1066 - Andrew Bridgeford [11]
This hanging contains ships and leaders and names of leaders,
if, however, this hanging ever existed
. . .
If you could believe that this weaving really existed you would read true things on it.
This glimpse of the Bayeux Tapestry, through the mirror of a poet's imagination, is all that we have in any surviving record until well into the fifteenth century. Only in 1476 - over 400 years after the events depicted - do we find the first unequivocal mention of the work. This is also the earliest time that the tapestry can be proved to have been situated in Bayeux. An inventory of Bayeux Cathedral in the year 1476 tells us that the cathedral possessed 'a very long and narrow hanging of linen, on which are embroidered figures and inscriptions comprising a representation of the Conquest of England'.3 Each summer, the document informs us, this old embroidery was hung around the nave of the Cathedral for a few days in the religious calendar.
How so fragile an artwork had survived since the 1070s, through the long and dangerous medieval age, has never been discovered. Even for a long time after 1476 the tapestry remains unrecorded in any surviving document. Always vulnerable to fire and vermin, and to the whims of changing fashion, it was especially at risk in times of war. It might easily have been destroyed during the bloody religious conflicts of the sixteenth century, for in 1562 Bayeux Cathedral was broken into and sacked by Huguenots. They went on a rampage through the building, burning letters and charters and destroying most of the items listed in the inventory of 1476. These included a great gilded crown that had been a gift of William the Conqueror and at least one extremely valuable, though unnamed, tapestry. The local clergy had warning of the attack and they had managed to transfer some of their most precious possessions to the care of the municipal authorities. Perhaps the Bayeux Tapestry was amongst the items secreted away; perhaps it was just overlooked by the frenzied attackers;somehow, at any rate, it escaped this near-disaster.
Other vicissitudes came and went; more peaceable times returned. The practice of exhibiting the work around the cathedral for a few days each year seems to have continued. We can, therefore, imagine the good citizens of Bayeux filing along the nave of their cathedral with the rhythm of each passing summer, admiring this antique embroidery on those few days when it was displayed to them. Apart from the changing fashions from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries, from flowing robes and pointed hats to tight breeches and coiffured wigs, the scene would have remained much the same - men and women, young and old, shuffling quietly along the smooth grey flagstones of their cathedral, peering intently at the work, some of their faces filled with pride at what seemed to be a simple chronicle of Norman achievement, others furrowing with perplexity at one of its more curious details. It was only in the eighteenth century that the Bayeux Tapestry came to the attention of the outside scholarly world. From this point its perilous journey down to the present day can be traced with greater certainty.
The chain of events that led to the 'discovery' of the Bayeux Tapestry is known in broad outline. The story begins with Nicolas-Joseph Foucault, who had been intendant of Normandy from 1689 to 1694. He was a learned man who spent much of his spare time in study. When he died in 1721 he bequeathed his collection of papers to the Bibliotheque du Roi in Paris. Among those papers was a skilful, if rather stylised, drawing of the first part of the Bayeux Tapestry. The antiquaries of Paris were intrigued by this mysterious drawing. Nothing in the drawing indicated where the original was, or indeed what it was. Nor was there any indication who the artist of the reproduction had been. The identity of the artist remains a mystery although it is possible that it was Foucault'sown