beyond the reach of souvenir hunters on permanent display in a long glass case.
The fame of the tapestry continued to spread, aided no doubt by the photographic reproductions that became possible in the second half of the nineteenth century. To Mrs Elizabeth Wardle, however, this was not enough. The wife of a wealthy silk merchant, she decided that England ought to have a record of the Bayeux Tapestry that was more tangible and enduring than a mere coloured photograph. In the mid-1880s she gathered a group of Victorian ladies of like mind and together they set to the task of embroidering a life-sized replica. So it was that the whole of the Bayeux Tapestry was made again, once more in England, 800 years after the original embroiderers had laboured over the selfsame task. The Victorian copy took two years to complete; the result was in most respects a brilliant and accurate likeness. Half close your eyes and walk around this replica today and you can easily believe that you are standing in front of the original itself. There were, however, limits to what these ladies could bring themselves to portray. When it came to depicting the male genitalia, which appear, on occasion, with noticeable prominence in the original, a strictly accurate rendering had to be forsaken in order to spare the blushes of all concerned. In their copy, the Victorian embroideresses decided to deprive one naked male character of his manhood entirely; another, they thoughtfully provided with a pair of underpants. Perversely, what they modestly sought to censor now draws attention to itself by its concealment. Completed in 1886, the facsimile was taken on a triumphant tour of England and thence on visits to the United States and Germany. In 1895 the replica was donated to the town of Reading by Arthur Hill, a former mayor. Britain’s own version of the Bayeux Tapestry now has pride of place in Reading Museum.
The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 and the First World War passed without mishap to the Bayeux Tapestry. It was during the Second World War that it was to undergo some of its greatest adventures.12 On 1 September 1939, just as German troops were attacking Poland in a manoeuvre that was to plunge the continent into five and a half years of war, the tapestry was carefully removed from its exhibition case, rolled on to the spool, sprayed with insecticide powder and locked for safe keeping in a concrete shelter within the basement of the bishop’s palace at Bayeux. There it remained for a year, except for the odd occasion when it was checked and the insecticide renewed. In June 1940 France fell. It was not long before the tapestry came to the attention of the occupying forces. Between September 1940 and June 1941 the tapestry had to be retrieved and exhibited to eager German visitors at least a dozen times. Like Napoleon before them, the Nazis were hoping to repeat William the Conqueror’s invasion of England. They, too, regarded the tapestry as a potent source of propaganda and inspiration, never suspecting for the slightest moment the subversive undercurrent that runs through the work. The German invasion, like that of Napoleon, was postponed in 1940. Churchill’s Britain was also better prepared than Harold’s England. Britain narrowly won the battle of the skies and, though the bombing of its people continued, Hitler’s thoughts turned to the invasion of the Soviet Union.
Even so, German interest in the tapestry was not to be assuaged and a more sinister group soon began to take an abiding interest in the work. This was the Ahnenerbe (Ancestral Heritage), the research and teaching branch of Heinrich Himmler’s SS which had been set up to provide ‘scientific’ evidence of the superiority of the Aryan race. The Ahnenerbe attracted a significant number of German historians and scientists who enthusiastically moulded their scholarly careers to the advancement of Nazi ideology. As an organisation, it remains notorious for its role in the inhuman medical experiments that were perpetrated on concentration camp victims, but history and archaeology continued to be a focus of its attentions. Even at the height of war, the SS devoted considerable resources to the study of Germanic history and archaeology, to Himmler’s occult interests, and to the plundering of art and artefacts of Aryan origin from occupied territories.
What commended the Bayeux Tapestry to the Ahnenerbe was not only its depiction of a successful invasion of England. It was a work of art that seemed to celebrate the fighting prowess of Nordic peoples – the Normans, descendants of the Vikings, and the Anglo-Saxons, descendants of the Angles and Saxons. Amid the terrible conflagration of world war, amid the seismic clash of army with army, the ‘intellectuals’ of the SS devised an ambitious project of study of the Bayeux Tapestry, including its complete photography, with an artist copying the images and publishing of the results. The French authorities had little choice but to comply. The most that could be done was to make representations concerning the safety of the work and to ensure that no one could say that it had passed into ownership of the occupying forces.
