These margins always deserved more consideration than they have received but perhaps they have always looked too jolly and too simple to be taken seriously. The allegorical, metaphorical and fable elements, it has to be admitted, are often neither easy to interpret nor to dissociate and the great difficulty is for modern thinkers to enter the contemporary mind, to see things with early medieval eyes. The training and education of scholars today prevent such empathy. It confines us all. Not only do we lack that empathy with the natural world and acceptance of the supernatural world our forefathers automatically possessed, but we have also been taught to seek simple meanings in most things, ‘this equals that’. We need greater sophistication than this. We have lost our sometime mental subtlety for comprehensive analysis, just as we have lost our ability to grasp layered verbal structures in such authors as Shakespeare, which students have to develop afresh.
We certainly do not expect the cartoon to present a palimpsest, a cryptic clue or a graphic riddle. Even Wormald, the expert who identified the Tapestry as English1, missed the significance of this pictorial commentary, as did Dodwell, who identified it as secular.2 We have to learn to think and see once again, with the sophistication of our ancestors. James Thurber’s simple surrealistic drawings and cartoons were distillations of observation rather than polished illustrations and as an acclaimed writer he also featured anthropomorphised animals and presented the precarious unreliability of the world along with memorable quotes. Let us suppose that the apparent simplicity of our margins could also be like these.
Scholars have entirely forgotten that most medieval men read pictures rather than words. This was the rationale behind church-painting and other decorative elements. In a world where only the Latin-speakers could become what we call literate, because they alone could comprehend basic writing lessons, alternative and pictorial symbols involving oral traditions and demotic expressions of memories actually became the medium of transfer for ordinary thoughts. We have evidence enough of this subtlety from antiquity. The Roman Empire being long-gone by 1066, we will in due course discuss the economics that replaced it, a new model that developed along different routes. It took a long time for what we call literacy to return with the demise of Latin, also for a money economy to redevelop, things we today take for granted. In the interim picture-languages and barter became the substitutes.
Picture languages are, of course, non-alphabetic but they can still encompass two meanings in a single picture, like the written double-entendre. Our margins may play upon the main frieze or they may have self-contained, even multiple, messages of their own. It has been assumed that we know all about the social and political histories of Normans and Saxons having read contemporary (propaganda) sources so we have no need to look further. Usually, therefore, only the prosopographic and dynastic elements are held by scholars to be deserving of further research. They concentrate on tracing lineal connections to such sources as the Domesday Book and thence to such rarities as our Tapestry. The sheer brilliance of all Norman achievements together with their admired ruthlessness, the model for so many business-like attitudes and claims, has made them ideal role-models for modern leaders. What is the point of discussing anything else? Surely the reality of history has been signed, sealed and delivered many times over? Maybe not.
The message of the Tapestry’s schema seems to fit all the assumptions (even modern myths) made about the Normans. Such things were apparently always obvious. Just because we see a picture of events on this embroidery does not make it a photo-documentary. It is still subject to hyperbole, even to lies. We should also remember that events in one place, described in florid terms, are (at this time and for hundreds of years to come) like economic information, devoid of validity outside a very localised context. The BBC’s news service did not exist and neither did newspapers. As a result, reportage and general accuracy of information in most of the past (even commodity prices) varied from village to village. Also important to us, only now can we see proof that Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, half-brother to Duke (King) William was a traitor, giving an entirely new perspective to this period and the eulogies and commentaries left by both sides3. As we shall see his treachery has real relevance to the Tapestry.
Then again, those who attempted to read the margins of the Bayeux Tapestry before encountered a problem similar to the reading of Domesday Book, not one of translation but of meaning. What would it have meant at that time? It is often essential to understand the events of the period when dealing with allegorical elements. The explanation must present the original audience’s own appreciation and not ours, so I will briefly run over some of the real political background of the years 1066-1086 4. We should also accept that many have said that this unique textile (the Bayeux Tapestry) was designed and executed in England under the patronage of Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, making his treachery very important, though there is an alternative and very convincing claim to patronage that we will come to in due course. It certainly does not obviously flatter Duke William, as some historians have tried to claim, and this in itself should raise questions in our mind. There are strong suggestions by scholars that it was created in a workshop in or near to Canterbury.5 Now we know Odo to have been a traitor that must surely change our view of the embroidery, whoever dictated the brief.
