The Bayeux Tapestry

Saturday morning

And then there's the bus.  It's big, sleek and shiny because it's brand new; this is, I think, its maiden voyage.  Bright white, with no writing whatsoever on the outside.  Instead of side view mirrors, it has big vertical panels inside, on each side, with camera feeds.  The seats, however, provide noticeably less room than the average commercial economy airline seat.  You can't stand up straight from your seat, because the seat in front is too close.  And a lot of the group – mainly women, who are smaller – complain that the seats are uncomfortable.  The seats feel fine to me, which probably means I'm the target body shape/size, at least for that seatmaker.  I'm not sure why the seats need to be packed in, especially since our group takes up only a little more than half of the seats.  

Our driver is a lot like the bus, tall, elegantly dressed, unfailingly courteous, but more craggy than sleek.  He apparently has a dry sense of humor; he and our guide talk – in French – a lot on bus trips, long or short, and she is constantly laughing as he keeps a straight face.  The driver is exceptionally good at driving, moving and turning and parking that huge bus through one medieval city after another, and around countless roundabouts the size of your dining room table.

Speaking of roundabouts, by way of Abbey:

• Sunday's fact:  By law, public buildings and motorways in France must comply with the "1% artistic,” meaning that 1% of the cost of the project, minus architects fees and a few other things, must be spent on commissioning new art, by living artists, to be displayed publicly on site.  (Wow!)  In many cases, this art appears in roundabouts. 

There are still doves cooing in the evenings and mornings, much louder than the other birds.  Or are they owls?  We could use our Merlin app, but we would have to turn out phones on.

This weekend, as noted, was Invasion Weekend.  Two of the most consequential invasions in Western history took place across the English Channel, nearly 900 years apart.  We got our fill of both of them this weekend.

In the 11th century, France was kind of a mess, split up among dukes and other kinds of hereditary rulers; the King of France wasn't much more than just another petty warlord.  England was just emerging from three hundred years of Danelaw, when the Danes (Vikings) controlled most of the middle of the island.  One of the more powerful dukes in what is now France was William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy.  Normandy is... well, you know where Normandy is, because of that other invasion*.  The other thing you need to know is that everyone with any power was related to everyone else with power, so succession upon the death of a king or duke was not always clear-cut.  And there's no Twitter or WhatsApp, so how do you even know when the king is dead?

Anyway, three guys, all related, figure in the first invasion.  Edward was King of England in 1066; Harold Godwinson was a major English noble, and William was in Normandy.  Edward was very old and on his way out, and both Harold and William claimed that Edward had whispered in their ear that they, not the other one, would be his successor.  

This is a long story, which you can look up, but what happened was that Edward died, Harold was on the scene, was chosen the next day by the Witan to succeed, and had himself crowned King of England the same day, and went on about the business of what kings do – including leading an army north to defeat the Vikings at Stamford Bridge on September 25, 1066, essentially ending Danelaw in England.  At the same time William, still in Normandy, was building ships, gathering an army and setting off across the English Channel to take what he believed was rightly his.

The Battle of Hastings took place on October 14, 1066 – so you can do the math and figure out just how much time Harold had to run the English army down from around York after defeating the Vikings, and take on William's superior numbers and armaments (and horses).  The battle goes on for 14 hours, the Normans surge, the Saxons surge back, Harold gets an arrow in the eye and William is no longer The Bastard, but The Conqueror.

Again, William's subsequent reign is a long story, and an interesting and important one.  The world is different because William won the Battle of Hastings.  And to celebrate the victory, someone (most scholars seem to agree it was Odo, William's half-brother and Bishop of Bayeux) commissioned a work of art to commemorate the famous victory.  This is the Bayeux Tapestry, which is not a tapestry (it's embroidered***) and has nothing to do (save Odo) with Bayeux.

It's even got Halley's Comet

The tapestry is one of the very most consequential records of the medieval period, and probably in Western history.  It's 70 meters long – almost ¾ of a football field – and 20 inches tall.  It tells the story with such detail and accuracy that historians depend on it for a wide range of understanding of medieval life and war.  It's in great shape (someday I'll read up on its restoration – what was restored and how it was done****).  The colors are magnificent.  It tells the story with feeling, passion, humor and solemnity.  Each figure is different.  Even the horses seem alive.

