When the Tapestry was first recognised and throughout the nineteenth century the answer to this question was easy: Le Tapisserie Broidé de la Reine Mathilde. It was at Bayeux, so it was the Bayeux Tapestry. Now we know that it was made in England and it is doubtful it was made for Bayeux Cathedral, it seems the legal title to the artefact rests with the English crown, for a felon’s goods (at that time) escheated, along with his estates, to the crown. So, if the bishop’s English tapestry is argued as not belonging to the English crown we might ask whether the French are also entitled to possess the bishop’s earldom of Kent and his estates elsewhere in England. I think not. Furthermore, if it was not embroidered by Queen Matilda, we need to ask who created it? And, of course, it is not a tapestry. Is it not surprising and more than a little embarrassing that even after 200 years of intensive study we know comparatively little about it or who made it and have given it such erroneous common and legal titles.
Currently academic opinion favours an embroidery workshop in Canterbury, because the iconography suggests (to some scholars) references to texts known to have been available in St Augustine’s monastery and it also favours direction by some senior (Norman) academic who could instruct the (inferior) workforce in the fine details required. That there was a team is undeniable. The variations in style and depiction are self-evident and, as an embroidery, it is argued that this team must have been female. This leads many to the conclusion that a convent, in or near Canterbury, possibly one concerned with important pieces of embroidery such as Opus Anglicanum, was responsible but under the direction of some scholar capable of astute, esoteric connections only understood by men like himself and able to borrow very expensive books to use as exemplars. Why this team of women should have been directed by the equivalent of a university don with the experience of a modern encyclopaedia and also with Rabelaisian propensities is an interesting question.
It seems to me that this line of arguing has become quite attenuated, though it does allow us to dismiss many of the Tapestry’s difficult details as inventions, imaginary, or copies of older and male-produced, manuscripts. It also seems stereotypical: women do the ‘women’s work’ while men provide the inspiration and academic input. Nor is this purely a gender-based argument for it was a male preserve to produce documents, to illuminate them and to study. However, other and certain male preserves were warfare, sailing, ship-building, hunting and the construction of buildings of all sorts, especially of military defences. It is not only instructive for us but it is also a severe handicap to the traditionalists’ theory of female embroiderers that there is no evidence of an outline drawing or cartoon, though it is claimed there must have been one.1 Why is that? If no trace has ever been found it is safest to assume that it did not exist. We should not twist the facts to suit our theories. It is true that we know of English gold-embroidery (Opus Anglicanum) that required a cartoon, but our Tapestry involved neither bullion work nor consistent repeat motifs. It involved no complicated stitches or heavy background filling. Given that we have no trace of an underlying cartoon and given that any senior clerical academic would certainly have spent a life completely divorced from any of the fields of specialisation enumerated above, how did the women supposedly involved come by such accurate information? The traditional explanation, that the Normans were a master-race of polymath supermen, just will not hold water. So, who was it directed these English artisans? For we certainly know it could not be a clerical superman, ignorant of the world. In fact, the number of accurately represented specialisations in all-male activities provides us with a mass of vignettes that also and by far outweigh the few possible (unproven) references to manuscript illustrations. The men who directed the search for manuscripts would not be familiar with the real world either, such was the divide between the cloister and the world, the religious and the secular at this time. In fact, it is doubtful if any individual possessed such comprehensive expert knowledge.
In the course of this study we have analysed a number of specialised fields. We have seen that shipping and sailing were very well understood by the artisans of the Tapestry. Similarly the tools of the shipbuilding trade were known in detail. Yet they did not know how to ship and unload valuable horses. Some of these embroiderers were humble enough in origin to know the tools of agriculture and its practise, including undoubtedly unique details. We have seen that building with earth and timber was accurately depicted with stave-construction, reverse-assembly and trapped joists evidenced in civil and in military architecture. Then in the wider military field these artisans not only knew different weapons, they also knew different spear-types and their functionality, they knew mail armour and that high trajectory fire from bows draws to the chest and not to the cheek or mouth and some among them knew about the very rare armours of the eastern Mediterranean. From our discoveries we can say that some were English but some possibly of Scandinavian origin. I think that there can be no doubt that these artisan-embroiderers were men, not women, and that they were not monks or clerics, in spite of their expertise in fables and also in religious imagery. The layman would learn such things from clerical instruction, but no such instruction or experience of the working world would be available to the cloistered cleric.
