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Order Number 8905616
The Bayeux Tapestry: Its English connection and its peripheral
narrative
Wissoiik, Richard David, Ph.D.
Duquesne University, 1988
U M I
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The Bayeux Tapestry:
Its English Connection and Its
Peripheral Narrative
yf A Dissertation
Presented to the Graduate School
of Duquesne University
As Partial fulfillment of
the requirements for
the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
by
Richard David Wissolik
October 19, 1988
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1
ABSTRACT
The Bayeux Tapestry:
Its English Connections 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.
The English designer of the Tapestry, under the orders of a
Norman patron, was constrained by circumstances from placing in
the main narrative of his work any "English" view of events that
might have been uncongenial to his Norman overlords.
The designer of the Tapestry, therefore, deliberately
constructed a "peripheral” narrative in the embroidery's borders,
especially in select areas and beneath certain scenes whose
historical background was politically sensitive, the indiscreet
handling of which would have proved inimical to Norman claims of
justification and legitimization. This historical background
concerned specifically the reasons for Earl Harold's journey to
Normandy in c. 1064, the relationship into which he entered with
Duke William, and the nature and the circumstances of the oath he
swore to Duke William while there.
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2
This "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.
We see the English view of the Bayeux Tapestry reflected in
the Historia Novorum in Anglia of Eadmer, an English monk of
Christ Church, Canterbury (in which city the Tapestry was made),
and who began to write at least by 1090. Eadmer, at Canterbury
since 1060, would have been anywhere between fourteen and thirty
years of age during the time (1070-1087) the Tapestry was being
produced. He was in an excellent position, therefore, to have
acquainted himself with local tradition, eye-witness accounts,
and would have become familiar with any purely English accounts
that might have been set down, but have since become lost. He
would also have learned much from Wulfnoth,* confessor of Earl
Harold, and from Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, men whom he
knew well, especially Anselm, whose biographer and constant
companion he came to be.
The nature and the development of the Tapestry's
"peripheral" narrative, its "code-1anguage" of a subject people,
is established through a systematic study of Old English
etymology, Germanic and Latin cognates, Old English glosses,
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3
literary elements, and Aescpic 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.
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Name
Richard David Wissolik
Dissertation Title The Baveux Tapestry: Its English Connections
and Peripheral Narrative
Degree Doctor of Philosophy in English
Date October 31. 1988
APPROVED ; I
Frank T. Zbozny, , Professor of English
APPROVED ..._________ _____________________________
^Bernard F. Befanek^ Ph. D., Associate Professor of
English
APPROVED
CE^seph'J. g&enaifc, Jr., Ph.D., Associate Professor of
English and Chairman, English Department
ACCEPTED_
Michael P. Weber, D.A., Dean, Graduate School of Liberal
Arts and Sciences
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PREFACE
In 1976, during a discussion of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale in my Medieval
Studies class, a student related that another professor insisted that no form
of feudalism existed in England before the Norman Conquest. Never a
"normanophile," nor a true-believer in the myth of the Norman "catalyst
theory," I set out for the college library to gather for my young charge
some of the more recent and enlightening studies by such writers as Warren
Hollister, Christopher Brooke, and Eric John, scholars who had been
bringing the idea of "English feudalism," and "cavalry warfare," into rather
less biased focus, and into a more realistic balance between the "gradualist"
and "catalyst" views of the transition from pre- to post-1066 Anglo-
Norman history.
In a time before the learned, but undisciplined scholarship of Freeman,
the "anglo-phile," and the ad baculum arguments of Round, the
"normanophile," the early translators of Old English literature, Thorpe
among them, had little difficulty in translating such words as cniht or
thegnas into "knight" and eoh into "war-horse." Since Round, and
persisting into Stenton and R. Allen Brown, the words are translated as
"boy," "earl," and simply "horse." The formula is a simple one: no horse, no
knight, no knight, no feudalism. One of the results, in terms of dominant
Tapestry scholarship, is that the Tapestry has always been seen from the
Norman point of view, as that view may be found in contemporary Norman
chronicles, and any antithetical English view, as may be seen through the
accounts of such writers as Eadmer, has largely remained ignored, despite
strong argument to the contrary from such commentators as Amyot, Brooke,
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Description: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
