The Bayeux Tapestry - Anglo-Saxon England's 'sunburst of glory' - may be the handiwork of the French after all. Steve Farrar reports
Among the souvenirs on sale in Canterbury Cathedral's gift shop is a range that celebrates the triumph of a foreign invader. Bayeux Tapestry cushion covers, curtains and footstools are popular, their relevance asserted with the assurance that the "tapestry was certainly designed by the famous school of needlework at Canterbury, and possibly sewn here as well". It might depict an epic English defeat, but the Bayeux Tapestry is celebrated as a final triumphal flourish of Anglo-Saxon art.
Some scholars have even seen subtle signs of native resistance embroidered into the antics of the cartoonish figures that decorate its fabric. But if George Beech is right, such nationalist glory and hidden meaning is pure whimsy. This triumph of medieval storytelling is not English at all. In a book to be published in July, Beech, emeritus professor of medieval history at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, US, argues that the genius and craft behind the tapestry were most likely French.
The events of 1066, when William the Conqueror defeated his Anglo-Saxon rival Harold at the Battle of Hastings, are carved deep in the nation's consciousness. The 70m-long tapestry - more accurately an embroidery - portrays the story in graphic detail. The treasured possession of Bayeux Cathedral in Normandy was made a decade or two after the conquest and constitutes a unique, near-contemporary record.
Once thought to have been woven by handmaids of King William's wife, Mathilda, the tapestry has in recent years been reclaimed for England.
Consensus now holds that it was the work of skilled English nuns at Canterbury or possibly Winchester. Sir Roy Strong, the respected art historian and former director of London's Victoria and Albert Museum, describes it as "a final sunburst of glory" of "the great civilisation of Anglo-Saxon England". One Kent historian even insisted: "We have taken a lot of criticism over the Elgin Marbles. It is time we redressed the balance and demand the Bayeux Tapestry come home to England."
Beech was unaware of such feelings when, ten years ago, he started leafing through medieval charters at a regional archive in France. The respected academic was studying the Abbey of Saint-Florent at Saumur, in the Loire Valley far from Normandy, when he stumbled across detailed records of an embroidery school that thrived there in the 11th century. He wondered how it might compare to the textile workshop that produced the famous Bayeux Tapestry. But to his surprise, the books he consulted admitted that virtually nothing certain was known about its provenance. Indeed, the first undisputed reference comes four centuries after its creation. Was it possible, Beech wondered, that the tapestry came from Saumur?
He started by exploring the Loire Valley workshop's international connections, revealing that Saumur's tapestry makers and embroiderers often took commissions from European heads of state, with one described as "a queen from across the sea". Beech observes: "The Saumur workshop must have been known to the Normans while there is no evidence at all of a workshop in Canterbury at this time."
William, abbot of Saumur, provided Beech with the next piece of the puzzle.
Before taking holy orders in 1070, he had been lord of Dol, a Breton town allied to nearby Normandy and key to William the Conqueror's campaign in Brittany in 1064. The two men had more than just a name in common - they had shared a war. Beech believes that William commissioned the tapestry from the abbot to commemorate and justify his actions. "It's a celebration of a military victory featuring William as a hero conquering England, and his Anglo-Saxon rival Harold as a liar who broke his oath," he says. Beech then discovered that soon after Abbot William arrived at Saumur, the abbey somehow acquired priories, churches and land in England and Normandy, the second largest foreign holding of William the Conqueror's territories. This may be evidence of part payment for the tapestry.
The case was getting stronger. Yet even as the pieces fell into place, Beech kept the nature of the project from his colleagues. "I told nobody other than my wife. I decided people would have been dumbfounded at a proposal that on the surface was so outlandish," he says. He needed more.
He turned to the tapestry itself and one of its most intractable mysteries - the Breton campaign. That such an episode with so little bearing on the conquest of England should have been given so much prominence - almost one tenth of the tapestry's length - has baffled historians. But if it was a product of Abbot William's workshop, then the interest in the fighting in Brittany becomes more apparent. The former lord of Dol may have influenced William the Conqueror to feature the campaign and this may explain the unparalleled geographical detail. Of the 11 places named in the tapestry, five are in Brittany, including Dol. "There is a detailed knowledge of local topography," Beech says. "The artist was clearly drawing on someone who knew that part of Brittany well."
The final element came from a poem composed by Baudri of Bourgueil, a friend and neighbour of Abbot William, in 1099 or 1100. This 300-line verse is about a tapestry belonging to Countess Adele, William the Conqueror's youngest daughter, and was hung in her castle at Blois, also in the Loire Valley. It depicted the Norman invasion of England. Many of the scenes described by Baudri are uncannily close to those in the Bayeux Tapestry.
The poem is well known but any link has been dismissed because the poet talks of golden silk and silver threads, not coloured wool. Beech says this was most likely just flattering exaggeration and that Baudri was indeed describing the tapestry, having studied it in Saumur. Beech suggests the tapestry may have subsequently left Blois and reached Bayeux in the middle of the 15th century as a gift passed between a succession of aristocrats.
Beech stresses that his Saumur hypothesis is just that - a hypothesis. But he feels that it fits better with what little evidence there is than more orthodox interpretations. He admits that some clues hint at an Anglo-Saxon influence - the accurate spellings of some English names, resemblances between figures in the tapestry and in manuscripts found at Canterbury. But names can be learnt, manuscripts borrowed.
Despite his scholarship, Beech expects the idea to spark a storm. It has been given a positive reception in speeches in France, the US and Ireland, while it featured in an exhibition of Romance art at the Louvre in Paris.
But he has yet to bring it to England. And that may be when the real battle begins.
Was the Bayeux Tapestry Made in France? is published by Palgrave in July, £40.