Threads of Life

by Clare Hunter

  As the Allied troops advanced on France, Himmler set in motion Germany’s coup de grâce: to raze Paris to the ground. But he safeguarded the tapestry. In June 1944 he had it secreted in a basement of the Louvre. Even then, he was troubled. Hitler’s deputy sent Himmler a coded order instructing its immediate export to Germany. The code-breaking centre at Bletchley Park in England, intercepted the message: ‘Do not forget to bring the Bayeux Tapestry to a place of safety.’ But Himmler had left it too late. When his SS guards arrived to take possession of the tapestry, the Louvre was already in the hands of the French Resistance. The Bayeux Tapestry stayed in France.

  The Bayeux Tapestry has not only been saved but reinvented over its long life. Originally called La Telle du Conquest, it was re-christened La Tapisserie de Reine Mathilde after the wife of William the Conqueror, who, some proposed, had had a hand in its creation. By the nineteenth century it had become known by its current name. Of course, it is not a tapestry. It is an embroidery. But the misnomer elevated it from the indignity of any association with women’s needlework, which, over the centuries following its creation, had become an increasingly de-valued art form. In 1738 the English traveller John Breval dismissed it as a ‘most barbarous piece of needlework.’ In 1843 John Murray III in his Hand-Book for Travellers in France described how the tapestry was subject to ‘the fingers as well as eyes of the curious’ and derided it as being ‘rudely worked with figures worthy of a girl’s sampler.’ Other nineteenth-century critics found its stitchery primitive, its cream ground too empty, the whole effect lacking finesse. Even the great English writer Charles Dickens was dismissive, describing it as the work of ‘feeble amateurs.’ While its antiquity secured it as a work worthy of scholarly interest and curatorial care, its re-invention as a tapestry distanced it from criticism, inferring the skilled craftsmanship of professional male weavers whose guilds ensured they had the monopoly on the production of large-scale tapestries. This tale of war became widely accepted as an artefact of male history, of masculine creation.

  Indeed, the tapestry is concerned with the world of men, albeit translated through the feeling hands of women. That world is its stage. It is a drama of war with a male cast – huntsmen, soldiers, kings – and events located at court, at sea, on farms, in foundries. There are no scenes of home, no flowers in the muddied fields, no apparent insight into women’s lives.

  Within its depictions of 632 men, over 200 horses, 55 dogs and more than 500 other animals and birds, there are only six women. They include Queen Edith lamenting her husband’s death; a young woman being caressed or more probably struck by a cleric; a mother holding her son’s hand as they flee from a burning house; a naked woman turning away from a nude man advancing on her with an erect penis; another naked woman holding a lamp in argument with a naked man who is brandishing an axe. The women are vulnerable, much smaller than their male companions. They are shown as diminished. They all seem powerless.

  There is also the suggestion, however, that parts of the tapestry were drawn by hands other than those of its main designer, and that female stitchers inserted images of their own making, evidenced by less accomplished draughtsmanship. It is perfectly possible, through the long years of its making, that there would have been opportunities for covert additions, the chance to slip in a personal testimony of life after invasion, or even to document abuse.

  Whether they inserted unsanctioned motifs and cameos or not, the presence of the embroiderers is palpable, held fast in their stitches. It is there in the diversity of needlecraft, the same stitches executed with a variance of skill. And it is there in the telling humanity of small errors or expediencies: a sudden shift to linen thread when the wool yarn ran out; a horse sewn in green thread; some armour etched in cross stitch rather than the more challenging chain stitch by some less accomplished stitcher. There are sections overlooked, a wrong stitch employed: mistakes, inconsistencies, omissions which lead us back to them, those stitching women – skilled, undoubtedly, but tired, hurried, careless at times. It is there in their awareness of the expense of their materials, the labour involved in hand-dyeing and hand-spinning wool. They attempt small economies as in their use of satin stitch which is sewn without looping the thread on the back, to save on yarn; a thread of colour allowed to travel to this place and that until it was all used up, servicing an eye, a letter, an element of chain mail before it reached its end.

  As I scan the tapestry, lingering over its scenes of monarchical triumph and military devastation, I feel pulled into its story. It is as if, in its many reproductions, it has withheld its spirit, determined to disclose its fully tactile self only to a live audience. It is its needlework that brings it immediacy: characters, events and emotions animated by the skilful, imaginative deployment of coloured threads and surface stitches. This is its potency. It is the needlecraft that captures texture, rhythm, tone, personality, the sewing that traps its appeal.

  These women had to be inventive. They had only four colours – red, blue, green and yellow – and the ten hues their dye afforded, to tell their tale. They chose their four kinds of stitches to make the most economical use of the wool, just four to create a masterpiece. With their limited palette and stitch repertoire, they conjured an illusion of depth which they emphasised by colouring a horse’s forelegs differently from its back, by outlining each separate element in a different colour than the one used to fill in its shape: even the smallest pieces were worked this way. Sailing ships, galloping horses, advancing soldiers were given the illusion of speed by dramatic changes of colour that introduced a sudden energy. The hands of a pleading prince or praying priest were etched in black to accentuate the emotional import of their gestured language. They located the action of war and its preparation in the specifics of place – the sturdy ramparts of a palace, the tumble of a stormy sea, the furrows of ploughed fields – each evoked by a change of pattern or an alteration in the direction of stitches.

  The embroiderers manipulated the curve of thread, the length of their stitches, the tightness or looseness of their thread (its tension, in other words) to capture the emotions of characters. This is very difficult to achieve with wool yarn. It has a slight burr that makes precision challenging. Despite being an embroiderer, or maybe because I am one, I am taken aback by their artistry. I had presumed I would find something rougher, simpler, a dutiful retracing of a drawn design in thread. But this is so much more. This is a human chronicle kindled into life through a long-practised knowledge of sewing.

  Here too are the embroiderers’ own responses to what they sewed, to the scenes they had to revisit: tenderness in the stitching of a hapless group of unarmoured archers battling for survival beneath the thundering hoofs of horsed nobility; empathy for the yowling dog guarding King Edward’s deathbed; sadness in the gloom of the stilled fleet of ghost ships beached below Harold shortly after he gains the throne: all set among the poignancy of loss in the borders’ motifs of fettered birds, hunted deer and predatory beasts. They elicit an emotional response, encouraging humanity across the centuries. That is the power of these stitchers, who, with just needle and thread, wool and linen, captured human experiences which, 900 years on, still move us.

  Others followed them. Through the centuries there was a succession of stitchers, those that came after, intent on the salve of repair. Their nurture is equally visible in the 500 or so patches and darns that lie scattered over the tapestry’s surface, in the newer stitches that replace what had worn away: marks of its restorers, menders and carers, the marks of time and of other hands willing it to survive.

  I spend nearly three hours with these needlewomen, trying to enter their world through how they sewed, noting their attention to weight, movement, texture, expression, character, emotion, place; trying to understand the choices they made – this pattern, that colour, this stitch – how they made their story tangible, truthful and intimate.

  Eventually I succumb to the audio guide. The plummy-voiced narrator is fulsome in his adjectives: ‘pi
cturesque, delightful, quite perfect, most impressive, truly magnificent.’ But not once does he mention the women who embroidered the tapestry. I visit the accompanying exhibition. There are displays of hanks of hand-dyed wool, a replica of a small section of the underside of the tapestry and an explanation of the stitches used; there are information panels and three-dimensional displays exploring the art of illuminated manuscripts, the making of medieval villages, the craftsmanship of welding armour, but the art of the sewing itself isn’t discussed or interpreted. Apart from a panel lamenting the lack of information about the embroiderers, the sewers are totally absent, even in the documentary film shown in the museum’s cinema.

  Suddenly I am seized with fury at the injustice. All those hours of labour, all that deployment of a practised skill, women’s inventiveness and imagination, dismissed as if it did not matter. Nowhere is there conjecture about these women’s lives. There is no description of their working conditions, no enthrallment at their expertise.

