Threads of Desire in the Bayeux Tapestry
As most readers no doubt already know, the Bayeux Tapestry is currently having a bit of a moment, on the occasion of its return to England for the first time in likely over 900 years. Woven in England sometime in the decade after 1066 and all that, the 200ft+ embroidery tells a complicated story about the events leading up to the Battle of Hastings, the death of the English king Harold Godwinson, and victory of Duke William of Normandy, ushering in a period of Anglo-Norman rule and the beginning of a more pronounced relationship between England and continental Europe. It is not clear when, exactly, it made its way over to France, but it probably had something to do with William’s half-brother Odo, who was bishop of the French city of Bayeux, which happens to be exactly where it ultimately ended up.
But now it is back in England and tickets to see it are already sold out through the end of the year. And no wonder – the Bayeux Tapestry has captivated viewers for centuries, including Napoleon, who ordered a public exhibition of the work in 1803 to drum up support for (another) invasion of England by France, and the Nazi regime, who studied the textile for its logistics of a cross-channel military expedition and used it as propaganda, arguing that the Normans (as descended from Germanic Vikings) presaged an Aryan supremacy over England.
It is also a minor miracle that the mixed-media artifact, recounting one of the most important events in medieval England’s history in woolen threads and Latin script, managed to survive nearly 1,000 years at all. We do not know where it was between its late eleventh-century manufacture and 1476, when it was recorded in an inventory of the Bayeux Cathedral. In the late eighteenth century, it was almost commandeered by French Revolutionaries as a cover for munitions wagon, while late in World War II, as Allied troops closed in on Paris, Nazi officials planned to seize it and take it to Germany – only to be prevented by the famous British codebreakers at Bletchley Park who intercepted the orders and alerted the French Resistance, who then secured the embroidery weeks before the liberation of Paris.
Bletchley Park and the liberation of Paris also reminds us, as the Bayeux Tapestry itself does, of how intertwined England and France have remained in the millennium since the Norman Conquest, cycling though periods of enmity and alliance, of overlapping territories and shared governance, of brutal wars with each other, and of military, political and economic unions. The complicated nature of these historical relationships was on full display last month at the British Museum, at a pre-opening party for the new exhibition arranged for King Charles and Prime Minister Andy Burnham of England and President Emmanuel Macron of France. President Macron joked that the end of the Tapestry, showing victory of Norman forces at the Battle of Hastings, was the “happy end,” while King Charles noted he was a direct descendent of William the Conqueror, and that the embroidery shows, “not merely an English story, nor only a Norman one, [but that] from the moment of its creation, it may have brought together our two peoples.” For his part, Macron similarly proclaimed the work as an example of how "we are united . . . [and a] reminder of what our countries can do if they join forces."
That might seem an odd way to describe a work of art that spends most of its length detailing how a Norman nobleman assembled an alliance of French forces, invaded England, laid waste to its territories, through military aggression killed its chosen king, and assumed the throne. But the textile, likely woven in the very first years after 1066, also remains one of the earliest surviving products of what is now known as Anglo-Norman (i.e., “English-French”) culture. And Macron and Charles, speaking just over ten years after the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union and six years after formally exiting this economic-political alliance, here express desire and nostalgia more than narrative content – the key word from Macron here is “reminder” – that is, a call to remember what Great Britain and France once were, not 960 years ago, but in their more recent past.
The irony here is that the intricate historiography of the Bayeux Tapestry advances a similar optimism for English-French relations, but ultimately documents their early, spectacular failures, first between Harold and William, and then, in retrospect, between William and the English people. One of the reasons scholars date the production of the work to the earliest years following the Battle of Hastings and the death of King Harold Godwinson (who likely did not die with an arrow to the eye, by the way), is due to its largely positive portrayal of Harold, despite the fact that he is the king who needs to be deposed and killed.
Early in the Tapestry, years before he becomes king, Harold ends up in Normandy – the reasons are unclear, but some Norman histories state he was sent by then-King Edward the Confessor (who himself had spent his childhood in exile in Normandy before ascending to the English throne – more complications) to promise Duke William the English crown. In the Tapestry’s account, William and Harold then go on a series of military campaigns together, and Harold is positively heroic, at one point stitched up as rescuing multiple soldiers from some deadly quicksand. Then the Tapestry shows Edward’s death and the English nobility acclaiming Harold as king.
Why? Because there is a version of this story, mostly Norman, where William was promised the throne, and Harold is a good-guy-gone-bad usurper, and William’s subsequent victory is divinely just. But the makers of the Tapestry, at least some if not all of whom were likely English themselves, would have been keenly aware that there was also an English side to the story, where Harold was a legitimate, throne-worthy king duly approved by English nobility to succeed the heirless King Edward, and that William and the Normans might be less than welcome in England. In the first years after 1066, during his “honeymoon” period, William and his nobility were hopeful that the change to Norman rule in England would largely be a peaceful transition of power. In the late 1060s, charters signed by William still acknowledged both Rex Haroldus and Rex Eadwardus as his predecessors. The Bayeux Tapestry, threading the needle between these two sides of the story, appears to be trying to craft a version of the history that could satisfy both the English and the Normans – an optimistic harbinger of the new, hybrid, peaceful Anglo-Norman rule to come.
Alas it was not to be. The English revolts started in 1069 and William spent the majority of his rule brutally suppressing them, while more and more English nobility and ecclesiasts were replaced with French ones. Harold became quietly omitted from charters and William repositioned himself as the rightful successor to the saintly Edward, not the traitorous Harold. Legends sprang up that maybe Harold didn’t die at Hastings, and was still out there, working on a triumphal return. The devastation of repression continued across English lands – the Domesday Book, the census produced by William at the end of his reign in 1086, records thousands of English properties as, still, simply wasta (“laid waste”).
In the end the Bayeux Tapestry reminds us that William’s hope for peace and unity, just like Macron’s, is always easier said (or woven) than done. But the Tapestry, produced at the beginning of imagined historical possibility, has survived so it can still tell its story, and still today has much to tell us about what was and what still might (hopefully) be.
If you can’t get to London to see the actual Bayeux Tapestry, here are three great ways to view it online:
• The Bayeux Museum has recently made available a digital version of the work at incredibly high resolution: https://www.bayeuxmuseum.com
• In conjunction with its exhibit, the British Museum has set up its own online experience of the Tapestry: https://www.britishmuseum.org/bayeux-tapestry-online-experience
• And finally, and somewhat remarkably, Martin Foys’s own scholarly digital edition of the work, originally published in 2003 (on CD-ROM, no less), is still online and accessible, and now free to use: https://www.sd-editions.com/bayeux
Martin Foys is the Nancy C. Hoefs Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His scholarship explores the intersection of Old English literature and other technological media forms, both the early medieval and the modern digital. He has published extensively on the Bayeux Tapestry, including the Digital Edition of the Bayeux Tapestry (2003). He currently directs the Old English Poetry in Facsimile project, a ten-year, open-access scholarly initiative to re-edit the entire Old English poetic corpus to now available digital manuscript images.
The views and opinions expressed in this post are solely those of the original author/s and do not necessarily represent the views of the North American Conference on British Studies.
