THE BOOK OF THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ● Transcriber’s Notes: ○ Additional information about the Bayeux Tapestry can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayeux_Tapestry ○ Much nicer images of the tapestry itself can be found here: https://www.bayeuxmuseum.com/en/the-bayeux-tapestry ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Illustration] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ THE BOOK OF THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY PRESENTING THE COMPLETE WORK IN A SERIES OF COLOUR FACSIMILES: THE INTRODUCTION & NARRATIVE BY HILAIRE BELLOC LONDON CHATTO & WINDUS 1914 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ _All rights reserved_ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ INTRODUCTION At Bayeux in Normandy, a little town as old perhaps as our race and older certainly than our records and our religion, there is to be seen in the main room of what was once the Bishop’s Palace a document unique in Europe. There is no other example, I think, of a record, contemporary or nearly contemporary, of an event so remote in the story of Christendom, detailed upon so considerable a scale and relating to a matter of such moment. It is these three characters combined which give to the Bayeux Tapestry its value. We have, indeed, pictorial representation more accurate and more detailed in some few cases, but relating to the periods when material civilisation was high—before the Dark Ages. We have again an ample store of evidence pictorial and written, relating to the vivid life of the earlier Middle Ages, and of course, an overwhelming mass of matter dealing with everything that accompanied or has succeeded the Renaissance. Even of the 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