[2] William the Conqueror's victory at Hastings and his subsequent coronation on Christmas Day, 1066 left him in a position to confiscate huge tracts of land from those Anglo-Saxon families that had been in arms against him and to redistribute some of them to his supporters.
Three of the main beneficiaries were his friend and counsellor William fitz Osbern; his half-brother Odo, Bishop of Bayeux; and his ally Eustace II, Count of Boulogne.
Eustace had fought by the king's side at the Battle of Hastings, had possibly even been one of the men who personally killed Harold Godwinson, and had many years before in 1051 massacred many of the citizens of Dover in an eruption of street violence there.
[8] Eustace's motive for joining the rebels is generally taken to have been dissatisfaction with the amount of land the king had rewarded him with,[9] though it is also possible that the death on 1 September 1067 of his overlord, Baldwin V, Count of Flanders, father-in-law of William the Conqueror, freed his hands.
[11] Retreating from the Norman defenders, Orderic tells us, "the fugitives, imagining that the Bishop of Bayeux had arrived with a strong force, lost their heads, and in panic went rushing down the precipice of the trackless cliffs, to perish more shamefully through this short cut than from the enemy's sword.