IN THE LOWER MARGIN OF THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY, AMID THE depiction of one of the shaping events in the history of the West, the Norman Conquest of 1066, lies a scene of everyday life— farmers plowing and sowing a field, harrowing or covering the furrows, another aiming his slingshot at the birds who might eat what has just been sown (panels 21–24). This is the kind of rural sight familiar to country people living on the land or in the villages of southeastern England in the eleventh century, and like so many of the objects and actions of the Tapestry, it points to current custom and event—the first known image in Europe of a horse rather than an ox being used for tilling the soil. We know that the farmers are English because they wear the mustache and mane of hair upon the nape of the neck that throughout the Tapestry distinguishes Anglo-Saxons from the French. The twelfth-century historian William of Malmesbury recounts that a spy caught by William on the eve of the Battle of Hastings and sent back to Harold’s camp reported that “almost every man in William’s army seemed to be a priest, all their faces including both lips being clean shaven; for the English leave the upper lip, with its unceasing growth of hair, unshorn, which Julius Caesar describes as a national custom of the ancient Britons.”1
Whoever designed the Tapestry could have seen such a picture in one of the medieval illuminated manuscripts—the calendars, or “labors of the month”—kept in Canterbury, where we know they were produced and housed before the Conquest and where the embroidered record of the Norman triumph might have been made. Yet the image in the margin is more than merely a scene taken from rural life or the copy of an image found in a book. This particular combination of planting and bird slaying illustrates a story one of the Aesopian fables known in classical culture and throughout the Middle Ages as “The Swallow and the Linseed.” Aesop’s Fables, originally written in Greek in the sixth century B.C., were translated into Latin in the first century A.D. and from Latin into English by the Anglo-Saxon king Alfred (849–899), who ruled in the last quarter of the ninth. At least this is what the poet Marie de France (ca. 1140–ca. 1190), who translated Alfred’s book into French, tells us in her collection of animal tales written about a century after the Conquest. Though Alfred’s book has been lost, we can assume that Marie’s “Ysopets” and the Bayeux Tapestry must have had a common source, were part of the popular body of such tales that circulated in an age of generalized illiteracy among the few who knew how to write as well as the majority who did not.
An eleventh-century calendar illumination, month of January
MS. COTT. TIB. B.V. F.3R © BRITISH LIBRARY/HIP/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.
The farmers and hunter are actors in the last of the Aesopian fables that limn the edge below the Tapestry’s dramatic first act, after such well-known tales as “The Lion, the Buffalo, and the Wolf,” “The Wolf and the Lamb,” “The Mouse, the Frog, and the Kite,” “The Crow and the Fox,” and “The Wolf and the Crane.” “The Swallow and the Linseed” is a cautionary tale of men planting flax and of a clever swallow who warns her fellows: “You must know (says the swallow) that all the fowlers’ nets and snares are made of hemp, or flax; and that’s the seed that he is now a-sowing.” Once the flax has taken root, “the swallow told ’em once for all, it was not yet too late.” Her warning ignored, the swallow “bids adieu to her old companions in the woods, and so betook herself to a city life, and to the conversation of men.” When the flax matures, “it was this swallow’s fortune to see several of the very same birds that she had forewarn’d, taken in the nets, made of the very stuff she told them of.” Aesop concludes his tale about the relation of causes to effects: “They came at last to be sensible of the folly of slipping their opportunity; but they were lost beyond all redemption first.”2
“The Swallow and the Linseed” has particular meaning in light of the Tapestry’s violent drama of betrayal and death. The artist who undertook to represent the story of Harold’s capture and oath, seizure of the English throne, and death at the hands of the man to whom he had broken his word was no doubt attracted by the dog-eat-dog, eat-or-be-eaten, kill-or-be-killed world of Aesop. He was intrigued by the scenario of a wise bird moving away from her foolish fellows and seeking the conversation of the civilized men living in cities. He found irresistible the principle that certain deeds, once set in motion, cannot be undone. Marie de France understood the meaning of “The Swallow and the Linseed” in just this way. In its warning to fools who refuse good advice, the animal tale could easily refer to William and Harold:
A fool who won’t believe the wise
Who could advise him what to do
And rescue him from error, too,
Deserves the painful consequence—
Now it’s too late for penitence.3
Yet “The Swallow and the Linseed” is meaningful in another sense, for this tale, which pits the cleverness of the birds against the viciousness of men, turns around flax, the very background material on which the story of the Norman Conquest is embroidered.
