14 October—Today is the 955^th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings. You may also see and hear it referred to as the 955-year anniversary by media types who couldn’t tell a pleonasm from a plethora or a paucity.

It was a few miles northwest of Hastings, a big town on the south coast of England, that on 14 October 1066 William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy, led his Norman-French (that’s right, French, but it was a long time ago) army to a monumental victory over the Anglo-Saxons under King Harold Godwinson. Thus commenced the Norman Conquest of England. The battle was actually fought closer to a town now called Battle. For some strange reason.

William the Bastard, as he was known until his PR man came up with the William the Conqueror handle the day after the big battle, was the son of Duke Robert I of Normandy, a.k.a. Robert the Magnificent, a life-long bachelor, and Herleva, who later bore the bastard’s legitimate half-brothers, Odo, Bishop of Bayeux and Earl of Kent, and Robert, Count of Mortain, after she married Herluin de Contville.

Legend has it that Herleva, a commoner, attracted young Duke Robert by showing her leg well above the thigh. Rob couldn’t marry a commoner, of course, but since he always loved or lusted after Herleva, he fixed up his favorite wench with his best bud, Herluin. Even though no historians appear to have written about it, it’s entirely possible—and in the circumstance not unlikely—that Odo and Robert are actually Robert the Magnificent’s sons rather than Herluin’s. Think about it. But we won’t indulge in speculation about what made Robert Magnificent.

On the subject of legends, the one about King Harold being killed by an arrow in the eye may not be totally accurate. The sources are all Norman, of course (since the victors write and weave and sometimes embroider the history), including the Bayeux Tapestry, which was commissioned by the aforementioned Bishop Odo, who fought in his half-brother’s (or brother’s) army, for his cathedral, not long after the Battle of Hastings.

The tapestry shows a soldier with an arrow near his eye, but the soldier doesn’t appear to be wounded because he’s standing up. Harold, on the other hand, is probably the wounded soldier holding a battle axe next to the guy with the arrow. The caption is “HIC HAROLD REX INTERFECTUS EST,” meaning “King Harold was killed.”

We do know that after the battle Harold was butchered by the Normans, in a typically French way, having had his head cut off “below the protection of his helm,” his “entrails liquefied,” and his thigh cut off and carried some distance away.

And Sir Walter Scott was among the writers who made a mint from the sometimes unfriendly relations of Normans and Saxons that followed the Battle of Hastings. But Norman vs. Saxon conflict is largely nothing more than the stuff of good fiction . . .