The Bayeux Tapestry: Its English connection and its peripheral narrative

The Bayeux Tapestry is an 11th century English embroidery which commemorates the Norman Conquest of England, and it is considered to be one of the primary authorities for the study of the Conquest and the events leading up to it. The Tapestry's overt narrative pattern seeks to emphasize the perjury of King Harold and to legitimize Duke William of Normandy's claims of legitimacy to the English throne. A "peripheral" narrative consists of verbal/visual puns, allusions to Aesopic Fables, Old English and Scriptural proverbs, classical and folk mythology, and the like, all combining to produce a distinctly "English view" of events. In other words, the Bayeux Tapestry contains two narratives, main and peripheral; the first presenting a Norman view, and the second, presenting an opposite, covert English view. The nature and the development of the Tapestry's "peripheral" narrative, its "code-language" of a subject people, is established through a systematic study of Old English etymology, Germanic and Latin cognates, Old English glosses, literary elements, and Aesopic Fables, several of which are identified and discussed for the first time, in this study. The appendices contain new observations which add to the body of proofs that the Tapestry was produced in Canterbury. Plates from the BM. MS. Harley 603 from Christ Church are offered in support of these observations. These plates represent previously rejected illustrations from the center portion of the MS which contain anomalies too compelling to be overlooked. They appear in their entirety, reproduced for the first time. Also included in the appendices is a comprehensive, annotated, bibliography of the Bayeux Tapestry and related studies. It may be concluded, then, that the Bayeux Tapestry does not represent a purely Norman view of the events of 1064-1066, but contains, as well, an English view in its borders (usually considered to be purely decorative), placed there by an English designer through the use of covert devices, representing a view inimical to Norman claims of legitimacy to the English crown.