History: October 2018 Archives

A millennium before Elvis sightings were to appear regularly in supermarket tabloids, stories of another unlikely survival circulated around England and Scandinavia.

Eleanor Parker, author of the award-winning history blog A Clerk of Oxford, translated an Old Norse text called 'Hemings þáttr,' about a soldier named Heming who travels from Norway to England and serves in the army of Harold Godwinson, the Saxon King of England.

In this version of the story, Harold survives the Battle of Hastings under a pile of corpses, is discovered and nursed back to health by a cottager who had been looting the bodies, and chooses to become a hermit monk at Canterbury rather than lead a rebellion and ask his earls to break the oaths they swore to William of Normandy after his victory. Harold lives for three more years, and loyal Heming visits him often, bringing food to his cell. When Harold dies, William discovers what has happened and comes to see the body for himself. Admiring Heming's loyalty to Harold, William offers him a high position as a baron and leader of his bodyguard, but Heming asks to be allowed to live as a monk in Harold's cell, which request William grants.

The mainstream media, in the form of the Bayeux Tapestry, says that Harold was killed and dismembered at Hastings. HIC HAROLD REX INTERFECTUS EST. History was written by the victors, embroidered, literally. Cause of death: Arrow to the eye, although there is some doubt about whether the arrow in the tapestry is original or the result of an overzealous 18th century restoration.

In 2014, shortly after the discovery of the remains of Richard III in a Leicester car park, an amateur historian paid to have ground-penetrating radar scan Waltham Abbey in search of the remains of King Harold Godwinson. (Other coverage: Telegraph, Daily Mail.) The site is named in an English text, Vita Haroldi ("Life of Harold"), which says that Harold survived the battle, then lived many years as a hermit monk at Dover and later at Chester.

For all the coverage in anticipation of the scan at Waltham, I haven't found an article saying what was found -- nothing, I assume. But three years later, there's a claim that Harold was buried in Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire.