BAD NEWS REACHED DUKE WILLIAM OF NORMANDY ON THE evening of October 13, 1066. In the two weeks since his spectacular crossing of the Channel in a thousand boats, he had pillaged freely in the English countryside between the old Roman ports of Pevensey and Hastings. Now word came that King Harold had defeated Scandinavian invaders near the town of York and was advancing rapidly from the North. By nightfall, Anglo-Saxons appeared along Senlac ridge, the high ground above the Norman camp. Harold held a strategic advantage over William, who was on unfamiliar terrain. He would be even stronger if reinforcements arrived from London.
William ordered his troops on high alert. Many did not sleep at all that night. Others awoke with the first light, which appeared at 5:20 on the morning of October 14. Sunrise at 6:28 brought an ominous sign. As William dressed for battle surrounded by his most trusted advisers—his half-brothers, Bishop Odo of Bayeux and Count Robert of Mortain, and a company of great Norman and Breton lords—his squires put on his corselet the wrong way around. It was a small thing, but William had confessed his sins the night before and made Communion at the first hour. In a world that believed in dialogue between the human and the divine, it seemed a sign from God. As his attendants struggled to turn the padding beneath his finely woven chain mail and breast armor, William made light of the situation. “We shall turn the strength of my duchy,” he joked, “into a kingdom.” He lifted the little sack of relics from Odo’s extended hand and placed them around his neck, and before Odo had finished praying for victory, William ordered the battle ranks. The duke was steady in the face of unpredictable events. In the crossing of the Channel on the night of September 27, William’s ship had arrived before the rest of the fleet. An oarsman reported that “as far as he could see there was nothing but sea and sky.” The Norman leader, certain that “all the others would arrive before long,” sat down to “an abundant meal, accompanied by spiced wine, as if we were in his hall at home.”
The French from France would be on the left, the Bretons on the right, William and the Normans in the center. The archers on foot would open the battle. Set crossbowmen would “pierce the faces of the English with their speeding shafts.” The knights on horse would be to the rear of the foot. William pronounced what he knew might be his final words: “Raise your standards, men, and let there be no measure or moderation to your righteous anger. Let the lightning of your glory be seen from the east to the west, let the thunder of your charge be heard, and may you be the avengers of most noble blood.”
Great shouting could be heard, the clinking of lifted helmets and mail, the clatter of horses’ hooves, and the harsh bray of trumpets on both sides. Dragons could be seen everywhere, on shields and on the banners that caught the wind, as William’s army began to array itself as he had ordered. The horsemen and infantry followed the banners to join their battalion; the archers observed them to know by the angle of their flutter how high and in what direction to shoot. The English could not be far off. Through the dust rising from the Norman camp, the forest glittered, full of spears.
Suddenly, one of William’s men rode out before the rest. He was not a knight, but a poet by the name of Taillefer, one of the jongleurs the duke had brought with him to entertain the troops. He tossed his sword in the air and began to twirl it in front of the enemy line. Heedless of death, he pricked his horse, which began to charge. He lowered his lance, which pierced an Anglo-Saxon shield, knocking the ax bearer lifeless to the ground. The jongleur severed the head from the prostrate body and, holding it in the air for the Normans to see, began to sing. “The Norman army,” in the words of a later chronicler, “struck up the song of Roland to fire them into battle with the example of a heroic warrior.” As Taillefer fell, the missiles of war began to fly overhead—arrows, javelins, axes, stones tied to sticks, the square bolts from the crossbows that no shield could resist.
The fighting did not at first go as William planned. The suddenness of the attack left no time for those on foot to place themselves in advance of the mounted knights. Norman archers could not soften Harold’s ax-bearing housecarls, the king’s personal guard. The knights with lances couched under their arms failed to penetrate the Anglo-Saxon shield wall. In the chaos of the first clash, the rumor circulated that William had been killed. His men broke rank. William quickly decided that he must turn the situation as he had turned his corselet earlier that morning. Drawing upon a tactic that had worked in the past and was well known to the knights who had traveled all the way from southern Italy for the campaign against Harold, the Norman chief joined his fleeing troops until he seemed to be leading the rout. Then, wheeling in his tracks, William raised his visor and showed his face. “Look at me,” he cried. “I am alive, and with the aid of God I will conquer. What madness is persuading you to flee? What way is open to escape? The sea lies behind. You will fight to conquer, if you want only to live!” Odo, armed with a club to respect the Christian prohibition against ecclesiastics shedding blood, “rallied the young men.”