For the purposes of study, the tapestry was transferred under military guard to the nearby abbey of Juaye-Mondaye in June 1941. The head of the study team was Dr Herbert Jankuhn. Professor of archaeology at Kiel, he was an active and enthusiastic member of the Ahnenerbe. Jankuhn gave a lecture on the Bayeux Tapestry to Himmler’s Circle of Friends on 14 April 1941 and he talked on the same subject to a regional meeting of the German Academy at Stettin in August 1943. After the war, Jankuhn, although implicated in the Nazi plundering of artwork from occupied territories, resumed his academic career. He published widely on Dark Age history; many students and scholars must have read and quoted his works without ever knowing of his more dubious past. In due course Jankuhn became an emeritus professor at Göttingen. He died in 1990. His papers on the Bayeux Tapestry have recently been donated by his son to the Bayeux Tapestry museum, where they will form an important part of its archives.
At length, at the suggestion of the French authorities, the Germans agreed that the tapestry should be moved for safe keeping to the art depot that had been created at the Château de Sourches, near Le Mans. This was a sensible idea, as the château, a vast eighteenth-century mansion set in 200 hectares of parkland, was situated at a safe distance from any vulnerable conurbation. Unfortunately, however, no facilities were provided to assist the French make the journey, and this, there and back, was a good 220 miles. The mayor of Bayeux, Monsieur Dodeman, a distinguished-looking old man with a pointy beard as white as Edward the Confessor’s, did his best to find some suitable form of transport for the famous embroidery. Despite much searching, the only vehicle that he was able to obtain was a singularly unreliable and potentially dangerous lorry which ran on charcoal, a Delahaye 10-horsepower camionnette à gazogène. So it was, early in the morning of 19 August 1941, that the Bayeux Tapestry began one of its most improbable journeys. The great work, together with its unrolling mechanism and twelve bags of charcoal, was loaded on board. The prefect of police, Monsieur Cervotti, and the keeper of the tapestry, Monsieur Falue, followed their driver on to the vehicle, and the spluttering camionnette departed with its priceless cargo in the direction of Sourches. The journey had already begun two hours late, on account of difficulties in starting the engine, but it was with earnest hearts and eager minds that the three gentlemen entrusted with the Bayeux Tapestry set off on a route that was to take them through the undulating countryside known as ‘Swiss’ Normandy.
At first things appeared to be going rather well. Not having eaten since early morning, the custodians of the tapestry stopped for lunch in the small town of Flers; the driver tuned off the ignition and the engine came to a halt with a shudder. The repast was presumably enjoyed; but when it came to recommencing the journey the engine refused to start. For twenty minutes the driver poked and twisted and shoved with his tools, and when at last the motor spluttered into life he re-emerged from a puff of smoke with his face black with soot and his features glistening with sweat. Cervotti and Falue hastily regained their places, but any further optimism was again misplaced. The engine faltered on the very first incline, just outside the town. Fearing that the motor would give out completely, the middle-aged keeper of the tapestry and the prefect of police jumped off the lorry and by dint of their considerable efforts managed to push the vehicle and its precious cargo to the brow of the hill. At this point, however, it proceeded to get away from the men pushing it and only came to rest when it reached level ground, the breathless Cervotti and Falue running behind as fast as they could in order to catch up with the runaway tapestry. The exercise of pushing the lorry uphill had to be repeated many times. It took ten hours, in all, to accomplish the distance of little more than 100 miles which separates Bayeux from Sourches.
Once at their destination, our exhausted heroes had no time to rest, or even eat. As soon as the Bayeux Tapestry and