AMONG THE CONTENDERS FOR THE ENGLISH CROWN UPON Edward the Confessor’s death in 1066, Harold Godwineson and Duke William of Normandy were not alone. The Scandinavians who had ruled Britain off and on for almost two centuries before Edward’s reign, the centuries sometimes called the Viking Age, laid claim to England alongside the Anglo-Saxons and Normans. King Harald Hardråda of Norway, in league with Harold Godwineson’s older brother Tostig, swept down from the North as William was preparing to cross the English Channel. William carried the day at Hastings because of superb diplomatic and military preparation, because of superior tactics and daring, because of the lucky arrow that landed in Harold’s eye. But William was one of those conquering figures—like Alexander the Great, Caesar, or Charlemagne—whom history favors, at least for a while, and as luck would have it, King Harald Hardråda’s attack upon King Harold at Stamford Bridge, near the town of York, so weakened the English that it was an important factor in William’s victory at Hastings just two weeks later. Harald Hardråda was a formidable foe, and had things turned out differently at the Battle of Stamford Bridge, William, whose ancestors were Scandinavian, would have faced a fellow Norseman at Hastings. The story of Harald Hardråda’s early adventures in the Mediterranean has special meaning for our understanding of Hastings and of the Bayeux Tapestry’s debt not only to Anglo-Saxon, Norman, and Scandinavian culture, but to that of the Middle East.
On July 29, 1030, Harald Hardråda, only fifteen years old, fought alongside his half-brother King Olaf of Norway at the Battle of Stiklestad. Olaf, who had been baptized in Rouen, Normandy France, and had traveled as a Viking to England, met his death, though he would later be resurrected as Saint Olaf Harald was only wounded and escaped into the Norwegian woods. Hidden by farmers, he “crept from forest to forest” until he reached Sweden, and from Sweden he sailed to Russia, where he and his retainers were received at Novgorod by King Jaroslav The Norwegians stayed for several years at the Russian court before making their way in the mid-1030s to Greece and Constantinople, where, in the phrase of the thirteenth-century Icelandic poet Snorri Sturluson, “His swan-breasted ships swept / Towards the tall-towered city.”1 Harald “presented himself to the Empress of Byzantium and immediately joined her army” In short order, he was the captain of the Varangians, the emperor’s personal guard composed of Scandinavian mercenaries.
The Norwegian and Russian courts were models of stability compared with the world in which Harald found himself, known even in the eleventh century for its “Byzantine” complications, for treachery and intrigue. One of the keenest observers of the imperial court at Constantinople, Michael Psellus, a tutor and adviser to successive emperors, summarizes his firsthand knowledge of the regime in the years covering Harald’s time in the East: “Not one of the emperors in my time—and I say this with experience of many in my life, for most of them only lasted a year— not one of them, to my knowledge, bore the burden of Empire entirely free from blame to the end. Some were naturally evil, others were evil through their friendship for certain individuals, and others again for some other of the common reasons.”2
So corrupt was the Byzantine court that, beginning in 988 when Emperor Basil II received a contingent of “Scythians” from the Taurus in Russia to help him suppress the rebellion of his former ally Bardas Phocas, the emperor surrounded himself with outsiders, “ax bearers” from the North. The name “Varangian” derives from the Old Norse vár, “pledge,” and was first applied to Scandinavians who came to fight for the rulers of Kiev and Novgorod. As “Men of the Pledge,” the Varangians were known for keeping their word. Anna Comnena, daughter of Emperor Alexius I, observes in the biography of her famous father (the Alexiad) that “the Varangians, who bear on their shoulders the heavy iron sword, regard loyalty to the emperors and the protection of their persons as a family tradition, a kind of sacred trust and inheritance handed down from generation to generation.”3
In the ten years Harald served as a Varangian in the Mediterranean, he fought in Africa among the Saracens, where he captured, according to the Icelandic saga that bears his name, eighty cities. From Africa Harald moved to Sicily, where he “garnered an immense hoard of money, gold and treasure of all kinds.” As Harald amassed booty, he sent it by “his own reliable messengers” back to Novgorod into the safekeeping of King Jaroslav Harald returned to Constantinople but did not stay very long. He left for Jerusalem, where he conquered Palestine in what appears as a foretaste of the First Crusade. Harald bathed in the river Jordan before returning to Constantinople. In one of his poems, Harald mentions having visited a “town in the south,” possibly Athens, which is at the source of the legend that Harald etched the runic letters on a great marble lion from Piraeus, now in Venice, though the letters themselves do not bear this out.
Again in Constantinople around 1046, Harald announced his plans to return north, and the empress had him imprisoned. Writing in the thirteenth century, the saga poet Snorri Sturluson, in a psychohistorical interpretation of events that had occurred two centuries earlier, surmises that the empress was secretly in love with him. Harald eventually did escape, however, through his courage and cleverness—and through a miracle. While in prison, he had a vision of his dead half-brother Olaf That very night, the Scandinavian prisoners were visited by the servants of a woman who had once been healed by Olaf, who had also appeared to her in a dream and “directed her to rescue his brother Harald.”
The liberated Varangians avenged themselves by putting out the emperor’s eyes, then they carried off the empress’s niece and sped to their galleys. All that remained by way of barrier was the great iron chain across the Bosporus. As his boats approached the chain, Harald ordered those of his men who were rowing to ply their oars as fast as they could, while the others were to move to the stern with all their goods. When the prow of the ship became stuck upon the iron links, he commanded those in the stern to rush to the prow, thus pivoting his “dragon” upon the fulcrum used to prevent enemies from reaching Constantinople. Harald’s boat escaped unharmed, while the other ship “stuck fast on the chains and broke its back. Many of her crew were lost, but some were rescued from the sea.”