The Anglo-Saxons rejoiced to see the Normans flee, and, as William had gambled that he would, Harold charged. The Normans drew the enemy from the high ground. Fanning out and doubling back, they caught the Anglo-Saxon army in a pincer maneuver like that by which Allied forces would trap the German Seventh Army in the Falaise Pocket in August 1944. And the fighting, as in the Battle of Normandy of World War II, was close and fierce. “The dead by falling seemed to move more than the living,” recalled one eyewitness. “It was not possible for the lightly wounded to escape, for they were crushed to death by the serried ranks of their companions.” William lost three mounts, killed from under him as he fought on horseback and hand-to-hand among his troops. “With his angry blade he tirelessly pierced shields, helmets, and hauberks,” writes William’s chaplain and biographer, William of Poitiers. “Utterly disdaining fear and dishonor, the Duke charged his enemies and laid them low.”
The sun set at 5:04 on October 14, 1066, and at the end of the day, six thousand human corpses, half of those who had ridden, sailed, or walked to Hastings, littered the field alongside six hundred horses. “The mangled bodies that had been the flower of the English nobility and youth covered the ground as far as the eye could see,” laments the twelfth-century historian Orderic Vitalis. Harold was dead, so mutilated that his wife was brought to identify his body by “certain marks.” Anglo-Saxons who survived their leader made a last stand along a trench known in the eleventh century as the malfosse, “bad ditch,” into which many Normans, not knowing the terrain, fell and perished without realizing they had won the day “Many left their corpses in deep woods, many who had collapsed on the routes blocked the way for those who came after. Even the hooves of the horses inflicted punishment on the dead.” As the last of Harold’s followers vanished into the night, William’s army, exhausted, made camp among the fallen of both sides over which he now ruled as king. Having awakened that morning still burdened by the title by which he had always been known, “the Bastard,” Duke William went to sleep that night having earned the name history would accord him—“the Conqueror.”
The meeting of Normans and Anglo-Saxons at Hastings was the most decisive battle of the Middle Ages and one of the determining days in the making of the West. Hastings changed Britain, which had been dominated since the end of Roman rule by invading tribes from the Continent and the North—Angles, Saxons, and Vikings. This day more than any other turned Britain away from its Scandinavian past and toward Europe. Hastings inaugurated the era of the knight, the social dominance of those who fought with lance on horseback. With the watershed of 1066 came the beginning of the end of the chaos and darkness—the political disintegration and the lack of learning—between the collapse of Charlemagne’s empire after his death in the early ninth century and the flowering of state institutions and culture of the Anglo-Norman world. How fitting that the Norman army should enter battle singing of the heroic deeds of Charlemagne’s nephew Roland, as if William would begin where the emperor of the Franks had left off William had himself crowned king of England on Christmas day 1066, just as Charlemagne had been crowned in Rome on Christmas day 800.
If the Battle of Hastings began with poetry, it ended in the realm of the visual arts. The Norman Conquest of England produced the world’s most famous textile, the Bayeux Tapestry, a 230-foot-long-by-20-inch-high running embroidered account of the events leading to Hastings and of the battle itself Made in the decades following the Conquest by those who were party to it, the Tapestry, which contains both images and Latin inscriptions, is a principal source of knowledge about the day that shaped England out of the remains of Anglo-Saxon culture and the Normans, who were themselves relatively recent settlers along the northwest coast of France and the bed of the Seine. William, only the sixth generation of the Dukes of Normandy, was the descendant of another bold adventurer, the Viking leader Rollo, who in 911 struck a treaty of peace with the French king Charles the Simple by which the old Carolingian territory of Neustria, now weak and ripe for raiding, would be his.
The Tapestry is unique.
Pieces of cloth from the ancient world give some indication of what appealed to the eyes of ancient Persians, Egyptians, and Greeks. Pile carpets from southern Siberia and Turkey, silks from Constantinople, Syria, and China, are dazzling reminders of the riches of the Middle and Far East. Weavings from the bogs of Switzerland, Scandinavia, and East Anglia reveal much about the making of worsteds and tabby beginning with the Celts. Church garments such as the gold- and silk-embroidered handiwork of Saints Herlindis and Relindis, who founded the Abbey of Aldeneik in the eighth century; the stole and girdle that once belonged to the tenth-century saint Cuthbert; and a silk twill coronation robe made for King Roger of Sicily in the 1130s are miraculous survivors of the medieval textile arts. None, however, is on the scale of the Bayeux Tapestry. None possesses its sustained aesthetic quality None tells a story in images and words. None, in short, captures the essence of an age as vividly as the Bayeux Tapestry, which is for the High Middle Ages what the friezes of Nineveh are for ancient Assyria, the Elgin Marbles are for Greece of the city-state, or the Lady with Unicorn Tapestry is for Renaissance Europe. The only piece of cloth comparable in celebrity to the Bayeux Tapestry is the Shroud of Turin, whose authenticity has been thrown into doubt by radiocarbon dating that suggests it is not the image of a Jewish man crucified in the first century, but a fourteenth-century fabrication.
The Tapestry opens a precious window upon feudalism and knighthood in England and France, political norms and military weaponry and tactics, nautical technique, shipbuilding, and the maritime culture of the North Sea and the English Channel. Its embroidered tableaux reveal much about relations among secular government, ecclesiastical hierarchy, and the papacy; local, baronial, castle, and church architecture; rituals of death, burial, and coronation; hunting and agriculture; customs of eating, cooking, and dress; the material world of sacred and sumptuous objects; and the means of communication and transportation in England, Normandy, and Brittany at the dawn of what Charles Homer Haskins calls the “Renaissance of the Middle Ages.”
The story that the Tapestry tells takes place over a period of two years leading up to the Conquest. At its left or beginning edge, we see the ailing king Edward the Confessor (ruled 1042–1066) in counsel with Harold Godwineson, Earl of Wes-sex and the man who would be king. The interior space may be the royal seat at Winchester, since Westminster Abbey, shown later in the Tapestry, had not yet been consecrated. We know that Edward is frail because of his bodily posture, drooping shoulders, and eyes, and because he has never been well. The Confessor, son of Emma of Normandy and her first husband, King Æthelred II (ruled 978–1016), “the Unready,” was a pious man, and things might have gone differently for England if some of the energy he spent praying had been reserved for reproduction. Edward, married to Harold’s sister, Edith, was childless, and his bearing at the beginning of the Bayeux Tapestry bespeaks the looming crisis for Anglo-Saxon England. We shall never know the exact nature of Edward’s initial exchange with Harold, yet it is hard not to infer that something must have been said about royal succession.
Leaving the audience with Edward, Harold rides to the God-wine ancestral lands in Bosham, where he feasts in the company of retainers. As the feast ends, the Tapestry shows the earl and his men boarding ships for what remains a mysterious trip to the Continent.
Was the purpose of Harold’s crossing of the Channel to discuss succession with Duke William of Normandy? A medieval biography of Edward speaks of Harold’s traveling abroad “in order to study the French princes.” Did Harold visit Normandy to arrange a marriage? His younger brother Tostig had married the sister of Baldwin V of Flanders, father of Duke William’s wife, Mathilda, and the twelfth-century historian Orderic Vitalis maintains that Harold, who had married not in church, but only more danico (“in the Danish custom”), by cohabitation, sought the hand of one of William and Mathilda’s daughters. Orderic’s contemporary Eadmer of Canterbury states that Harold sought the release of members of his own family, his brother Wulfnoth and his nephew Hakon, Anglo-Saxon hostages sent to the Norman court at the time of Harold’s father’s own troubles with King Edward (see p. 16). Still others suggest that Harold did not intend to visit Normandy at all but was en route to Hungary to bring back the most legitimate candidate for kingship, the Æthling Edgar, great-grandson of Æthelred II. The historian William of Malmesbury argues implausibly that Harold was on a fishing expedition when his ship was “blown off-course by a bad wind.” Harold was known as a great hunter, and the Tapestry portrays him repeatedly with a falcon on his arm, but fishing was not a noble pursuit in eleventh-century England.
