How did Harold himself die?
Lately there's been an attempt to read
the death scene in the Tapestry
as though he was the figure cut down by the horseman,
not the warrior pulling the arrow out of his eye, the story you and I grew up with.
But it seems to me
perfectly clear that the words "Harold Rex" occur directly and significantly above the arrow-struck figure.
Then certainly the knights would have been on him,
cutting him down,
leaving him disembowelled.
The Thanes bravely mounted a last stand,
defending the body of their King,
but for many it was now a lost cause.
It was time to save one's neck,
to get out of the way.
There are such sad stories of what follows,
and perhaps some of them are true.
One of them has Harold's lover,
Edith Swan Neck,
walking through the heaps of gory corpses
to identify the dead King
by marks on his body,
known only to her.
What we do know
is that around half the nobility of England perished on that battlefield.