The great mystery surrounding the origin of the Bayeux Tapestry is now partially solved by scientific analyses of the physical object itself, yielding answers to the questions of not when, where, or by whom, but of what and how it was sewn.
The Tapestry is made of wool laid upon a background of linen, with a single exception of linen-embroidered thread upon linen in the curious circular object held by one of the ambient figures in panel 107 amid the plunderers after the landing at Hastings and before the final feast. So the answer to the question of how it was made lies in a scene of planting not unlike that of “The Swallow and the Linseed” just under Harold’s capture by William’s vassal Guy of Ponthieu and the curious dwarfed figure of Turold, who some have speculated is the Tapestry’s master maker.
The Tapestry began as fibers of the bast family, which may have been indigenous to the British Isles but more likely came to Britain from the Middle East. The first records of flax as a source of fabric situate it in the alluvial soil of the Caucasus some fifty centuries before 1066. Neolithic man knew flax. Swiss Lake dwellers, the Celtic ancestors of the pre-Roman inhabitants of both England and France, used wool and flax for clothing. The Egyptians knew three or four species of flax indigenous to the region, and from there it spread to Greece, Rome, France, Spain, Holland, Flanders, and the British Isles. The Romans who invaded Britain in the first century A.D. encountered flax, which may have been growing there for almost a thousand years, or since the visits of Phoenician traders anxious for British tin and other raw materials.
The origins of the Bayeux Tapestry lie in the flax plants pulled by their roots—not cut—from the moist soil of southeastern England or western France. The stalks were soaked in warm water and dried in the sun until fermentation and dessication separated the usable inner strands from the chaff of the outer shell. They were then combed with a natural thistle or metal card, spun on a handheld spindle, used since time beyond memory to twist raw fiber into thread, and woven probably on one of the horizontal looms that revolutionized the craft of weaving in the settled cultures of the West. Given the length of certain sections of the Tapestry, the loom might even have had a drumlike roller at one end to wind the threads of the warp and a roller at the other end to receive the bolt of cloth. The cloth was scoured or fulled, then pressed and polished to give a lustrous finished sheen. This would have been one of the new, horizontal, treadle shaft looms that arrived in Western Europe from the Middle East, possibly from as far away as China via Italy or Spain, and that revolutionized the weaver’s art. “Men weave with their feet while the women have a stick which moves up and down,” wrote Rabbi Rashi of Troyes in the second half of the eleventh century from what would become one of the textile and trading centers on the Continent.4
Rashi’s observation is important, for what had been throughout the known world and since time immemorial women’s work, done in the home while standing up, became in the century of the Conquest also a man’s occupation performed sitting down and, eventually, in revived workshops and factories of the type first established in England under Roman occupation. Like Caesar, William the Conqueror was aware of the importance of cloth for military as well as nonmilitary use, bringing with the Norman armies of Conquest textile workers from the Continent to which their ancestors had fled centuries earlier to escape the Saxons. Among all that it portended, 1066 was a watershed event in the making and trading of the raw materials and finished goods that would make England and the Low Countries kings of cloth in centuries to come.
