1066 - Andrew Bridgeford [129]
At some point before 1102 the poet Baudri of Bourgeuil saw the Bayeux Tapestry; his poem addressed to Countess Adela of Blois certainly bears the mark of its imprint, but quite when, or where, he saw the work is unknown. There is no record of his having ever visited Bayeux, nor that he ever met Bishop Odo. Their paths, however, crossed at least once for Baudri seems to have been present at the Council of Clermont as well. He later wrote a history of the Crusade - Hieros-lymitae Historiae - in the course of which he gave a famous description of Urban's speech in such terms that it can hardly be doubted that he was reporting what he had heard with his own ears. Was it, perhaps, on this occasion that Baudri had a chance to see the Bayeux Tapestry? This is not inconceivable, for Baudri wrote his own poem only a few years later, some time between 1099 and 1102. There is something rather pleasing in supposing that Odo, the old rascal, decided to show off the exploits of his younger years as retold in the stitches of the English; and to that end he brought along the tapestry to display before the assembled grandees at Clermont on the eve of the First Crusade.
The poet Wace was born on the island of Jersey broadly around the time that Baudri wrote his poem Adelae Comitis-sae. He became a learned cleric at Caen, a few miles from Bayeux, and by the mid-1160s had been granted a prebend or stipend at Bayeux Cathedral by King Henry II. It was during this period that he devoted himself to writing one of his major works, a long history of the dukes of Normandy in rhymed French (or more specifically western Norman) verse called the Roman de Rou. A large section of the poem covers the events of the Norman Conquest of England. Wace researched assiduously; he travelled widely, trawled through documents and interviewed contemporaries. One might presume that he would have known of and used the evidence of the Bayeux Tapestry, especially if it was being held at Bayeux at the time. Strangely, however, there is no unequivocal evidence that he knew of the tapestry at all. There are, it is true, three striking points of similarity that are shared with no other surviving source: only Wace and the tapestry tell us where Harold was taken after he was captured by Count Guy of Ponthieu - the castle of Beaurain; only Wace and the tapestry site Harold's oath at (or at least near) Bayeux; and only Wace and the tapestry recount the story of Bishop Odo riding into the confusion of battle at Hastings, waving his baton to encourage the more faint-hearted knights. But the poem contains more points of divergence than it does of striking similarity.
Thus Wace makes no mention of the existence of the Bayeux Tapestry itself. Nor does he make any mention of Turold, Ælfgyva, Wadard, Stigand, Vital and Count Eustace of Boulogne. There are striking differences as regards Harold's oath scene. In the tapestry Harold swears the oath standing upright, touching two reliquary boxes with tremulously outstretched fingers [plate 5]; but Wace has Harold kneeling, not standing, and he swears the oath only upon one reliquary box.3 The copper figurehead on Duke William's ship, on which he made the crossing to England in 1066, is described by Wace in the following terms:
On the head of the ship at the front,
Which sailors call the prow,
He had a child made out of copper
Carrying a strung bow and arrow.
The child had his face turned towards England