1066 - Andrew Bridgeford [10]
Orderic Vitalis was familiar with the complete version of William of Poitiers' Gesta, which he used extensively, though not without discretion, and he provides us with the most detailed and useful of the twelfth-century accounts of the Norman Conquest. Born near Shrewsbury in 1075 to an English mother and a Norman father, Orderic was placed by his parents in the Norman monastery of Saint-Evroul at the age of ten, 'a weeping child', he tells us, 'unknown to all, knowing no one'. He spent his whole life as a monk there, devoting himself to researching and writing. He wrote a continuation of the history of William of Jumieges, and then, between 1115 and 1141, he threw himself into a much larger project, a history of the Normans, which he called his Ecclesiastical History. Orderic's own beautifully neat copy of this work survives in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. Divided in his sympathies between the England of his boyhood and the Normandy of his education and adult years, Orderic justified the Conquest of 1066 as bringing Church reform to England, but at the same time he did not flinch, where necessary, from criticising the brutality of the conquerors. He even makes William the Conqueror refer to himself as a 'cruel murderer' as he lies dying in 1087 and has him make the following rather uncharacteristic (and unlikely) admission: 'I treated the native inhabitants [of England] with unreasonable severity, cruelly, oppressed high and low, unjustly disinherited many, and caused the death of thousands by starvation and war, especially in Yorkshire.'9
Written sources such as these are the bedrock of historical investigation. The story told in these black-letter records is exciting and revealing and puzzling. Yet when you close these books and pass to the Bayeux Tapestry your imagination still feels as if it has emerged out of the darkness of a cave into a world of sunlit colours. These busy little figures are not just eleventh-century cartoon characters stitched on to linen. They stand for real people, real people whose lives were changed, and in some cases ended, by the greatest of all events in English history. More than that, recorded in these threads are forgotten stories yet to be retold.
4
Stitches in Time
How is it that so fragile an object has survived for so many centuries? What accident of fate decreed that it should endure, when so much else that is inherently more durable has perished? This, in itself, is a remarkable story.1 The earliest evidence of the tapestry's existence appears at the turn of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Some time between 1099 and 1102 a French poet named Baudri, abbot of the monastery of Bourgeuil, composed a poem for Countess Adela of Blois, a daughter of William the Conqueror.2 Part of this poem describes, in elaborate and flowing detail, a brilliant tapestry that was apparently draped around the walls of Countess Adela's bedchamber. This tapestry, so Baudri tells us, was made out of gold, silver and silk, and among other things it depicted the famous conquest of England by Adela's late father. The poet proceeds to describe the work, scene by scene, and it slowly becomes apparent that what he is describing mirrors closely a large part of what we now know as the Bayeux Tapestry. Yet it cannot possibly be the Bayeux Tapestry. The work that Baudri describes is much smaller in scale; the technique is different and the materials are altogether richer. Did Countess Adela's tapestry - a sort of exquisite, miniature version of the real thing - really exist on the walls of her luxuriant bedchamber? If it did, it has long been lost. Or was her tapestry, as Baudri seems to imply and as most scholars believe, purely imaginary,