Microscopic analyses done when the Tapestry was removed for cleaning in 1982–1983 show in some detail that the thread of the linen background was turned in a “Z” (counterclockwise) pattern, with a torsion varying between 400 and 460 turns per meter for the warp and 430–650 for the weft, and that the weave of the linen is of a fineness of 18–19 threads per centimeter.5 The more delicate linen of the Tapestry is folded at its upper and lower edges and mounted upon a coarser linen backing that most certainly was not there from the start. Radiocarbon 14 dating done in the early 1980s situates the backing in a time frame between 1440 and 1680, though current technology would permit a much more precise and narrower temporal window.6 This 230-foot narrative is stitched upon nine separate lengths of linen, varying between 13.90 meters and 2.43 meters and sewn together so finely that the seams were not discovered before 1874, well after the Tapestry began to attract the interest of connoisseurs and amateur historians.
Before the analyses done in 1982–1983, it was commonly believed that there were eight and not nine sections. We know that the first suture was made after embroidery had been sewn on top of the pieces to be joined. The horizontal mismatching of embroidered stitches upon the linen base lies like an earthquake fault across a road at the top of panels 33 and 34. So, too, the skillful overlappings of subsequent images and writing tell us that joinings after the first were made before the colored wool stitches and fill were sewn upon the linen. In light of the disintegration of the right border, and given what we know about the length of other segments, the Tapestry—by best guess—is missing three to seven feet, at the end of which, it is assumed, there once stood an image of William upon the throne to match that of Harold’s coronation after King Edward’s death.
If the linen of the background came from the soil, after a long process of transforming flax into cloth, the wool of the embroidery came no doubt from the abundant sheep of Normandy or southern England, such as that shown in the Tapestry in the scene of pillaging after the Norman landing on the coast. Here, too, there is archaeological and written evidence of an increase in the sheep population of England to suggest that William encouraged sheep raising alongside cloth manufacture as a matter of Anglo-Norman governance.7 The Bayeux Tapestry is in some deep sense a celebration of the textile arts.
Microscopic and chemical analyses tell us that the wool of the Tapestry was degreased, then treated with a mordant containing alum in order to ensure the fastness of the dyes that were applied while the wool was still in the fleece rather than after being spun. Cross sections of individual strands of wool fiber, examined under an electron microscope, show a deep penetration of dye colors, confirming what is visible to the naked eye: The colors of yarn sewn on the surface of linen have faded relatively little compared with the color of the same threads protruding on the other side that have not received nearly the same exposure to light; the threads that have been rubbed and have shed some of their fibers on the outside are no less vividly colored at their core.
Dyeing was an art known to the Romans who had occupied Gaul and England from the first to the fourth centuries A.D. Pliny claims in his Natural History, written in the first century, that the Gauls knew how to make “every imaginable color” from the juice of plants. Chromatography of the hundreds of samples of fiber analyzed beginning in 1982 shows ten colors and shades of the original wool yarn of the Bayeux Tapestry: rosy red, darker brick red, mustard yellow, beige or fawn yellow, black blue, dark blue, medium or indigo blue, dark green, medium green, and light green. Physical spectrometry shows traces of luteoline (Reseda luteola) and apigenine present in weld, alizarine and purpurine present in madder (Rubia tinctorum), indigotin, pastel, or woad (Isatis tinctoria), and a lack of the use of tannins.
The colors of the Tapestry, unlike those of subsequent restorations, were produced from natural vegetable dyes and their combination: dyes made from red madder or seaweed, yellow broom or lotus root, and blue woad, which was widely cultivated in Normandy Three shades of green are a mixture of yellow and blue. Analysis shows that the wool yarn, after dyeing, was spun in an “S” (clockwise) direction with a tension of between 175 and 350 turns per meter and a thickness varying between .6 and 1.8 millimeters. This is hand-spun stuff indeed, and one is tempted to imagine the spinning even in one of the rural dwellings or cottages shown in panels 106 to 108, among the castles, high halls, churches, and cathedral of the Tapestry, in the scene of pillaging between the landing at Pevensey and the Norman feast prior to the Battle of Hastings.
