How well did Harold Godwinson and William the Conqueror know each other prior to the battle of Hastings?

A backstory was therefore invented, to suit the tastes of William’s supporters. Or is that Harold’s? In fact, there are multiple overlapping backstories, stitched together from legends, guesswork, and propaganda. The historian’s task is to sift through all the stories and pick out what might be of use.

When did Harold Godwinson and William the Conqueror first meet?

We know that Harold and William met late in Edward the Confessor’s reign, most likely in the summer of 1065. But is this when they first met? In the absence of detailed records, this question is difficult to answer.

Harold isn’t mentioned in the chronicles before 1049, well into his twenties, so an early meeting with William can’t be ruled out. And it’s likely that Harold knew who William was. As a son of the Earl of Wessex, he should have known something of the neighbouring princes who, through trade and peacekeeping, had dealings with his father. Normandy was just across the Channel – a neighbour of Wessex in effect. He would have known that the king, Edward the Confessor, had recently lived in Normandy and attended William’s court.

But the early 1050s brought trouble for Harold: There was a powerful party of Normans at Edward’s court, vying with Harold’s family to dominate the king’s counsel. Matters came to a head in 1051 – Harold’s family lost, and were driven into exile.

In late 1051, William visited Edward in England, but Harold was in Ireland and would not have met him then. At some point, probably in 1052, William also got hold of two of Harold’s close relatives – a brother and a nephew – as hostages. Harold, still in exile, would not have met him then either. But from then on, William was associated with the hostile Norman party at Edward’s court.

Exactly how William got hold of Harold’s relatives as hostages is far from clear. They may have been kidnapped by the Normans who fled England when Harold’s family returned in 1052. Or perhaps Edward sent them to William in case Harold’s family sought vengeance upon him for their exile. Either way, in Harold’s mind, William was now a hostile agency, who had something over on him.

It's possible that Harold met William in the mid-1050s. Edward’s contemporary biographer reports that Harold travelled in the Frankish lands and studied the tactics and capabilities of Frankish princes.

A charter of 1056 shows that Harold was present in Flanders at that time, with its count, Baldwin, and other counts, including Guy of Ponthieu (who appears in the Bayeux Tapestry). Although William doesn’t appear with him in the charter, Harold might have visited other places besides Flanders on his foreign trip. He may at some point have visited Normandy to see the hostages, and from 1053 – after succeeding his father as Earl of Wessex – he’d have had to deal with William in cross-Channel business.

But the only meeting we can be sure of occurred late in Edward’s reign, most likely in the summer of 1065, when Harold travelled to the Frankish lands a second time. He came into William’s hands – as a guest, according to the Normans; as a captive, according to the English – and the two men went campaigning in Brittany.

Why did Harold travel to Normandy?

The first generation of English writers after the Norman Conquest are totally silent about Harold’s trip, which is telling in itself. It suggests that something happened that was relevant to 1066 and that had to be covered up.

Norman sources claim that Edward had sent Harold to offer William the English throne (or to confirm an earlier promise). English sources give various explanations, including an attempt to bargain for the release of the hostages and a fishing expedition blown off course (which is possibly a euphemism for an intelligence-gathering trip).ge

The Bayeux Tapestry may imply that Harold wasn’t heading for Normandy, since it shows him landing in the neighbouring county of Ponthieu, whose count begins to escort him north to Beaurain, in the opposite direction. But men from William arrive and pressure Guy into handing Harold over. The one thing that does emerge from a judicious appraisal of this mixed bag of sources is that Harold tried to avoid falling prey to William.

William then took him campaigning, for diplomatic effect – to show off his new prize and give the impression that Harold was his guest.

When he later made Harold swear oaths of some sort, the set-up was the same. Harold appeared, before onlookers, to swear the oaths willingly but in reality did so under duress. It was a piece of political theatre. Norman and English sources disagree on the content of the oaths and even on where the ceremony took place (Bayeux, Rouen, and Bonneville-sur-Touques all being named by different writers).

William’s supporters, defending his invasion after 1066, claimed that Harold had sworn to uphold the Duke’s claim to the English throne and garrison castles for him. Other accounts told of oaths Harold had sworn involving a marital alliance with the Norman ducal house.

Harold probably did promise something to William – otherwise, the Duke wouldn’t have let him go (along with one of the hostages). But it’s doubtful that he swore to uphold William’s claim to the throne, which was manufactured in 1066 and justified in hindsight. There’s no evidence in any source from before that date that Edward desired to make William his heir.

By that point, if not long before, Harold and William were rightly very wary of each other, harbouring multiple grudges. From William’s point of view, Harold’s family had thwarted Norman ambitions at Edward’s court and crushed and expelled the Norman faction. From Harold’s perspective, William was a wily opponent who had a hold over his family in the form of the two hostages.

Eadmer, an English writer born in 1060, presents William as an extremely dangerous man, which he was. William’s supporters project such qualities onto Harold, portraying him as an arch-deceiver, treacherous in every respect. At the battle of Hastings, there was no neat accidental death by a random arrow. Rather, William’s troop made a beeline for Harold and hacked him to pieces, with one knight cutting off Harold’s genitals as a trophy. The world was too small for two men such as Harold and William to share it.

Undoubtedly, there was a lot of additional backstory that we’ll never know. The bitterness of 1066 does suggest that William felt that Harold had betrayed him somehow. Harold, for his part, may have had no other choice, realising that William was a man like himself, who would stop at nothing to get what he wanted.

1066: The battle for England

Member exclusive | The year 1066 is the most famous in English history, but there's a lot more to the story than one bloody battle at Hastings. In this four-part series, medievalist Marc Morris talks David Musgrove through the full story of the Norman Conquest.

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Tom Licence is Professor of Medieval History at the University of East Anglia and a Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge. His biography of Harold for Yale English Monarchs is expected to appear in 2026

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