I first saw the Bayeux Tapestry when I was twenty. That was before 1983, when it was taken down from its perch around the interior walls of the palace of the bishops of Bayeux, cleaned, photographed (both rear and front), remounted upon a new backing, and placed in a three-sided, angled glass case. Where viewers once stood in the middle of the room, surrounded by the rectangular horseshoe of the Tapestry, they now walk around the outside of the horseshoe as if it were an artifact, albeit a spectacular one, in a museum space. Explanatory panels, projections, audiophones, maps, and dioramas enrich the experience. Light just bright and warm enough to bring out the Tapestry’s natural colors more fully than at any time in the past has replaced the old low light associated with the husbanding of electricity in postwar France. All of which means that I caught a glimpse of the last vestige of how the Tapestry might have looked draped around the interior walls of the great hall of a castle or suspended from the piers of the nave of a large church. This was a time when the Tapestry, now considered first and foremost a work of art, may have had a social, political, and even propagandist function as an imposing record of the Norman Conquest of 1066 or, as the first historical mention of the Tapestry in 1476 relates, a liturgical role in the yearly Feast of Relics in Notre-Dame of Bayeux.1
The trip to Bayeux was my mother’s idea. She grew up in North Carolina, where her formal training as a textile engineer was rounded by the tradition of southern crafts—embroidery, needlework, quilt making—comparable to the arts of the needle of medieval England and Normandy, still known for their embroidery and lace. When we moved north, my mother transformed her native talents into what in the 1950s was called “creative stitchery” Abstract collages assembled from all kinds of materials, from swatches of fabric and thread to ribbon and feathers, laid upon a background of cloth, decorated our walls like the domestic silks, plain tabbies, or embroidered linens found in some homes of the Middle Ages.
My mother and I stayed in Bayeux’s Hotel Lion d’Or. I would later learn that this is where, in the summer of 1941, a team of art historians, archaeologists, and artists, sent by Hitler to study the Tapestry, were lodged and fed. After the war, de Gaulle met Churchill at the Lion d’Or, and they shared omelets smothered in legendary Norman butter. So you might say that my first love of the Tapestry came about as a “whirlwind of circumstances”—maternal guidance, the possibility of touching a bit of medieval history along with the living history of World War II into which I was born and which by then was already an intellectual interest, the incredible beauty and power of the Tapestry itself, and eggs. Since then, I have wanted to know more about who designed it, who embroidered it, and where, when, and, in keeping with my mother’s preoccupations, how it was actually made.
The story of the sewing of the Tapestry would have delighted my father, who was an expert in the manufacture of finished cloth. Were he still alive, I would have so enjoyed speaking with him about how his eleventh-century equivalent might have gone about finding or commissioning a suitable piece of linen, discussing thread counts and selvage, assessing the dye lots and tex or weight of wool yarn. I can still remember the way he would look closely and rub a piece of worsted between thumb and middle finger, put a match to a fiber or two, hold it to his nostrils, and know the exact composition and weave of the little swatch of cloth whose ragged edges had been cut by pinking shears.
On my last visit to Bayeux, I made an appointment with the Tapestry’s current curator, Sylvette Lemagnen, whose official title is “Conservateur de la Médiathèque Municipale et de la Tapisserie de Bayeux.” She told me that I would be her first appointment of the morning, and when I arrived at 10:00 A.M., I was shown promptly into the outer office, a high-ceilinged room with long French windows. Five or six women sat at their desks, speaking on the telephone or typing in front of computer screens, while another waited in front of a copier, and still another fed a fax. A printer hummed alongside the bleeps of the answering machine as it delivered the morning’s recorded messages. It was a workshop of sorts, what the medievals called a “ladies’ chamber,” which designated the place where sewing took place. Who knows if these present-day keepers of the Tapestry of Bayeux were not the descendants of the women who had embroidered it over nine centuries ago?
The curator, who was herself completing a doctoral thesis on the Tapestry, informed me right away that there were no unedited documents in the center’s archives. I realized that I was probably not the first pesky scholar to enter her office with the hope of uncovering some of its hidden secrets. We chatted amiably about current scholarship and the state of the question of the Tapestry’s origins. Was it made right after the Norman Conquest or a little later? Was the idea that of William the Conqueror’s wife, Mathilda, or his half-brother Odo? Did it all take place in England or in France? At one point I asked Mme. Lemagnen why the French persisted in calling the Tapestry a tapestry when it was, in fact, an embroidery A rolling of the eyes and a pouty exhalation were the signs of what I could only imagine to have been something along the lines of “You Americans are sometimes so naïve.”
“The mayor of Bayeux would never permit it,” she replied.
“The mayor?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “He is afraid that if you could change the name of the ‘Bayeux Tapestry’ to the ‘Bayeux Embroidery’ the name ‘Bayeux’ might also someday be changed, and that would mean a loss of tourism for the town.” She reminded me that the Tapestry had not always been called thus and that before it was the Bayeux Tapestry, it was Queen Mathilda’s Tapestry and, before that, King William’s Cloth.
Her response surprised me, since I could not have imagined that a matter as lofty as the name of a famous work of art came down to a question of tourism and money. But, of course. The Tapestry still participates in the medieval tradition by which churches and monasteries guarded the relics of saints and other treasures in order to attract pilgrims along the paths that are the equivalent of today’s great tourist routes—Saint Jacques of Compostela in the south and, to the west, Mont-Saint-Michel, which is actually pictured in the Tapestry in its eleventh-century state. From that moment, I began to think of the Tapestry not only as a great work of art, but as a physical object with a long past, including how it disappeared for so many centuries, how it was used to cover a wagon full of munitions during the French Revolution, how it has been pressed into the service of various local interests and national causes since its rediscovery in the 1720s.
As I left the administrative offices of the Centre Guillaume le Conquérant, I was swept along by a sea of English schoolchildren who had crossed the Channel earlier that morning. They were streaming out of several long buses in the parking lot, and as soon as they passed the ticket window, they surrounded the Tapestry so fully that I could hardly see it. Each time I managed to push nearer the glass, which was really too close to see a wide enough swath of the Tapestry to understand the brilliance of its visual flow, I found myself forced again to the rear of a sea of bobbing adolescent heads. One of the things that I have learned about the Tapestry in the course of study is that it was meant to be looked at in large sweeps that enfold the viewer in what sometimes seems like a three-dimensional space.
I made it around the horseshoe, more or less, and headed from the display room to the bookshop where I had once purchased a long, unfolding reproduction of the Tapestry that has given me much pleasure over the years. This was the best access one could have to it from afar until the appearance in 2003 of the digital edition of the Tapestry on CD, better than the reproduction in books, whose pages, no matter how fast one turns them, never capture the propelling forward movement of the Tapestry’s ship launchings, Channel crossings, or cavalry charge. I found one of the books Mme. Lemagnen had recommended. I walked up Bayeux’s rue Saint-Jean and stepped into the courtyard of the Lion d’Or. Sitting in front of an omelet that bubbled and bulged as it arrived hot from the kitchen, I remembered that first time and began, there and then, to imagine this little excursion into the medieval past so important in the making of a world that is still recognizably our own.