The Bayeux Tapestry is a unique work, and the few scraps of Scandinavian textile wall hangings that have survived, most of which were made after 1066, offer little to guide us as to how an embroidery on linen might have come about. We can only guess on the basis of physical evidence and comparisons with other arts of the period in order to imagine how it might actually have been made. The very size of the undertaking tells us that though it may express the vision of a single mind, it was not the product of a single set of hands. Here the analogy with the cathedral building site, its master architect, masons, craftsmen, laborers, and sculptors working either on-site or in workshops nearby, is apt. The Tapestry contains one such scene of building as a workman in panel 66 places the finishing touch, a weathercock, upon West-minster Abbey, the first Romanesque building in England, completed just two weeks before Edward’s death.
William undertook a rebuilding of the parish churches, cathedrals, abbeys, and castles of England after the Conquest that is almost unrivaled in the West, some of it with stone brought all the way from the Continent. The collective work of cathedral building was slow, however, and as an analogy to the making of the Tapestry, nothing like what is suggested in a Punch cartoon of July 15,1966, which shows a harried embroiderer, needle in the air, surrounded by skeins of yarn, stitching furiously as the Battle of Hastings is being fought in the background. The Tapestry probably took more in the vicinity of months or a year than the decades and even generations of a cathedral or great church.
At the end of the nineteenth century, Elizabeth Wardle, wife of silk industrialist Thomas Wardle, enlisted the Leek Embroidery Society of Staffordshire to make a full-scale replica so that England might have a Tapestry of its own. Hers was no local homespun idea, but part of the effort, led by William Morris, to preserve artisanal crafts, including the art of making natural dyes, which had nearly disappeared with the appearance of coal tar– and benzene-based aniline dyes in the 1850s. Thomas Wardle’s brother George was the manager of Morris’s design firm in London, which assisted in the dyeing of one hundred pounds of wool from the same woad, madder, and weld as those of the Bayeux Tapestry. In a little over a year, thirty-five women completed a reproduction of the Tapestry, which was placed on exhibit in the Reading Museum after touring the United States and Germany Their task was shortened slightly, however, by the removal, in keeping with Victorian sensibilities, of all traces of male genitalia from the Tapestry’s human figures as well as from many of the horses. In the case of the nude figures beneath the figure of Ælfgyva in panel 39 (see p. 119), short pants have been traced over the offending organs, though the trace lines have not been filled with wool stitching.
A closer analogy is to be found in one of the textile workshops of the Middle East, more particularly in the highly organized silk-making factories of Constantinople, whose products were known in the West and to which we will return in the course of our discussion of the Tapestry’s overall design and deeper meaning.
A still closer and more immediate analogy lies in the manuscript workshops, or scriptoria, which in the eleventh century would most likely be located in one of the great abbeys or monasteries of England or France. Mont-Saint-Michel, which is pictured in the Tapestry at the mouth of the river Couesnon at the beginning of William and Harold’s venture into Brittany, was one of the great centers of manuscript production in an age before the revival of commerce and specialization of labor following the Conquest moved the making of books into more commercialized workshops in larger population centers. William encouraged the making of manuscripts. The man he installed as archbishop of Canterbury, Lanfranc, brought with him from Normandy books and copyists who revolutionized both the hand and the style of English manuscript illumination in the decades following the Conquest. Scollandus, who came from Mont-Saint-Michel to be the first abbot of Saint Augustine’s, Canterbury, was originally a scribe. The monastic copy room, or scriptorium, was the end point of the various activities connected to the making of manuscripts, beginning with the preparation—depilation, stretching, polishing, and collating—of parchment, some of the skin possibly from the same sheep that yielded the Tapestry’s wool.
In the making of a manuscript, there would be negotiations between the book’s patron or purchaser and the master manuscript makers. They would discuss the size and quality of the skins to be purchased, the number and size of illuminations, the richness of the colors to be used (blues made from lapis lazuli were particularly expensive), whether there would be gold or silver leaf, the place and character of marginalia, the quality and luxuriousness of the binding. At the end, a contract might be signed like that between a present-day home owner and builder.
Once agreement had been reached, the master planner in a manuscript workshop assessed the skins in order to fold them in sequential folios that, when cut, would lie flat. So complex, in fact, were the techniques of aligning the first fold with the animal’s spine and then folding either twice for a large manuscript (a quarto) or three times for a smaller manuscript (an octo) that the secret of just how it was done was not discovered until the nineteenth century The master laid out the margins, left and right, upper and lower, pricked the parchment with pins for tethered string, and traced with lead the rulings for writing and the spaces to be left blank. The layout specialist might also suggest subjects and make sketches for illustration. Once the parchment had been laid out and ruled, a reader might read out loud the work to be copied by copyists wielding a quill pen and a pen knife for erasures. A rubricator traced in chapter and section titles, often in the red ink that his name connotes. Using the colors prepared by specialists in the making of ink and paint from some of the same plants that yielded the Tapestry’s dyes, illuminators filled in the areas left for images, sometimes laying gold and silver leaf. The same or other artists went to work in the margins, adding the visual glosses and doodlings—thebas de page and drolleries that have so puzzled scholars over the years. Binders sewed the carefully folded folios of parchment in a codex book, and, finally, craftsmen made a book cover, some of which were so encrusted with precious metals and gems that they attracted the Viking raiders of monasteries up and down the Seine and along the English and Irish coasts long before the Norsemen settled in what would henceforth become Normandy, the “Land of the Men from the North.”
There are many important formal analogies between the Bayeux Tapestry and medieval manuscripts: the horizontal ruling along upper and lower borders filled with meaningful miniatures—Aesopian fables, exotic and domestic animals, floral and geometric decoration, scenes of hunting, bearbaiting, erotica— all along the Tapestry’s length, writing to identify people and places amid the main visual tableaux, suturing of the Tapestry’s separate sections in what is the equivalent of the binding of a book. The inscriptions that are such an important element of the Tapestry and that serve to identify the people, places, and actions depicted there resemble to some degree the instructions a master manuscript planner would leave on the parchment to guide those who would carry out the visual illustrations. Inspection of the rear of the Tapestry shows that in certain places the inscriptions were sewn before the figures they were meant to identify Many of the tableaux depicted in the Tapestry, the numerous scenes of council, for example, are so stylized as to lead one to think they must be set pieces from one of the pattern books used by manuscript illuminators in order not to have to reinvent every subject and setting each time. It would be hard to conceive the making of a work of the specific character and size of the Tapestry without something along the lines of the organization that went into the production of a medieval illuminated manuscript.
Again, though we do not know exactly where or when, we know either Queen Mathilda, or Odo, or Odo’s vassals conceived of a memorial to the Conquest, to the glory of a husband, brother, or feudal lord. There may have been discussions about the form of such a monument—the advantages of something in stone like Battle Abbey, begun on the site of victory at Hastings almost immediately after the event, versus those of something more portable, the nature of a private rather than a more public work. At some point, one of the advisers to Odo or the queen, like the retainers and counselors pictured in the Tapestry itself, might have mentioned the great victory friezes seen by Anglo-Saxon and Norman visitors to Rome in the course of the tenth century or one of the reports of textile hangings in Byzantine churches brought back by the Scandinavian troops who guarded the emperor in Constantinople.
There would be talk of the materials themselves, whether to use “precious gold, silver, and silk, studded with gems and pearls,” as in Baudri de Bourgueil’s description of a hanging in William’s daughter Adela’s bedroom, or whether the embroidered account of 1066 would be made of plainer stuff The decision to embroider the Tapestry out of wool on linen in all likelihood points to a function, conceived from the outset, that would involve regular unfurling and rerolling, and possibly transport, which would have been rendered more difficult by the interweaving of metal filament and the application of jewels or other ornament. Cost would not have been a consideration, since either Mathilda or Odo had access to the riches for which England was famous at the time of the Conquest. The English complained bitterly about the treasure appropriated from religious institutions and sent to France by Odo after 1066. It remained to find a workshop suitable for such a large-scale venture, though it is also likely that the where of the weaving of the Tapestry was settled from the start and may have influenced the nature of the project.
Somewhere in southern England or western France, in the second half of the eleventh century, at least nine pieces of linen backing along with ten different colors or shades of dyed wool thread, iron needles, shears of a type that had been around since Roman times, design sketches either on loose pieces of parchment or in set-scene pattern books, lead for drawing on linen, and frames for holding cloth stretched and steady were assembled either in a single workroom or in several, either in a religious foundation or in a more secular and domestic hall, for the purpose of embroidering an account of what must have seemed like relatively recent events.
Like any work of art of such a large scale, the Bayeux Tapestry shows an inconsistency or two. In the scene where Guy of Ponthieu speaks to Harold shortly after his capture in panel 20 stands a group of eight men, or at least eight heads, with only eight legs among them. In some of the equestrian figures, the same horse is shown as being of different color. Yet, unlike many medieval manuscripts in which experts in the science of paleography can recognize differences in handwriting that would indicate more than one copyist or painting styles of more than one illuminator, the Tapestry shows a remarkable artistic consistency from beginning to end. Examination of the back of the Tapestry shows a difference in scale and possibly also in skill between, say, the miniaturized scene of Edward’s deathbed stacked vertically on top of the scene of his enshrouding, and the rest, and may signal the handiwork of more than one embroiderer. Yet the overall coherence of conception points toward a master artist or designer who imposes his vision throughout. It also indicates that those who actually executed such a single vision must have worked either from a separate drawing or set of drawings or, alternatively, that the pattern for the Tapestry might have been drawn directly upon the linen surface. There is some trace of design marks upon the linen, though these may be related to one or more of the restorations made in the course of its long history
The nineteenth-century historian Jules Michelet once characterized the Middle Ages as “a thousand years without a bath!” Not so the Bayeux Tapestry, which according to experts has probably been washed a time or two, and such washing, it is conjectured, might have removed sketching in lead or other material beneath the embroidery. Even if the Tapestry’s figures had originally been traced directly upon the linen, it is hard to believe that whoever traced them could have worked without some version of a preliminary sketch. An example of drawing on cloth survives from the tenth century in the Life of Saint Dunstan, who as a young man had so “developed his skill in the arts of writing, of playing on the lyre, and of painting” that he is called upon by the noble-woman Æthelwynn to draw designs on an ecclesiastical robe to be “embellished with embroidery in gold and precious stones.” The cleric is clearly capable of designing inscriptions and other figures within the context of an embroidery workshop and a “team of needlewomen.”8
So, let us imagine a workroom in which the various textile materials have been assembled, some portion of the linen stretched upon a wooden frame, a set of designs either traced upon the linen or alongside it, and a Tapestry Master who also acts as foreman of a team of embroideresses.
Though those who actually embroidered the Tapestry were most likely women, the designer was probably a man, which tempers somewhat the view of one of the Tapestry’s first commentators, Agnes Strickland, that men should not be allowed to speak of the Bayeux Tapestry, since they would “not know how to put in the first stitch.”9 The attribution of the design to a man is based upon an analogy with the male world of manuscripts of this period, as opposed to that of subsequent centuries when women became more actively involved in the making of books. The Tapestry designer was not only possessed of some little clerical training, if only because of the Latin inscriptions, but was also familiar with the dominant art forms of his day—oral and possibly written poetic works such as the fables with which we began and which were used throughout the Middle Ages to teach young boys good grammar as well as good behavior. He might have heard one or more of the heroic poems such as the The Song of Roland or the LatinSong of the Battle of Hastings, written not long after the event by Guy of Amiens, uncle of Guy of Ponthieu, who figures in the Tapestry’s opening act and actually accompanied Queen Mathilda from Normandy to England for her coronation in 1068.
Even with a modicum of education, the Tapestry Master would have known the Bible, parts of the basic works of the Church Fathers, books of prayer and psalms, and possibly some version of either an Anglo-Saxon or Norman chronicle. He might certainly have come into contact with metalwork, ivories, textiles in the form of clerical robes, altar coverings or hangings, other decorative objects, and wood and stone carvings. Of course, he would have encountered the architecture of either England or France, or possibly both, as depicted in the Tapestry, though what is today appreciated as architecture might have seemed at the time no more than a military stronghold, a town dwelling, a peasant’s hut, the palace of a local lord, or God’s own house.
The Tapestry Master had a greater knowledge of distant cultures than has heretofore been recognized. He was familiar with the world of Byzantine silks and knew either directly or by hearsay of the great victory friezes of the Roman world, Trajan’s or Marcus Aurelius’s Column, possibly via a Christianized version commissioned in the early eleventh century at the behest of Bernward, a monk of Hildesheim, Germany The Tapestry Master might have seen one of the “Exultet Rolls” of southern Italy, on which the biblical text was written for a clerical reader alongside illustrations to be shown to the congregation. Though the Bayeux Tapestry may appear to our eye the work of a naïf, and though its medium may be that of simple cloth, whoever designed it knew much about the art forms of his day and developed in his masterpiece, as we shall see, what, at the dawn of what the historian Marc Bloch calls “the second feudal age,” was an international style.
Working either from a sketch alongside or upon the linen, the embroideresses, again with extraordinary consistency, used three basic stitches throughout. The first is a stem stitch, in which the needle comes out of the cloth each time, overlapping slightly the previous stitch in order to form a straight line or a curved line due to the turning of the angle of successive stitches. This stitch can be observed in its simplest state in the Latin inscriptions whose straight parallel, perpendicular, and diagonal lines, sometimes capped with a small serif, resemble the writing of a child who learns to print in capitals. The stem stitch is put to sophisticated use as a tool for sketching. It is used regularly for hands, faces, and unclothed bodies such as the legs stepping into the water as Harold’s retinue leaves Bosham or the naked bodies in the margins, as if to imply nakedness via a lack of wool in panels 7 38, 39, and 123.
The stem stitch suggests fateful consequences in the outline of the “ghost ships” that lie ominously along the lower margin below Halley’s comet in panel 75 and the counselor whispering in Harold’s ear after his usurpation and when the prospect of invasion is just an idea, stitched or sketched out, and waiting to be filled in. The overlapping joined boards of the ghost ships will reappear in the empty stem stitches of the timber made into lumber in the construction of William’s fleet in panel 83. The stem stitch is perfect for the depiction of decorative tiles or stonework on the sides of buildings. It renders the wavy lines of the choppy Channel in Harold’s travels to Normandy and back and in William’s passage on the night of September 27, 1066, capturing as it does the insubstantiality of water as opposed to the other substances represented in terms of solid mass—the Tapestry’s 626 human figures, 202 horses or mules, 55 hounds or dogs, 505 other animals, 41 ships, 37 buildings, and 49 trees.
A variety of the stem stitch, the outline stitch, is characterized by less overlap in its tracing of figures, which are then filled in by “laid and couched” stitches—a laying of wool yarn in a mass that is gathered while another series of threads is stitched at a right angle and the mass secured, or “couched,” to give the effect of solidity within the contours of an outline. The outline stitch is to the “couched” colored yarn it contains as the lead surrounding a solid piece of colored glass is to the transparent colors of a medieval stained-glass window. As the yoking of a gathered mass of yarn, giving the impression of little ringlets, the “laid and couched” stitches are perfectly suited for depicting the chain mail of armored knights, the craggy landmass on which rests Mont-Saint-Michel, or the wrinkles in garments. Sometimes, too, the outline penetrates the more solid mass of gathered yarn, as in the case of garments whose folds are represented by internal sketching in yarn of a different color from that of the fill, yielding a certain naturalism of the clothed body.10
There is in the Tapestry little attempt at perspective, which is rendered for the most part by the depiction of objects as large and small, as in the larger, closer boats and the smaller, more distant ones shown at the time of William’s crossing, or by the use of different-colored yarns, as in the near legs of certain horses sewn in lighter or darker hues meant to give the illusion that the off-legs are farther away. The actual embroidery of the Tapestry must have been astonishingly well prepared in terms of the choice of color. An examination of the bridges of yarn visible from the back shows that the same thread may be used to sew a figure of the main panel, an inscription, and then a border. Such careful planning suggests use of a pattern drawn on the linen and confirms that the different vertical zones of the Tapestry were stitched simultaneously as the sewing progressed from left to right.