Whatever the reason for Harold’s travels, sometime in the fall of 1064 he made landfall near the frontier of upper Normandy He is shown barefoot and wielding a dagger, indications of shipwreck. The Tapestry thus dramatizes Harold’s capture by William’s vassal Guy of Ponthieu, who transfers the valuable prisoner to the duke’s custody at his court in Rouen.
From Rouen, William and Harold set out on a military expedition to Brittany While crossing the river Couesnon, Mont-Saint-Michel in the background, Harold is shown bravely rescuing a knight who has slipped into the treacherous mud of the riverbed. William and Harold capture the strongholds of Dol, Rennes, and Dinan. And as the duke and the earl return to Normandy via Bayeux, William bestows arms on Harold, who swears a sacred oath on relics—not just on relics, but on two reliquaries. The Tapestry captures him, arms outstretched, touching with both hands the jeweled cases that bind him in God’s presence to his word. In the epic scenario leading to Hastings, the embroidered image of Harold’s swearing is the equivalent of a photograph of what would become his misdeed.
The crux of the Tapestry drama turns around the nature of Harold’s oath. Did Harold merely become William’s vassal, as the gift of arms and oath of fealty would indicate? Did he make promises regarding the release of hostage family members? Did Harold swear to respect William’s rights of succession to the English throne? Was there some kind of understanding involving joint rulership? Was Harold’s oath taken willingly or under duress? Was he tricked, as Anglo-Saxon sources suggest? Part of the Tapestry’s lasting appeal stems from the fact that alongside the numerous partisan historical accounts by medieval chroniclers on both sides of the Channel, it is not a one-sided version of the events of 1066. In the mold of all enduring works of art, the Tapestry’s images, and even its words, make for the richest range of possible meanings.
Having sworn an ill-fated oath, regardless of its actual content, Harold returns to England, where he again meets with King Edward, who looks even more beleaguered than he did at first. As we know from the historical record, Edward died on January 6, 1066, and was buried in Westminster Abbey, England’s first Norman Romanesque church, which had been consecrated only two weeks earlier. The Tapestry signals the newness of construction via a figure placing a weathercock on the roof as Edward’s bier is carried to its final resting place.
The Tapestry’s second act begins with Harold’s seizure of the crown the day after Edward’s death and the appearance of Halley’s comet, which was visible in the skies all over Europe in April 1066, at the Tapestry’s upper edge. Harold is depicted with the traditional emblems of imperial power, a scepter and an orb topped with a cross, in the frontal pose of majesty familiar to Roman and Byzantine emperors as well as to Charlemagne and the Ottonians of the tenth century, who saw themselves as the heirs of Rome.
The news of usurpation spreads quickly to Normandy, where William, in council with Odo, orders a fleet to be built in preparation for invasion. The Tapestry discloses in detail the felling of trees for lumber, the shaving and shaping of boats, and the loading of ships with food and wine, arms and armor, and horses prior to William’s crossing of the English Channel on the night of September 27. In England, the Normans burn and loot, build earthwork fortifications, scout the countryside. We see them foraging, cooking, and feasting before battle. Both sides reconnoiter and position themselves for the dramatic first clash of battle.
The extraordinary depiction of the chaos and violence of William’s engagement with Harold renders the tactical back-and-forth of Norman knights and Anglo-Saxon infantry, of hand-to-hand combat of sword against bearded ax, of lance against shield, of archers and booty seekers, of dead horses and dismembered bodies upon the field of Hastings. The Tapestry ends with a lucky Norman arrow shot through Harold’s eye, though we may never know the nature of the final design since the right edge disintegrates in tatters, much like the disarray of the fleeing Anglo-Saxon army after the death of its leader.
Concrete, brutal, vivid—the Tapestry projects a moving image of an important historic event, and every age sees in it its own version of a living, motion-filled past. In our own time, it has been compared to animated comic strips and the moving picture show. For the early nineteenth century, the tapestry was most like the panoramas, precursors to the nickelodeon, that were popular in both England and France. Like the panorama, the cartoon, and the movie, the Tapestry makes history come alive. The story it tells revolves around two of the most powerful of medieval men, whose ambitions and capacities make their meeting at Hastings seem inevitable.