From Constantinople, Harald made his way back to Novgorod, where he reclaimed the gold and “valuable treasure of all kinds” sent there from Greece, Africa, Sicily, and Palestine. “This hoard of wealth was so immense that no one in northern Europe had ever seen the like of it in one man’s possession before.” He left for Sweden, having married King Jaroslav’s daughter, one of whose sisters married the king of Hungary and the other the king of France. When Harald, after plundering in Denmark, eventually returned to Norway, it was as co-regent with Olaf’s son Magnus, from whom he had purchased half the realm with the booty amassed in the East: “Harald had a huge ox-hide spread out on the floor, and the gold was emptied onto it out of the chests…. All those present were astonished that such immense wealth in gold should have been assembled in Scandinavia in one place.” At Magnus’s death, Harald laid claim to Denmark in addition to Norway, and it was Harald who in the spring of 1066 joined forces with Harold Godwineson’s brother Tostig, Earl of Northumbria, to lay claim, in the line of Danes who had ruled England off and on for over two centuries, to half of England as well.
Harald’s itinerary—from Norway, to Russia, to Constantinople, Africa, and Sicily, then back to Norway and, finally, to Britain—shows the permeability of northern and southern worlds. And though Harald was exceptional, he was not alone. In the century of the Norman Conquest, northern merchants, clerics, pilgrims, warriors, and even some free farmers traveled by rivers and overland portage across what is now Russia or by sea through the Straits of Gibraltar to the Middle East, northern Italy, Rome, Jerusalem, and Constantinople, where they traded, prayed, and fought like Harald in the emperor’s guard. In 957, Helga or Olga of Kiev visited Constantinople; in 990, the Icelander Thorvald the Far-Travelled, a missionary converted by the Saxons, made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, returning via Syria and Byzantium. The thirteenth-century Icelandic Njal’s Saga tracks the voyage of Kolskegg, whose itinerary is very much like that of Harald. “Kolskegg was baptized in Denmark. But he never found happiness there, and moved on east to Russia, where he stayed for one winter. From there he travelled to Constantinople where he joined the Emperor’s army. The last that was heard of him was that he had married there and become a leader in the Varangian Guard. He stayed there for the rest of his life; and he is now out of this saga.”4
Runic characters incised in stones of the Middle East and in stones erected especially in Sweden and Gotland commemorate beloved family members who died in faraway Constantinople, or “Micklegarth.” The Norse name “Halfdan” is incised in a marble screen of the south gallery of Hagia Sophia. A stone in Fjuckby, Uppland, was placed there by Liutr the pilot in memory of his sons: “One was named Ake, who perished while abroad… he sailed into Greek ports….” A stone in Ärlinghundra, Uppland, was erected by Härlev and Torgerd, whose father, Säbjörn, “commanded a boat in the East with Ingvar….” On another, Tjälve and Hlomlög ordered stones for their son who “owned a boat and sailed it East. …” A runic inscription from Östergötland, Sweden, around A.D. 800 marks the death of Øyvind, who “fell in the East” with a companion.5
As we see in the Bayeux Tapestry, Harold II of England had himself crowned the day after Edward the Confessor’s death, alleging in the scene visible in the upper part of panel 70, where Edward’s relatives are gathered, that the dying Edward had left him the crown and kingdom upon his deathbed. Harold’s older brother Tostig, who controlled the army at the time of what he considered to be Harold’s usurpation, left immediately, according to the chronicler Orderic Vitalis, for Normandy, where he secured Duke William’s permission to return to England. William, calculating and clever as he was, encouraged Tostig without offering anything more concrete, knowing that an attack upon Harold from whatever source would weaken him and would make William’s ambitions in England easier to realize. “But it is written,” Orderic reminds us, that “‘Man proposes, God disposes,’ and things fell out otherwise than they planned.”6 Tostig found himself neither strong enough to enter England nor able to return to Normandy because of unfavorable weather.
“Tossed about by the west and south and other winds,” Tostig proceeded to Flanders, Frisia, and Denmark, seeking help in taking back the kingdom that he saw as belonging as rightfully to him as to his brother Harold. Tostig might have gone to Flanders because his father, Godwine, had sought and received refuge there when forced to flee at the height of his own troubles with King Edward in 1051–1052 and because he was married to Judith, daughter of Count Baldwin of Flanders. Yet Flanders was also an unlikely source for aid in conquering England, since William of Normandy was married to Baldwin’s daughter Mathilda. From Flanders, Tostig went to Denmark, where he reminded the Danish king Sweyn that his uncle Cnut had ruled England and that, were the two to unite, half of England might be his. In an uncharacteristic show of modesty and restraint within the world of Icelandic sagas, Sweyn replied that “as far as I am concerned, I intend to be guided more by my own limitations than by my uncle Cnut’s achievements.”
Tostig left for Norway, where, as the chronicler Orderic Vitalis tells us, he pleaded with King Harald Hardråda: “‘Great king, I approach your throne as a suppliant, offering myself and my service in good faith to your majesty, in the hope of being restored by your aid to the honour which is mine by right of inheritance. For Harold my brother, who ought rightly to obey me as the firstborn, has treacherously risen against me and presumptuously on false pretences made himself king of England. Therefore I seek help from you as your liegeman, knowing that you have a strong army and every military virtue. Destroy my brother’s upstart strength in war, keep half England for yourself, and let me have the other half to hold as your faithful vassal as long as I live.’”7 Tostig’s proposal fell on receptive ears. “The earl and the king talked together often and at length; and finally they came to the decision to invade England that summer.”8
This was, of course, the summer of William’s shipbuilding and amassing of a fleet on the river Dives, as seen in Tapestry panels 83–86. From Dives, William moved his armada, estimated at between seven hundred and one thousand ships (though the chronicler William of Jumièges reckoned it at three thousand), to the ancient Roman port of Saint-Valery at the mouth of the river Somme, in order to take advantage of a shorter crossing. There, according to his chaplain and biographer, William of Poitiers, Duke William sat for several weeks, prevented by unfavorable winds from setting sail. He prayed, he sighed, he made pious offerings, he had “the body of Valery a confessor most acceptable to God, carried out of the basilica to quell the contrary wind and bring a favourable one.”9But, above all, William watched the church’s weathercock, a gesture that may be alluded to in the Tapestry on panel 66, where a workman, in placing the finishing touch upon a large building project, sets a weathercock atop Westminster Abbey. “You looked to see by what wind the weathercock of the church was turned,” the author of The Song of the Battle of Hastings addresses William. “If the south wind blew, at once you returned thence joyful; if suddenly the north wind diverted and held off the south, lamenting, you bedewed your face with welling tears.”10
The same wind that prevented William from crossing the English Channel blew Harald Hardråda’s forces down from the North. The Norwegian king arrived off the river Tyne with some three hundred ships. Joined by Tostig, who had spent the summer raiding like a Viking along the northern coast, Harald Hardråda entered the mouth of the river Humber sometime around September 18. At Gate Fulford outside the city of York, the combined Norwegian and rebellious English forces met Earls Edwin and Morcar and defeated the Mercian army in what was the first of three great battles of the year 1066. King Harold of England, meanwhile, had learned of the invasion in the North and marched with full force toward York. There negotiations took place, in the course of which Harold is said to have offered Harald Hardråda “six feet of English soil, or seven, since he is reported to be bigger than most men.”
On September 25, 1066, at Stamford Bridge, the English army defeated and killed both Harald Hardråda and Harold’s brother Tostig in as complete a victory as any of the Middle Ages.
Harald Hardråda, known as “the Thunderbolt of the North,” was the last of the great Viking leaders. He used his military might to amass wealth with which he eventually purchased kingship. His travels, in fact, can be traced by the Byzantine coins he left in his wake. A coin that Harald received from Emperor Michael IV as a reward for his participation in the campaign against the Bulgarians may have been the model for the Danish silver penny of Sweyn Estridsen, struck around 1047, as well as for many copies of Byzantine coins produced in Denmark.11 In an addition to the eleventh-century History of the Archbishops of Hamburg, Adam of Bremen makes the claim that Harald Hardråda took his great treasure with him to England on his final expedition. So if we follow the money, the wealth that weighed so much, in Adam’s words, that “twelve young men could hardly lift it to their shoulders” fell into the hands of Harold Godwineson.12
King Harold Godwineson’s victory at Stamford Bridge was bittersweet, however. Within a matter of days, he learned that on the morning of September 28, Duke William of Normandy had landed in the old Roman port of Pevensey not knowing, of course, whether he would face Harald of Norway or Harold of England. From his encampment, William began pillaging the countryside, as depicted in Tapestry panels 104–108. That William plundered in the part of England that was the ancestral seat of the Godwine family and belonged to Harold both as king and as Earl of Kent must have added to the ignominy of the news.
How did word reach Harold in the North?
The Song of the Battle of Hastings tells of a peasant hiding under a rock by the sea, where he observed the Norman landing. Upon mounting his horse, he rode toward York and encountered Harold “returning from battle, laden with rich spoils. The messenger rushed to meet him and poured out the tale he bore in this way ‘O King, truly I bring you fearful news! The duke of the Normans, with Frenchmen and Bretons, has invaded the land; he is ravaging and burning. If you ask how many thousands he has, no one will be able to tell you…. He is seizing boys and girls, and the widows also; and at the same time all the beasts.’”13 In panel 106 of the Tapestry we see what appears to be the slaughter of livestock, and in 118 the Normans torch a house from which a woman and child flee. The Tapestry images of William’s plunder in Kent could not be further from the reputation his army had earned in the weeks of waiting in Saint-Valery where, in the words of William of Poitiers, “the cattle and flocks of the people of the province grazed safely,… and the crops waited unharmed for the scythe of the harvester.”
Harold’s moves after the Battle of Stamford Bridge are difficult to know with certainty. If he decided to move south only after hearing the news of William’s landing, which could not have reached York before October 1, his army covered the 180 miles to London in just five days. After spending five or six days in London in an effort to recruit reinforcements, the English army must have left London on October 11 in order to cover the fifty-eight miles from London to Hastings, where they arrived, exhausted, on October 13, 1066.
Harald Hardråda and Tostig’s challenge near York and the extraordinary march to Hastings were determining factors in Harold of England’s loss of life and crown the very next day. He had made a series of tactical mistakes. He did not wait until he could replenish his troops and overwhelm the Norman invaders with numbers. He did not prepare for a defensive war, since he conceived of himself as the attacker. Harold brought to Hastings approximately seven thousand troops against William’s slightly fewer knights, archers, foot soldiers, and auxiliaries. The small difference in numbers was inflected, however, by an imbalance in the competence and quality as well as the preparedness of the opposing troops. Harold had left his best and most seasoned men in the North; and William had a much higher percentage of professional warriors and a larger contingent of archers.
The Tapestry treats in some detail the events preceding the Battle of Hastings—scouting, negotiation, and positioning. In panel 117, William is informed of Harold’s arrival. In panels 122–128, the Norman troops ride to encounter those of Harold. The inscription over panel 127 reads, “William questions Vital if he has seen Harold’s army.” A helmetless Norman figure on top of a hill in panel 130 performs reconnaissance, while an English figure, hand raised to his eyes in a gesture meant to enhance vision, spots the Normans in panel 132. Harold is informed of the presence of William’s army in panel 133.
Chronicle accounts insist upon William’s offer, delivered by a Norman monk, “to accept a judgement determined by the laws of peoples” (William of Poitiers), to submit to “the decision of the Holy See, or to ordeal by battle” (William of Malmesbury). In the words of his biographer William of Poitiers, William “did not wish the English to die as enemies on account of his dispute; he wished to decide the case by risking his own head in single combat.” “But,” writes William of Malmesbury, twelfth-century chronicler of English kings, “there was no holding Harold. Rash as he was, he refused to lend a patient ear to good advice, thinking it discreditable and a blot upon his record to turn tail in the face of any danger. With the same impudence, or—to put it more kindly—imprudence, he sent packing the monk who had come as an emissary from William, refusing in his passion even to receive him with civility; he merely expressed the wish that God might judge between himself and William.”
At about the third hour, or 9:00 A.M., on October 14, William’s Norman knights met the ax-wielding Anglo-Saxon foot soldiers of King Harold’s army Tapestry panel 134 shows William giving the order of attack, which is received in stages as the command is transmitted. As in a slow-motion film in which the events of a single moment are suspended, words are transformed into action—the first clash of battle, shown in panel 144.
The Tapestry’s depiction of battle is generally accurate, to judge by the chronicle accounts that speak of Hastings at a temporal remove of between ten years for William of Poitiers’s Gesta Guillelmi, to twenty years for Amatus of Montecassino’s History of the Normans, to over a century for Robert Wace’s Roman de Rou. At first, William failed to break Harold’s defense, Harold having the advantage of the high ground on Senlac Hill, as seen in panel 157. William’s army was supposedly demoralized, and the rumor circulated that its leader had been killed. Bishop Odo is seen rallying the troops in panel 158, and William shows himself in panel 160. Harold, who, tacticians say, should have advanced and attacked, was unable to control his army, which sensed that victory had been achieved, and he abandoned the main body of the army on the hill to pursue William’s troops. In the chaos of battle, brilliantly portrayed in the upended horses and tumbling riders of panels 155 and 156, and in the back-and-forth of action in panels 156–167, William’s army, aided by the mobility of mounted knights, managed to turn and feign flight in order to entice the defenders from the hill. Then, turning once more, William charged up the hill and, in the phrase of William of Poitiers, “cut them to pieces.”
It was then that Harold, alongside his brothers Gyrth and Leofwine, was killed, struck through the eye by an arrow launched by one of the eighteen archers shown in the border beneath panels 160–164. The account of the arrow through Harold’s eye is not a contemporary one and first appears in Amatus of Montecassino’s History of the Normans. Other accounts claim Harold died early in the day and was hacked to death. The Song of the Battle of Hastings contains the most vivid description, according to which William “pierced the king’s chest with his lance,” Eustache of Bologne cut off his head, Hugh of Ponthieu “liquified his entrail with a spear,” and Giffard “cut off his thigh and carried it some distance away” The dismemberment lends some credence to the chronicles that claim Harold’s body to have been so disfigured that his wife, Edith, had to be called to identify it “by certain marks.” The Norman victory was complete, as the ragged English in the Tapestry’s final segment flee into the tatters of its damaged final edge. Harald Hardråda’s coin horde, amassed in the Middle East and gathered by Harold of England after the Battle of Stamford Bridge, fell into the hands of King William, whose mints after the Conquest struck coins of the Byzantine type.
Panel 144 is remarkable for what it reveals about the event of 1066, and it contains an extraordinary moment of visual turning in the Tapestry itself. At the very instant that the first Norman lance touches the first Anglo-Saxon body and in the space between lance and shield, the varied and exotic decoration of the lower border—fables, ornamental spirals, chevrons, palmettes, acanthus leaves, and exotic animals—yields to dead bodies and body parts, arms and armor, fallen horses, the detritus of war. The pair of birds facing each other in panel 143 just before physical contact lose their balance, are tipped backward, upended. It is as if the Tapestry Master sought to mark the moment at which civil and political dealings conducted in words—royal and ducal councils, messages, last wishes, oaths, orders, and negotiations—gave way to the physicality of bodies and battle.
The border that to this point had been ruled off from the main panels as a separate decorative space suddenly opens, dropping like a trap, to join the plane of action as the ground and foreground of the carnage at Hastings. Fighters move on this plane amid the slaughter. In panel 158, a knight defends himself with his shield. The Norman archers of panels 160–164 stand upon this ground. Figures in panels 167, 168, and 171 strip fallen bodies of their coats of mail. Nor is this the first opening of the ground beneath the main panels. The border disappears beneath panel 45 as William and Harold cross the treacherous river Couesnon, and men slip into sand riddled with eels and snakes. To the right in lower 46, a lion attacks the leg of a fallen knight. The disappearance of the ruling that separates the main panels from the lower border signifies a loss of footing in the world, an inability to stand on firm ground, a mingling of men and mud, of men, reptiles, and beasts.
What follows in the border beneath panel 144 is all business, horror, inhumanity, an unspeakable scene of death and dismemberment, in which Norman and Anglo-Saxon bodies are mixed and human bodies are mixed with dead animals. What lies in the lower border before panel 144 is just the opposite—decoration implying leisure, fables, or the stuff of literature, a tempering of events, a slowing of the eye distracted from the forward march of history in the main panels, cultural play.
The figures in both the upper and the lower margins, separated by the ornament of diagonal bars, spirals, and decorative floral elements, consist for the most part of pairs of accosted animals—that is, animals facing each other in what appears sometimes to be a posture of attack and at other times a more gentle pairing—as well as addorsed animals, aligned back-to-back lions with their tails raised and lions with their tails in their mouths; tigers with tails raised in upper 8; winged dragons in lower 31; wyverns—a winged dragon with feet like those of an eagle and a serpentlike barbed tail—in lower 135 and lower 48; griffins—a fabulous animal with the head and wings of an eagle and the body and hindquarters of a lion—in lower 85 and 92 as well as upper 15 and 106; griffins with tails raised in upper 24; winged horses above panels 134–135; birds of various species—vultures in panel 107 under the scene of Norman plunder, storks with their heads in the ground under panel 91, cranes under panel 56; centaurs— creatures with a human head and the body of a horse—in upper 25; winged centaurs below panel 3; roosters in upper 26; rams in upper 27; deer in upper 29; camels in upper 32; peacocks in upper 37; boars in upper 46.
The animals in the margins of the Tapestry are impressive in their number— 87 pairs in the lower border from the beginning until the first shock of battle, 120 pairs in the upper border from beginning until the end, for a total of 207 pairs, or 414 animals in all, not counting, of course, the animals in the fables and the hunting and hunted animals in the margins. And the animals are astonishing in their variety Some are real and domestic—roosters, rams, deer, and boars. Some are real and exotic—lions, camels, and peacocks. A good number are creatures of the imagination from medieval bestiaries, animal books inherited from the ancient world—dragons, centaurs, griffins, and wyverns.
The beasts in the borders are most striking, however, in their symmetry Though they appear in a variety of positions and with a variety of attributes relative to other pairs, the animals of any given pair—accosted, addorsed, accosted and looking back or away from each other, addorsed and looking back toward each other—are consistently symmetrical. The striped tigers of upper panel 8 both show a lowered head and raised tail in a twisted posture meant to mimic each other. The facing lions in upper 16 both assume the rampant position, head and tail raised, front paws in the air. Of the facing wyverns in upper 41, each has hoisted its tail over its shoulder. The upended birds in upper 117 are reflections of each other. When the wings of a bird assume an unnatural position, that position is regularly reproduced by its paired mate, as in the outstretched wings on the birds in upper 5 and 138 or the single extended wing in upper 130–131. The facing cranes in lower 56 both have their beaks in the air; the facing cranes of upper 128 both have their beaks in the sand.
In several instances, an animal pair seems to escape the borders and move to the center of the Tapestry, as in the accosted birds with head feathers raised under the motte-and-bailey castle of Dol in panel 47, the accosted sheep or dogs under the motte-and-bailey at Rennes in panel 49, or, under the motte-and-bailey of Dinan in 52, the accosted knights whose swords, shields, banners, and torches are aligned so symmetrically that they seem to be moving in some kind of destructive dance. The pair of birds atop the cornice of the balustrade where Harold sits to hear the news of the appearance of a comet in panel 75 are integrated to the Tapestry as architectural ornament. Elsewhere, the pairing is erotic and even parodic, as in the accosted naked man and woman in the lower border of panel 30 and in the upper border of panels 123–124—couples of lovebirds whose presence renders visible the ambiguity of the animal twosomes of the Tapestry Accosted in one way, the animals in the margins are prepared to fight; accosted in another, they are, arms outstretched like birds with raised symmetrical wings, ready to make love.
The symmetry of the animals in the upper and lower borders, their luxurious ornamental status, and the exoticism of tigers, winged lions, lions with tails raised, centaurs, griffins, dragons, wyverns, camels, and peacocks reorient our understanding of the Bayeux Tapestry in the direction of the Mediterranean and the Middle East. More precisely, they guide us toward the one source by which such images might have been known in the eleventh century, or before they will become such an integral part of the system of heraldic signs in the twelfth—the world of Byzantine silks. The great shaping reservoir of ornamental, symmetrical, exotic animal imagery are the woven silks that circulated throughout Western Europe in the centuries before the Norman Conquest. The Bayeux Tapestry owes much more to Byzantium than to the Scandinavian textiles found at Oseberg and Rolvsøy Norway, or the linen from Överhogdal, Sweden, which themselves were inflected by the prestige of weavings from the East.
The Tapestry and silks were designed for display on the walls of public or domestic space. Though we do not know whether the Tapestry was intended to hang in a church or palace, it is difficult to imagine any means of display other than that of a wall hanging. Similarly, we can tell by the length of the pattern repeats in many silks from the eighth through the eleventh centuries that they were woven to be hung in the large spaces of a church, on walls, in front of doors or the presbytery, in the nave arcades, or around the arched vault over the high altar.
Emperor Justinian (ruled 527–565) gave to the Church of Saint Sophia in Constantinople a large quantity of precious cloth woven with gold, precious stones, and pearls. Some of the cloths were meant to cover liturgical objects such as the chalice and the Eucharist dish, or paten. Others were suspended between the columns of the recessed area reserved for the Eucharist. Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, a sixth-century church modeled on the buildings of the East, contains a mosaic showing decorative hangings over the doors and between the columns of the Great Palace of Constantinople (see insert, figure 4). The churches of Rome were filled with silks. In the early ninth century, Pope Leo III (papacy, 795–816) draped a “rather large gold embroidered, purple veil, which hangs from the silver beam before the image of the Saviour, over the entry to the vestibule” of Saint Peter’s. Figural hangings are noted under Pope Gregory IV (papacy, 827–844), “Alexandrian veils hanging in front of the main door with men and horses.” Pope Sergius II (844–847) had “three purple silk covers” placed over icons. Pope Stephen VI (papacy, 885–891) presented to Saint Peter’s “ninety silk hangings with lion motifs, [one hanging] for each presbytery arch.”14
The Tapestry and Byzantine silks are similar in that both are examples of mixed media. Of the hundreds of pieces of silk that survive from what must surely have been thousands, many contain inscriptions. Writing on silk, or writing woven into silk, is an Eastern phenomenon and distinguishes the world of Byzantine silks from that of Scandinavian textiles, which show no trace of written inscription. However, the inscriptions on surviving fragments of Greek silk, unlike those of the Tapestry, give some indication of their origin. All five of the imperial lion silks to have reached the West between the middle of the ninth century and the first quarter of the eleventh reveal in Greek letters the reign under which they were made. On the Siegburg lion silk is written, “During the reign of Romanos and Christophoros, the Christ loving rulers;” on the Crefeld-Berlin-Düsseldorf and Cologne lion silks, “During the reign of Constantine and Basile, the Christ loving rulers;” on the Auxerre lion silk, “During the reign of Leo, the Christ-loving ruler.” The Aachen elephant silk contains two inscriptions, one partially unreadable: “In the time of Michael,…” and “When Peter was the archon of Zeuxippos, indiction …” The inscriptions on Byzantine silks are on the order of a signature, and though one cannot tell who actually made them, one knows under whose command they were made, silk production being an imperial monopoly.
The Tapestry inscriptions seem to yield relatively more information about who appears where on its surface, and in places they even hint at the nature of the actions depicted. Yet they are in their way also remarkably mute. They yield little essential information about the key dramatic moments and issues around which the events leading to the Battle of Hastings actually turn. They give no indication of the Tapestry’s origin. Rather, they serve as place markers, orienting us geographically or temporally within the long embroidered scroll. Beginning often with the Latin UBI (“Where”) or HIC (“Here”), they point to where a particular action or exchange takes place: UBI UNUS CLERICUS ET ÆLFGYVA (“Where a cleric and Ælfgyva”); UBI HAROLD SACRAMENTUM FECIT WILLELMO DUCI (“Where Harold swore an oath to Duke William”); HIC HAROLD DUX REVERSUS EST AD ANGLICAM TERRAM ET VENIT AD EDWARDUM REGEM (“Here Duke Harold returned to England and came to King Edward”); HIC EDWARDUS REX IN LECTO ALLOQUITUR FIDELES (“Here King Edward in bed speaks with his faithful”); and HIC DEDERUNT HAROLDO CORONAM REGIS (“Here they have given the crown of king to Harold”).
The inscriptions of the Bayeux Tapestry are enticing, but they promise more information than they actually deliver. Though we learn the name of the mysterious lady Ælfgyva in panel 39, we still wonder about the cleric with her and why he touches Ælfgyva’s head. An inscription tells us that Harold swore an oath to William, but nothing about what was sworn. We learn via writing that Harold came to William upon his return to England, but nothing about the nature of their council. The Tapestry’s script tells us that Edward spoke to his faithful on his deathbed but remains quiet about the nature of any deathbed confession or testament, words at the core of the dispute over royal succession and William’s invasion of England. An inscription reveals that “they have given the crown” to Harold, without revealing who exactly has made him king or under what jurisdiction.
The discretion of the Tapestry’s inscriptions supports the claim that the deepest intention and effect of this multifaceted work of art is to allow the widest possible range of interpretation and thus the widest field of identification among viewers with the widest set of investments and interests. Norman, Anglo-Saxon, or Scandinavian—each can read anything desired into the empty vessels of inscription. And whatever is projected upon it by way of meaning will be united with other such projections that meet on the surface of the embroidery. The Tapestry’s openness binds those who see it and read its inscriptions into a single people by offering something for all while excluding and subduing none. Each can walk away thinking that his party is represented, which is also why scholars through the ages have been able to maintain with apparent rigor equal and opposite points of view regarding the Tapestry’s commission, purpose, and date and place of creation.
Some of the scenes and images from the Tapestry derive from the Byzantine world, if not directly from silks. While the portrayal of Harold in majesty, discussed in relation to Continental elements of the Tapestry’s design, was characteristic of the way the Germanic emperors represented themselves, the Ottonian and Salian kings learned about frontality from the Greeks. The orans position of Archbishop Stigand next to Harold is found in the crypt of San Clemente at Rome, yet before that, it was set into the byzantinizing apse mosaic of Saint Apollinaris as orant in sixth-century Ravenna. The scene of King Edward on his deathbed in panel 70 resembles the set scene of the Dormition of the Virgin on her bier, surrounded by mourning apostles on Byzantine embroideries from the tenth century on. The Dormition is to the East what the Virgin’s Assumption is to the West.
The curious masthead of William’s ship, the Mora, in its crossing of the English Channel in panel 98, consisting as it does of a small cross atop a square frame with another cross within its equilateral sides, is very much like the cross carried by a crowned emperor, a rigid standard atop a pole, on the silk belonging to the diocese museum of Bamberg Cathedral (see insert, figure 5). As in the main panels of the Tapestry, the moving figures of the Bamberg silk are framed by borders with medallions enclosing foliate and geometric designs; and like the Tapestry, it shows the capacity of Byzantine weavers to carry out large figurative compositions, possibly even of a contemporary event, and not just ornamental repeats. This silk, from the grave of Bishop Gunther, is datable between the year 1017 and Gunther’s death in 1065. Gunther died in Hungary while returning from a diplomatic mission to Constantinople on behalf of Henry IV and it is possible that the Bamberg silk was a gift from the Byzantine emperor Constantine X (ruled 1059–1067) to his German counterpart. Had Bishop Gunther not died on his way home and had he not died in 1065, envoys sent by William to secure Henry IV’s support for the invasion of England might have seen this silk when they visited the imperial court in 1066.
What the Bayeux Tapestry takes most consistently from imperial Byzantine silks are the accosted and addorsed animals along its upper and lower borders. A silk from the shrine of Saint Anno, who died in 1075, was translated to Siegburg, Germany, along with the saint’s relics in 1183, though the inscription places its weaving between 921 and 931. The Siegburg silk shows confronted lions with raised tails. A lion silk that was removed from a shrine holding the relics of Saint Heribert, archbishop of Cologne, who died in 1021, shows a very similar couple (see insert, figure 6).
Imperial lion silks are joined by pieces containing confronted elephants. An imperial silk from the Aachen, Munster, treasury taken from the shrine of Charlemagne in 1843, though not originally buried with him, shows decorated elephants wearing a saddle with a bilateral tree behind them. Each elephant is contained within a floriated roundel, with smaller circular floral designs in the space between circles. An elephant silk currently in the Louvre, Paris, displays accosted elephants framed not by individual medallions, but by a border like that of the Bayeux Tapestry, containing geometric patterns and interlace, an ornamental string of hearts, a Kufic—decorative Arabic writing—inscription, and a train of camels at its leftmost edge (see insert, figure 7). Under the feet of each elephant is a winged animal with four legs, the head of a dragon, and a raised tail. We know from the inscription, which reads, “Glory and prosperity to the Qa’id Abu Mansur Bukhtakin, may God prolong his existence,” that the Paris elephant silk was executed no later than the mid–tenth century, since Abu Mansur was put to death in 961.
Griffins also figure in the menagerie of symmetrical animals. An addorsed rearing pair with heads looking back at each other belongs to the cathedral treasury of Sion, Switzerland (see insert, figure 8). The use of murex, or “true purple,” dye in this weaving, once the lower edge of a dalmatic, speaks for a tenth- or eleventh-century imperial manufacture. A pair so upended that not even their rear feet seem to be on the ground belongs to Le Monastier, Haute-Loire, France. Thought to have been woven in tenth-century Constantinople, this piece of the shroud of Saint Chaffre shows quadrupeds suspended from the beak of each griffin and between them a tree on whose branches sit symmetrically posed birds and dogs. Between the wing and tail of each griffin are a pair of birds with griffinlike wings. Each repeat of this pattern contains no fewer than five mirrored pairs, ten animals in all.
Though the Saint Chaffre griffin is more complicated than silks with singly paired figures against an unfilled background, the weaving of even the simplest pattern is extremely complex. The design for the Aachen elephant silk, for example, required 1,440 manipulations of the heddle, the loom’s pattern-producing device. This suggests that the symmetry of the exotic accosted and addorsed animals of the East is a function not of tradition or aesthetics, but of the technical manipulation of the pattern loom. In weaving the design in one direction, the weaver kept a record and simply reversed it in the figure harness mechanism to produce an image exactly the reverse of the original. The result is two images that reflect each other across the entire length of cloth.
A hunter silk from the same period, currently in the Museo Sacro, Vatican, features two pairs of hunters and their prey separated by a tree, hunting dogs, birds, and trees filling the space within the spandrel, which itself contains geometric and foliate designs. The symmetry is obvious not only in the hunters’ positions relative to their prey, which reflect each other along a horizontal axis (though the bottom pair is the opposite of the top), but in the equal extension of the tree over both, its trunk the central axis through which the pattern is mirrored from left to right. This must have been an astonishingly difficult design to execute, but it had to be designed only once. More precisely, only one-half of the whole had to be entered into the loom. The other half is a repetition in reverse of the first, and the repetition of the whole design is a repetition of this reversal.
The repetition of small figural or ornamental designs in woven textiles, whether integrally or in reverse, is so universal, even after the advent of the jacquard loom and mechanical means of executing a pattern, that it is impossible to say where and when it first began. Probably not in Byzantium or the Middle East but in China, whence silk arrived in Constantinople sometime around the middle of the sixth century and the repeat pattern loom a little later. The holding of a pattern in memory so that it might be repeated suggests an early relation between weaving and writing or the keeping of a written record of a particular design before the means were found to implement a pattern stored in the loom. It suggests, too, a relation between weaving and the enormous prestige attached to symmetrical designs in both the East and the West and in a wide range of media—carpets, manuscript illumination, wall painting, mosaics, architecture, and sculpture.
