The Man Behind the Bayeux Tapestry

by Trevor Rowley

  31 Mother and child escaping from a substantial house that has been torched by Normans, from the Bayeux Tapestry.

  The final third of the Tapestry relates an account of the Battle of Hastings. To begin with, the Norman cavalry advance, first walking and then galloping; inspired by a speech from William they then charge the English shield wall. Despite the death of Harold’s brothers Gyrth and Leofwine, the English continue to hold their hilltop position. The lower border joins in the general mayhem by depicting dead warriors and horses, dismembered limbs and corpses being stripped of their chainmail and weapons. When a rumour begins to circulate that William has been killed, Odo is once again portrayed in a favourable light, rallying and encouraging the troops. The caption reads, ‘Here Bishop Odo, holding his staff, encourages the boys’. The duke raises his visor to be recognised and the next scenes show first the death of Harold’s personal guard and then of the king himself. The caption reads, ‘Here King Harold has been killed’; although this has generally been taken to mean the mail-clad figure with an arrow that has penetrated his helmet, it could equally apply to an adjacent warrior who simultaneously is being cut down. Effectively, the end of Harold is the end of the surviving Tapestry. A much repaired final section sees the unarmed English survivors making their way off the battlefield and a final caption, which is probably spurious, refers to the English running away.

  32 The chest in which the Bayeux Tapestry was kept from the fifteenth century.

  Several authorities argue that the original was probably about 1.5m longer and portrayed William’s triumphal entry into London and his coronation held on Christmas Day 1066. For centuries the Tapestry was folded and stored in a chest in Bayeux Cathedral, apart from eight days following the feast of St John the Baptist when it was probably displayed around the nave of the church. The uppermost part of the folded Tapestry would, therefore, have been the last panel, which would, therefore, have been the most vulnerable to damp and decay. The survival of the majority of the Tapestry in such relatively well-preserved condition resulted from the fact that it was folded and thus protected for most of the time, being brought out of its box for only eight days a year. Attention has also recently been drawn to the chest in Bayeux Cathedral that is traditionally said to have housed the Bayeux Tapestry. The chest is sufficiently large enough to have contained the Tapestry before it was lined in the eighteenth/nineteenth century and it has been argued that the Tapestry may have also been protected by the preserving properties of the box itself. The chest appears to be made of cedar and, if so, the Tapestry spent the first 600 years or so of its life carefully folded into a chest impregnated with cedar oil, a natural moth repellent (Hill & McSween 2011, 44–51).

  • Odo’s Role in the Creation of the Bayeux Tapestry •

  The Tapestry was first attributed to Bishop Odo in 1824 by Honoré Delauney, but it was the seminal work of Sir Frank Stenton in 1957 which laid the foundation of modern Tapestry scholarship and where the responsibility for making the Tapestry was firmly placed on the shoulders of Odo (Stenton 1957). Furthermore, it was argued that the Tapestry was executed by English seamstresses in Canterbury and that it was probably completed in time for the consecration of Odo’s new cathedral in Bayeux in 1077. An alternative theory, which has fewer adherents, is that the Tapestry was commissioned around the time of Odo’s trial in 1082 or during his subsequent imprisonment, in an attempt to regain William’s favour.

  There are several compelling reasons to suggest that it was Odo who commissioned the Tapestry. Firstly, Odo appears on at least four occasions in the story – more than any other individual except William and Harold. Moreover, his actions are emphasised as being central to the success of the Norman mission. It is also possible that an unnamed Odo appears witnessing Harold rescuing Norman soldiers at Mont-Saint-Michel. Odo’s role in the Conquest is graphically highlighted in the Tapestry; for example, when he ‘encourages the boys’ at Hastings, the depiction of his horse is larger than any other on the Tapestry. The image stands alone and is not overlapped by other animals or riders, giving it a unique prominence in the whole of the Tapestry.

