This is one of the most iconic scenes in Medieval art history: the death of King Harold at the Battle of Hastings of 1066 which sealed the deal for the Norman conquest of England. The embroidery here is of course the famous Bayeux Tapestry, created about a decade after that famous battle. And academics have argued for decades about this scene, probably publishing more volumes of paper debating it than blood was shed in battle (the intellectual conflict of course being much more fun and not deadly, not even to academic careers).
It looks here like our man Harold has been shot in the eye with an arrow. The name “Harold” appears in the inscription right above the man clutching the said arrow, which is piercing his head. One of the earliest written accounts from 1080 (by a monk named Amatus of Monte Cassino) seems to provide independent evidence, writing that Duke William “gouged out his [Harold’s] eye with an arrow.”
But not so fast declare the naysayers — Harold is instead the figure getting hacked to death by the man on a horse to the right! Looking at the Latin inscription, we see “Harold Rex Interfectus Est/King Harold was killed” with the last word falling immediately over the fallen body. Such verbal positioning — putting the last word right above the figure indicated in the phrase rather than putting the name of the figure above their image — typifies the Bayeux Tapestry. Furthermore, in the “Carmen de Hastingae Prolio” a poem dating even earlier than the 1080 account by Amatus, Harold’s death is recounted differently:
“The first of the four, piercing the king’s shield and chest with his lance, drenched the ground with a gushing stream of blood. The second with his sword cut off his head below the protection of his helm. The third liquefied his entrails with his spear. And the fourth cut off his thigh and carried it some distance away.”
Furthermore, later studies of the Bayeux Tapestry show that the arrow was not even originally part of the embroidery, but a later restoration: originally, there had been a longer spear which pierced the not-Harold’s brain.
And this discussion is only the “tip” of the arguments made on this issue.
Source(s): “The strange death of King Harold II: propaganda and legitimacy in the aftermath of the Battle of Hastings,” Chris Dennis, pp 14-18, _The Historian_, Spring 2009. Historytoday.com, “Shot through the eye and who’s to blame?” Martin Foys, vol 66, 10 October 2016 _History Today_.
