Hisel Family Crest and Name History

Origin Displayed:  English

Where did English Hisel Family come from? What is the English Hisel Family Crest and Coat of Arms? When did the Hisel Family first arrive in the United States?  Where did the various branches of the family go? What is the Hisel family history?


The name Hisel came to England with the ancestors of the Hisel family in the Norman Conquest of 1066.  The Hisel family lived in Cheshire.  This name however, is topographic reference indicating that the original bearer lived in close proximity to a hazel tree or grove.

Cheshire, England

Norman Conquest

The death of Edward 'the Confessor', king of England, initated a brief period of conflict between the various claimants to his throne that irrevocably changed the country of England.  Immediately following the death of Edward, Earl Harold Godwinson was elected and coronated king by the English nobility, and he became known as King Harold II.

Harold Godwinson (or Harold II) (Old English: Harold Gōdwines sunu) (c. 1022 – 14 October 1066) was the last Anglo-Saxon King of England. Harold reigned from 6 January 1066 until his death at the Battle of Hastings on 14 October of that same year, fighting the Norman invaders led by William the Conqueror during the Norman conquest of England. Harold is one of only three Kings of England to have died in warfare; the other two were Richard the Lionheart and Richard III.

Harold was a son of Godwin, the powerful Earl of Wessex, and his wife Gytha Thorkelsdóttir, whose supposed brother Ulf Jarl was the son-in-law of Sweyn I and the father of Sweyn II of Denmark.
Godwin and Gytha had several children, notably sons Sweyn, Harold, Tostig, Gyrth and Leofwine and a daughter, Edith of Wessex (1029–1075), who became Queen consort of Edward the Confessor.

Battle of Hastings

On 12 September William's fleet sailed. Several ships sank in storms and the fleet was forced to take shelter at Saint-Valery-sur-Somme and wait for the wind to change. On 27 September the Norman fleet finally set sail for England arriving it is believed the following day at Pevensey on the coast of East Sussex. Harold now again forced his army to march 241 miles (386 kilometres) to intercept William, who had landed perhaps 7000 men in Sussex, southern England. Harold established his army in hastily built earthworks near Hastings. The two armies clashed at the Battle of Hastings, at Senlac Hill (near the present town of Battle) close by Hastings on 14 October, where after nine hours of hard fighting and probably less than 30 minutes from victory Harold was killed and his forces routed. His brothers Gyrth and Leofwine were also killed in the battle.

Death

The account of the battle Carmen de Hastingae Proelio (the Song of the Battle of Hastings), said to have been written shortly after the battle by Guy, Bishop of Amiens, says that Harold was killed by four knights, probably including Duke William, and his body brutally dismembered. Amatus of Montecassino's L'Ystoire de li Normant (History of the Normans), written thirty years after the battle of Hastings, is the first report of Harold being shot in the eye with an arrow. Later accounts reflect one or both of these two versions. A figure in the panel of the Bayeux Tapestry with the inscription "Harold Rex Interfectus Est" (Harold the King is killed) is depicted gripping an arrow that has struck his eye, but some historians have questioned whether this man is intended to be Harold, or if Harold is intended as the next figure lying to the right almost prone, being mutilated beneath a horse's hooves. Etchings made of the Tapestry in the 1730s show the standing figure with differing objects. Benoît's 1729 sketch shows only a dotted line indicating stitch marks without any indication of fletching (all other arrows in the Tapestry are fletched). Bernard de Montfaucon's 1730 engraving has a solid line resembling a spear being held overhand matching the manner of the figure to the left. Stothard's 1819 water-color drawing has, for the first time, a fletched arrow in the figure's eye. Although not apparent in the earlier depictions, the Tapestry today has stitch marks indicating the fallen figure once had an arrow in its eye. It has been proposed that the second figure once had an arrow added by over-enthusiastic nineteenth-century restorers that was later unstitched. 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.

Burial of King Harold II

Burial

The account of the contemporary chronicler William of Poitiers, states that the body of Harold was given to William Malet for burial:

"The two brothers of the King were found near him and Harold himself, stripped of all badges of honour, could not be identified by his face but only by certain marks on his body. His corpse was brought into the Duke's camp, and William gave it for burial to to William, surnamed Malet, and not to Harold's mother, who offered for the body of her beloved son its weight in gold. For the Duke thought it unseemly to receive money for such merchandise, and equally he considered it wrong that Harold should be buried as his mother wished, since so many men lay unburied because of his avarice. They said in jest that he who had guarded the coast with such insensate zeal should be buried by the seashore".

Another source states that Harold's wife, Edith Swannesha, was called to identify the body, which she did by some private mark known only to herself. Harold's strong association with Bosham, his birthplace, and the discovery in 1954 of an Anglo-Saxon coffin in the church there, has led some to suggest it as the place of King Harold's burial. A request to exhume a grave in Bosham church was refused by the Diocese of Chichester in December 2003, the Chancellor having ruled that the chances of establishing the identity of the body as Harold's were too slim to justify disturbing a burial place.  A prior exhumation had revealed the remains of a man, estimated at up to 60 years of age from photographs of the remains, lacking a head, one leg and the lower part of his other leg, a description consistent with the fate of the king as recorded in the Carmen. The poem also claims Harold was buried by the sea which is consistent with William of Poitier's account and with the identification of the grave at Bosham Church which is only yards from Chichester Harbour and in sight of the English Channel.
There were legends of Harold's body being given a proper funeral years later in his church of Waltham Holy Cross in Essex, which he had refounded in 1060.  There is a legend that Henry I of England met an elderly monk at Waltham Abbey, who was in fact a very old Harold. King Harold had a son posthumously, called Harold Haroldsson, who may have been this man, and may also be the occupant of the grave.


To Be Continued