Born in the town of Falaise in 1027 or 1028, William was the illegitimate child of Duke Robert I and a “girl of that town.” Robert, according to medieval sources, saw Herlève washing clothes in a stream near the castle and immediately fell in love with the tanner’s daughter, with whom he conceived a child when he was no older than seventeen. William’s parents never married, though Robert later arranged a union between Herlève and the Viscount of Conteville. Their two sons, Odo of Bayeux and Robert of Mortain, accompanied William on the Conquest and figure prominently among the Tapestry’s principal actors. In 1035, Duke Robert left Normandy for the Holy Land, a pilgrimage from which he never returned.
Before his departure for the Middle East, Robert elicited from his vassals a promise to protect and support his son William, then only seven. Some kept their word, while others profited from William’s minority to seize what they could while the duchy remained leaderless. It may, in fact, have been William’s humble origins that account for his survival. Appealing to the members of Robert’s former household, moving constantly throughout Normandy, hiding her son in peasant cottages, Herlève used her wiles, wiles associated to this day with the French peasantry, and her knowledge of the reaches of the countryside to protect William from attack by Norman nobles and even by the king of France.
Before long, William began to protect himself. At the age of nineteen, he defeated rebellious barons outside of Caen and forced them to swear in the presence of clerics and on holy relics a Truce of God, prohibiting private war from Wednesday evening until Monday morning and during the seasons of Advent, Lent, Easter, and Pentecost. It was the beginning of the medieval peace movement and the beginning of William’s pacification of the duchy over which he would in the following decade gradually gain control.
“A warrior age salutes a warrior, and in the young William it found a warrior to salute,” writes William’s biographer David Douglas. William was a brilliant military leader, defeating even the French king Henry I at the Battle of Mortemer in 1054. It was after Mortemer that Guy of Ponthieu, who captured Harold, became William’s vassal. Yet the duke was also a savvy political strategist who understood the importance of an alliance with the church. An anonymous monk of Caen, who may actually have seen William, describes him as a balance between the medieval ideals of strength and wisdom: “a burly warrior with a harsh guttural voice, great in stature but not ungainly He was temperate in eating and drinking…. After his meal he rarely drank more than thrice. In speech he was fluent and persuasive, being skilled at all times in making clear his will.” William reversed the Viking practice of sacking religious institutions, and alongside the castle building and fortification of the type depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry, he built monasteries, abbeys, churches, and cathedrals and supported ecclesiastical reform. A hundred years before the accession of William, probably not a monastery survived in the region of Rouen. At the time of the Conquest, Normandy was renowned for its abundance of religious houses that benefited directly from ducal patronage. So, too, the duke profited from the knowledge of accounting put to use in the administration of his expanding duchy by clerics who knew how to read and write.
The Norman church was reorganized under a strong set of bishops who cooperated with the duke. The duke, in turn, cooperated with the pope. In preparation for the invasion of England, William summoned his vassals to swear loyalty in his absence. He met with the young Philip I, king of France, who was at the time under the tutelage of William’s father-in-law, Count Baldwin V of Flanders. He dispatched envoys to the court of the king of Germany and future emperor of Rome, Henry IV (ruled 1056–1106). But, most important, William sent a mission to Pope Alexander II, who bestowed his blessing upon a Norman crossing of the Channel. William went into battle on the morning of October 14, 1066, with the papal banner and, around his neck, the consecrated relics on which Harold had sworn. If Hastings was a brilliant and brave military triumph that seemed at times to hang by a thread, even that thread would have snapped were it not for the months of local and pan-European preparation, much of which is visible in the Tapestry, prior to the event.
