over 400 years after the events depicted – do we find the first unequivocal mention of the work. This is also the earliest time that the tapestry can be proved to have been situated in Bayeux. An inventory of Bayeux Cathedral in the year 1476 tells us that the cathedral possessed ‘a very long and narrow hanging of linen, on which are embroidered figures and inscriptions comprising a representation of the Conquest of England’.3 Each summer, the document informs us, this old embroidery was hung around the nave of the Cathedral for a few days in the religious calendar.
How so fragile an artwork had survived since the 1070s, through the long and dangerous medieval age, has never been discovered. Even for a long time after 1476 the tapestry remains unrecorded in any surviving document. Always vulnerable to fire and vermin, and to the whims of changing fashion, it was especially at risk in times of war. It might easily have been destroyed during the bloody religious conflicts of the sixteenth century, for in 1562 Bayeux Cathedral was broken into and sacked by Huguenots. They went on a rampage through the building, burning letters and charters and destroying most of the items listed in the inventory of 1476. These included a great gilded crown that had been a gift of William the Conqueror and at least one extremely valuable, though unnamed, tapestry. The local clergy had warning of the attack and they had managed to transfer some of their most precious possessions to the care of the municipal authorities. Perhaps the Bayeux Tapestry was amongst the items secreted away; perhaps it was just overlooked by the frenzied attackers; somehow, at any rate, it escaped this near-disaster.
Other vicissitudes came and went; more peaceable times returned. The practice of exhibiting the work around the cathedral for a few days each year seems to have continued. We can, therefore, imagine the good citizens of Bayeux filing along the nave of their cathedral with the rhythm of each passing summer, admiring this antique embroidery on those few days when it was displayed to them. Apart from the changing fashions from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries, from flowing robes and pointed hats to tight breeches and coiffured wigs, the scene would have remained much the same – men and women, young and old, shuffling quietly along the smooth grey flagstones of their cathedral, peering intently at the work, some of their faces filled with pride at what seemed to be a simple chronicle of Norman achievement, others furrowing with perplexity at one of its more curious details. It was only in the eighteenth century that the Bayeux Tapestry came to the attention of the outside scholarly world. From this point its perilous journey down to the present day can be traced with greater certainty.
The chain of events that led to the ‘discovery’ of the Bayeux Tapestry is known in broad outline. The story begins with Nicolas-Joseph Foucault, who had been intendant of Normandy from 1689 to 1694. He was a learned man who spent much of his spare time in study. When he died in 1721 he bequeathed his collection of papers to the Bibliothèque du Roi in Paris. Among those papers was a skilful, if rather stylised, drawing of the first part of the Bayeux Tapestry. The antiquaries of Paris were intrigued by this mysterious drawing. Nothing in the drawing indicated where the original was, or indeed what it was. Nor was there any indication who the artist of the reproduction had been. The identity of the artist remains a mystery although it is possible that it was Foucault’s own daughter Anne, who is known to have had a talent for drawing. In 1724 a scholar named Antoine Lancelot (1675–1740) brought the curious drawing to the attention of the Académie Royale des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. The Foucault sketch was reproduced in an article Lancelot wrote in the Académie’s journal. This was the first time that any image of the Bayeux Tapestry would appear in print, but as yet nobody had the slightest idea what the thing was. Lancelot realised that the drawing was of an important work of art but in other respects he confessed his bewilderment. He had, he said, ‘been unable to discover whether this sketch represents a bas-relief or the sculpture round the choir of a church or a tomb; whether it is a fresco or a painting on the glass of several windows or’ (and here he hazarded a last guess) ‘possibly a tapestry’.4 He could see that the Foucault sketch only represented part of some larger work. He concluded that ‘there must be a continuation’; though he can hardly have imagined how extraordinarily far the continuation ran.
The credit for tracking down the original goes to the Benedictine historian Bernard de Montfaucon (1655–1741). Having been alerted to the matter by Lancelot, he commenced his own quest to find the mysterious and intriguing artwork. By October 1728 his network of contacts had put him in touch with the prior of the abbey of Saint-Vigor in Bayeux. The prior was a local and he was able to tell Montfaucon that what was depicted in the Foucault drawing was an old band of embroidery which was exhibited in Bayeux Cathedral on certain days of the year. At last the enigma of the Foucault drawing had been solved and the Bayeux Tapestry became known to the outside world.
There is no surviving evidence that Montfaucon himself visited the embroidery, although it is difficult to imagine that he did not, having taken such pains to track it down. In 1729 he published the Foucault drawing on a slightly reduced scale in the first volume of his Monuments de la monarchie française. He then sent Antoine Benoît, one of the foremost draftsmen of the period, orders to produce an accurate sketch of the rest of the tapestry and to change nothing. In 1732 Benoît’s sketch of the remainder of the tapestry was reproduced in the second volume of Montfaucon’s Monuments. The whole of the surviving tapestry had now appeared in print. The early drawings are important: they provide evidence of the condition of the tapestry in the first half of the eighteenth century. Already the last section must have been missing for the work peters out in Benoît’s drawing much as it does now. In his commentary Montfaucon reported that there was a local tradition that ascribed the tapestry to William’s wife, Queen Matilda. Montfaucon thought that this theory was entirely reasonable. So began the unfortunate and pervasive myth of ‘Queen Matilda’s Tapestry’.5
A trickle of visitors arrived from England. One early English visitor was a learned antiquary called Andrew Ducarel (1713–85), who visited the tapestry in 1752.6 He found that gaining access to it was surprisingly difficult. Ducarel had heard of the Bayeux embroidery and he was keen to see it at first hand but when he arrived he found that the priests at the cathedral resolutely denied all knowledge of it. Surely this could not be right, he insisted. He had read about the tapestry. He had travelled from England in order to see it. It depicted the conquest of England by William the Conqueror and they must know about it. No, they replied, he was mistaken. They had never heard of such a thing. Ducarel was not one to give up easily. He reiterated what he knew and then added the further information that the embroidery was displayed yearly around the nave of the very cathedral in which they were standing. At last, this appeared to jog the memories of the priests. It seems strange, but it was not the content of the tapestry but rather the circumstances of its exhibition that were familiar to them; but perhaps they were simply unwilling to unroll it for some passing traveller. At any rate, Ducarel’s persistence paid off and he was at last led to one of the small lateral chapels on the south side of the cathedral, one dedicated to Thomas Becket. It was here that the Bayeux Tapestry was kept, rolled up in a strong wainscot press. Inch by inch it was unravelled for him in all its vivid colourful detail. Ducarel must have been one of the first Englishmen to see the Bayeux Tapestry since the eleventh century. He later wrote of his great satisfaction at seeing this ‘immensely valuable’ work; though he lamented its ‘barbarous needlework’. The general difficulty in locating the tapestry was not helped when no less a thinker than the great philosopher David Hume incorrectly reported that ‘this very curious and authentic monument’ had been lately discovered in ‘Rouen’.7 At any rate, the celebrity of the Bayeux Tapestry on both sides of the Channel was slowly increasing; but dangerous times were ahead. Having survived seven centuries of obscurity in astonishingly good condition, the fragile embroidery was now to embark on some of its most perilous adventures.
The storming of the Bastille prison on 14 July 1789 ushered in the overthrow of the monarchy and the violent upheavals of the French Revolution. The old world of religion, aristocracy and monarchy stood for everything that the revolutionaries were against. In 1792 the revolutionary government of France declared that everything that reflected the history