  It is argued that there are strong similarities with Anglo-Saxon art, both manuscripts and reliefs. Canterbury was a celebrated centre for the production of illuminated manuscripts and artworks in the eleventh century, particularly pictorial narrative. Many aspects of the styles of depiction used in the Tapestry correspond to the artistic styles and traditions of Canterbury (Wormald in Stenton 1957). Scholars have identified exact parallels between some of the illustrations on the Tapestry and illuminations from St Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury, with which Odo, as Earl of Kent, had close associations. For example, the trees depicted have their closest parallel in the Aelfric Heptateuch, an English illuminated manuscript from Canterbury of the second quarter of the eleventh century. Also in a drawing of Noah’s Ark from the same source the figures of men, women, animals and birds are similar to those on the Tapestry. The Viking-type prow of the ark is also reminiscent of those on the Norman invasion ships (see colour plate 20) (Williams 1997, 80–1). A Norman forager carrying a rope is almost identical to a figure in the Psychomachia of Prudentius, a manuscript found at St Augustine’s.

  Odo controlled the area around Canterbury and would have had the power and wealth to commission a lasting record of a momentous event, in which he played a leading role. In addition to celebrating William’s victory, Odo may well have used the Tapestry to try to persuade surviving English nobles and clerics of the validity of the new Norman regime. Thus the Tapestry, while emphasising the legality of Norman rule, recognises the courage of the English troops.

  • Turold, Wadard and Vital •

  Besides the major historical characters, only four other individuals are mentioned by name, of which Turold, Wadard and Vital were Odo’s vassals, holding large estates from the bishop both in Normandy and in post-Conquest England. The distribution of the lands of these three characters suggests that on the march to London, Duke William confiscated Godwinson family estates and passed them on to his own lords, including Bishop Odo, who, in turn, granted confiscated lands to his own followers, and they could also have appropriated land for themselves. Some of this land had actually been taken from monasteries by English magnates before the Conquest, but later gave rise to disputes involving the new Norman lords, such as that at Penenden Heath in the 1070s. Amongst the lands which Turold acquired were estates which had belonged to Aethelnoth Child. Aethelnoth was one of the wealthiest aristocrats in pre-Conquest England and appears to have been the leader of the Kentish contingent of the English fyrd at Hastings. He was taken as a hostage to Normandy with King William in March 1067 and never returned (Tsurushima 2011). Odo gave Turold the task of guarding Rochester, its hinterland, the Medway crossing and the route to Essex. The king built a castle at Rochester soon after the Conquest and trusted it, like Dover Castle, to Odo. In turn, Odo passed it to Turold, who had no major estates in Normandy and thereafter was called Turold of Rochester. After Turold’s death, his son Ralph probably became constable of Rochester Castle.

  Wadard has been identified as another of Odo’s vassals, who he may have known from the Conteville area and who was an officer in the bishop’s household. On the Tapestry he is depicted with a small military unit, looting and seizing provisions. Wadard appears to have been a provisions officer, following Odo’s travelling episcopal household. He was amongst those of Odo’s men who were trusted to guard Dover Castle and was one of the first knights to have been given houses in Dover town.

  The third of the knights associated with Odo was Vital, who appears as a scout giving information to Duke William about Harold’s location before the Battle of Hastings. Vital’s estates were worth far less than those of Turold and Wadard. It has been argued that as his lands were largely on the Kentish coast his interests were those of a sailor and merchant and he was probably bilingual. The following account appears in The Miracles of St Augustine, according to Goscelin of St Bertin’s (Ts
urushima 2011):

  Under the first Norman king of the English, men from England, on business with fifteen ships landed at the market town of Caen. There having completed their trading, they were preparing to return, conveying stone to the king’s palace of Westminster – for they were under contract to the Royal superintendent. This office was held by an upright man named Vital, who, having been received into fraternity by the Lord Abbot Scotland [abbot of St Augustine’s, Canterbury], was proving himself most effective in conveying stone for the monastic building work of St Augustine’s.

  Tsurushima argues convincingly that not only were these three men closely associated with Odo, but they might have advised the Tapestry designer on military, maritime and architectural details, about which they were experts. Furthermore, they all had interests in Kent, which could support the claim that the Tapestry was made in Canterbury.