What were these specialists with military experience doing as embroiderers? The flamboyant colours we see in the margins may themselves offer a clue, for while unusual colouration certainly adds variety to repetitious imagery, it might also be the result of colour blindness. Colour and form are located in the extrastriate cortex and cerebral achromatopsia is colour blindness arising from ischaemia or infarction of the ventral occipito-temporal cortex and is frequently more complex after brain trauma.2 Therefore, insult to the head could cause colour-vision loss or confusion while a blow behind the left ear, say over the top of a shield, to this area would be very dangerous. Given the common form of helmet, ‘boiled egg’ fractures of either skull hemisphere must also have been common. Here would be one explanation for achromatic representations: some of the embroiderers may have experienced traumas consistent with injuries sustained during military conflict.
The needlework technique employed (laid and couched work with stem and outline stitches) is not particularly sophisticated. Neither is its execution here as competent as contemporary bullion-work survivals. Because the execution of these stitches is open and swift (helping it to be lively and engaging), I suggest that such products may not have been uncommon in the dwellings of the affluent. Later, true tapestries came from documented ateliers, employed cartoons and were woven with greater sophistication and labour. The amazing display of technical knowledge on the Bayeux Tapestry lifts it from the amateur field and being an embroidery, not a true tapestry, any cartoon would have been worked on the linen base, which would certainly have left traces noticed over the years. Had it (like true tapestries) been designed to be heritable and portable for a peripatetic lifestyle, it would have been in sections, not presented as a continuous panorama. We know that in the later medieval period in England and Italy royal patrons employed large teams of mixed male and female workers under the direction of male designers for whom creating a cartoon, or pouncing the more repetitive elements, was common practise. 3 At this date however, c.1070, we have no records to assist us. We see a markedly different workshop arrangement to that of any of the later true-tapestry products.
The intrusion of interlace or ringerike design is an obvious clue, but it is very much harder to say how many separate pairs of hands were involved over all. Indeed, this would make a study in itself. The scene of woodsmen felling trees for the shipwrights is accompanied by particularly realistic birds, which we can accept as woodpeckers. So did the same hands embroider the whole scene at this point, someone who knew ‘man and bird and beast’? When William’s forces make landfall at Pevensey we see a very convincing duck springing skywards. So what else can we relate in this section to one person with the ‘fancy of a fowler’? The wyverns are, again, different where ‘Duke William exhorts his knights’, while the mounts are decidedly wooden and the winged horses above them quite amusing. Yet where ‘English and French fell together in battle’, the liveliness and originality of the afflicted mounts is remarkable and clearly informs the viewer that some of the needleworkers were better at horses than others. They were, presumably, horse-men to have such empathy with these creatures. They feel for the poor beasts, they are more to them than expendable tactical units or financial debits.
There is a good deal more we would like to know about the practical production of this artefact. Was it worked in sections and these joined and camouflaged with an infill, or was it continuously worked? The latter seems the only feasible explanation as it would be essential to maintain tension while each section was worked. This suggests that a reasonably long piece was sewn together to be worked to completion, then rolled-on from one roller to another within a long frame, and this would also allow top and bottom tensions to be maintained, presumably by lacing to each frame as show in later illustrations4 and as with the preparation of vellum and parchment. The variations in Tapestry width are explicable as changes in density of weaving of the original linen ground of 18 inches stretched by the lacing and perhaps also accompanied by dampening the workpiece in order to improve tension. Such a method of working by winding a long length is radically different from any later methodology for either embroidery or tapestry, but then we have no record of male-only embroidery teams at a later date, or of such virtuoso displays in technical detail, or of such a lengthy single work-piece, all of which are unique to our embroidery.
The choice of ¼ toise for the depth was probably dictated by the reach of the embroiderers (weavers could have gone a full toise), for whether working in underside couching or another stitch it would not be easy to raise (pinch) the surface of a tensioned workpiece held between end rollers and with tensioned side frames, so two hands would be required in order to pass the needle from recto to verso: width was dictated by reach. The individual stitches seem to vary a little from 1mm each to 2mm, granting the effect of mass even at close range. Nevertheless, this methodology is economical for it leaves large areas of the linen field as an exposed background (unlike Opus Anglicanum) and it uses only wool and no expensive silks or bullion. Those brief reversals of events, such as the death of King Edward, may have been included for emphasis, but they could also be the result of one team of workers jumping ahead prematurely instead of checking with their supervisor what the team behind them were doing. The economy of the method suggests the workmanship is good, but it has not been laboured, the product will not ultimately be fit for a king, certainly not for God. This is a practical, everyday commission, nothing out of the ordinary for this workshop but required by the patron as soon as possible.
