The Carmen de Hastingae Proelio (Song of the Battle of Hastings) is a 20th-century name for the Carmen Widonis, the earliest history of the Norman invasion of England from September to December 1066, in Latin. It is attributed to Bishop Guy of Amiens, a noble of Ponthieu and monastically-trained bishop and administrator close to the French court, who eventually served as a chaplain for Matilda of Flanders, William the Conqueror's queen. Guy was an uncle to Count Guy of Ponthieu, who figures rather prominently in the Bayeux Tapestry as the vassal of Duke William of Normandy who captured Harold Godwinson, later to become King Harold II of England, in 1064. History and background The Carmen is generally accepted as the earliest surviving written account of the Norman Conquest. It focuses on the Battle of Hastings and its immediate aftermath, although it also offers insights into navigation, urban administration, the siege of London, and ecclesiastical culture. It is in poetic form, 835 lines of hexameters and elegiac couplets, and is preserved only in two twelfth-century copies from St Eucharius-Matthias in Trier, Bibliothèque royale de Belgique MS 10615-729, folios 227v-230v, and Bibliothèque royale de Belgique MS 9799-809 (the latter containing only the last sixty-six lines). The Carmen was most likely composed within months of the coronation of William as king of England (Christmas Day, 1066) – probably sometime in 1067, possibly as early as Easter of that year, to be performed at the royal festivities in Normandy, where King William I presided. The motivation for the poem's production and performance is open to debate. Queen Matilda may have commissioned the Carmen as an entertainment and to memorialize her husband's conquest, as queens customarily commissioned works of history composed by clerics, and Guy d'Amiens was known in the court of her father, Count Baldwin V of Flanders, where the bishop had witnessed a charter in 1056 with Earl (later King) Harold, Count Guy of Ponthieu, and Count Eustace of Boulogne. This theory is suggested by the work praising the allies from France, Boulogne, Ponthieu, Brittany, Maine, and the new Norman kingdom in Apulia, Calabria and Sicily. All the allies would have attended the Easter celebrations for the sharing-out of war booty. In 1066 Bishop Guy may have sought to win royal esteem, possibly damaged by the involvement of Hugh of Ponthieu in the death of King Harold and the senior family's attempts to