The Collected Works of Hilaire Belloc. Hilaire Belloc

Dark Ages and of that violent and happy transition from the Dark Ages to Mediæval civilisation, we have here and there sharp pictures—mostly pictures of the pen and not of the pencil. But these pictures relate—almost always—episodes which were not the capital episodes of their time. The Bayeux Tapestry stands quite apart in this: that it represents so faithfully and so thoroughly one of the half-dozen acts essential to the remaking of Europe, and that it so represents an act which, on the analogy of every other of that early time, we should expect to receive only from a short and doubtful literary account. It is the one picture we have of any magnitude showing us the things of the Crusading turning-point. For Western Christendom, as we know, awoke from its sleep and flowered into the Middle Ages through three great efforts: The Norman Adventures, the Reform of the Church under St. Gregory VII, and the Crusading March. All these were the product of a sort of spring which came upon our ancestry more than eight hundred years ago, and which restored in a renewed form the civilisation of the West. Of that spring the Bayeux Tapestry remains the one piece of ocular description which has survived.

      Unfortunately, there must be added to this statement (which would be final if we could be certain of our dates) a critical warning. The date of the work is not certain. I will set forth in a moment the arguments which have been put forward for fixing the work to this or to that moment. We can happily be certain beyond reasonable doubt that it was produced within the lifetime of men who could remember the Invaders of England. It is not later than that. It has even been believed to be actually contemporary with the Invasion itself, and produced under the direction of those who took part in the expedition. But though it is virtually a contemporary document, even if we find ourselves compelled to accept the lower of these limits, yet we unfortunately have not a definite proof of the year or years in which the work was finished. This is the one point which mars our satisfaction in our possession of this thing. It is here worthy of curious remark that the history of the English is singularly fortunate in the wealth of record which it has at call. No other nation has such an accumulation of ancient testimony to hand. No other nation has such a document as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle or as the Doomsday Survey, and, by an accident both of civil and of religious history, no other nation has preserved through the revolutions of a thousand years so much material record undestroyed.

      When a man first sees the Tapestry at Bayeux his immediate impression and his most vivid one is the impression occasionally, but rarely, produced by some perfect architectural relic—an impression of liveliness as though time had been telescoped up for his advantage. I say that this impression is rare, but when we do get it, it is violent. You feel it in the “immortal marble undecayed” of a portrait bust of the Mediterranean; in the sharp colouring of the funereal inscriptions of Constantine; in the flagstones and the columns of the Forum at Timgad. It is exceedingly difficult to convey in language this shock which the eye receives when centuries seem to drop out and the action of men to be brought up from the remote past to the present as an object is brought up from the remote distance to the foreground through the action of a lens. I can best compare it to the shock which the mind receives upon hearing after many years, and long after it has been thought forgotten, a familiar voice; or to that similar arrest that our whole being suffers when we smell some smell which went with a whole experience of youth. I say it is very rarely that a surviving monument of the remote past will give this shock. Most antique material things carry deeply bitten into them the evidences of decay. But now and then (the Gospel of St. Chad at Lichfield occurs to me as I write) you get freshness and, as it were, companionship from something which belongs to the dead, who have been dead so long that the very style of their lives has vanished. All this you get when you first see the canvas at Bayeux.

      It must next be clearly understood in what convention and with what purpose those who made this embroidery worked.

      The object of all this kind of work in every age where it has flourished (and such ages cover nearly the whole of human history) is to establish a record. The motive is “lest the deeds of those great men, our fathers, should perish.” Now, there are a hundred ways of satisfying that motive more or less. The one that first occurs to us to-day is of course Inscription. But Inscription suffers from two faults: first, it is not universal; secondly, it is jejune.

      It is not universal, because the written characters and the language which they express cannot be universal. They may be lost, or they may become provincial and neglected. It is jejune because full experience is not to be crowded into even an excess of words. You will find in Normandy (not a day’s walk from Bayeux, by the way) a very long inscription to a local personage of the third century. It is in Latin—that is, in the most universal of literary mediums—and yet it has served principally for the quarrels of archæologists. There is no prime term in any early inscription that will not serve for such a quarrel, simply because language is an imperfect symbol. You are pleased to understand to-day the inscription upon a bronze tablet let into the wall of a public building and thus inscribed:

      “This Foundation Stone was laid by the Rev. Charles Woodle, M.A., on the occasion of the Second Jubilee of Her Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria.”

      You understand what it means. A few centuries hence (if the language has survived), one determining symbol after another will be a matter of dispute. Men will be arguing what “Rev.” means, what “M.A.”; perhaps what “Jubilee,” what “Gracious”—and all the rest of it. The word “Foundation” will give them a good deal of trouble.

      What is the alternative? If record by verbal symbol is so imperfect and if all symbol must be sensual, what other sense can we approach? Humanity has never made anything of the symbolism of music, and never will. It is not fixed. There remain only the eye and the picture meant for the eye. Now in a picture, however rude or however perfect, whether in the flat or the round, you get the most permanent record. All humanity except our time has understood that. The appeal to the eye is at once the most universal, and can be with the least expense of effort the most detailed. Our own time will probably suffer more through the neglect of this than through any other of our neglects, and posterity will ignore us most through our lack of pictorial symbol. It does not tell a future age anything to paint a picture of cows at a ford. It tells a future age very little to paint a picture of the Coronation, but to make a bas-relief of one policeman holding up one motor-bus, one man selling newspapers to one other man, and so on, all along a frieze, would be to leave a record of London, and a record which would be independent of the vitality of alphabets and idioms.

      Now, this kind of record demands a Convention; in other words, it must be symbolic much more than it is mimetic, and that is the note you get in the work preserved at Bayeux. Not the reproduction of things seen, but the perpetuation of their ideas: a few figures standing for a host: an emblem defining a man: an episode noticed to its simplest terms.

      Now as to the authenticity of, or to be more accurate the date of, this famous document. The more slipshod, earlier, and picturesque historians, with their touch of charlatanism and their eye upon the public (notably Freeman), naturally desired to believe, and even more naturally said, that the embroidery now preserved at Bayeux was exactly contemporary with the Conquest.

      We must not include in our criticism or our blame such men as Napoleon, who, after all, did not pronounce himself, but took what he was told; nor men not professedly historians who carried on the tradition that the work came from the needle of William the Conqueror’s wife and her ladies. An unhistorical statement proceeding from one who does not profess acquaintance with the bases of history cannot be seriously criticised. But, as the legend that the Bayeux embroidery is actually contemporary with the Invasion of England has been erected into a sort of University dogma and propagated through English schools and text-books, it is as well to point out to my readers the nature of this simple error.

      The Battle of Hastings was fought on the 14th of October 1066. The Bayeux Tapestry is later than the First Crusade, the climax of which campaign was the capture of Jerusalem on July 15, 1099.

      It is as certainly later than the First Crusade as a picture of a man in trousers and a top-hat is later than the French Revolution. How much later it is than the First Crusade we cannot yet say, and perhaps will never be able to say. We can say (just as we can say about the gentleman in the trousers and the top-hat) that it is quite appreciably later than the turning-point in history