Trèves ( ;) and Triers (see also names in other languages), is a city on the banks of the Moselle in Germany. It lies in a valley between low vine-covered hills of red sandstone in the ...
,
Bibliothèque royale de Belgique
The Royal Library of Belgium (french: Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, nl, Koninklijke Bibliotheek van België, abbreviated ''KBR'' and sometimes nicknamed in French or in Dutch) is the national library of Belgium. The library has a history t ...
MS 10615-729, folios 227v-230v, and Bibliothèque royale de Belgique MS 9799-809 (the latter containing only the last sixty-six lines).
The ''Carmen'' was most likely composed within months of the coronation of William as king of England (Christmas Day, 1066) – probably sometime in 1067, possibly as early as Easter of that year, to be performed at the royal festivities in
Normandy
Normandy (; french: link=no, Normandie ; nrf, Normaundie, Nouormandie ; from Old French , plural of ''Normant'', originally from the word for "northman" in several Scandinavian languages) is a geographical and cultural region in Northwestern ...
, where King William I presided. The motivation for the poem's production and performance is open to debate. Queen Matilda may have commissioned the ''Carmen'' as an entertainment and to memorialize her husband's conquest, as queens customarily commissioned works of history composed by clerics, and Guy d'Amiens was known in the court of her father, Count Baldwin V of Flanders, where the bishop had witnessed a charter in 1056 with Earl (later King) Harold,
Count Guy of Ponthieu, and
Count Eustace of Boulogne. This theory is suggested by the work praising the allies from France, Boulogne, Ponthieu, Brittany, Maine, and the new Norman kingdom in Apulia, Calabria and Sicily. All the allies would have attended the Easter celebrations for the sharing-out of war booty. In 1066 Bishop Guy may have sought to win royal esteem, possibly damaged by the involvement of Hugh of Ponthieu in the death of King Harold and the senior family's attempts to assassinate the young duke in childhood. Bishop Guy himself was out of favour with the pope, and it has been suggested that he wanted to garner some Norman influence by writing the ''Carmen'' in William's honour and inviting
Lanfranc
Lanfranc, OSB (1005 1010 – 24 May 1089) was a celebrated Italian jurist who renounced his career to become a Benedictine monk at Bec in Normandy. He served successively as prior of Bec Abbey and abbot of St Stephen in Normandy and then ...
of Pavia, abbot of
Abbey of Saint-Étienne, Caen
The Abbey of Saint-Étienne, also known as Abbaye aux Hommes ("Men's Abbey") by contrast with the Abbaye aux Dames ("Ladies' Abbey"), is a former Benedictine monastery in the French city of Caen, Normandy, dedicated to Saint Stephen. It was found ...
and later
Archbishop of Canterbury
The archbishop of Canterbury is the senior bishop and a principal leader of the Church of England, the ceremonial head of the worldwide Anglican Communion and the diocesan bishop of the Diocese of Canterbury. The current archbishop is Justi ...
(to whom the
Proem
__NOTOC__
A preface () or proem () is an introduction to a book or other literary work written by the work's author. An introductory essay written by a different person is a ''foreword'' and precedes an author's preface. The preface often closes ...
of the poem is dedicated) to use his influence with king and pope. A further possibility (though none of these are mutually exclusive) is that Guy composed the ''Carmen'' to present
Eustace
Eustace, also rendered Eustis, ( ) is the rendition in English of two phonetically similar Greek given names:
*Εὔσταχυς (''Eústachys'') meaning "fruitful", "fecund"; literally "abundant in grain"; its Latin equivalents are ''Fæcundus/Fe ...
,
Count of Boulogne
Count of Boulogne was a historical title in the Kingdom of France. The city of Boulogne-sur-Mer became the centre of the county of Boulogne during the ninth century. Little is known of the early counts, but the first holder of the title is recor ...
, in a favourable light in order to reverse King William's banishment of Count Eustace following his failed invasion of England in the autumn of 1067 (Eustace remained in fact out of favour until late in the 1070s).
The ''Carmen'' possesses exceptional historical importance as an early account of the Norman Conquest. It is the most vivid of the original written accounts and practically the only one to give a non-Norman point of view in detail. The
Bayeux Tapestry is problematic; the identity and purpose of its creators is unknown, though it bears evidence of English involvement (eg. English spelling) in its production. In fact, it is the ''Carmens very vividness which has caused it in the past to come under attack as either a forgery, fraud or at the least a later, 12th-century source.
Frank Barlow argued that the ''Carmen'' was most likely from the year 1067, and following
Elisabeth van Houts
Elisabeth Maria Cornelia van Houts, Lady Baker (born 1952) is a Dutch-born British historian specializing in medieval European history. Van Houts was born in Zaandam in the Netherlands. She married historian Sir John Baker in 2010.
She is an Hon ...
' arguments in her article "Latin Poetry and the Anglo-Norman Court 1066-1135: The ''Carmen de Hastingae Proelio,''" this is the commonly accepted scholarly opinion. The ''Carmen'' is notable for literary reasons, too. It describes the Norman Conquest in terms borrowed from classical and Carolingian epic and praise poetry, but in ways that contrast with other contemporary praise poets. The ironic application of classical and Carolingian language to William sows doubt about his faithfulness and piety (two core political values for the Carolingians and the Capetians). This indicates that the contradictions and early weaknesses of William's conquest and regime were already apparent in 1067, even as Guy could praise William for his achievement.
[Thomas O'Donnell, "The ''Carmen de Hastingae Proelio'' and the Poetics of 1067," ''Anglo-Norman Studies'' 39 (2017): 151-162.]
Editions
* ''Carmen Widonis - The First History of the Norman Conquest'', transcription, translation and commentary by Kathleen Tyson, Granularity Press 2018.
* ''Carmen de Triumpho Normannico - The Song of the Norman Conquest'', transcribed from digital images of the manuscript and translated by Kathleen Tyson, Granularity Press 2014.
* ''The Carmen de Hastingae Proelio of Guy Bishop of Amiens'', edited by Catherine Morton and Hope Muntz, Oxford at the Clarendon Press 1972.
* ''The Carmen de Hastingae Proelio of Guy Bishop of Amiens'', edited and translated by Frank Barlow, Clarendon Press 1999.
References
Sources
* Davis, R. H. C. 1978. 'The Carmen de Hastingae Proelio'. ''The English Historical Review'' Vol. 93, No. 367, pp. 241–261
JSTOR.
* van Houts, Elisabeth. 1989. "Latin Poetry and the Anglo-Norman Court 1066-1135: The ''Carmen de Hastingae Proelio''," ''Journal of Medieval History'' 15, pp. 39–62.
* O'Donnell, Thomas. 2017. "The ''Carmen de Hastingae Proelio'' and the Poetics of 1067," ''Anglo-Norman Studies'' 39, pp. 151–162.
External links
Latin text of the ''Carmen de Hastingae Proelio'' In J.A. Giles, ''Scriptores rerum gestarum Willelmi Conquestoris'' (1845) at Archive.orgSame Latin text in the same book in Google Books
{{DEFAULTSORT:Carmen De Hastingae Proelio
Norman chronicles
Anglo-Norman literature
Norman conquest of England
11th-century Latin books