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The Bayeux tapestry records pictorially in a series of 56 panels, stretching for 70 metres, the last successful invasion of England. It reveals that the invasion of 1066 was a combined operation involving the building of 800 ships to transport an army of some 12,000 men and 2,000 horses across the Channel. For its time it was as complex a piece of planning as the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944.
Since its creation, probably in the 1070s, the tapestry had rested for centuries in comparative obscurity in the care of Bayeux cathedral. In the 18th century, squabbling British antiquarians, for whom the artefacts of the past constituted a supplement, even a substitute for the written record, had established its historical importance. But with the confiscation of church property in the early years of the French Revolution, the tapestry became the property of the state, and states use history and its artefacts for propaganda purposes. The tapestry itself was intended as propaganda for William the Conqueror. It illustrated Harold’s breaking of his oath to William, giving the latter a just cause for war against a perjurer. This Norman/ French version of the conquest was indignantly rejected by English patriots. For the novelist Bulwer-Lytton and Tennyson, Harold was the tragic victim and William a brutal tyrant. Throughout its history the tapestry exposed the tensions that underlie our relationship with the French.
Napoleon consistently used a controlled press to brush up his image. In 1803 he had assembled an army in Boulogne which would conquer England. Ordering the tapestry to be exhibited in the Louvre, he assumed the mantle of William the Conqueror. To Carola Hicks, ‘it could not more directly predict the same outcome for the same enterprise’, i.e. the successful invasion of England. But the invasion never came off; while William became King of England, Napoleon ended up on St Helena.
The most serious threat to the tapestry came with the obsession of Himmler and the racists of his SS. As Himmler wrote, it was important ‘for our glorious and cultured German history’, because it represented the superiority of the Aryans over the decadent nations of the West. The efforts of the SS to get the tapestry first to Paris and then to Germany as the Allies advanced across France is a splendidly researched set-piece in this book.
The use of the tapestry as propaganda by rapacious conquerors is only one theme of Hicks’s book, which is subtitled ‘The Story of a Masterpiece’. She casts her net very widely indeed. She catalogues the use of the tapestry by writers, from Bulwer-Lytton to Scott Fitzgerald, Aldous Huxley and Anthony Powell.
The tapestry, as Hicks points out, is not a tapestry at all but a piece of coloured wool embroidery on linen. But embroidery was women’s work and this raised the whole status of women in 19th-century society. Did embroidery give women a dignified role or was it, as Mary Lamb, a disciple of Mary Wollstonecroft, called it, ‘self-imposed slavery’ to the exclusion of higher pursuits?
Agnes Strickland and her publisher spotted that female royals were a marketable commodity. Strickland used the tapestry for her best-selling Queens of England (1840). It was a female historical novelist who lamented ‘the growing tendency among women to become historians’. This tendency has become an established feature of our literary landscape. But in Victorian England the historian Edward Freeman, author of a five- volume history of the Conquest, put Agnes Strickland in her place. ‘I suppose I am not expected to take any serious notice of some amusing remarks on the Tapestry made by Miss Agnes Strickland.’
The most fascinating chapters of this fascinating book are devoted to the history of the tapestry in the 19th and 20th centuries. The Society of Antiquaries sent Charles Stothard to Bayeux in order to draw a coloured facsimile of the tapestry, completed in 1819. With the coming of the railway, Bayeux became a tourist attraction for the British cultured elite in the 1850s. In 1876 the Director of the Victorian and Albert museum commissioned a hand-coloured photograph which was much visited. Two factors encouraged interest in the tapestry. Mediaeval history staged a comeback, from the Gothic Revival via Walter Scott to the Pre-Raphaelites. Two eminent historians fought a very public battle over the nature of the Norman Conquest. Edward Freeman, a formidable polemicist who wrote an attack on fox-hunting that Trollope struggled in vain to refute, held that Saxon freedoms had survived the Conquest; J. H. Round maintained that 10,000 Normans lording it over 1.5 million new subjects irretrievably destroyed the Saxon heritage.
Just as important as history was the Victorian passion for sewing and embroidery. In 1869, 37 ladies of the Leek Society of Art Embroidery in Staffordshire set about embroidering in the natural woollen hues beloved of William Morris, a replica of the tapestry 250 feet long. After touring England, Germany and South Africa it is now wonderfully displayed in Reading town hall museum. Only in one detail is their work not an exact copy. In the fringe of the tapestry beneath a panel showing a cleric touching a woman, is a naked man equipped with large genitalia. The ladies of Leek endowed him with trousers.
The final chapters of this book show how the images of the tapestry have been used by political cartoonists. There is President Mitterrand on horseback in chainmail confronting Mrs Thatcher, pierced to the heart by Cupid’s arrow. In Private Eye Tony Blair is portrayed sitting on William’s throne defending his beleaguered Transport Minister Stephen Byers. Images of the tapestry were used to promote Guinness and Hovis bread.
There was a time when schoolboys would have recognised these images as part of our history. But in our multicultural and modernising Britain we are in danger of losing our own history. I believed that the removal to storage of the V&A’s coloured photographs in the 1980s represented such indifference. I was wrong. The learned curators of the V&A tell me they will come home to the British and Renaissance gallery to be opened in 2009. It is not often that this reviewer sees light at the end of the tunnel.
To see the tapestry splendidly displayed in Bayeux is an extraordinary aesthetic experience. It glows. Its very absurdities — horses with bright blue bodies, red legs and brilliantly yellow tails — Lady Tennyson remarked ‘give one a feeling of perfect truthfulness’. Dickens dismissed it as the botched work of amateurs (in fact it was probably the work of experts, the nuns of Canterbury), yet ‘it still gives an oddly vivid and fresh impression’. Carola Hicks’s scholarly book is a masterly account of its origins and the controversies that have always surrounded it.
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