I mentioned yesterday how much I loved the descriptions of the women embroidering the Bayeux Tapestry in Sarah Bower's The Needle in the Blood. I tried to find a few illustrations to match the descriptions in the book. I'm not sure how close I came, but I thought I would share a few to tempt you a bit more to read the book.
"The embroidery does not follow the order of the plan, nor any order recognizable as that of the events they have all lived through. One day horses falling in battle, the next King William and his brothers commissioning ships to be built; a morning on a Saxon peasants pursued by Norman knights wielding whips, and afternoon on the exploits of Harold fighting alongside William against Conan of Brittany, heroically rescuing a man from drowning in a river writhing with giant eels. Some days working upside down before switching sides with your partner and seeing the strange world of wool and linen right way up again. These partnerships ever changing, the women switching from one frame to another as they complete a figure or a scene."
Although it is called a tapestry, it technically isn't one at all. It is not woven but embroidered on linen with woolen thread. It consists of only eight different colors (red, two shades of yellow, two of green, and three of blue) that were likely made of some vegetable extraction. There are only two types of stitches used--stem stitch and couch stitch for the filling in of colors.
"Yet the embroidery is real enough, the wool stinking of the sheep's piss used to set the dyes, the linen taut as drumskins in the frames, men and horse, ships and city walls emerging from the tangle of needles and thread and charcoal lines as the world came out of Chaos. Though a great deal more slowly. It can take a week or more to complete a single suit of mail. Overlapping the stitches so densely that you can almost imagine the woolen replica would offer as much protection as the real thing, building up ring by ring the fishscale effect that sometimes reminds Gytha of accompanying her father to the early morning market his great red, gentle hands lifting the gills of the fish to test their freshness. And you can eke out the process further by snapping needles, rubbing out Sister Jean's guidelines so mistakes ensue and have to be unpicked."
There seem to be several churches in the tapestry, but I couldn't quite figure out which was Mont Saint Michel, but I did spot bishop Odo (on the left next to his brother King William) and thought he deserved a place in my post as well.
"Last winter Gytha lost track of the time she and Margaret spent embroidering the image of a Norman abbey called Mont Saint Michel, its dainty arches balanced on a folded hill of sage green and ochre, its roof ridged with yellow gold, a place impossible outside the imagination of God yet built by these two, with their aching backs and smarting fingers stiff with cold, their tips swollen with chillblains like overripe plums. Even if they could work the complete cycle of the hours, without stopping for food or rest, the project might take so many years its patron would be in the grave before it was complete."
This scene in the tapestry is apparently something of a mystery. It has never been satisfactorily explained. It is a woman named Aelfgyva being slapped by a cleric with a tonsure. Sarah Bower's inspiration for Gytha and Odo perhaps?
For more Bayeux Tapestry fun check out this video on YouTube and here you can read about the tapestry scene by scene. And you can check out Sarah's book, too!