The tapestry was probably made in England to celebrate William's victory, and tells the story from the Norman side.  But it is not propaganda as such; it tells the story – the history – the way stories are usually told:  by the victor.  It is one of the treasures of human history.  I've come across it again and again while reading about that period of history.  And we got to see it, up close and personal.

It lives in a museum of course, behind glass in a darkened horseshoe room, 35 yards out, around the corner, and 35 yards back.  The only light is on the tapestry itself, just enough to see.  We got audio guides, telling the story as we walked along.  At the end, Abbey and I went back to the beginning and did the whole thing again, this time just looking.

No pictures allowed, so - no pictures.  Tapestry pics here are from the internet.  And you can see the entire tapestry, online, in detail, here.

The tapestry has been compared with a comic book (see the "In Popular Culture" section); George Wingfield Digby wrote in 1957:

It was designed to tell a story to a largely illiterate public; it is like a strip cartoon, racy, emphatic, colourful, with a good deal of blood and thunder and some ribaldry.

Anyway – pretty cool.  What a privilege, one I'll never forget.

And then on to the beaches.  Saturday afternoon and all day Sunday were dedicated to Operation Overlord, and I think I'll do all of that tomorrow.

Saturday evening, the whole group walked through town (another medieval town!) to the restaurant.  On the way we passed the Notre Dame Cathedral of Bayeux, which stood out to me as a particularly beautiful building, of all the beautiful medieval buildings we have seen.  It was consecrated in 1077, eleven years after the Battle of Hastings, and William (by then The Conqueror) and his wife Queen Matilda were there.  Abbey spent a while wandering around town before dinner, and ran into a wedding at the Cathedral.  

                     

                       

               


Right behind the Cathedral was the Liberty Tree, planted there in 1789 to celebrate and represent the Revolution.  It's 235 years old, and in the summer there's a light show, after dark, on the tree and the Cathedral.  The theme of the show is peace and freedom.  The light show runs until midnight, every night - hours and hours of peace and freedom, every night.

NOTES:

* - Normandy, by the way, is named for the Vikings (Northmen) who basically took it from the French who had been living there (and who probably weren't actually even "French" yet) in the ninth century, about the same time the Vikings were making life difficult for the English.  In 845 a Viking named Ragnar sailed 120 (!) ships up the Seine to Paris, which must have been quite a sight.  The Holy Roman Emperor at the time was named Charles the Bald (I'm not making that up)** and he paid Ragnar a lot of money to go away, back to Normandy.  The Vikings, no fools they, sailed back up the Seine at least twice more, and Charles paid them to go away.  So they did it again.  Wouldn't you? 

** - He was the grandson of Charlemagne.  Can you imagine becoming the Holy Roman Emperor but a thousand years later what people know about you is that you were bald?  His grandfather Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman Emperor, created an empire that was pretty big by medieval standards, and the organization and infrastructure to support it.  His grandfather was Charles Martel, whose forces defeated the forces of Islam at Tours in 732 and started the Reconquista, at the end of which the forces of Islam were gone from Europe.  And our Charles was bald, and he kept getting beat up on the way to school and having his lunch money stolen.

*** - Wikipedia gets picky:  

In common with other embroidered hangings of the early medieval period, this piece is conventionally referred to as a "tapestry", although it is not a "true" tapestry in which the design is woven into the cloth in tapestry weave; it is technically an embroidery, although it meets the traditional broader definition of "tapestry" as: "A textile fabric decorated with designs of ornament or pictorial subjects, painted, embroidered, or woven in colours, used for wall hangings, curtains, covers for seats, ..."

 That definition at the end of the quote is from the Oxford English Dictionary, of all places.

**** - I've read a bit about the history of the Tapestry and cannot find any record of a major restoration - until very recently; in fact, only the preliminary inspection of the tapestry (done in less than a month, during a time when the museum is closed anyway) has been done so far, as far as I can tell.