TAITMAIL Buying in to the Bayeux
David Hockney, so inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry that he lives close to it in Normandy – “Something that has defined my life for more than eight decades” he wrote to The Independent - thinks moving it to London for an exhibition would be “madness”.
"Some things are too precious to take a risk with" he wrote. "Moving the Bayeux Tapestry is one of them. It is nearly a thousand years old, the most complete narrative work of art in Europe…
"It is fragile, which makes it madness to think of moving it. It is too big a risk."
But we don’t have to. We already have our own Bayeux Tapestry, in a lot better nick than the French version, safe and sound and in Reading.
Looking at the Norman original - not actually a tapestry, of course, but embroidery - in its specially constructed and environmentally perfect museum 18 months ago, the colours and exquisite shapes were, are, kept as striking as when the thing was made nearly a millennium ago. A breathtaking work of art.
But looking more closely, the background on which the images float hardly looks capable of hanging in its sealed space, so patched and thread-bare is it. Some think it’ll be a patchwork quilt by the time it arrives in London to go on show at the British Museum from September to July 2027.
It was in a political context, of course, that the decision to lend it was made, a gesture of European unity, just as the creation of the 70-metre long cartoon strip was an emblem of new national unity. The news that it was on the move was followed by a storm of protest from conservators, curators, historians and artists like Hockney. It’s not the first time a loan has been mooted: the last was in 2018 and the idea was abandoned in the face of experts’ reservations, less persuasive now in the prevailing global climate.
The Bayeux Tapestry is a miraculous survival. Embroideries like this were not uncommon, recording events and particularly battles, but no other one has survived. It was not, of course, the work of a single hand, but possibly by a team of, probably, nuns (though then the enthusiasm and graphic detail with which the naked couple having sex is portrayed in one of the margins is surprising). It has been assumed that it was commissioned by William’s bellicose, high-living and apparently art-loving half-brother Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, to highlight the righteousness of William’s claim to the English throne. Maybe not.
The exact process would have been complex. It was begun a few years after the events, probably in about 1070, took more than a decade to finish. There must have been a single overview for the narrative, a director for what is as close as the Middle Ages get to a film. The embroiderers would have had drawn templates to work from probably, produced by monks in a scriptorium, the finest artists. There would have to have been a large well-lit space for a workshop, and carpenters would have had to build a substantial frame, or series of frames, for such a big work. There might have been as many as 17 different hands at work on it, almost certainly nuns, so that the likelihood is that those on the project at the start were no longer involved at the end. It is monumental with 58 scenes, 626 characters and 202 horses to tell the story, and it, and it gets 400,000 visitors a year.
Recent new theories from academia suggest that there was no intention for the tapestry to go to Bayeux, and it could have come down to us as the Canterbury Frieze; that the director was not Odo but the abbot of St Augustine’s Abbey in Canterbury, Scolland, a Norman master illuminator appointed in 1070, who may even appear in the tapestry himself, and Odo was the patron. It might have been devised for the refectory in the new abbey Scolland was planning, to give the monks some improving and correct political thoughts while they ate in silence (the text on the tapestry is, of course, in Latin, the lingua franca of the church). Scolland didn’t live to see the abbey completed, and when it was the tapestry was forgotten in a box in Bayeux Cathedral.
Trot forward a few hundred years to the age of Art & Crafts, a movement and age obsessed by medieval practice, techniques and design. Reading Museum has a version of the tapestry, well, a copy, created with all the precision and attention to detail that is the hall mark of A&C art.
It was supervised by the wife of a silk merchant from Leek in Staffordshire, Thomas Wardle, who was also a friend of and collaborator with William Morris, and fixated on creating authentic natural dyes for his silk. He had a successful shop in Bond Street. Wardle and his wife Elizabeth went to the V&A as it was to become and saw photos of the Bayeux Tapestry. Mrs Wardle became determined to make an exact version of it, declaring “England shall have a copy of its own”.
Elizabeth Wardle was born in 1834, married at 23, had 14 children and developed a national reputation for her needlework. In 1879 she founded the Leek Embroidery Society and in 1881 the Leek School of Art Embroidery. Thomas provided the wool yarn using vegetable dyes and after a year it was completed in 1886 when it went on tour in Britain and abroad to market Mr Wardle’s wares. It is the central treasure of Reading Museum which opened in the town hall in 1883.
The idea of the UK having its own Bayeux Tapestry was not new. In the 1870s the British government had commissioned the photographer John Cundall to make a continuous photographic replica of the whole thing, coloured in by art students – by whom the anatomically correct naked warriors were kitted out with boxer shorts, the 11th century creators not having been hide-bound by Victorian taste. And this provided the template for Elizabeth’s team of 35 (ironically Cundall’s photograph now belongs to the Bayeux Museum who acquired it from the estate of the Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts for £16,000).
Of the embroiderers who came from Derbyshire, Birmingham, Macclesfield and London as well as Leek, 27 were misses (including four Miss Wardles). The finished work went on tour across our cities and in Germany and the US, and in 1895 it came to rest in Reading Town Hall. There the tour ran out of money, and a former mayor of Reading, Arthur Hill, offered to buy it for £300 to present to his borough.
It’s not the real thing, but it is a different real thing. And it’s our real thing.
Image shows Reading's Bayeux Tapestry