Who wrote the earliest known arrow-to-the-eye account of Harold's death?

Amatus of Montecassino wrote the earliest known account of Harold Godwinson being killed by an arrow to the eye. His account appears in L’Ystoire de li Normant, a history of the Normans composed in the early 1080s.

Amatus was a Benedictine monk at Montecassino in southern Italy. His work primarily covered the Norman conquest of southern Italy, but it also preserved a version of Harold’s death at Hastings. The account is striking because earlier surviving descriptions do not provide the same clear arrow-to-the-eye detail.

The evidence needs a little caution. Amatus’s original Latin text is lost; the work survives through a much later French translation that was abridged and may contain alterations. The Bayeux Tapestry shows a figure with an arrow near the eye, but it is uncertain whether that figure is Harold, and the scene may have been changed during restoration.

Later writers, including William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon and Wace, helped make the arrow-in-the-eye story famous. Historians still regard the precise circumstances of Harold’s death as uncertain.