1066 - Andrew Bridgeford [15]
And yet the endnote of Charles Stothard's involvement with the Bayeux Tapestry turns out to be one of human frailty. Working for long periods alone with this unique work of art, so vividly redolent of the greatest event of his nation's past, Stothard succumbed to the temptation to remove a small piece of the upper border for himself, approximately 2½ by 3 inches in size. In December 1816 he managed to return to England with his souvenir undiscovered. Five years later, before it had become known what he had done, Stothard tragically fell from a scaffold at the church of Bere Ferrers in Devon and was killed. Through Stothard's heirs, the little fragment found its way to what is now known as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, where it was exhibited, quite openly, as 'A Piece of the Bayeux Tapestry'. In 1871 the museum decided that it ought, in all propriety, to return the stray piece to Bayeux. The missing fragment was gratefully received but by then the damage had been done and repairs effected. It was decided that Stothard's souvenir should remain in the little glass case in which it had arrived from London, complete with its English description, but that it should be displayed adjacent to the place where the fragment had originally been cut away. This was all well and fine, except that hardly a day would pass without a visitor accosting the keeper and asking him about the fragment and its curious English label. Eventually the keeper became so exasperated that Stothard's piece was removed from display and it was placed for safe keeping in the municipal archives, where it still remains.10 A story also circulated that Mrs Stothard had been the culprit - on account, some said, of 'the weakness of the feminine character'; but no one now doubts that Charles Stothard himself had been the thief. He was not alone in wanting to depart with a memento. A thief on a lesser scale was the Rev. Thomas Frognall Dibdin - and it would be naive to assume that there were no others. Dibdin visited the tapestry shortly after Stothard departed in 1818. In a book of his travels he reported, with an air of perfect normality, that having gained access to the tapestry with some difficulty, he managed to obtain for himself 'a few straggling shreds of the worsted with which it is worked'.11 What became of these scraps is unknown. In 1842, when the tapestry was removed to a new home in the town, it was finally placed beyond the reach of souvenir hunters on permanent display in a long glass case.
The fame of the tapestry continued to spread, aided no doubt by the photographic reproductions that became possible in the second half of the nineteenth century. To Mrs Elizabeth Wardle, however, this was not enough. The wife of a wealthy silk merchant, she decided that England ought to have a record of the Bayeux Tapestry that was more tangible and enduring than a mere coloured photograph. In the mid-1880s she gathered a group of Victorian ladies of like mind and together they set to the task of embroidering a life-sized replica. So it was that the whole of the Bayeux Tapestry was made again, once more in England, 800 years after the original embroiderers had laboured over the selfsame task. The Victorian copy took two years to complete; the result was in most respects a brilliant and accurate likeness. Half close your eyes and walk around this replica today and you can easily believe that you are standing in front of the original itself. There were, however, limits to what these ladies could bring themselves to portray. When it came to depicting the male genitalia, which appear, on occasion, with noticeable prominence in the original, a strictly accurate rendering had to be forsaken in order to spare the blushes of all concerned. In their copy, the Victorian embroideresses