1066 - Andrew Bridgeford [68]
For a brief moment it seemed as if the city of London would hold out. The remaining English leaders rallied around the boy Edgar and in London they elected him as king. But the hopeless reality of their plight soon dawned on them and Edgar, Earls Edwin and Morcar, Archbishop Ealdred and the chief men of London all submitted to William at Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, by late November or early December 1066. William eventually came to terms with Edgar Ætheling, who went on to lead an eventful life and was still living in the English countryside as late as the early 1120s.27 On Christmas Day 1066 Duke William of Normandy was crowned king of England at a tense service in Westminster Abbey, less than twelve months after Edward had been buried and Harold crowned within the same great walls. He was the third of England's kings in that tumultuous year of 1066. Of his two battle companions highlighted by the embroidery, Odo of Bayeux became Earl of Kent and was granted enormous landholdings in many English counties as his reward. Count Eustace had arrived back in Boulogne by Easter 1067.28 By the autumn of that year, and perhaps already at Easter, he was not a happy man.
10
English Art and Embroidery
We have seen that the Bayeux Tapestry is a many-layered masterpiece, how cleverly it seems to be shot through with the English viewpoint and how its account of the Battle of Hastings subtly and unexpectedly puts the emphasis on the controversial Count Eustace II of Boulogne and his Frenchmen rather than the Normans. Is there any further evidence of this?What can be known of the true origin and meaning of this extraordinary work?
When Bernard de Montfaucon found the Bayeux Tapestry in the late 1720s he reported that 'the common opinion in Bayeux is that Queen Matilda, wife of William the Conqueror, had the tapestry made'. 'This opinion,' he wrote, 'passes for a tradition in the region. It seems highly probable.'1 In this way one of the most enduring myths about the Bayeux Tapestry was propagated. To eighteenth-century observers, the most obvious thing about the tapestry was that it told the story of Duke William's famous conquest of England. How natural it must have been to assume that Queen Matilda and her ladies-in-waiting spent their idle hours, with needle in hand, embroidering the Conqueror's famous triumph over Harold while the man himself was busy reducing the English to final and complete submission. Despite the lack of evidence this story was for a long time accepted as true. In the nineteenth century a debate did occur between those who attributed Ha tapisserie de la Reine Mathilde' (Queen Matilda's Tapestry) to William's wife and those who thought, for various reasons, that it must be a later work and that it was, therefore, to be ascribed to another Matilda, the Empress Matilda who was the Conqueror's granddaughter. No one, however, seemed to doubt that it was the work of some Queen Matilda or other. The only problem was choosing the right one.
Study of the Bayeux Tapestry has always been hampered by the fact that there is not a single reference to it in any surviving contemporary document. Step by step, however, close examination of the tapestry itself and ingenious detective work have enabled these early assumptions to be discarded. Early observers assumed that this heroic frieze, which at first glance seemed to be a straightforward celebration of the Norman triumph, must itself be of Norman origin. Several distinct clues quite apart from its subversive content have overturned this belief.2
The Bayeux Tapestry is an embroidered wall hanging, and herein lies the first clue which suggests an English origin. From surviving texts it is known that Anglo-Saxon women, in particular, were renowned for their skill at embroidery. No tradition comparable in either quality or quantity seems to have existed on the other side of the Channel. The Normans excelled at