As precarious as William’s minority and accession to power had been, the route by which Harold Godwineson came to power in England was just as perilous, though he might at the outset have appeared predestined to rule. The Godwine family came to prominence during the final years of the reign of Æthelred II as the kingdom faced the threat of Viking raids. Harold’s father, Godwine, survived the death of Æthelred in 1016 and was appointed to high office by his successor, King Cnut (ruled 1016–1035), to whom he was also related by marriage. In the crisis of succession after Cnut’s death, Godwine is suspected of having had the future king Edward’s older brother Alfred blinded and murdered in the first attempt of Æthelred’s sons by Emma to return from Normandy, where they had been in exile during the rule of Cnut. When Cnut’s son King Hardecnut died in 1042, Edward came home to England and initially relied upon Godwine to secure and preserve his throne. Relations between Edward and Godwine were never easy, however, and in 1051 the king declared Godwine an outlaw, repudiated his daughter, Edith, and gave him just five days safe conduct to leave England. The king confiscated Wessex, which at the time consisted of almost all the territory south of the Thames. It is possible, too, that at this time Edward promised his succession to William, who, according to The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, visited King Edward while the Godwines were away. William’s chaplain and biographer, William of Poitiers, states that the offer was made in gratitude for the refuge afforded Edward in his early years and came with the assent of English nobility
Godwine, his wife, Gytha, and their sons Sweyn, Tostig, and Gyrth crossed to Flanders, while his other sons, Harold and Leofwine, went to Bristol to recruit mercenaries. There they were received by Diarmait Mac Mael-Na-Mbo, king of Leinster, who held the Viking city of Dublin, to which Harold’s sons would flee after Hastings. Nobles turned outlaws, Harold and Leofwine raided along the south coast of England. By 1052, they sailed up the Thames, forcing Edward to restore the Godwine lands in Wessex, to take back Edith, and to replace the Norman Robert of Jumièges, whom Edward had installed as archbishop of Canterbury with Stigand, who is pictured in the Bayeux Tapestry alongside Harold in the scene of his coronation. Godwine’s son and grandson Wulfnoth and Hakon were sent as hostages to Normandy to guarantee the agreement, since Edward, who had grown up there, trusted Norman nobles more than many of his own countrymen.
When Harold Godwineson succeeded his father as Earl of Wessex in 1053, he was the wealthiest man in the kingdom. According to the Domesday Book, which William ordered compiled in 1086 based on the living memory of landholdings in 1066, the Godwine family held estates valued for tax at 5,187 pounds, while King Edward personally held only 3,840 pounds. For the nine months and nine days he was king of England, Harold combined the ancestral Godwine lands with royal possessions.
Adventurous, resolute, aggressive, brutal, and brilliant tacticians, willing to risk all for the sake of a kingdom, William and Harold lived by the law of the strongest in a world in which the death of a ruler more often than not brought a bitter struggle for succession. How is it, then, that their story was captured not in the marble or bronze of ancient heroic monuments, but in the simple medium of embroidered wool on linen, the work most likely of women? The question goes right to the heart of the drama depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry and underscores the role of art in the conversion of a factional and tribal society founded in violence into a society governed by something like the rule of law
Great works of art are often the repository of dreams. As a visual record of the Conquest, the Tapestry was a powerful vehicle of cultural memory at a time when even the most powerful lords were illiterate. Not only a means by which future generations might learn of the event, the world’s most famous textile worked to forge a community in which conquerors and conquered might someday fuse into a single people with shared interests and values. Warring factions continued to contest the rulership of England long after the Conquest. Yet, as we shall see in the pages that follow, the Tapestry is a voracious cultural artifact, absorbing and weaving together all who were party to the historical trauma of 1066.
There may be something physiological in the workings of the eye and the neurological space behind the eye in our perception of a work of art whose appeal has lasted as long as that of the Tapestry. And even if the appeal is not physiological, something so profound and shaping happened in the decades following 1066 that we are no longer able to see it clearly: It is simply part of our perceptual universe.
The Bayeux Tapestry is a means of understanding the High Middle Ages. It reflects and unlocks the world around it, captures a cultural moment and anticipates historical change, embodies and models understandings and institutions at a critical time in the formation of English culture out of the disparate threads of the Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian and Viking, Norman, and Continental cultures and even vestiges of the late Roman and Mediterranean worlds. Part of the enduring effect of the Tapestry, which is monumental in its own right, has to do with the power to integrate so much and so fully the various strands of imagery and meaning available at the time of its creation. In this, the Tapestry is the artistic birth certificate of what is sometimes referred to as the “Norman miracle” and of our own sense of the shape of the past.
