Vintage Framed Embellished Etching of King Harold's Death at the Battle of Hastings. Ink and pastels have been used to augment the shadows and highlight the white tones. Shows soldiers in the throes of battle, with the King on horseback in center, head thrown back, clutching the golden arrow that pierced his brain and signified the beginning of the Norman Conquest. Under glass, unsigned and unattributed. Framing label on back. 

Condition: Commensurate with age. 

Overall Size: 28 3/4 x 33 3/4 in. 

Sight Size: 16 1/2 x 21 3/4 in. 

Frame Thickness: 3 in. 

The widely held belief that King Harold died at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 by an arrow to the eye is a subject of much scholarly debate. A Norman account of the battle, Carmen de Hastingae Proelio (“Song of the Battle of Hastings”), said to have been written shortly after the battle by Guy, Bishop of Amiens, says that Harold was lanced and his body dismembered by four knights, probably including Duke William of Normandy. 12th Century Anglo-Norman histories, such as William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Regum Anglorum and Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum, recount that Harold died by an arrow wound to his head. An earlier source, Amatus of Montecassino’s L’Ystoire de li Normant (“History of the Normans”), written only twenty years after the battle of Hastings, contains a report of Harold being shot in the eye with an arrow, but this may be an early 14th Century addition. The sources for how Harold met his death are contradictory, thus modern historians have not been able to produce a definitive story without finding something that will compromise any hypothesis. The most famous representation of his death in this manner is found in the famed Bayeux Tapestry, created just a few years after the actual battle, where a panel with the inscription “Hic Harold Rex Interfectus Est” (“Here King Harold is killed”) shows a figure gripping an arrow that has struck his eye. Scientific analysis of the tapestry, however, suggests that this may have been a late 18th or early 19th Century modification to the Tapestry. Etchings made of the Tapestry in the 1730s show the standing figure with differing objects. It has been proposed that a supine figure being mutilated and trod upon next to the supposed king is the original Harold, and the standing figure had an arrow added by over-enthusiastic 19th Century restorers. A further suggestion is that both accounts are accurate, and that Harold suffered first the eye wound, then the mutilation, and the Tapestry is depicting both in sequence.

Commensurate with age.