What was a technical reason for the accosted and addorsed animals of woven Byzantine silks, the repetition in reverse of a design on the repeat pattern loom, is not technical in the embroidered animals of the Bayeux Tapestry An embroidered design, no matter how small, is drawn and stitched anew each time, and though the facing members of a pair may be symmetrical, they are never exactly the same as among the pixels of woven silk. Unlike in the main panels, where the shape of the Conquest story dictates the sequence of figural presentation, in the borders there is simply no practical reason why the animals face each other—except for one: that of prestige. What is a technical matter in the making of woven silks is for the embroidery of the Tapestry a matter of style. Byzantine silks, many of which served as borders for larger textiles, were luxury items par excellence associated throughout the centuries in question with the opulence of the East, with the might and mystery of the emperors of Byzantium, for whom silk making was an imperial privilege. Their designs were received into the Tapestry because of the status bestowed upon those who wore, owned, were buried in, or simply viewed the noble bestiary from the East.
The emperors of Constantinople held a monopoly over the goods that went into making silks, over their manufacture and purpose, including trade. Unauthorized use of the murex dye— “true purple”—that went into certain imperial pieces was punishable by death. The control of silk was considered a matter of state policy comparable to the keeping of military secrets. Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus warned his son against giving barbarians imperial cloth, imperial crowns, and the technique of Greek fire; this despite the fact that the Byzantines, according to legend, had stolen the first silkworms, smuggled out of China in the bamboo walking sticks of monks, in the reign of Justinian.
The emperors used silks as a form of currency, as a tool for the negotiation of foreign policy, and as gifts to ratify treaties and agreements. The release of precious silks, as the historian Robert Lopez succinctly phrases it, “extended to the grantee some of the power and prestige” that belonged to the emperor and to his people.15 The silks that left Byzantium for the West as diplomatic gifts, part of a marriage arrangement, or by trade were used as court dress, ecclesiastical vestment, church hangings, shrouds for relics, decorations for books, seal bags, and burial palls.
Silks from Byzantium ended up in western France. Duke Richard I of Normandy (934–996) endowed the church at Fécamp with “Phrygian textiles” heavy with gold and emeralds, fine white linens, purple cloths mixed with gold, and silks decorated with embroidery Many French and English words for textiles still betray the Eastern origins of actual cloth. The French word for silk, samit, derives from the Greek hexamitos, meaning “six-threaded,” and yielded the English “samite.” “Mousseline,” a combination of silk with gold thread mentioned by Marco Polo, is from Mosul, Iraq. “Baldachin,” a rich brocade, comes from the Italian for the city of Baghdad; damasquin and “damask,” silk woven with elaborate designs and figures, come from Damascus, Syria.
Silks also reached Scandinavia. King Cnut II, who died in 1086, was buried at Odense in a purple silk that was no doubt of Byzantine manufacture, as were the silks in the grave of Bishop Absalon, buried at Sorø, Denmark, in 1201. In the Icelandic Laxdaela Saga, Bolli Bollison, a member of the emperor’s guard, returned from Constantinople to Iceland with eleven companions. “They were all wearing scarlet and rode in gilded saddles; they were all fine looking men, but Bolli surpassed them all. He was wearing clothes of gold-embroidered silk which the Byzantine Emperor had given him, and over them a scarlet cloak. He was girt with the sword ‘Leg-Biter,’ its pommel now gold-embossed and the hilt bound with gold.”16
Many Byzantine silks could be found in England of the tenth and eleventh centuries. The relics of Saint Cuthbert (635–687), translated to Chester-le-Street in 883 to protect them from Danish invasion, were “recognized” in the middle of the tenth century when King Æthelstan (ruled 924–939) and his brother Edmund added “two robes of Grecian workmanship.” Abbot Ælfric of Eynsham claims that Anglo-Saxon merchants went abroad to purchase embroideries, silk, and other Eastern goods “useful to the King, to ealdormen, to the rich, and to the whole people.” Plain tabby weaves have been excavated from tenth-century graves near Coppergate, York, and from Saltergate, Lincoln. A tabby silk weave with a bird design, taken from the tomb of Edward the Confessor at Westminster Abbey, could be the very piece of silk represented in the Bayeux Tapestry as the cloth in which Edward is wrapped on his deathbed or the shroud in which his body is carried for burial.
Some woven pieces reached Kent and, more precisely, Canterbury, where the Tapestry might have been made. Embroideries, probably of Byzantine origin, have been found in graves in Kent from the sixth and seventh centuries. The cathedral chapter house is repository to two dozen silks with various patterns— lions, griffins, eagles, peacocks, and other birds. Some remain intact, whole cloth, while others were at some point cut from larger pieces and used as bags for the seals attached to charters and other documents. Seal bags provide important information for the dating of a particular piece of silk because the date shown on the charter is a time before which the silk had to be made.
One of the Canterbury seal bags shows a double-headed eagle, the double-headed eagle also being a function of the repeat pattern loom, surrounded by a border of small birds in medallions, looking alternately left and right (see insert, figure 9). This silk was woven in Byzantium in the ninth or tenth century and was cut and transformed into a seal bag in the eleventh. Another Byzantine piece from Canterbury contains the design of an animal’s head, a lion or tiger with a flat broad head and small ears. Whoever designed the Bayeux Tapestry might, in fact, have seen these two examples of Byzantine weaving. He certainly had the opportunity to encounter silks as altar cloths or decoration in a church, as ecclesiastical alb, dalmatic, chasuble, or stole, as book cover, or as seal bag either in Normandy or in England and, if in England, possibly even in Canterbury, Kent.