50 For Harald Godwinsson, in 1066, the benefits of posing as the people’s prince were even more self-evident. Lacking as he did so much as a drop of royal blood, his surest claim to legitimacy lay in the fact that his peers, and perhaps even the dying Edward himself, had all given him the nod.51 Nor, despite the mildly embarrassing detail that both his name and mother were Danish, could there be any doubt as to why he had been considered worthy to rule as the supreme representative of the English. Harald had been – as even his bitterest enemies acknowledged – “the most distinguished of Edward’s subjects in honour, wealth and power.”52 No one was better qualified to guard his countrymen against foreign invaders. “Our king”53 he was duly hailed in the wake of his slaughter of Hardrada’s army. Harald, at Stamford Bridge, had successfully defended both “folc and foldan.”Yet even as he cleaned his sword of Norwegian blood, the circumstances that had brought him to the throne continued to menace his prospects. Back in 1063, in the wake of a hard-won victory over the Welsh, Harald had been presented with the head of his murdered enemy: a baneful and portentous trophy. Three years on, and his ability to claim the scalps of his adversaries had come to rank as the only certain measure of his fitness to rule. Not even with Hardrada safely fertilising the soil of Northumbria could he afford to relax. Other predators, other invaders, still cast their shadows. All that summer of 1066, Harald had been standing guard on the Channel – and now, with his warriors force-marched up the length of England, he was grimly aware that he had left his southern flank unprotected. Wearily, then, with the crows still flocking and clamouring above the fields of Stamford Bridge, he set about retracing his steps. He could have no doubts as to the urgency of his mission. Long before becoming king, Harald had made it a point “to study the character, policy and strength of the princes of France”54 – and of one in particular. Grant so much as the sniff of an opening, he had to reckon, and the Duke of Normandy would take it.For certainly, by 1066, there could be no doubting that William ranked as a truly deadly foe. His apprenticeship was long since over. Seasoned in all the arts of war and lordship, and with a reputation fit to intimidate even the princes of Flanders and Anjou, even the King of France himself, his prime had turned out a fearsome one. So too had that of his duchy. Quite as greedy for land and spoils as any Viking sea king, the great lords of Normandy, men who had grown up by their duke’s side and shared all his ambitions, had emerged as an elite of warriors superior, in both their discipline and training, to any in Christendom. For a decade and a half William and his lieutenants had been probing southwards, engaging in a uniquely lethal and innovative style of combat, pitting themselves against those most proficient castle-builders, the castellans of Anjou. The buffer zone of Maine, which back in the early 1050s had passed almost entirely into Angevin hands, had been systematically broken to William’s will. Patience had been blended with daring; attrition with escapades; months spent ravaging vineyards with sudden midnight surgical strikes. “Terror had been sown across the land.”55 Nor, even with Maine securely in his grasp, had William been content to rest in his saddle. Campaigning had become a way of life for him, and for all those who followed his standard. Horses still had to be exercised, castles built, estates and towns and riches won. No surprise, then, that England, where the great men still fought on foot, and defended their wooden halls with little more than ditches, and were not organised for ceaseless warfare, should have served to beckon the restless and hungry duke. To most Englishmen, accustomed as they were to look for danger from across the northern seas, the notion that the upstart Normans might represent a genuine menace to their ancient and wealthy kingdom had appeared a fanciful one – but not to Harald. He, at any rate, had taken pains to analyse William at close quarters. He had made sure to observe in the field how the duke’s castles were built, and the aggressive use to which they could be put, and the ominous potential of the Norman cavalry. Indeed, he had even ridden with William on a raid into Brittany – and performed so heroically during the course of the expedition that he had been rewarded for his feats with a gift of armour from the duke himself.This startling feat of espionage had been achieved only a couple of years before the fateful testing time of 1066. Quite what it was that had brought Harald to Normandy in the first place would later be much debated. The Normans would insist that he had been sent by Edward to promise William the succession; the English that he had travelled there of his own volition in order to negotiate a marriage alliance or perhaps the release of a hostage. It is not impossible that both claims were true. Altogether more certain, however, is that Harald, after a calamitous initial journey to Normandy – one that had featured both a shipwreck and a spell in the dungeon of a local princeling – had ended up as William’s guest. Though this might have been awkward for him, Harald was not his father’s son for nothing: and so it was, smoothly and with a fine show of Godwin opportunism, that he had set himself to a close study of the man whom he would long since have fingered as his likeliest rival for the English throne. Carefully veiling his own ambitions, he had encouraged William to spill out everything. Sure enough, the duke had openly acknowledged to his charming and attentive guest how he did indeed intend to press his right to England, by virtue of his relationship to his long-dead greataunt, the Lady Emma, and by sundry blessings that he claimed to have received from King Edward. Harald, more than content to play his rival for a fool, had duly sworn to support and advance William’s cause. His reward had been yet further gifts, and a ship back home to England. “Watchful mockery” indeed.No wonder, then, in the early weeks of 1066, that William should have responded to the news of Harald’s accession with icy and bitter rage: he felt the fury of a man who had been cheated as well as robbed. Particularly shocking to him was the memory of how his guest, pledging his support, had done so with a gesture of awful and public solemnity, his hand laid on a relic box, a deed of fateful boldness: for what was an oath if not a challenge flung directly at God? “But alas” – as those who knew the new king had long appreciated – “he was a man always too quick to give his word.”56 It was all very well for Harald to claim that his oath of loyalty to William had been extorted from him under duress, and that he had been crowned entirely by right, according to the wishes and customs of the English people. Such details did not serve to absolve him, for there existed laws more awesome and binding than those of any mortal kingdom. William, at any rate, understood this well enough. Indeed, he had always capitalised powerfully upon it. He was a man, after all, who had turned the Peace of God so thoroughly to his own advantage, and imposed it with such an iron fist, that other princedoms, in comparison with Normandy, could appear to the Normans themselves mere bear pits, “rife with unbridled wickedness.”57 No surprise, then, that the duke, in his determination to secure his right to England, should have moved quickly to explore what else God might be able to do for him. He was acutely sensitive, in a way his wily but lighthearted rival was not, to the changing spirit of the times – a spirit that set a premium on the universal over the local. Certainly, he had no doubts that the laws of England could be made to seem as nothing when compared with the awful majesty of the one supreme law: that of God Almighty Himself. William, whose stern religiosity had always been combined with a talent for spotting trends, was a ruler surpassingly well fitted to appreciate the new enthusiasms that were animating the highest reaches of the Church – and what they might mean for himself. One of his bishops had sat alongside Leo IX at the Council of Reims. One of his abbots had been a school friend of Alexander II, the reigning Pope. The mighty tide of reform, which far from subsiding with Leo’s death had continued to swell and surge and advance, could hardly help, then, in the great crisis of 1066, but be a matter of surpassing interest to William.Nor, in turn, could William fail to arouse a matching enthusiasm among reforming circles in Rome. In the summer of 1066, even as Harald Hardrada was preparing to unfurl Land-Waster, a very different banner was being readied for the Duke of Normandy. “The standard of St. Peter the Apostle”