This is a riff on a Charlie Rozier article of the same name in History Today
The Bayeux Tapestry is an embroidered cloth that depicts the events leading up to the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, led by William, Duke of Normandy, challenging Harold II, King of England, and culminating in the Battle of Hastings. But is this monumental work of art Norman, French, or something in between? Discussions regarding this late 11th Century embroidery suggest an English origin. From its inception and throughout its 950-year history, it has embodied a rich tradition of cross-cultural meaning and exchange.
Made in England?
The Tapestry’s link to Bayeux probably dates to its inception. Strong evidence suggests that William’s half-brother, Bishop Odo of Bayeux, commissioned it, though others, including William’s queen, Matilda, Count Eustace of Boulogne, and even William himself, may have paid for it, too.
The piece comprises 58 scenes captioned in Medieval Latin, embroidered (crewel) with dyed wool yarns (and so not technically a woven tapestry) on tabby-woven linen, a rare example of Romanesque art. Its size—nearly 230 feet (70 m, or a little over 76 yards) long and 20 inches (50 cm, just under 2 feet) tall—certainly suggests it was the work of many hands. The unembroidered background provides a large, clear field of cloth, which allows the figures and decorative elements to stand out clearly.
It’s been called a lot of things by both English and French scholars, including the Toile de St-Jean (canvas of St John, because of its regular display in Bayeux on the Feast of St John), Toilette du Due Guillaume (toilette meaning a small canvas), Tapisserie de Guillaume le Conquerant and the Tapestry of Queen Maud (Matilda). Almost every commentator recorded a local tradition attributing the Tapestry to Queen Matilda, a theory of origin which persisted until the mid-20th Century.
Regardless of who ordered it, the Tapestry represents a pro-Norman justification of the Norman Conquest of England. Its narrative asserts that Harold promised to uphold William’s claim to England and swore an oath of allegiance on sacred relics in Normandy before taking the crown for himself after the death of Edward the Confessor. This left William with little choice but to invade England and punish Harold as an oath-breaker. Yet, the narrative of the Tapestry is not one-sided; it depicts Harold a more tragic hero than an arch-villain, initially shown as a friend of William and fighting for him, even saving Norman soldiers from the mud of the River Couesnon, before ultimately falling prey to his own ambitions.
Despite its pro-Norman narrative, England, with a tradition of and high-quality needlework, has a better claim on the Tapestry’s origin. There is also a strong tradition of pictorial narratives in some of the best works of pre-Conquest English manuscript art, including the “Old English Hexateuch” (with over 400 scenes depicting the first six books of the Bible now in St Augustine’s Abbey in Canterbury) and many later 11th Century English narrative works. There is no evidence of such needlework in 11th Century Normandy, and none for Norman manuscript art before the 12th Century; these traditions probably developed because of exchanges with England. Finally, English-speaking designers and embroiderers were the only ones who knew the English variant spellings in the Tapestry. Indeed, there are few surviving 11th Century wall hangings of any size.
Wilderness Years
The unheralded makers (there would have been at least a score of them) must have completed the Tapestry before William exiled Odo in 1082, after a disagreement over the bishop’s planned expedition to Italy to proclaim himself pope. It is tempting to imagine what Odo did with it and how William received it. There may have been a grand public unveiling well received by William and his fellow Normans. We know the Tapestry must have been accessible before 1102, when a Norman poet, Baudry of Bourgueil, who imagined it kept in the bedroom of William’s daughter, Adela. Although Baudry probably intended this fanciful description to flatter Adela, with whom he hoped to win favor, the story reveals that he at least saw the Tapestry, but historians cannot determine when or where.
For the next eight centuries, scant descriptions of the Tapestry offer thin clues as to its whereabouts. In 1562, a Huguenot mob stormed the Bayeux Cathedral during Mass, ransacking the building and its treasures. Nicholas-Joseph Foucault, Intendant for Normandy between 1689 and 1704, commissioned a hand-drawn sketch/transcription which an unknown artist completed up to where William rescues Harold from Count Guy. This drawing of what was then an apparently little known artefact drew the attention of a succession of antiquaries, including Antione Lancelot (1675-1740) and Bernard de Montfaucon (1655-1741). Their work resulted in many published drawings and engravings of the Tapestry and a variety of (usually fairly critical) commentaries on its place in art history, as well as comparisons of its content with the surviving written sources for the Norman Conquest.
