The Bayeux Embroidery as a Historical “Source”

The Bayeux Embroidery is an important subject of inquiry in the field of art history as a rare and unusually large surviving example of a medieval tradition of embroidered pictorial narratives. Scholarship on the embroidery, however, has long been dominated by political historians using its pictorial narrative, along with textual narratives supposedly resembling it, as a record of historical events and even as a reliable source of evidence about how the Norman conquest of England came about. By aligning selected scenes on it with decontextualized passages from the written sources they trust and ignoring many other scenes in the main frieze, most of the border imagery, and numerous alternative textual accounts, historians of national politics have constructed in several different ways what is known in this genre of scholarship as the “the chain of events” that supposedly led to Duke William of Normandy’s invasion of England and his victory in the Battle of Hastings (14 October 1066) over the army of King Harold II, who was killed in the battle. By doing so, these historians have also resolved, at least to their own satisfaction, the centuries-old controversy about who was the legitimate successor of King Edward (later known as the Confessor), who died on 5 January 1066. Was it the dead king’s brother-in-law, Earl Harold Godwineson, who took the throne the next day and became king of the English? Or was it Duke William of Normandy – the late King Edward’s mother’s brother’s son’s bastard son – who invaded in late September of 1066 and, after defeating Harold II’s army at Hastings, was crowned and consecrated in London as king of the English on Christmas Day, 1066?

Instead of trying to solve what appears to be an insoluble problem by seeking to establish the true story of how the conquest came about, modern historians have always had the option of acknowledging, as William of Malmesbury did in the early twelfth century, that “the truth of the facts is in suspense and uncertain” and that in all probability, neither William I nor Harold II had much of a claim to be King Edward’s legitimate successor.