The Bayeux Tapestry: Woven by the Victors

This is shaping up to be the year of the Bayeux Tapestry. From September this monumental work of medieval art will be on display at the British Museum, and its return to England for the first time in almost 1,000 years has been greeted with immense enthusiasm.

It has been hailed as a homecoming: although we do not know for sure where the tapestry was created, it is now generally accepted that it was made in Canterbury, a decade or so after the Battle of Hastings. Anglo-Saxon manuscripts from Canterbury’s monasteries display parallels with the tapestry’s distinctive style, and the most likely workers were English women, who were known for the fine quality of their embroidery. If English hands made it, though, an English perspective is largely silent in the tapestry itself, that artful but deeply partisan tribute to the Norman victory.

In the British Library, just down the road from where the Bayeux Tapestry will be drawing the crowds, is a manuscript which does allow us to hear from that perspective. This book was also made in Canterbury, perhaps half a century after the tapestry was produced. It contains copies of a number of older Anglo-Saxon texts, including the works of the homilist Ælfric. It bears witness to the use and adaptation of pre-Conquest literature well into the 12th century, even as English society was changing rapidly under Norman influence.

Among the contents is an Old English translation of one of the most widely read works of the Middle Ages. Dating to the third or fourth century, the Distichs of Cato is a collection of wise sayings traditionally (though spuriously) associated with the name of Cato the Elder. It was familiar to readers across medieval Europe, as it was often used as a classroom text for teaching Latin. As well as offering elementary practice in grammar and translation, it taught students general principles for life, put into concise and memorable verses. Schoolroom use of these sayings continued long after the Middle Ages, and have been quoted by countless authors, from Chaucer to Erasmus and Benjamin Franklin.

The Old English version of this text is preserved in three manuscripts, all made after the Norman Conquest, though the original translation is probably from the late Anglo-Saxon period. The translation makes significant changes to its source, often giving the sayings a different emphasis from the Latin. It is full of good advice, sensible guidance on speech and social behaviour: ‘Don’t promise anything twice: why does it have to be promised again, unless it was a lie before?’ ‘Be content with what you have. It’s less dangerous on a small ship and a small body of water than on a large ship and a large body of water.’ ‘If you do something wrong when you’re drunk, don’t blame it on the ale, because you were the one in charge of it.’

Some of the most attractive sayings go deeper, advising how to deal with misfortune: ‘Never come to such grief that you do not hope for better things’, or ‘Always be learning something; though your good fortune may abandon you, don’t abandon your craft.’ One is useful advice for all historians: ‘Study many books and listen to many stories, but know which you ought to believe. People write many unbelievable things.’

As often happened with medieval texts of this kind, more proverbs and sayings were added to the collection in the process of transmission. The manuscript from Canterbury has several of these, including such quirky Anglo-Saxon proverbs as ‘In every river, the worse the ford the better the fish’. But the last addition, almost the last item in the collection, sounds a very different note. It reads:

Woe will come to the nation which has a foreign king – immoderate, eager for money and merciless at heart! For his greed will be upon that nation, and his mind’s yearning upon his own land.

In its anguished emotional tone and its political concerns, this short addition is strikingly at odds with the rest of the collection. It acts as a sudden sharp reminder of the time when this manuscript was made, in the troubled aftermath of the Norman Conquest. We cannot know who wrote these words, or what specific event might have prompted their lament for the fate of a nation under foreign rule. But surely this is the voice of the conquered, expressing a despair which the Bayeux Tapestry, commemoration of the victors’ triumph, leaves unspoken.

Eleanor Parker is Lecturer in Medieval English Literature at Brasenose College, Oxford.