"Just as there is no contemporary English evidence to corroborate the Norman accounts of the events of Edward's reign prior to 5 January 1066, so, it seems, there is none to suggest that succession to the English throne had ever been arranged as Edward the Confessor had allegedly done for Duke William. If that is the case, where did William of Poitiers get the idea from? Once the question is posed, the answer is obvious. William of Jumieges' Deeds of the Dukes of the Normans is a sequence of ducal biographies. Shortly before each duke's demise, he is said to have summoned an assembly of his nobles, and to have commanded them to pledge their faith, individually, to his chosen son and successor, in order that each of them should be bound to him prior to his father's death. Anyone who later contested the succession would therefore be guilty of perfidy…. [T]his is exactly the device which William of Poitiers describes being used in England in 1051 or 1052. The only difference is that the English nobles are said to have sworn to Duke William in his absence. Earl Harold, however, had supposedly sworn later, to the duke in person, just as Norman nobles had done to chosen ducal successors since the foundation of the duchy in the early 10th century. According to William of Poitiers, it was for this very purpose that Edward had sent Harold to Normandy. In view of the specific undertakings Harold had given--meticulously itemized by William of Poitiers--his hasty accession as king transformed him into the defining example of English perfidy. What William of Poitiers had done was retrospectively to impose on Edward the Confessor's England the succession practices of the duchy of Normandy. Thereby he both justified Duke William's claim to succeed Edward, and negated Harold's, regardless of the fact that Harold's succession was a fait accompli. To suggest that Edward the Confessor had imported Norman succession practices is frankly incredible…
"to impose alien, unfamiliar succession practices on the English nobility in an attempt to bind them to an unprecedented royal bequest of the kingdom to an alien. Yet that is what William of Jumieges and William of Poitiers have persuaded most subsequent historians to accept. Whereas the Norman sources feel obliged to acknowledge that Harold had some sort of claim, which they endeavour to refute, the contemporary English sources seem quite unaware of Duke William's claim. Hence the sharp divide between the period from 5 January 1066, when there is some common ground between the two sets of narratives, and the period prior to that date, when there is none. The reason why is quite simply that there was no Norman claim until it was confected in Normandy, on the basis of Norman succession practices. Once the claim is analysed, this is plain. The simplicity of this solution to the apparent conflict of evidence has not found much favour, because historians have been unwilling to accept that the Norman writers might have reproduced a confected case, or perhaps even confected it themselves. Partly this reluctance arises from an unspoken assumption that medieval monks were simple-minded souls who were doing their inadequate best to record events accurately. Yet it is clear that William of Jumieges and William of Poitiers, or later Orderic Vitalis and William of Malmesbury, wrote with the sophistication, and sometimes the deft obliqueness, insinuation, and evasion of their Roman models. Moreover, it has been argued that outright mendacity on the part of William of Poitiers and William of Jumieges would have been impossible, even if it were conceivable, because the facts were well known. That they fail to be mentioned in the English sources is deemed to be partly a matter of chance, and partly an expression of a willful English reluctance to face up to them. Yet the modern world, in which communication and therefore knowledge of events is far more widespread, would suggest that this is a very naive view. The tendentious interpretation of events, and even manifest falsehood, have often been widely accepted precisely because it has been deemed politically necessary that they be accepted. It would have been so much easier to secure such acceptance, at least outwardly, when any sort of knowledge of relevant events was restricted to a very small coterie, rendered much smaller than usual by death in the pitched battles of 1066 and subsequently, by intimidation, and by exile…"
--George Garnett, The Norman Conquest: A Very Short Introduction