So in an account of how—not where, when, or by whom—the Tapestry was made, we might imagine a foot or so a day worked in linear sequence by embroideresses surrounded by baskets of yarn, a ready supply of needles, sketches from the type of pattern books used in the illumination of manuscripts to be followed directly or transferred to the linen, bits of trimmed yarn upon the floor, all under the watchful eye of the Tapestry Master, calculating the length of scenes and the placement of sutures, drawing upon the linen, writing out the inscriptions or spelling them out loud, making suggestions about the decorations in the margins that are less sequential than the events of the main panel, and inspecting the whole at regular intervals.
The Bayeux Tapestry is in some ways like the Torah scroll of the Hebrew scribe, who cannot make mistakes with the impunity of the copyist of a codex book, obliged, in the instance, to recopy only one folio page. Its linen pieces vary between 13.90 and 2.43 meters, and despite the numerous blemishes, repaired tears, and even the waxy substance that has penetrated the linen at certain places, we know from the lack of needle holes that do not seem part of the original design that the Tapestry was more than carefully done. Where such needle holes have appeared, they have, as we know from comparison with drawings made in the eighteenth century, been used as a guide to the restoration of stitches that were there from the start. It is always possible, of course, that major errors were made and that the Tapestry Master simply ordered the imperfect linen strip to be cut off and a new one begun. This might explain the extreme variation in the length of the Tapestry’s nine separate linen links. Again, we will never know, since the pieces that remain appear seamlessly joined both by individually embroidered stitches and by theme.
Once the separate sections of the Tapestry were complete, we might imagine a sewing together like the basting sessions of a modern-day quilting bee and possibly a stitching of the whole onto a more substantive backing. As the suturing progresses, the finished linen strips would be rolled upon a winchlike device such as that described by Hudson Gurney who saw the Tapestry in 1817 “coiled round a machine, like that which lets down buckets to a well,” or as sketched in 1829 by the antiquarian Thomas Frognall Dibdin, who claims that we see the Tapestry rolled in his drawing “precisely as it appears after the person who shews it takes off the cloth with which it is usually covered.”11 (See p. 33).
No matter who actually commissioned the Tapestry or where it was embroidered and assembled, it is hard not to envision regular communication between patron and Tapestry Master, as between Master and embroideresses. If the patron was Mathilda and the work took place in a royal castle, she might have participated on some daily basis in the making; and if it was Odo, he might have received regular reports on the progress of embroidery and even visited the workshop to view, like an architectural building site, the transformation of his idea for a memorial to the Conquest into a woven masterpiece. There might have been a final unfurling and viewing, followed by a first hanging in either palace or church. If in a great castle hall, then celebration of the type described in a medieval romance would have accompanied the Tapestry’s “coming out.” Musicians might have played and tumblers tumbled, while jongleurs recited a chanson de geste like The Song of Roland. It has been suggested that the written inscriptions of the Tapestry are intended as cues to aid the oral poet’s memory of significant lyric moments of an epic song, possibly even a lost vernacular “Song of Hastings” alongside Guy of Amiens’s Latin Song of the Battle of Hastings.12 If the Tapestry, having been removed from nunnery or castle workshop to a church in either England or France, was first unrolled around the nave of a cathedral, its display might have been accompanied by solemn ceremony and prayers of thanks led by Odo. Odo might in his sermon have recounted the story of the Norman Conquest, turning the historical event in which he participated into the stuff of legend. In either account, the stunning unveiling of the Bayeux Tapestry was only the beginning of its enduring artistic and social effects.