The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
English embroiderers (probably Canterbury) · an embroidery, not a tapestry: wool yarns stitched on a plain-weave linen ground, in stem stitch for line and lettering and laid-and-couched work for filled areas · one continuous strip about 68 metres long and about half a metre high, of several lengths of linen joined in the making, scored as one object · a main field between two narrow borders, with Latin inscriptions above the scenes · made most probably at Canterbury, most probably for Odo, bishop of Bayeux, in the decade or so after 1066 · its end lost, its last stretch heavily restored in the nineteenth century · Musée de la Tapisserie de Bayeux
Mode
Continuous narrative embroidery; a near-contemporary secular history told at monumental length, with inscriptions over the scenes and commentary in the borders
Mythos
The oath sworn on relics, broken and avenged by heaven and the sword; perjury and nemesis, the king who rises by the breach and falls by it
Phase
From Edward the Confessor sending Harold abroad, about 1064, to the flight of the English after Hastings in 1066, in one direction, with one scene out of order
Presentation
Wool on linen, about 68 metres by about half a metre, a central field between two narrow borders; about fifty-eight scenes by the modern numbering; the end lost
Register
Brisk, lively, often comic; rising to grandeur at the funeral, the comet, the fleet and the battle, where the lower border becomes the field of the dead
Scale
A kingdom changing hands, walked along a strip about half a metre high
Governing Proposition
A strip of linen about half a metre high and about sixty-eight metres long carries, in wool of a few colours, the story of how William of Normandy came to be king of England: an English earl sent abroad, captured, rescued and armed by the duke, swearing on relics, taking the crown, and dying in battle under the sentence of the cloth. The wager of the hanging is that a conquest can be told as a single walk, oath and death on one cloth at two points of one passage, and that English hands telling the Norman case can let the losers’ grief stand inside it.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
It is called a tapestry and it is not one. A tapestry is woven; this is embroidered, wool yarns stitched onto a ground of plain-weave linen. The ground is a single continuous strip, about 68 metres long and about half a metre high, made of several lengths of linen joined in the making so well that the strip reads as one. The wool is of a small palette: terracotta, buff or yellow, several greens, blues, a dark blue-black, grey. Two stitches do almost everything. Stem or outline stitch draws the line and the lettering; laid-and-couched work, long threads laid side by side and tied down by threads across them, fills the areas of colour. The unit scored here is the hanging at Bayeux as it stands, one object, with its lost end counted as loss.
The strip is divided along its length into three registers. A central field carries the narrative; above and below it run two narrow borders of beasts, birds, fables and ornament, which for long stretches keep their own business and at moments turn to comment on the story between them. Latin inscriptions run above the scenes for most of the length and name the men and the events. By the conventional modern numbering there are about fifty-eight scenes. Nothing frames them: trees and buildings stand between episodes and pace the strip, and the story runs on from one to the next in a single direction, as a walk does.
Where, when and for whom it was made are inferences, not documents. The general view of the scholarship is that it was made in England, most probably at Canterbury, in the decade or so after 1066, most probably for Odo, bishop of Bayeux and half-brother of William of Normandy. The makers are not named, and the hanging is credited here to English embroiderers on that view. It is held in Bayeux, in the Musée de la Tapisserie de Bayeux. What stands now runs from Edward the Confessor sending Harold abroad to the flight of the English after Hastings, and stops ragged in the flight.
Movement II
Edward the Confessor, king of England, sends Harold Godwinson abroad. Harold crosses the Channel and is taken prisoner by Guy of Ponthieu. William, duke of Normandy, has him released and receives him. The opening third of the strip is a chain of obligations: each event puts the English earl further into the duke’s debt, and the cloth keeps the account. Nothing in it is yet a crime. It is the ledger the crime will be measured against.
At William’s court comes the scene no one can now read. The inscription says “UBI UNUS CLERICUS ET ÆLFGYVA”, “where a clerk and Ælfgyva”. Who Ælfgyva was, what the clerk does to her and why the scene stands here are open questions, as old as the hanging’s publication. The scene is required by something, and that something is lost. It is the first of the places where the hanging keeps what it knew to itself.
Then William campaigns in Brittany, and Harold rides with him. The strip gives the campaign at length: Mont-Saint-Michel, the quicksand, from which Harold carries two men out, Dol, Rennes, Dinan. Harold is brave and admirable, and William gives him arms, which binds him further. Then, at Bayeux, the hinge of the whole cloth: Harold stands between two reliquaries, a hand on each, and William sits enthroned beside him. Everything before this point has been the making of a debt. Everything after it is the oath kept or broken.
Movement III
Back in England, the strip does something it does nowhere else: it runs backward in time. Edward’s body is carried in procession to the new church at Westminster, the hand of God reaching down above its roof; and only after the funeral does the strip show the king on his deathbed. For one scene the walk and the story go in different directions, and the funeral is set at the point where the death should be. Whatever the reason, the order makes the passing of the king and the claim to his crown the same few steps of linen.
Harold is crowned. The breach is shown without comment, as a fact of state: the new king enthroned. The cloth needs no word against him here. The viewer has walked past the reliquaries a few metres before.
Then the sign. Men in a crowd look up and point at a star with a streaming tail, and the inscription says “ISTI MIRANT STELLA”, “these men wonder at the star”. Harold sits on his throne, told the news. In the lower border beneath his feet are ghostly ships, a fleet that is not yet there. The border has stopped being ornament and become prophecy. It is the clearest instance of the hanging’s second register at work: the main field shows what happened, and the margin shows what it means.
Movement IV
In Normandy William orders a fleet. Trees are felled, planks shaped, ships dragged down to the water; men load casks and arms. The fleet crosses under sail, a field of masts and horses’ heads, and lands. The army forages and cooks; a meal is served, and a bishop blesses it at a table drawn in the posture of a Last Supper. Beside the march, small and exact, a woman leads a child out of a house that soldiers are setting on fire.
The battle fills the last stretch. The Norman cavalry charges; the English stand in a shield wall on foot; horses somersault at a ravine. The lower border, which for most of the strip has held beasts and fables, fills with the dead: severed limbs, bodies stripped of their mail, men pulling the shirts from corpses. The border has become the field. Here the hanging is at its highest pitch, and here its colour does its finest work, blue horses and yellow, the far legs in another colour from the near, so that depth is made with no modelling at all.
Then the inscription the whole cloth has been moving toward: “HIC HAROLD REX INTERFECTUS EST”, “here King Harold is killed”. Under it stands a figure with an arrow, and its reading is contested: whether it is Harold, and how much of the arrow is a restorer’s work. The verdict, at least, is not contested. The man who swore on the relics is dead, and the sentence the strip has carried since Bayeux has been carried out.
Movement V
After Harold’s death the English flee, and the strip stops ragged in the flight. What followed is unknown in length and content; most often it is supposed to have been William’s coronation at Westminster in 1066, which would complete the claim the cloth began with an English king and an oath. The final section as it stands was heavily restored in the nineteenth century, so that even the end that remains is partly a later hand. The argument closes, oath, breach and sanction; the confirmation does not. The loss is charged to survival, not to the form.
Its documented history at Bayeux runs from the cathedral’s inventory of 1476. It survived there through the Revolution; Napoleon had it shown in Paris in 1803 and 1804; in the Second World War it was under German study. From the eighteenth century it was published, and the questions it raises have not closed since. It is a primary source for the arms, ships, buildings, dress and farming of its age, and it has been copied and answered: the copy made at Leek, and in the 1970s the Overlord Embroidery. It has long been claimed as an ancestor of the strip cartoon. Most of that reach runs outside the practice of art, and it came late.
Among the long narratives on the desk, Along the River During the Qingming Festival, a scroll of about the same century that also unrolls one way and has probably lost its end, stands at 8.7, and Durham Cathedral, the Conquest built in stone in the same generation, at 8.8. The hanging stands below both, at 8.4. Against the scroll it is the stronger survivor and the deeper well; against both it is the lesser in elevation, and in what it discloses as its own rather than its patron’s. What it holds is the walk: the reliquaries, the star, the stripped dead and the king killed, all on one cloth, so that a viewer moving along it from the oath to the sentence passes through two years in a few minutes’ walk.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged episode by episode. The argument is an oath, its breaking and its sanction, and most of the length is required by it. Harold’s journey, capture and rescue put him in William’s debt; the Breton campaign shows him valiant and armed by the duke, which binds him further; the oath on the relics is the hinge; Edward’s death and Harold’s crowning are the breach; the comet is the sign; fleet, crossing and battle are the consequence; Harold’s death is the sentence carried out. What yields to the subtractive test: the Breton campaign runs long for what it adds, the preparations at Hastings are generous beyond need, and long stretches of the borders are ornament that could be other ornament. Necessity is high and not complete.
Score: 8.0 / 10
What is brought into the open is how a conquest is made legitimate, and what the making covers. The surface argument is the Norman one: a sworn man broke his oath and was punished. But the hanging, made by English hands, lets other truths stand in plain view beside it. Harold is brave in Brittany and carries two men out of the quicksand; Edward is mourned; a woman leads a child out of a house that soldiers are firing; at the battle the dead in the lower border are stripped of their mail. Legitimacy is a story told over violence, and the losers’ grief can be carried inside the victor’s account. Held below the gate because much of the disclosure lies in ambiguity the viewer supplies, and much of the meaning is the patron’s case rather than the work’s discovery.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Elevation is present and of one kind, momentum and grandeur of event rather than transport. It rises at Edward’s funeral procession to the new church at Westminster, the hand of God above the roof; at the comet, the men pointing, Harold on his throne told the news, ghostly ships in the border below; at the fleet under sail, a field of masts and horses’ heads; and above all in the battle, where horses somersault at the ravine, the shield wall stands against the charge and the borders fill with the dead. The length itself, walked, is a grandeur. What holds the axis lowest is register and frequency: the drawing is lively and often comic, the figures small and schematic, and for long stretches, the feasts, the journeys, the parleys, the work moves briskly without rising. It is vigorous far more often than it is sublime.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Myth is built, not evoked, at the centre: the oath sworn on relics, broken, and avenged by heaven and the sword. That pattern is the structure of the whole narrative, and it is archetypal, perjury and nemesis, the king who rises by the breach and falls by it. The sacred machinery is load-bearing: the relics under Harold’s hands, the hand of God over Westminster, the star as portent, the bishop blessing the meal at Hastings in the posture of a Last Supper. Harold acquires a tragic dignity the Norman case does not need and the work does not deny him, and the particulars stay particular: Turold, Wadard, Vital, a cook with a spit. Held below the gate because the archetype is a chronicle’s: the myth frames history rather than remaking it, and the moral is supplied more than discovered.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The inheritance is Anglo-Saxon manuscript drawing, above all the Canterbury tradition, and the embroidered narrative hanging, known from written record, as in the hanging of Byrhtnoth’s deeds given to Ely, and from fragments such as the Oseberg textiles. Continuous narrative has ancient precedent, Trajan’s Column among it. The departure: a near-contemporary secular event, politically live, told at monumental length as one continuous strip, with inscriptions, named living men and a running commentary in the borders. The stake was real: English makers telling the defeat of England for a Norman patron, and leaving room for both readings. Held below the gate by survival itself, which makes the hanging look more singular than it was: hangings of its kind existed and are lost, and how far it departed from them cannot be measured. A real turn, its size uncertain.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Substitute a different form and most of what the work knows goes. The strip is time: a story of cause and consequence unrolled in one direction, without frames, so that the oath and the death are the same cloth at two points of one walk, and the viewer’s passage along it is the passage of 1064 to 1066. The borders are a second register beside the first, and they change with the story: beasts and fables early, the ghost fleet under the comet, the stripped dead at the battle. Form becomes comment. The inscriptions bind word to image without displacing it. Made as a hanging, it could surround a great interior and hold a congregation inside a history; a codex could hold the scenes, not the momentum, the scale or the public presence. Held below the top because where and how it hung is inference.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Demonstrated, not promised. Since its publication in the eighteenth century the hanging has sustained three centuries of examination without exhausting. The questions are live and many: who commissioned it, where it was made and for what building; whose side it takes; who Ælfgyva is and what the clerk does to her; whether the figure with the arrow is Harold, and how much of the arrow is a restorer’s; what the fables in the borders say to the main story; how many hands made it and how the cloth was divided among them. It is a primary source for arms, ships, buildings, dress, horses and farming, and each discipline returns to it; the borders alone have a literature. Held below the summit because some of the yield is a document’s, information rather than an inexhaustible meaning.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Force and reach are scored together, in the field of Anglo-Norman and Romanesque narrative art. The intrinsic force is real: continuous secular history at monumental scale, the most ambitious pictorial narrative of its century to survive in the West. The reach is delayed and partial. For some six centuries the hanging was a treasure of one cathedral, and its reach is credited from its rediscovery in the eighteenth century; it is large, but it runs mostly outside the practice of art, and it is discounted for the delay. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the historiography of 1066 and the imagining of the Conquest; Napoleon’s display of it in Paris in 1803 and 1804 and its later political use; replicas and answers, the copy made at Leek and the Overlord Embroidery of the 1970s; and the long claim that it is an ancestor of the strip cartoon.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: about 68 metres of a perishable textile have survived about 950 years, and the story is legible from Edward to the English flight. Against it, the end is lost, and with it the close of the argument, most likely the coronation that completes the claim, which takes more from the form than a margin would; and the last stretch as it stands is substantially a nineteenth-century restoration. Presence: kept at Bayeux on the record from the cathedral inventory of 1476, through the Revolution, Napoleon’s display in Paris and the Second World War, when it was under German study, and now among the most visited works of its age. Fabric: stains, holes, restitching and a replaced backing. The survival of a textile this long and this whole stands high, held down by the lost end.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged as command of embroidery at monumental length, read to the same anchors as paint or stone. With two stitches and a handful of colours the makers draw motion: horses rear, fall and gallop; ships heel; men row, fell trees, carry casks and swing axes. Colour is used structurally, not naturally: horses blue or yellow, the far legs in another colour from the near, giving depth with no modelling. Trees and buildings divide the scenes and pace the strip; the inscriptions are laid in without crowding; the joins are made so well that the strip reads as one. The making is load-bearing, because the strip’s momentum is its argument. The costs: the drawing is schematic, faces are formula, proportions vary, and the quality is uneven along the length, some stretches stiff and crowded beside others fluent and inventive. High command of a narrow means.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Edward’s deathbed and the stripped corpses in the lower border at Hastings; or a beast fable in the border and Harold’s death. They obey one law: the same scale of figure, the same palette, the same convention of colour for depth, the same strip and the same two borders, held across about 68 metres and several lengths of linen. The range is wide: court, church, sea, field, kitchen, battle, fable and the heavens. The borders bend to the story without breaking their rule, which is the strongest evidence of one law. What holds the axis below the top: the borders’ relation to the main field is not uniformly governed, long stretches of ornament, then sudden pointed comment, then erotic figures with no settled reading; and the lost and restored end leaves the close of the law unknowable.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The orders held are many, and the one strip integrates them. The state: succession, kingship, embassy, oath, conquest. The sacred: relics, a church, a bishop, God’s hand, a portent in heaven. War, from the building of ships to the last flight. Labour: felling, shaping planks, loading casks and arms, cooking, and in the lower border ploughing, sowing and harrowing. Nature: horses, dogs, hawks, the sea, the beasts of the borders. Fable and the moral order, in the border tales; and history itself, as the subject. What holds it lower is what is thin: consciousness, since faces are formula and inner life is gesture only; the family, Edward’s household and the woman and child, little more; and women, almost wholly absent from the main field. It holds more than a room or a court, and much less than a novel of a society.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Bottomless Well and The Imperishable at 9.0, then The Living Form and The Inner Law at 8.8. Three centuries of questions still open, from Ælfgyva to the arrow, and a source each discipline returns to; about 68 metres of a perishable textile carried through about 950 years, legible from Edward to the flight; a form in which the strip is time, the oath and the death on one cloth, with borders that turn from ornament to prophecy to the field of the dead; and one law of figure, palette and border held across the whole length.
Limiting Dimension
The Sublime at 7.6: the hanging rises at the funeral, the comet, the fleet and the battle, and for long stretches moves briskly without rising, its drawing lively, comic and schematic. Above it, The Inevitable at 8.0, where the Breton campaign, the preparations at Hastings and the long ornamental borders give to the subtractive test; and the four gate axes at 8.2 and 8.3, where the disclosure is partly the patron’s case, the myth frames a chronicle, the swerve cannot be measured against lost hangings, and the reach came six centuries late and runs mostly outside art.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.0 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.8, The Made at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.0 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.3, The Archetypal Deep at 8.3 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.3 fall short by two tenths, and The Swerve at 8.2 by three. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below The Sublime, at 7.6, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.4. The twelve sum to 101.3, an average of 8.44 that displays 8.4.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the hanging as it is kept at Bayeux, of its published facsimiles and of its scholarship. No image or written source was consulted. The work scored is the embroidered hanging at Bayeux as it stands: one object, a single continuous strip of several linen lengths joined in the making, with its lost end counted as loss and its last stretch, heavily restored in the nineteenth century, taken as what now stands there. Not in the unit, and weighed only as evidence of reach: the copy made at Leek, the drawings made of the hanging in the early nineteenth century, the modern panels stitched to supply an ending, and the many reproductions. The patron, the place and the date of making are inferences of the scholarship and are given as such; no axis rests on them. The restoration, the stains and repairs and the replaced backing count only as facts of survival. Only three inscriptions are quoted, in their Latin, with the desk’s own English beneath. Facts that could not be verified are not given or are stated as open, among them the exact height and its variation, the number of linen lengths and of joins, the number of colours, the counts of people, horses, ships and other animals, the number of women in the main field, the wording of the closing inscription and how much of the end is restored, the date of the first backing, how and when the hanging was shown in the cathedral, where it was meant to hang, the scholars who first published it, the manuscripts its figures may be drawn from, the number of hands, which border fables are which, the hanging’s condition and colour today, and its modern loans; and, as open questions, who Ælfgyva was, whether Harold is the figure with the arrow, and what the lost end held.