Rise to Fame
Legends and stories abound beginning in the 19th Century. An 1840 report claims a 1792 French battalion tried to use the Tapestry as cover for a requisitioned wagon until a police commissioner recognized the significance of the object and issued a recovery order for a more suitable canvas wagon cover. Between November 1803 and February 1804, the Musee Napoleon in Paris displayed the Tapestry, and Napoleon himself viewed it privately. The exhibition, accompanied by an official guidebook and widely reported by the French press, ensured that the Tapestry came into greater public prominence than ever before. In 1842, the Tapestry’s keepers moved it behind an eye-level glass case in a purpose-built exhibition space in the municipal library of Bayeux. It remained there for 70 years, moving only once during the Franco-Prussian War. During this period, conservators also repaired and re-lined it.
In the 1870s, the South Kensington (now Victoria and Albert) Museum requested permission to photograph the entire Tapestry for display and dissemination of reproductions outside Bayeux. In 1931, the organizers of an exhibition on French art in London requested permission to borrow the Tapestry. A barrage of protests followed, with emphasis on the potential damage to the tourist economy of Bayeux and to the Tapestry itself. They eventually rejected the request.
Life During Wartime
In 1938, the Tapestry’s keepers planned to place the work inside a zinc-lined wooden crate, rolled on a winder in a purpose-built concrete shelter below the Hotel du Doyen in Bayeux. During the German occupation, the Ahnenerbe (ancestral heritage) branch of the SS identified the artefact as evidence of early Germanic culture and subjected it to many studies. The SS academics displayed, photographed and examined the artefact, moving it around several times. Dr Herbert Jankuhn, an archaeologist from Kiel, even gave Heinrich Himmler a talk on the Tapestry. After the Allied invasion in June 1944, the Germans moved the Tapestry to Paris, storing it in the cellars of the Louvre. General Dietrich von Choltitz later recounted how Himmler had ordered its preservation in late August, but by then French Resistance fighters occupied the Louvre. The Louvre displayed the Tapestry in late 1944 and returned it to Bayeux in March 1945.
Homecoming?
The Bayeux Tapestry has been subject to immense public and academic interest in the decades since 1945. The exhibitors have kept it in climate and light-controlled conditions in a purpose-built space in a former seminary since 1983. Its size and its unique ability to be understood simply by being looked at mean that it continues to achieve its aim of telling its story to large audiences. The museum attracts almost 400,000 visitors a year, with audio guides available in 16 languages. In 2007, UNESCO registered the Tapestry as a “Memory of the World” artefact. Scholars and rulers have recognized the Tapestry’s rich significance and, we can also assume, the innumerable ‘ordinary’ persons who have viewed and formed their own understanding of the Tapestry over its roughly 950-year existence.
The Persistent Past: Discovering The Steele Diaries
Analyzing artifacts is just part of a historian’s work. Putting the artefacts in the right light, seeing them as their makers and users saw them, then translating those visions into the historical record is the rest of it.
This is how history books are written.
And Finally...
On 5 September:
1813: The US Navy’s 14-gun, 6-pounder schooner-rigged brig USS Enterprise captures the RN’s 12-gun (10 carronades) gun-brig HMS Boxer off Pemaquid Point, Muscongus Bay in what is now Maine during the War of 1812. Remarkably, both commanders died very early in this desperate battle, and locals interred them together.
1939: President Franklin Rooseveldt declares American neutrality in the recently begun European war. While this declaration was not required by US law, it was an important international fig leaf to protect American shipping from the predations of raiders and submarines.
And today is the INTERNATIONAL DAY OF CHARITY, observing the death of Mother Theresa in Calcutta, India on this day in 1997. While the head of the Mother House of the Missionaries of Charity in India, the Kosovo-born nun donated her 1979 Nobel Prize largesse to her charity.