Its cartoon-like quality is not the result of a lack of artistic technique among all contemporary English illustrators (as commentators sometimes imply), but of the vernacular nature of this workshop, which did not engage any great artists, while the open background is the only possible technique for such an enormous textile. The temptation has been to represent the style as less sophisticated than, say, Continental illuminations, but this is a total misconception. Manuscript illustrations of pre-Conquest date are both sophisticated and distinctive, for example the Benediction of St Aethelwold, 5 datable to the 970s, has much more embellishment and is far more sophisticated than the Bayeux Tapestry, while the Grimbold Gospels 6 produced at Winchester in the early eleventh century has both sophisticated figure-work and composition. It is true that after the Conquest surviving illumination styles do begin to change from an insular style and to absorb influences probably derived from Ottonian and Carolingian manuscripts as, for example, the Trinity College Psalters’ depiction of St Eadwine writing,7 but that belongs to a later date when there had been time for new men and new influences to intrude into a requisitioned scriptorium.
That artistic sophistication could be transferred to textiles is evidenced by the silk embroidery (Opus Anglicanum) fragments taken from St Cuthbert’s tomb at Durham, said to have been the gift of King Aethelstan or of his queen, made at Winchester in the early tenth century. But such rare fragments as these are from high-value, small textiles, things not designed as items of utility but truly as treasures. The English native tradition of drawing does, however, seem to have lingered on in the post-Conquest period and for some time afterwards, for elements of the fourteenth century Luttrell Psalter8 still appear to echo the Bayeux Tapestry figures and others found in manuscript illuminations of pre-Conquest date. Another piece of evidence worth remembering is the Bury Bible of St Edmunds,9 illuminated at Bury St Edmunds Abbey, not by one of the brothers but by Master Hugo, a secular artist and metalworker employed by the abbey in the 1130s. Historians have, perhaps, been too eager to divide both pre-and post-Conquest worlds into competent clerics and simple seculars. The acid test, in my opinion, is worldliness: the greater the knowledge of the outside and secular world exhibited in a work, the greater the realism as opposed to the display of piety, the less likely it is that a cloistered cleric was involved in its production.
Was there sympathy expressed on the Tapestry for the English cause, given that the embroiderers were English? This is very difficult to establish though some have tried to detect and argue as much. There are no obviously subversive messages and all the flattery is directed initially at Duke William, then at Bishop Odo, for clients do not pay for unflattering portraits. There may well intrude some apologist elements, attempts to suggest that Harold was a victim of circumstances, which could be English or they could just be noble sentiments, take your pick. In the first place we are told of his voyage to France in sympathetic terms, larded with warnings it is true, but not overly harsh. The coarse story he tells to listeners in Normandy is not really open to amelioration, but it would be a useful fact for any claimant to the English throne to know. His actions in the Brittany campaign are apparently laudable. His return to England seems to express sympathy for his humbled state and the offer of the crown to him, by unknown persons, has elements of tempters offering an irresistible award.
Of course, the invasion and battle scenes give major emphasis to the Norman-French, their cause and their actions, yet English troops are shown to fight bravely and well: to say otherwise would, of course, diminish the victors’ own bravery and achievement. The absence of a Malfosse incident from the Tapestry is yet another indicator that none of the embroiderers was a survivor of the battle. Like the crossbows, they knew it not. Yet they had heard of the hidden traps in the marshy ground beneath the slopes of the English left flank for the wooden-looking horses of the massed Norman-French cavalry are suddenly transformed into very realistic dying destriers, somersaulting and kicking in their death-throes. At this point we can truly say that we move from the embroidery as an artefact to evidence of a work of art, this by virtue of the empathy it expresses with the subject depicted. And if there was no Malfosse shown on the Tapestry, presumably Odo did not experience it though well aware of the lillies he had encountered – if he was the patron who commissioned the embroidery. A good reason for giving him command of the archers at this point in the battle.
So, if Englishmen embroidered this artefact they were careful to present the wishes of their client, even though they were ignorant of some important details. All the indicators we have are that they perfectly understood the details they depicted. Here we have a curtailed and partial account focussed principally on noble participants. It is not a common soldier’s-eye view but a privileged one. Whoever ‘wrote the brief’ was a cavalryman. This commission was a business, not an enterprise, so the embroiderers all drew upon their own experiences, which must have included participation in such brutal warfare. These were men who had gained their experience in England and before 1066. The events of a particular day were subsequently dictated to them by someone outside the team or workshop and who (the common experience of all soldiers in action) saw only the events that unfolded before him. They drew on their own experiences and their patron from his, coloured by his personal pride.
