an old lady very surrounded

France 5 – Thursday December 9 at 8:55 p.m. – documentary

She is an old lady who remains surrounded by mysteries. Almost a thousand years after its manufacture, the Bayeux tapestry continues to fascinate historians and scientists. Intended to celebrate the conquest of England by William of Normandy in 1066, the 68.4-meter-long embroidery has survived the centuries and miraculously survived wars and revolutions, fires and bad weather.

“No work of a comparable scope has come down to us, whatever the period of our history”, relates with reason the documentary that Alexis de Favitski and Jonas Rosales dedicate to the precious relic. By way of comparison, the hanging of the Lady with the Unicorn, another famous tapestry, kept at the Cluny museum, dates from the beginning of XVI.^e century.

Despite its great age, the Bayeux tapestry – which is in fact an embroidery – is far from having revealed all its secrets. There is still no certainty about the identity of its sponsor and the place where it was made. It could be Odon de Conteville, the half-brother of William the Conqueror. Bishop of Bayeux and Earl of Kent, he appears many times on the nine canvases that support the embroidery.

Real picture book

The analysis of the fifty-eight scenes which compose it also suggests that it could have been embroidered in the English abbey of Canterbury, which is precisely in Kent. But difficult to say, because nobody knows where the tapestry was during the first four hundred years of its life: the first proof of its existence dates only from 1476, in an inventory of the cathedral of Bayeux.

While waiting to resolve its last mysteries, the Bayeux tapestry is consulted by many academics, who come to draw material to confirm or deny their hypotheses on how Europeans lived in the XI^e century.

A veritable picture book, the embroidery is full of details on the ships of the time (thirty-two are represented there), on the architecture of motte castles, the way of fighting with a lance and a sword ( the battle of Hastings, which was decisive in 1066 in the conquest of England by William, renamed “the Conqueror”, occupies a third of the work) or even the diet of the English and the Normans: roughly, the first favored beer, the latter pork and sea fish.

We can only regret that the documentary, which does not avoid length, avoids certain subjects. Like these scenes representing naked women, pursued by men as the battle approaches, which could suggest rapes committed by the Norman army on the English population. Likewise, little or nothing is said about how William brought the island nobility to heel after his victory, confiscating almost all of the English land to give it to his followers and fiercely suppressing the various attempts at rebellion.

Specialists have, it is true, a mitigating circumstance: the tapestry ends abruptly after Hastings – William’s coronation is not even represented there -, which suggests that its last part has been destroyed or that it is not ‘has never been completed. Another mystery.