The Bayeux Tapestry

This celebrated antique tapestry--called Bayeux from the place where it is preserved--is a pictorial history on canvas, more minute in some particulars than the written history, of the invasion and conquest of England by the Normans in 1066.

Tradition asserts it to be the work of Matilda--wife of William the Conqueror--and the ladies of her court, and to have been presented by the queen to the cathedral of Bayeux, Normandy, as a token of her appreciation of the assistance which its bishop, Odo, rendered to her husband at the battle of Hastings.

This tapestry is a web of canvas or linen cloth two hundred and fourteen feet long by twenty inches wide: upon it the history of "The Conquest" is worked in woollen thread of various colors. It was annually exhibited on St. John's Day, around the nave of the church.

When Napoleon contemplated the invasion of England in 1803, he caused this record to be removed to Paris, and exhibited in the National Museum, after which it was returned to Bayeux.

The exhibition of this tapestry in the National Museum awakened public curiosity concerning it, and the truth of the tradition was then established. The tapestry is divided into seventy-two distinct compartments, each representing one particular historical occurrence, and bearing an explanatory Latin inscription.

According to Mr. Bruce, the latest authority on the subject, the tapestry contains, besides, the figures of 505 various quadrupeds, birds, sphinxes, etc., the figures of 623 men, 202 horses, 55 dogs, 37 buildings, 41 ships and boats, and 49 trees--in all, 1,512 figures, and only three women. The Bayeux Tapestry would have been destroyed during the French Revolution, had not a priest succeeded in concealing in from the mob, who demanded it as covering for their guns.