How cruel was William the Conqueror to the Anglo-Saxons? This document reveals the "miserable" truth

Michael Wood on unlikely characters in the Bayeux Tapestry's story

Medieval-style illustration of a crowned figure and companion reclining beside a table of fruit, looking toward ships and a battle scene in the sky above a green landscape.

Published: September 30, 2026 at 4:00 PM

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I first saw the Tapestry in the old Bibliothèque municipale in Bayeux, almost a lifetime ago now. Its magical power is all the more poignant because it was made by English needlewomen as a record of the brutal conquest of their own land – a defeat so harrowing that it took a century for the English to accept. Some would say they never did.

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The Bayeux Tapestry, it’s now agreed, was made in England, probably at Canterbury. Its English sympathies are among its many extraordinary aspects. It tells the tale of the noble hero who fatefully broke his oath – an oath that by tradition was sworn at Bayeux.

There are 626 people depicted on the Tapestry, with just three women – one of them nameless and clutching her child’s hand as her house is burned down and she flees in terror. Of the men who are named, most are kings, dukes and bishops, the key characters in the story. But there are three exceptions that have always intrigued historians. Turold, Wadard and Vitalis are three of the Norman rank and file. Why are they on the Tapestry? That question leads us directly to the matter of who commissioned it, and why.

We can identify the three men in the pages of Domesday Book, William the Conqueror’s survey of England made 20 years after the battle of Hastings. By then, Turold was dead, but his son Ralph is named as holding his father’s land in Kent. Wadard and Vitalis were still living, and had done very well out of the Conquest. What unites the three is that they were all men of Odo – the Conqueror’s half-brother, bishop of Bayeux – who played a famous role at Hastings.

First, Wadard. On the Tapestry we see him on horseback in chain mail directing men gathering supplies after the Norman landing. It’s a small event not mentioned by the historians, but he was evidently a knight in the entourage of Odo. Turning through the folios of Domesday, in 1086 Wadard had land in nine places in Kent. Among them was Nurstead, with its church of St Mildred; at Buckwell he owned a mill and “an alder wood”; and in Dover six houses gifted by Odo, his “protector, deliverer and donor”.

Then there’s Vitalis of Canterbury. He appears on the Tapestry at a crucial moment before the battle, when Duke William interrogates him about the approach of the English army, depicted with almost cinematic skill. In 1086, Vitalis, too, had several holdings: the main one on the coast at Whitstable, with 69 smallholders and five slaves, five salt houses, a church and a small pasture for pigs. I imagine Vitalis enjoying the sea breezes, gazing out to Normandy, a short hop if he wanted to visit home.

Finally, Turold, who appears on the Tapestry earlier in the story. After Harold was wrecked on the French coast in 1065, Turold is one of two messengers of the Norman duke sent to bring the Englishman to William’s court. After 1066, Turold was also rewarded by Odo with estates in Kent and houses in Rochester and Canterbury.

So the three men appear on the Tapestry because their lord wanted to commemorate his own followers who had played their part in the great enterprise that propelled the Normans onto the European stage. That in turn supports what scholars have long suspected – that the sponsor of the Tapestry was none other than Odo of Bayeux himself.

It was, of course, a bitter and violent time. The Conqueror himself was a cruel and grasping man: too relentless to care, even though the world might hate him. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, “grædinæsse he lufode mid ealle” (“he loved greediness above all”).

As for how the ordinary English felt about these events, we have little evidence, but Wulfwin and Leofwin (brothers, as I take it, who farmed at Siffleton in 1066 before Vitalis took their land) were, I guess, no different from Ælfric at Marsh Gibbon in Buckinghamshire – who, Domesday says, “held it freely in 1066 but now farms at a rent from William, a Norman, graviter et miserabiliter [miserably and with a heavy heart]”.

That’s the other side of the coin to Wadard and Vitalis relaxing on their loungers in the garden of England. And when they made their journeys back to Normandy, joining the crowds at the Bayeux summer relic festival as the Tapestry was displayed round the cathedral nave, they could point proudly and say: “That’s me! I fought at Hastings – on that day when we won England”.

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This article was first published in the October 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine

Authors

Michael Wood

Michael Wood is professor of public history at the University of Manchester

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