  It has recently been claimed that many of the assumptions about the commissioning of the Tapestry are based upon the Renaissance concept of the artistic patron. It is unlikely that Odo or any other single sponsor would have micromanaged the production of the embroidery. If so, how does a work authored, designed and produced by others bear such a strong imprint of the author’s agenda? The answer could be that it was an institutional production. While Odo was probably the Tapestry’s benefactor, the nature of its contents, such as the inclusion of Turold, Wadard and Vital, are consistent with it being the work of St Augustine’s Abbey (Pastan & White 2009).

  It is widely believed that the setting for Harold’s oath given before William, the critical point of the narrative, was in Odo’s cathedral in Bayeux. Odo’s central role in the English campaign depicted on the Tapestry is not repeated by contemporary accounts. Most descriptions of Odo at Hastings rely on the story told in the Tapestry, which is just as Odo would have wanted it to be. There is little other documentary evidence to suggest that Odo played any role at the Battle of Hastings. William of Poitiers, writing much closer to the events of 1066, mentions the presence of the two bishops, Odo and Geoffrey of Coutances, together with numerous clergy and a few monks, and that the assembly prepared for combat by prayer. He also states that Odo never took arms and never wished to. The Song of Hastings and Orderic Vitalis do not mention Odo at Hastings.

  Similarly, there is conflicting evidence about where Harold swore his oath. It is the Tapestry which appears to place the oath in Odo’s diocesan church at Bayeux, but William of Poitiers locates it at Bonneville, while Orderic Vitalis says that the oath was sworn in Rouen. The only near-contemporary document to connect the scene to Bayeux is a late twelfth-century life of Thomas Becket, where the oath is taken in a hunting lodge near to Bayeux (Barlow 2003, 73–4). The depiction of the oath is probably the most important scene in the whole of the Tapestry and locating it in Bayeux was to place Odo and his cathedral at the very centre of the story. There was no need for Odo to be portrayed in this scene, which was, after all, taking place in Odo’s own house.

  Perhaps the most powerful argument for Odo’s role in creating the Tapestry was the nature of his own ambitious personality. Odo was an enthusiastic and successful patron of the arts, and the development of Bayeux as an intellectual centre and the Conquest of England made him the second richest and second most powerful man in the Anglo-Norman world, with the capacity to call upon the artistic resources of the newly won kingdom. It is totally in keeping with Odo’s disposition that he should commission a work which graphically told the story of how those riches were acquired and gave himself a pivotal role in the depiction of that achievement.

  • The Other Candidates •

  In 1982–83 the Tapestry was cleaned and conserved before being moved to its new home in the Musée de la Tapisserie de Bayeux. This allowed a detailed examination of the embroidery to be carried out. Since that time there has been a considerable amount of revisionary speculation about the Tapestry, both about its fabric and about its contents. The consensus is still that Odo was involved in some way with its creation, but several other candidates have also been proposed. These include Queen Edith, Edward the Confessor’s wife; Eustace, Count of Boulogne; Wadard and Vital, the Loire Valley abbey of St Florent de Saumur and even Archbishop Stigand. Recently, the idea that Queen Matilda was responsible has been revived, but far more credible is the suggestion that Edith of Wessex was closely involved in making the Tapestry. She was both Harold’s sister and widow of Edward the Confessor, placing her close to the centre of events in 1066. She is one of only three women depicted on the Tapestry, where she is seen sitting at the foot of Edward’s deathbed. After the Conquest she moved into Wilton nunnery, but established cordial relations with King William and continued to be one of the most influential English aristocrats until her death in 1075, when the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that, ‘The king had her brought to Westminster with great honour.’ She is known to have been an accomplished needle worker and she ran a royal embroidery workshop, producing textiles for churches as well as Edward’s robes of state. She was in a unique position to have sponsored the politically balanced Tapestry, as interpreted by some scholars, but as with all the candidates there remain, and will remain, many unanswered questions about Edith’s possible involvement in the production of the Bayeux Tapestry (Hicks 2006, 29–39).