So, there was no prepared framework of events, no agreed official version of events to portray, this was not made as an official history for the benefit of posterity, only as a basic outline account with special emphases. Nor was there any story beyond presenting the success of the Norman cause. After all, that was what the person who commissioned the Tapestry wanted the embroiderers to say and perhaps the same person told them what (in his opinion) had happened at the battle. This client was important and therefore laid particular emphasis on the cavalry within which he had served. We might suspect that there was a brief written description or framework of events, a brief, of the scenes and events that were to be shown, probably dictated by the patron to a scribe or clerk and then passed to the production team where specialists would take relevant sections under the direction of a supervisor. An accurate record of the whole day, or campaign, was not required and did not exist in any form but the salient points of a brave victory needed to be followed, including the worthiness of the foe. Viewers would expect the technical details to be correct.
Something more needs to be said, to be considered. This survival is truly remarkable, virtually intact and moth-free, not reused, cut-up, put down a guarderobe, not eaten by rats or mice or rotted by rain penetrating the roof, saved from sunlight so that localised bleaching is not apparent, faded only in respect of vegetable dyes occasionally subjected to light at any level – how was this achieved? Well, in a cedar-wood box for some centuries, though probably not for all its time. Photo-chemical deterioration limited to once-a-year exposures, mechanical damage very limited for the same reason and then by display on a roller, physical damage limited to each end: very little at the truncated end of story, the missing conclusion, rather more evidence of restoration at the beginning of the Tapestry. So perhaps it was rolled to begin at the beginning and this exposed outer was therefore abused the most. What is not evident is real damage to the margins, in fact just a little to the foot of the Tapestry and very little to the heading, whether above the upper margin or within its content. This is all the more remarkable in that medieval arras/tapestries were hung from tenter-hooks and any such treatment, let alone repeated hangings or extended hanging, would seriously damage the heading, displacing the weave and embroidery, eventually tearing through the selvage. However skilled the restorers, the evidence of such damage would be irreversible and, anyway, we have no reason to believe that the hanging would be treated with any special care.
Of course, serious doubts have been raised about the nineteenth-century restorations and also about the earliest attempts at recording the images in the eighteenth century. In 1907, Charles Dawson raised doubts and quoted Mr Hudson Gurney in 1814,10 who had said that the Tapestry was ‘injured at the beginning and very ragged towards the end’, a position that now seems to have been corrected by extensive restoration.
For display within Bayeux Cathedral in the eighteenth century a half-liner or heading band was sewn on to the head selvage, yet unless the nineteenth-century restorers effected work that was little short of miraculous, the present, apparent, state of preservation of the upper margin is astonishing. If we look at the earliest drawings, those of Nicholas-Joseph Foucault (d.1721) and later reproduced by M. Lancelot in 1729, the Antonine Benoit sketches of 1729 and Father Bernard de Montfaucon’s engravings of 1730, as well as Stothard’s engravings (1816-19) we see the same picture, damage at the foot but quite amazing integrity to the heading. If there had been stress, then the earliest photographs by E. Dossetter, reproduced by Frank Fowke (1873-75) could not show the linen at the headings intact and almost perfect in every respect.
This comprehensive strength at the heading, in both the weave of the linen ground and the integrity of the embroidery, can only mean one thing. It was never hung on tenter-hooks. On the face of it this means that our Tapestry was never hung. It was produced and then stored, but why? Only by resorting to pure speculation can we construct an explanation. Just supposing it was produced to celebrate the victory of Eustace of Boulogne’s invasion and Bishop Odo’s installation as king or regent, or even as archbishop, then the failure of this invasion and William’s return would place Odo in great danger. He might then have hidden, or sent to safe-keeping, such serious evidence of pride and of outright treachery. Maybe it was never delivered to him. Someone, perhaps, later removed the damning conclusion to show William its content, causing William to arrest Odo, triggering the subsequent Domesday Surveys of Kent and Sussex (after 1082), which then confirmed all King William’s fears. As a result, or partial consequence, we now have Domesday Book, the comprehensive audit of 1086.
I think we can now confidently claim that unless some hitherto unknown and highly specific (genuine) document is produced providing evidence to the contrary, the Bayeux Tapestry was made in England, not in France, by men, not by women, and by seculars rather than by clerics ignorant of worldly matters. The inescapable corollary seems to be that these secular male embroiderers were not men with personal experience of the battle at Battle, nor even of recent Norman-French developments in armaments. The probability is that they were Englishmen under English direction, possibly with a written brief, an atelier contracted to a Norman-French client and very possibly, at least in part, themselves ex-soldiers. They also had excellent local knowledge of landscapes and architecture and had been well-schooled (though not formally educated) in aspects of religious information involving the fables of Aesop and as much as contemporary bestiaries were able to inform the world. Some among them also appear to have been well-travelled, able to add to the stock of available literary knowledge from their own experience. Finally, we are left with the very strong evidence that this unique artefact actually survives because it was never used for the purpose for which it was constructed. It remained a superfluous and largely irrelevant document until rediscovered in more recent times.