The lord of Normandy and Maine could now stop and reckon his chances of becoming lord of England also.  While our authorities enable us to put together a fairly full account of both Norman and English events, they throw no light on the way in which men in either land looked at events in the other.  Yet we might give much to know what William and Harold at this time thought of one another.  Nothing had as yet happened to make the two great rivals either national or personal enemies.  England and Normandy were at peace, and the great duke and the great earl had most likely had no personal dealings with one another.  They were rivals in the sense that each looked forward to succeed to the English crown whenever the reigning king should die.  But neither had as yet put forward his claim in any shape that the other could look on as any formal wrong to himself.  If William and Harold had ever met, it could have been only during Harold’s journey in Gaul.  Whatever negotiations Harold made during that journey were negotiations unfriendly to William; still he may, in the course of that journey, have visited Normandy as well as France or Anjou.  It is hard to avoid the thought that the tale of Harold’s visit to William, of his oath to William, arose out of something that happened on Harold’s way back from his Roman pilgrimage.  To that journey we can give an approximate date.  Of any other journey we have no date and no certain detail.  We can say only that the fact that no English writer makes any mention of any such visit, of any such oath, is, under the circumstances, the strongest proof that the story of the visit and the oath has some kind of foundation.  Yet if we grant thus much, the story reads on the whole as if it happened a few years later than the English earl’s return from Rome.

It is therefore most likely that Harold did pay a second visit to Gaul, whether a first or a second visit to Normandy, at some time nearer to Edward’s death than the year 1058.  The English writers are silent; the Norman writers give no date or impossible dates; they connect the visit with a war in Britanny; but that war is without a date.  We are driven to choose the year which is least rich in events in the English annals.  Harold could not have paid a visit of several months to Normandy either in 1063 or in 1065.  Of those years the first was the year of Harold’s great war in Wales, when he found how the Britons might be overcome by their own arms, when he broke the power of Gruffydd, and granted the Welsh kingdom to princes who became the men of Earl Harold as well as of King Edward.  Harold’s visit to Normandy is said to have taken place in the summer and autumn mouths; but the summer and autumn of 1065 were taken up by the building and destruction of Harold’s hunting-seat in Wales and by the greater events of the revolt and pacification of Northumberland.  But the year 1064 is a blank in the English annals till the last days of December, and no action of Harold’s in that year is recorded.  It is therefore the only possible year among those just before Edward’s death.  Harold’s visit and oath to William may very well have taken place in that year; but that is all.