It was commissioned and completed somewhere between 1067 and before 1080, that is soon after the actual Conquest and before Odo’s fall from grace in 1082. I think it was very close to 1067 and I do not accept that he had it made in order to decorate the cathedral he built at Bayeux and consecrated in 1077. If he wanted it made he must have directed the general and approved the final schema, or some close associate did in order to flatter him. I think we can discount claims that it contains some secret English resistance message based on a tenuous Old Testament link6 and rabbinical legends apparently unknown in the Christian Church, all collated by academic embroiderers who then included both English and French indicators in the Latin superscript. Patrons do not pay for portraits devoid of flattery and are likely to have taken violent exception. Even if these legends had been known by someone, rabbinical teachings are not likely to have met with the approval of an anti-semitic church or have been presented to a bishop. Although Odo played a key part in the battle at Caldbec-and-Battle Hill7 and no doubt wished to record this, he also became justiciar in the immediate post-Conquest period and was an important earl. Yet, for all this, by c.1076 he had fallen out with Archbishop Lanfranc and was called to a trial on Penenden Heath. After that things got worse. In 1082 he was arrested by the king in person and from then-on imprisoned in Normandy until the king’s premature death in 1087. Bishop Odo, though one of the most powerful magnates in the land and the king’s uterine brother, had powerful enemies including the King of England. This was not in any sense a band of brothers, as historians have so often claimed.
During Odo’s imprisonment King William ordered a series of surveys and audits, now known to us as Domesday Book, commencing with Odo’s principal fiefdom of Kent. These surveys disclosed tax evasion on a massive scale by Odo, his associates and henchmen and many others8. No magnate embarks on such massive defalcations for legitimate or loyal purposes and he certainly had treachery in mind. He also had a dangerous, major interest in England’s armaments industry, located in the Weald9. Odo was therefore not a loyal subject or brother and this in itself should make us suspect the content of his Tapestry. It appears that the whole of the Norman upper hierarchy was shot through with jealousies, rivalries and ambitions, which helps us account for the shaky beginnings of the Conquest. William had more to fear from Normans and Frenchmen than from Englishmen after 106610. For most of 1067 he was ‘on holiday’ in Normandy leaving his brothers to rule England – and things started to go wrong.
The Bayeux Tapestry and Domesday Book are, beyond doubt, our two most important sources, as well as being our only two pictures, of the Anglo-Norman world in 1066, though both were actually executed a few years later. Now, the very complexity and wealth of detail in each is bewildering – where to start? This has been the predicament for so many scholars over the years. There have been many false by-ways, what else could we expect in just such complexity? It is this very complexity which compels me to stop from time-to-time in order to explain some special aspect of the Tapestry, even though others have covered it before. My primary interest has been in the margins, but these are, in truth, part of the whole because they are not just decorative borders. Each part is important to the other and read together they are greater than a simple sum of the parts. We unlock the full archive of information once we can read all strands simultaneously.
Superficially this Tapestry tells the story of the invasion and events leading up to it, also the promise of the English throne made to William by Harold when under duress and, supposedly, by King Edward, though neither is shown as a formal event and the Tapestry names no such promise by either of them, nor was such a promise valid in English law. Only swearing on holy relics made it (if true) binding in this superstitious (Christian) world. The accuracy of the story the Tapestry tells has, from time-to-time, been questioned because, as an exercise in propaganda or justification, distortion of the facts is going to be inevitable. We clearly see some of Aesop’s fables included, as others have noted, and also creatures derived from the bestiary known as Isodorus of Seville’s Etymologiae, book XII11, the one available at this time, though there was also the Historia Naturalis of Pliny the Elder12 and Hrabanus Maurus’s De Rerum Naturis, an ecclesiastically approved source often reliant on Isodorus’s original.13 All these could be sources. The anonymous Roman text known as the Physiologus was also, apparently, well distributed (in Latin) across Europe,14 though Aristotle’s De Animalium seems to have been of no use for physical descriptions. One problem is that early bestiaries had few pictures, relying instead on descriptions, while another is that later bestiaries sometimes altered the pictures and descriptions presented from those in earlier bestiaries and therefore need to be avoided. We cannot identify the creatures described in 1066 with those depicted, say, in the fourteenth century, for ideas changed.
My perception is that these margins are entirely narrative rather than decorative, that they tell a story throughout. I suggest they provide double-entendres and a sound-track to accompany the superscript Latin running commentary added to the main frieze. The animals and birds provide the sound-track and they also seem at times to speak directly to the viewer, to us. For the majority of viewers these margins would provide a visual commentary enlarging upon the schema which, in itself, tells us of the educational level, or approach, of the general viewer, for this marginal, visual narrative was planned ab initio and not added later like the Latin superscript. Do we really accept that Normans all possessed a higher education and the ability to read Latin? Of course not, what mattered most to the majority of viewers speaking any language was the visual narrative in one form or another. That is why the superscript is so basic in its commentary, at times a little uncertain or even ambiguous. It was never intended to be comprehensive. The margins are the commentary on the necessarily succinct schema or frieze.
Did the religious and academics who saw this Latin have any need of the accurate, fine details of the pictures or even any experience at all of such specialisations as agriculture, shipbuilding or warfare by which to judge them? Of course they did not. Such a suggestion is ridiculous, ignorant and modern. The blandest of images would have sufficed for them. This in itself tells us that pictorial details on our Tapestry had very special importance, being designed to engage and persuade viewers of all degrees of expertise, whatever their status, designed to speak to those who were not monks or clerics of any sort. Yet this narrative is more than just a comic book for the illiterate, for the margins also allow the main frieze to be conveniently condensed by enlarging upon the main depiction. When we read all three strands together we have recovered the complete picture and the Tapestry’s information is finally unlocked and decoded. That is what we are now going to attempt. Think of it as a comic strip with separate commentaries, in fact commentaries in two languages and one of them at least for all tongues.
The medieval world readily synthesised religious and classical traditions in its scholastic circles but the layman, or non-scholar, further synthesised what was presented to him, in pre-digested form by religious scholars, with his own everyday life, with the natural world and rural life, including popular superstitions. The esoteric was reality to him. There were angels and devils (unseen) all around him. He was told so by the religious. God had him under permanent surveillance, so did the Tempter, there were legions of elementals filling the air and hiding behind bush, briar and hedgerow. If scholars conflated older (classical) learning with their religious training, then whatever also, consequently, filtered down through them to the large non-literate level in society was certainly accepted at face value. Who could doubt the existence of dragons and gryphons? And what of the lingering vestiges of older religions? So, we can distinguish five possible strands of instruction woven together in the margins of an artefact like the Bayeux Tapestry, strands formally defined by contemporary religious education but to which we can put more everyday descriptions.
We have the literal interpretation as allegory, the moral or tropological presentation (often a fable known to the audience) and the anagogical (the historical or religious prophesy) presentation, yet with some typological (Old and New Testament) linkage possible, and finally we can also expect animation, which has the effect of anthropomorphising the creatures depicted for the ordinary man or woman close to the natural world – viewers who would not be looking for the same esoteric or elevated didactive imagery as the religious viewer, rather for something direct, everyday, familiar and informative, animals like themselves. Nor should we forget that older folk-tales would persist. Thoroughly cleansing the mind of the effects of modern education is probably, as George Bernard Shaw famously observed,15 impossible but for these academically untutored people, only aware of the natural world and its rhythms surrounding them. The received wisdom they absorbed was inextricably woven into their experience of everyday life, rural life. I suspect that their world was the richer for this inclusion of fantasy elements, though tormented by the religious and the supernatural.
In spite of this vernacular level the biblical hermeneutics, those officially approved beliefs and stories told to ordinary mortals from the pulpit, would be strictly channelled by the church’s insistence on remaining within the Catholic theological tradition. Clerics could not stray from the narrow doctrinal path without becoming heretical. It is interesting and instructive to see that at times a purely secular element intrudes into our embroidery, suggesting that however learned the designer of the Tapestry was, he was not an ordained cleric but someone very much in touch with the world beyond the cloister, capable of creating imaginative picture language for people like himself, free to express things because he did not realise they might be theologically wrong. This is why I maintain that this was always intended as a purely secular and vernacular artefact, one with something for every man. This flies in the face of received (academic) wisdom but it is self-evident such cloistered and unworldly brothers and bishops as those of medieval reality would not wish to see the rustic, vulgar, lewd and unedifying matters our Tapestry contains presented to themselves, and it is very doubtful that they would permit the presentation of such things to their impressionable public.
I have treated each depiction or vignette, whether fabulous or truly animal (contemporaries could not distinguish one from the other), on its merits and I have tried to be consistent in my identifications. Some fables are now much better known than they were then, some were better known than others (so bore repetition) and the attributes of creatures, and possible metaphors, also changed with the passage of time. The medieval bestiary at this date is imperfectly known to us, though we can recognise that many elaborations arrived only in later books of this type and that surviving evidence, such as Isodorus book XII or the descriptions provided by Pliny, is clearly imperfect for we encounter creatures on the Tapestry were not recorded by them, not recorded in any surviving texts until much later. They could not have been copied from any known book. Already we can say that the Tapestry is telling us of lost texts and, in this respect, it becomes a primary source in itself. Clearly Isodorus and Pliny were not the only sources of beasts available to the Tapestry’s embroiderers, but we know of no others. The embroiderers were not just copying pictures from ancient books, though they may have done this at times either consciously or unconsciously. This originality is so important that we will come to it again in due course. It undermines any claim of clerical or cloistered origin for the embroidery.
Medieval bestiaries recorded both the real and the fabulous together, that was their reality. Though you had not seen a certain beast it could still exist, as learned men, clerics and scholars insisted that it did. Depictions also depended on individual artists, so that when dealing with the natural world there is likely to be much less standardisation, certainly from a secular artist, than when depicting the fabulous world, for in the former case the artist was free to use his memory and imagination. Scholars declare that representations of birds are scarcest in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, but only because they have ignored this source. They also say there was ‘little attempt at accurate representation’ though sources such as Harley ms 603 and our Tapestry show, for example, well observed ducks.16 They are confused by the use of birds and animals to provide human attributes, expecting natural histories instead.
The Tapestry was the product of a team (detectable in several ways) so the depictions of animals and birds are not always consistent because they depended on whim rather than a pocket guide and because several artists were involved. Birds, in particular, are a headache to identify for each embroiderer obviously had his or her own opinion as to the distinguishing features and colours to be employed from the limited palette available (eight colours), yet on a significant number of occasions we can identify them. Birds and beasts are used to convey anthropomorphic reactions and, in such cases, it is expression and animation that counts for more than identification, habitat or attributes. These embroiderers were not cloistered and certainly had not been oblates without access to the outside world from childhood or they could not have known such things. They would all have copied the same creature or bird in the same way from the same source as scribes were trained to do, yet they did not.
Herons may have context to add to colour and shape, geese look goosey, hawks and eagles are not always separable but, as both have similar attributes outside a religious context, we may choose by size and by association. The birds of ill-omen and dark in hue will be vultures, corvids or kites, all carrion feeders and a few, being red, are very probably kites, the traditional scavengers of any remainders, so I have divided them all into vultures (carrion birds) and kites. The carrion crow was widely feared as the harbinger and companion of war, not just a carrion-feeder but also intelligent, vicious and especially fond of pecking out the eyes of corpses and the dying. Anyway, all these are carrion-feeders and unwelcome as omens or portents. I have guessed that the large, largely black and gold birds shown in association with royalty and sickness were intended not as raptors but, instead, as the fabled caladrius. Had they been shown in outline only, to make them white, they would have lacked emphasis and, indeed, would have resembled portents rather than real creatures. Yet real they were to contemporaries, even when not visible, and a double association with golden eagles would also be apt for kingship. Finally, the strange variations in colours sometimes seen might not just have been there to provide variety of expression, or artistic license. There may have been other influences on colour choice and use, even perhaps medical reasons. We will examine such matters much later, when we have told the whole story and can unlock and decode the secrets of the Tapestry.
We have a similar problem with big cats. Lions seem self-evident. They have manes, they are commonly encountered in the margins though their aspects do vary (variations are important indicators of mood), but ‘pards’, leopards and tigers, are not so easy to separate as later bestiaries depict them all as spotted cats, and so we should expect them to be depicted in this way in c.1070. Nevertheless, on the Tapestry we can observe some variations that suggest greater discrimination and they have no lion-manes. We can say that pards are big cats without the noble status of the ‘king of the beasts’, the lion. They are intended as the lower retainers, knights and sergeants, fierce rather than born noble. The lions represent the truly noble. This is a society proud of birth, of blood, but not yet truly feudal. Stags and horses seem easier to identify, dogs look ‘doggy’, wolves can usually be identified by their context and have appropriate colour and form and foxes also, as a general rule, have their colour and their distinctive tails. Aesopian fables in particular help us to identify them by context.
When we come to fabulous beasts we are on much safer ground. Their recognition and their attributes depend on formulaic descriptions. Who has actually seen a fabulous beast in life? Yet we have to admit that someone standardised the depictions made on the Tapestry, for artists mostly depended on descriptions at source. The representational physicality was usually left to each reader of a source, because of a lack of illustrated bestiaries. Nevertheless, someone knew what to depict in given cases and so ensured consistency throughout our Tapestry, even though we have no other contemporary template. We can, I think, identify him as the designer. Lions with wings are obvious and gryphons are a cross between raptor and predator. No problems there. Dragons are rarely shown, have four legs and can breathe fire. Wyverns (related and equally evil) have only two legs and knotted tails and they spout bile, lies and venom instead of fire. They are common and often have forked tongues, and when given more imaginative treatment look quite Nordic in design. I have elected to call these creatures wyverns as they have consistent associations, though there was considerable confusion in later manuscripts as to the precise aspect of wyverns, due to the imprecision of earlier descriptions. Generally, in the later illustrated bestiaries, we see pictorial confusion with ‘vipera’ and ‘hypnalis’ (viper and a kind of asp), neither of which in such illustrations ever looked like snakes. That is why we, like the designer of the Tapestry, must have a lexicon of some sort. He and members of his team obviously had one, even if of his own devising.
These fabulous beasts are some of the most important indicators for our analysis as they convey especial allegorical significance. It seems that many ordinary and presumably unlettered people were familiar with such images and also with their meanings, even the anagogical aspects. On the other hand, though some education should have been required in order to understand Aesopian fables, they had apparently already passed into folklaw via the clergy. Of course, only the practised cleric would recognise typological allegories. We must not forget that laymen were used to having the Bible interpreted for them and into their own tongue. There was no access to it other than through a priest reading and translating the Vulgate, so they probably expected and accepted a clerical exposition of anything scholastic The double-entendre might, therefore, have been, at times, more obvious to a scholar or cleric than to a layman, especially when it involved biblical texts. One might call such things layered meanings, that is layered even within one of the three main communication vehicles employed by the Tapestry. I would expect all birds and animals shown to be intended as allegorical and/or anthropomorphic, occasionally topographic indicators, rather than merely decorative. When we come to the battle they become a sort of emotional sound-track for the action shown. Where we are in doubt as to the exact creature intended we will need to invoke both context and a basis of probabilities (within contemporary evidence) in order to come to a reasonable conclusion. In the absence of dictionaries, it is just the same with any written language, we cannot always translate with absolute certainty. We are dealing with a dead language, one that has been lost. Nevertheless, our menagerie is always suggestive of mood and emotions, even when indicative or predictive, which is why I call them anthropomorphic, and, by-and-large, it is a standardised and a fun menagerie.
Our embroidery, although composed with eight sections of woven linen-cloth all sewn together, is remarkable for its continuous length, its conception as a single artefact and, then again, for its survival intact down the centuries in this respect. It is true that we are missing the tail-piece but we have no reason to assume that this was separately worked from the rest of the embroidery. This artefact was, and still is, of inconvenient length for all concerned, so long that it had to hang in a very extensive room, inconvenient also for the embroiderers who must have had some special apparatus devised for its working. I think that for convenience of analysis we can divide the length of the Tapestry into three sections or chapters of the story, though we might also call them acts of a play. These are not of identical length but do account broadly for thirds, the last being incomplete because we do not possess the tail-piece.
The first chapter concerns what has been called ‘Harold’s mission’, his journey to France, sojourn in Normandy and return to England. An enigma. The second chapter covers the events of his return and Duke William’s preparation for, and his accomplishment of, invasion. This is ‘the Norman version’. The third, final, chapter starts at Telham Hill, where each side sights the other, then it runs to the conclusion of the Tapestry: substantially the battle. Here we find other questions and the action shown is selective, not comprehensive. I will come to the missing tail-piece and conclusion of the Tapestry in due course, for its possible content will provide us with a clue to the overall original length of the Tapestry. I believe this to have been rather longer than previous analyses have suggested, and I don’t think we should make assumptions as to what it showed. It did not have to show Duke William crowned as king. The Tapestry does not tell us that Edward promised the throne to William. That is an assumption made by historians based on the claims made elsewhere by Norman encomiasts. Just because it is in our history books and because historians have said so does not make it the truth. Where is the evidence in the superscript? Nowhere is William given the title of king. All these things will unfold as we excavate and unlock the evidence. This is hands-on archaeology as well as code-breaking. Enjoy!