  33 Eustace of Boulogne depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry.

  It has been argued that even if Odo was not the actual patron of the Tapestry, it could have been made as a gift for the bishop. Chief among those potential donors is Eustace, Count of Boulogne, who commanded the Flemish troops at the Battle of Hastings. Eustace’s appearance in the Tapestry is problematic and his presence or otherwise depends upon a fragmentary inscription in the border which nineteenth-century restorers expanded into Eustacius. There is also a possible representation of the count leading the charge of the Norman cavalry. One recent commentator has suggested that this was not Eustace at all, but William’s half-brother Robert of Mortain. There are also conflicting versions of Eustace’s role at Hastings. William of Poitiers claimed that the count urged William to withdraw and was shamefully wounded in the back while retreating. On the other hand, the Song of the Battle of Hastings portrayed Eustace as a hero who saved William’s life and gave up his own horse for the duke. In 1067, however, Eustace committed a cardinal error by attacking Odo’s headquarters at Dover, after which he was outlawed and stripped of his lands; but a few years later, in the mid-1070s, he was reconciled to the king and his lands were restored. The pro-Eustace party argues that the Tapestry could have been a gift to Odo from Eustace, in order for him to regain favour with the king through his brother (Bridgeford 2004). An even less likely candidate, Archbishop Stigand, has recently been proposed as the creator of the Tapestry. Keats-Rohan suggests that it was the work of Stigand collaborating with Odo immediately after Hastings and before 1070 (Keats-Rohan 2012, 159–74).

  Surviving contemporary narrative tapestries are rare but the closest comparable works come from the non-literate world of Viking Scandinavia. There is an intriguing reference to a near-contemporary tapestry in the work of Baudry de Bourgueil, who died as Bishop of Dol in 1130. Baudry, writing in verse form before 1102, described a hanging in the chamber of Adela, Countess of Blois and daughter of William the Conqueror. It told the story of William’s Conquest of England, starting with the appearance of Halley’s Comet and finishing with the Conquest of Kent. The author tells us that the hanging had captions and showed the construction of the fleet and the subsequent Channel crossing. On the face of it, this looks like a description of the Bayeux Tapestry being hung in the Loire Valley in the late eleventh century (Musset, 23–5), but Baudry was an imaginative poet as well as a cleric and may have been transferring knowledge of the tapestry he had seen in Normandy to Adela’s chamber. One scholar has, however, recently argued that the Tapestry was actually produced in the Loire Valley at the monastery of St Florent of Saumur. He proposes that the work was commissioned by King William for propaganda purposes and managed by William, the
abbot of St Florent, who was grateful to the king for coming to his father, Rivallon’s help at Dol in 1064. It is argued that this would help explain the inclusion of the detailed coverage of the ‘Breton Campaign’ (Beech 2011).

  Until recently, it was generally accepted that the Tapestry was designed to be installed in the nave of Bayeux Cathedral from the outset. There were objections which pointed out the lewdness of some of the border scenes and that the Tapestry had a violent secular theme which made it an inappropriate decoration for a church, but examples of similar hangings can be found in other churches dating roughly from the same period. It was also argued by some that the narrow strip of embroidery hung around the church would have been too small to have been appreciated. It was argued that the decidedly secular character of the Tapestry, which has ‘no religious drift’, meant that it was ‘originally made for an extensive secular hall’ and that Odo had palaces in England, Normandy and Rome, any of which would have provided a suitable home (Dodwell 1995, 14).

  An alternative installation for the Tapestry has been suggested on the basis of a radical reinterpretation of its iconography. Whereas historically it was thought that the Tapestry was designed to be displayed in a rectangle, either in a church or a great hall, it has been proposed that there are symmetrical scenes in the hanging which mean that it was intended to be displayed in a square. This would have meant that there was a geometrical relationship between three scenes involving Harold or Odo: firstly, the feast at Bosham, secondly, Harold’s oath and thirdly, Odo’s blessing of the banquet before the Battle of Hastings (see colour plate 10). The two feast scenes would have been opposite each other and the oath would have been at the centre of the third wall; under this display scheme at the centre of the fourth wall would have been Odo wielding his baton triumphantly at the height of the battle. It is argued that behind this scheme was a rivalry between Harold and Odo and that there are a number of scenes which balance out the activities and fortunes of these two powerful men (Owen-Crocker 2005).