The Tapestry is an icon of the Middle Ages. Alongside the great cathedrals like Notre Dame, Canterbury, and Chartres; famed castles like the Tower of London or Chinon; legendary lovers like Abelard and Heloise or Tristan and Iseult; heroes and heroines like Richard “the Lionheart” or Joan of Arc; poets and intellectuals like Dante or Thomas Aquinas; saints like Bernard or Francis; mythical figures like Robin Hood, Arthur, Lancelot, and Guinevere; fabulous objects like Excalibur, the Round Table, and the Holy Grail; and the musical rhythms of Gregorian chants or the Carmina Burana, the Tapestry is deeply entwined in the popular imagination with what “medieval” means. It has appeared on the cover of books, in comics, in video games, and in movies, beginning with the 1958 Richard Fleischer film The Vikings. The heroine Jimena is featured embroidering the Bayeux Tapestry in Anthony Mann’s 1961 El Cid, as are Ophelia in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1990 Hamlet and Lady Marion in Kevin Reynolds’s 1991 Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.The Tapestry appears on the wall of De Bracy’s castle in the Classic Comics Illustrated version of Ivanhoe and in the background of the child’s animated version of Brian Jacques’s Redwall. It is featured on countless trinkets, household knickknacks, and clothes—on mugs, dish towels, sampler-size embroideries, decorative banners, pillows, scarves, T-shirts, and ties. Put to parodic or comic use, the Tapestry returns as travesty. To commemorate the new millennium, Bayer AG produced a running history of the Bayer Corporation—“the Bayer Tapestry”—from the founding of the chemical company in 1860 to the acquisition of Monsanto in 1995 and Chiron Diagnostics in 1999. A New Yorker cartoon of 1991 shows a man wearing what appears to be a 230-foot-long tie with a reproduction of the Tapestry trailing behind him and around the corner. Underneath, the caption reads, “Bayeux Tie.”
The “Bayeux Tie” was not the first notice in The New Yorker. The cover of the July 15, 1944, issue acknowledged D-Day just five weeks earlier, with a brilliant rendering of the crossing and landing of Allied troops on the beaches of Normandy in the format, style, and colors of the Bayeux Tapestry (see insert, figure 1). In the place of King Edward and Harold, we see King George, Roosevelt, and Churchill; in the place of Duke William and Odo, we see General Eisenhower and Field Marshal Montgomery (whose ancestors came to England with the Conquest); in the place of the Tapestry’s Viking boats, Allied ships and planes cross the English Channel; and in the bottom panels, Allied soldiers and tanks chase surrendering Germans across Norman fields as Hitler, hands in the air, emerges from a bunker whose architecture reproduces, as if a tracing, the building in which the treacherous Harold sits after his coronation. Even the Tapestry’s decorative borders, filled, as we shall see, with exotic animals, floral designs, and scenes from everyday life, translate into the American eagle, a face and microphone of the Free French, a handshake across the sea, fish, submarines, and land mines, and, under the scene of Hitler’s surrender, fleeing rats. The inscriptions, in the block capitals of the Tapestry’s epigraphic Latin, read GEORGE REX: ABSIT INVIDIA: MONTY ET IKE: MARE NAVIGAVIT: D-DAY•JVNE VI A•D•M•C•M•X•L•IV: BAYEUX JVNE VII: SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS—KING GEORGE: PUT QUARRELS ASIDE: MONTY AND IKE: CROSSES THE SEA: D-DAY-JUNE 6 AD 1944: BAYEUX JUNE 7: THIS IS HOW IT GOES WITH TYRANTS.
Rea Irvin, the cartoonist and the first art director of The New Yorker, shows considerable knowledge of the situation of the Allied forces in the spring of 1944. The enigmatic PUT QUARRELS ASIDE: MONTY AND IKE refers no doubt to the tension between Generals Montgomery and Eisenhower. But he had no way of knowing that the leaders of the Third Reich were fascinated by the Bayeux Tapestry. It is to that story and to the history of the Tapestry since its discovery in the early eighteenth century that we now turn.