La Jornada: Britons fascinated by embroidery that celebrates their own defeat and conquest

It measures just 50 centimeters high, but its 68 meters in length is equivalent to a Boeing 747. It is the Bayeux Tapestry, a work from the 11th century that is on display until July 11, 2027 at the British Museum in London, thanks to an exceptional loan from the Bayeux Museum, in Normandy. Despite its name, it is not a woven tapestry, but rather a monumental embroidery: an aesthetic prodigy unparalleled in medieval European art, from a period from which barely any faded textile scraps survive.

The tapestry has survived a checkered history of fires, wars and removals, escaping disappearance several times. During the French Revolution, the Tapestry was almost cut down to be used as a canvas to cover military carts, although it was used to cover potato sacks. Later, the Nazis, who saw the tapestry as proof of the supposed Aryan superiority due to the Viking origin of the Normans, studied it and extracted a fragment. In 1944 they tried to take it to Germany, but the French Resistance prevented the looting.

Its exceptional conservation is due to the fact that for centuries it remained locked in a chest, protected from light and moths, and was only exhibited during the Festival of Relics at Bayeux Cathedral. Thus the surprising vividness of its reds, blues and yellows was preserved. Even so, time left countless holes, tears and stains, aggravated by poor restorations. The one from 1842, for example, modified one of the most famous scenes of the Tapestry that was only discovered in recent studies: the arrow shot in the eye that kills the English king Harold.

Popularity

The popularity of the tapestry, which is on track to surpass the 1.7 million visitors to Tutankhamun at the British Museum in 1972, is relatively recent. English antiquarians popularized the tapestry in the 19th century, through drawings, engravings and photographs, integrating it into the Victorian context of the search for national identity, medievalism and nationalisms. It notably inspired paintings, caricatures and poetry, such as the epic drama Harold (1876) by Tennyson.

In 1885, embroiderers from Staffordshire created a full-scale replica – today in the Reading Museum – which toured England, attracting crowds. Victorian morality, scandalized by the nudity and phallic profusion of the original, censored the copy: it dressed the nudes in gold pants or striped underwear and drastically reduced the phallic attributes of the horses, hiding the humor, satire and double meaning of the original embroidery.

The “fever” for the tapestry is also reflected in the academy: from 424 titles in 1988 it rose to 1,780 in 2015, an increase of more than 320 percent. The reason is its enigmas: without documents from its first four centuries, it is unknown who commissioned it, who made it, where and why.

Frank Stenton in 1957 codified the canonical thesis that attributed as patron to Bishop Odo of Bayeux – represented in the tapestry –, half brother of William, Duke of Normandy, as propaganda to legitimize the Norman conquest; Today the hypothesis that it was designed for the Abbey of Saint Augustine in Canterbury gains great strength, due to its similarities with the illuminated manuscripts produced there. Studies today continue to ask the question of authorship, patronage and function, to which are added explorations of its materiality, its reception over the centuries and how it constructs power, gender, territory and memory. This ambiguity feeds an inexhaustible circle: each hypothesis questions the previous ones and forces us to look at the tapestry again.

The embroidery was a collective work, probably carried out by expert English embroiderers who, paradoxically, portrayed an almost entirely male world: only six women appear. Recent readings find satire, moral codes and possible subversive messages in his images. Most likely made in the 1070s, it is embroidered with woolen threads on fine linen and consists of nine sewn cloths. According to the project’s curator, Millie Horton-Insch, no thought is given to the difficulty of making the thread: for every hour of embroidery, between four and six hours were needed to produce it.

Its 58 scenes unfold, from left to right, like an immense horizontal papyrus that narrates the confrontation between King Harold Godwinson and Duke William of Normandy for the English throne, after the death of Edward the Confessor, culminating in the Battle of Hastings. The last three meters of the work are missing. Experts believe that they represented William’s coronation at Westminster and the submission of the Saxon nobles, closing the story.

Beyond the central plot, a portrait of the 11th century emerges around it, populated by ships, banquets, castles, weapons, knights and hunting animals. Over the images there are concise inscriptions in Latin that identify characters and episodes and which can be seen in full and with minimum details at https://www.bayeuxmuseum.com/en/the-bayeux-tapestry/discover-the-bay eux-tapestry/explore-online/#explore

Another interpretive example is provided by Gale Owen-Crocker, focusing on a key scene, that of the banquets, as well as the constant marginal images of predators hunting, besieging and devouring their prey. Consider that the scene represents an allegory of the “hunger for England” or greed for power and that the embroiderers expressed a moral judgment that equalizes both sides in sin and portrays the invasion not as a heroic feat, but as a destructive process where Saxon autonomy and culture ended up being entirely “swallowed” and consumed by Norman voracity.

National emblem

Faced with the difficulty of understanding why the English elevate an object that celebrates their own defeat and conquest to a national symbol, Nigel Ramsay – medievalist and senior researcher at the Institute of Historical Research – responds to The Day: “The British have a peculiar ability to turn defeats into founding episodes. The Battle of Hastings in 1066 ended up annihilating a good part of the English nobility, ended up being seen as the beginning of a new England and the ease with which the defeat of the Anglo-Saxons occurred is overlooked. Something similar happened in the Second World War with Dunkirk in 1940: a disastrous military retreat that went down in memory as the “spirit of Dunkirk, symbol of defiance in the face of adversity.”

On the other hand, Oxford historian William Whyte in a text explains how it matters little if the tapestry narrated a defeat: for some, Hastings ended Anglo-Saxon freedom; For others, it gave rise to modern England, as it was drawn to the development of Western Christianity and the feudal state it brought with it. He concludes by comparing the current period with the Victorian period, which despite its power was full of uncertainties and profound changes that caused a sense of anxiety where national history could provide the desired stability.