Books

1066 and all that

On the 950th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings a new book examines the 11th-century Bayeux Tapestry, which tells the story of England's conquest

If you are in the UK, in your loose change you might just find a 50-pence coin is­sued this year with the queen's head on one side and what seems to be a me­dieval knight with an arrow in his eye on the re­verse, along with the year 1066. This is clearly com­mem­o­rat­ing an event that hap­pened in that year, but what coun­try would com­mem­o­rate the 950th an­niver­sary –why not wait for the mil­len­nium?

A new book in Cata­lan by Montser­rat Pagès i Pare­tas, El Tapís de Bayeux, eina política? Anàlisi de les imat­ges i nova in­ter­pretació, with an Eng­lish trans­la­tion by the au­thor of this ar­ti­cle, will tell you more. How­ever, in a nut­shell, the event in ques­tion was the Bat­tle of Hast­ings, which took place on Oc­to­ber 14, 1066, near the town of that name on the south coast of Eng­land. So im­por­tant was the event that 1066 is prob­a­bly the only date in me­dieval his­tory that most Eng­lish peo­ple re­mem­ber with­out an ef­fort. This is partly be­cause a hu­mor­ous book from the 1930s with the title ‘1066 and all that'; it was fa­mous be­cause it con­tained two dates, one of which was 1066.

But what ac­tu­ally hap­pened in 1066? In that year, Duke William of Nor­mandy in­vaded Eng­land, be­liev­ing he was the right­ful heir to the throne after the death of the pre­vi­ous king –Ed­ward the Con­fes­sor– in­stead of the Anglo-Saxon noble, Harold God­win­son. Not only did Duke William in­vade Eng­land, but he was suc­cess­ful. He man­aged to de­feat Harold on the bat­tle­field at Hast­ings, where Harold al­most cer­tainly met his death, be­com­ing King of Eng­land and reign­ing until 1087.

This led to a change in dy­nasty and all the kings of Eng­land for the next 300 years or more had close ties with what is now France. There were also other changes: the ar­rival of a new French aris­toc­racy in Eng­land, bring­ing with them a de­vel­oped sys­tem of feu­dal­ism; they also built many cas­tles through­out Eng­land and made wider use of a new ar­chi­tec­tural style, gen­er­ally called Ro­manesque, but in Eng­land also known as Nor­man ar­chi­tec­ture. Per­haps the change that is most no­tice­able today was the in­tro­duc­tion of Old French as the lan­guage of gov­ern­ment and ad­min­is­tra­tion, which is the main rea­son why mod­ern Eng­lish is a fu­sion of di­verse lin­guis­tic roots –on the one hand the pre-Con­quest Anglo-Saxon and Scan­di­na­vian in­flu­ences, and on the other the weight of Old French (and Latin).

The image on the re­verse of the 50p coin shows what is usu­ally sup­posed to be the death of King Harold, killed by an arrow in his eye. It is de­rived from a very spe­cial work of art called the Bayeux Ta­pes­try (ac­tu­ally an em­broi­dery). Al­though now in the city of Bayeux in Nor­mandy, it was made in Can­ter­bury in Eng­land. The Ta­pes­try vividly de­picts, in a se­ries of im­ages, al­most as if it were an 11th-cen­tury car­toon strip, 70 me­tres in length and about 50 cen­time­tres high, the events of 1066, cul­mi­nat­ing in the Bat­tle of Hast­ings it­self.

The Ta­pes­try is a key sub­ject of aca­d­e­mic study for his­to­ri­ans and art-his­to­ri­ans in the Eng­lish-speak­ing world. Yet, it is also well-known out­side aca­d­e­mic cir­cles. Eng­lish peo­ple in­stantly recog­nise it, to the point that it has en­tered pop­u­lar cul­ture and can be found in the open­ing ti­tles of many films (The Vikings, Bed­knobs and Broom­sticks, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves) and TV se­ries (Black­ad­der). Sadly, it is less well known in Cat­alo­nia.

This sit­u­a­tion has now been reme­died by the book writ­ten by Montser­rat Pagès i Pare­tas, cu­ra­tor of Ro­manesque Art at the Na­tional Mu­seum of Cata­lan Art (MNAC), and re­cently pub­lished by Pub­li­ca­cions de l'Aba­dia de Montser­rat. Not only is it the first work to de­scribe the events shown on the Ta­pes­try in Cata­lan, but it also puts for­ward a hy­poth­e­sis about why it was made and who com­mis­sioned it. The in­ter­est of this hy­poth­e­sis meant that, when the au­thor first showed me her text, I did not hes­i­tate to en­cour­age her to pub­lish it in Eng­lish to guar­an­tee the max­i­mum dif­fu­sion of her ideas. The end re­sult is a bilin­gual work which, as some­one who has stud­ied the me­dieval his­tory of both coun­tries, I hope will make the pe­riod and this ex­tra­or­di­nary, unique work of art much bet­ter known.

El tapís de Bayeux, eina política? Montserrat Pagès i Paretas, Publisher: Publicacions de l'Abadia de Montserrat (2015) ISBN: ISBN: 978-84-9883-781-0 Price:
39.00
The first work in Catalan on the 11th century Bayeux Tapestry that proposes a hypothesis about the making of this extraordinary art work

Catalan writer; English translator

Montserrat Pagès was born in Barcelona, although her family's roots can be traced to the Empordà. Having studied the Pre-Romanesque and Romanesque art of the Baix Llobregat in her undergraduate dissertation and doctoral thesis, since 1990 she has worked as a curator at the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (MNAC). The majority of her publications have been devoted to Catalan Romanesque painting. Her interest in the Bayeux Tapestry, this extraordinary, exceptional, yet enigmatic work of art, is a consequence of her profession as an art historian determined to understand the meaning behind images and to analyse them from all possible angles.

Philip Banks is a Londoner who came to Catalonia to do research for his doctoral thesis on early medieval Barcelona in the mid-1970s. He subsequently became an English teacher at the Escola d'Idiomes Moderns of the Universitat de Barcelona, although he maintains his interest in the medieval world.

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