What is the tapestry?

The Bayeux Tapestry is world-famous today as the source of much of our understanding of the Norman Conquest. However, scholars only first identified the tapestry’s significance in 1729. It was discovered on display during the religious festival of relics at Bayeux Cathedral in Normandy. The tapestry still resides in the town in the Musée de la Tapisserie de Bayeux. 

There are many questions surrounding its origins that will probably remain unsolvable, continuing to provoke much speculation based upon little historical evidence. Even its name is misleading, as it is actually an embroidery, sewn onto fine linen. True tapestries are woven on a loom.

It measures nearly 70 metres long and is 50 centimetres tall. A narrative travels across the centre of the panels, telling the story of the Norman Conquest, with side narratives and decoration in the borders above and below. The main narrative is supported by text, which helps to identify the characters and scenes.

The tapestry would have originally been longer, as the last panels are missing. However, the majority survives and tells a sophisticated story. It is based around the justification for William the Conqueror’s claim to the English crown and his invasion and defeat of King Harold at the Battle of Hastings in 1066.

In the margins

More subtly, some of the tapestry’s borders illustrate scenes from English fables, or moralising stories, which were unlikely to have been readable by Normans. One such story is ‘The Wolf and a Crane’, where a wolf has a bone stuck in its throat that is retrieved by a crane using its long beak.

Some of these fables act as commentaries on the main scenes of the tapestry. For example, ‘The Fox and the Crow’, where a crow drops the cheese it has stolen and a fox grabs it, is a moral about one thief stealing from another thief. It injects humour and a less than flattering commentary on the main scenes. This suggests a designer with an ambivalent attitude to the Normans.

The Eyewitness

It is unlikely that just one person was involved in the making of the Bayeux Tapestry, but the style of the embroidery is consistent and has a sophisticated narrative, which points to a single designer.

Part of the tapestry shows the Breton campaign – a war between the Duchy of Normandy and the Duchy of Breton which took place in 1064. At that time, the senior monk at Mont Saint-Michel, an abbey in Normandy, was Scolland. He acted both as treasurer and head of the scriptorium (a group of monks skilled at creating manuscripts). After the Norman victory at Hastings, Scolland, along with others from the same monastery, went over to England. He was appointed by King William as Abbot of St Augustine’s, in 1070.

Historian Richard Gameson has proposed that the monk shown enthroned and pointing to the Abbey of Mont Saint-Michel in the tapestry is Abbot Scolland, which would mean he was an eye witness to the action shown. If so this would explain why several of the early scenes in the tapestry focus on the Breton campaign, despite it being less important than the Norman Conquest and Battle of Hastings.

The Anglo-Norman nature of the making of the tapestry and its narrative reflect Scolland’s own intellectual and cultural life and his complex political affiliations. Scolland’s authority at St Augustine’s Abbey, his close links to the Norman victors and his experience, especially as head of the important scriptorium of Mont Saint-Michel, make him the most likely candidate for designer of the tapestry.
   

_{Top image: Scene from the Bayeux Tapestry showing Vital, a knight who had direct links to St Augustine’s Abbey}

_{© DeAgostini/Getty Images}