FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Date: 13/06/2013
Contact: Kathleen Tyson, +44 **** *** 566, carmenandconquest@gmail.com
Oldest record of the Norman Conquest reveals a new history of 1066
A new translation of the 1067 epic poem of the Norman Conquest suggests William the Conqueror landed at Winchelsea, the Saxons died facing the Normans on the ridge above Hastings, and the City of London owes its historic liberties to French clerics.
London– Published this month and available globally through Amazon as both a paperback and ebook, The Carmen and the Conquest provides the original 1067 Latin account of the Norman Conquest by Bishop Guy d’Amiens and an English translation by Kathleen Tyson that breaks new ground for the history of 1066. Geographic clues in the poem place the 500 Norman ships and 5000 troops recruited from throughout Europe in the Brede Valley, then an estuarine port tidal all the way from Winchelsea to Sedlescombe. Tyson suggests the landing was chosen because it provided the safest beachhead for the heavily laden ships and the Normans perceived the port as legally Norman territory. The land and port had been held under royal charters by Fecamp Abbey in Normandy until Godwin of Wessex and the young Harold (King Harold in 1066) violently seized the land from the Norman clerics and colonists in 1052. Hastings and Pevensey were also seized from foreign abbeys, making them territorial objectives of the invaders and not just scenes in the conquest landscape.
“The Carmen tells a thrilling story with important insights into the causes and course of the conquest. Past translations have omitted important details and been inaccessible to the history reading public, and I wanted that to change,” said Tyson. She started translating the Latin piecemeal herself when she suspected the account of negotiations for the City of London was inaccurate. In her translation King William cedes privileges and self-determination to the City when told by a bishop that a French church has claims there.
Tyson isn’t the first to suggest the Normans might have landed in the Brede Valley. Dr Marjorie Chibnall of Clare Hall, Cambridge, who died aged 96 last year, suggested the Brede Valley as a possible landing site in 1995. Orderic Vitalis’ 12th century Ecclesiastical History, which Dr Chibnall translated, records that the Saxons gathered to confront the Normans at the place they called Senlac and named the battle as the Battle of Senlac. Senlac means sandy stream. The Brede River, swelled twice daily by tides, would have been the most prominent sandy stream in Sussex in 1066. If the battle was fought on the great ridge above Hastings, as Tyson now suggests, the Saxons would have been facing the river and sands in the valley below while the Normans faced toward the steep slope of the ridge and Hastings, explaining the different names each side gave to the same battle.
Tyson even provides a reason for siting Battle Abbey somewhere else entirely. One of King William’s first acts was to legally convey Hastings and other coastal lands back to Fecamp Abbey in 1067, so that when he founded Battle Abbey to memorialise his conquest three years later he had to look further inland for another hill.
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