  The sewers would have sat, hour upon hour, month upon month, year upon year, bent over a long rectangular frame, facing each other. Some had to sew upside down. There would have been pressure, an overseer pushing their work on. There would have been moments of crises, when they ran out of one colour and had to make do with another, when sections didn’t match up and they had to camouflage an unsightly join, perhaps by inserting another tree.

  The sewing was laborious: one hand above the frame, the other below, catching the needle on its exit and pushing it upwards again, on and on: tedious, exacting, monotonous. Their bodies would have ached with the constant arching over their frames; their eyes smarting with the gutter of fire smoke and candlelight, wearying in the poor light from small windows on winter days, the demands of unrelenting focus. It would have been a chore.

  Even if we don’t know who they were, we know what they did. We can see their skill, appreciate their craft and admire their contribution. These, at the very least, should be acknowledged. Instead, the embroiderers are banished from the story of the Bayeux Tapestry as if their part in its creation was marginal.

  This is not the fault of the textile curators who care for our textile heritage. It is not to criticise the guardians of the Bayeux Tapestry. They have inherited the historical and social value placed on the tapestry, not as a triumph of women’s needlework but as a chronicle of war, of French victory, of political propaganda and as a visual archive of medieval life. There have been investigations into the processes used, speculation about the identity of the sewers and academic study of the tapestry’s anomalies in design, but none has led to precise information. Without that, a curator’s interpretation is compromised and any conjecture risks criticism. And so, as with many other pieces of our textile heritage, avoidance is preferable. Embroiderers remain uncelebrated because they are largely anonymous, and while their needlework might be of historical value, donated to and collected by museums, without the necessary provenance, their creators cannot secure a part in its story.

  For centuries, this was the fate of women embroiderers. They were robbed of their power. This is the history of needlework.

  From the late seventeenth and into the next century, sewing moved into the home, to the domestic sphere, annexed from the public realm of work, economics, heritage, politics and power. There were small insurrections: women using needlework to claim their place in the world, stitching down political comment or a feminist complaint, documenting their experiences through domestic sewing, but they were rare, and their small flames of defiance all too easily disregarded. By the nineteenth century, needlework had been irretrievably demoted, and domestic embroidery was seen as a decorative frippery – just women’s work.

  Yet in 1816, for the tapestry’s 750th anniversary, the London Society of Antiquaries commissioned its historical draughtsman, Charles Stothard, to produce a drawn replica of the Bayeux Tapestry. It took him two years. Despite his detailed illustrations, the society found that the flatness of ink failed to catch the captivating essence of the original. So it took a wax impression of its surface, which was cast in plaster to trap the tapestry’s texture and the resonance of its stitching. Clearly, it was its sewn persona that made it unique. But even then, there was little curiosity about the women who had crafted it.

  The spirit of the Bayeux Tapestry, however, lives on. In 1885, The Leek Embroidery Society in Staffordshire made an entire replica of the original tapestry sewn by thirty-five women. The society’s founder, Elizabeth Wardle, felt that ‘England should have a copy of its own.’ All displays of genitalia in the original had been decorously draped in the design the society received from South Kensington Museum so as not to offend the feminine sensibilities of its makers or viewers. In 1997, its last missing eight feet of original narrative was re-imagined by the embroidery artist Jan Messent using, as far as was possible, similar materials and techniques. On it she stitched William’s final triumph: the bestowal on William of the keys to London by the vanquished nobles, and his coronation in Westminster Abbey.

  In 2012, another version of the missing end panel was made in the Guernsey island of Alderney as part of the 950th anniversary celebrations of the Battle of Hastings. This was a community project in which the stitching was undertaken by 400 participants under the direction of local resident Kate Russell. It too depicted William’s coronation and was shown for a while alongside the original tapestry in Bayeux. And there have been other tapestries, other stitchers, across time, who have been inspired collectively to create their own sewn narratives. The Overlord Embroidery is a commemoration of the D-Day landings on the Normandy beaches in the Second World War: an eighty-three metre tribute to the fighting forces. It was commissioned in 1968 and sewn by members of the Royal School of Needlework with materials sourced from the uniforms of serving soldiers, seamen and airmen. The 120-metre long Keiskamma Tapestry of South Africa was created by Xhosa women at the start of the millennium to document their and their country’s history, and was unveiled on International Women’s Day in 2006. It is now wrapped around the walls of the country’s Parliament as a reminder of the human gain of racial equality. The Bayeux Tapestry’s most recent reinvention was in 2017, when it was used as the template for a new tourist attraction in Northern Ireland. The Game of Thrones Tapestry went on display at the Ulster Museum in Belfast to celebrate and chronicle the HBO television fantasy drama of the same name which has been watched by millions worldwide. Embroidered on Irish linen, the tapestry recreates, in seventy-seven metres of needlework, each twist of betrayal and the many battles that punctuate the eight seasons of nail-biting adventure.

  And the spirit of the Bayeux Tapestry is there in The Great Tapestry of Scotland, stitched by over a thousand women – and a few men – narrating the chronicle of a nation. Designed by the inventive and community-arts-bred artist Andrew Crummy in 2013 as a homage to the Bayeux Tapestry, it is also sewn on linen in wool threads. In its 160 panels it captures the human history of Scotland with a democratic and empathetic eye. It threads a journey through the Scottish psyche, exploring what has shaped its national identity: its outer islands and inner cities, croft life and industrial trade, intellectual enlightenment and variety theatre, poetry and music.

  Its sewers could employ a broader palette of coloured wools and a wider repertoire of stitches than their medieval counterparts. Industrialisation and the invention of synthetic dyes has allowed them a vastly more extensive colour scheme. Their knowledge of stitches stretched across the world and across time and they used it imaginatively. Textures rise from the surface in hundreds of different kinds of embroidery techniques: wool thread manipulated, woven, twisted, flecked, couched, knotted, looped, animating each story with the heartfelt, often heart-ached, narrative that lies behind each panel.

  The sea is rendered local through intimate knowledge: thick in sewn braided waves; gently flowing in waved rows of running stitch; deep in stretches of navy and aquamarine; striped in undulations of mottled blue; still in an expanse of grey sat
in stitch; threaded lightly towards the shore on single strands of wool or patterned with light eddies of tangled colours. Using just a needle and thread each group has interpreted their own intimate sea, bringing alive its presence in their specific locality.

  I made a small contribution, which was more prosaic than any of the rippling seascapes. I was assigned a footballer in a panel that celebrated Scottish hope and glory in the game. As I repeated the stitches of those medieval needlewomen, I discovered that the wool yarn was contrary, constantly snagging in complaint at my rough skin or a ragged nail; fluffing in protest at anything demanded of it beyond the simplest of stitches; weakening and breaking on its fold at my needle’s eye. I had only one footballer to memorialise and yet I found him exasperating. He took inordinately more time, patience and care than I had supposed. And I lauded those unknown Bayeux Tapestry needlewomen, who spent years taming their wool yarn, getting to know the pull of it, its strengths and waywardness, and persuading it to yield to their demands.

  When I went to see Scotland’s tapestry, I wandered through the galleries feasting my eyes and nourishing my love of sewing. I stopped admiringly in front of a panel dedicated to the Scottish novelist Sir Walter Scott, his head phrenologised into the building blocks of Abbotsford, the magnificent house he built in the Scottish borders, each block inscribed with his book titles. The woman next to me gave a sigh: ‘too much cream,’ she lamented. It was the same criticism levelled at the Bayeux Tapestry itself by Victorian critics used to a cram of stitchery. ‘You can tell that some people were better at the stitching than others. The quality’s so . . . varied.’ She said this with another regretful sigh, as if it were ever thus, an inevitable national weakness. But to me, as I told her, that was the joy of it: the evidence of all those different hands coming together to create a stitched masterpiece redolent with variety. It was the same joy I had taken in the Bayeux Tapestry.