Let me briefly lay before the reader the evidence upon which this decision must be accepted. I will enter into no one of the many—I had almost said innumerable—doubtful details. I will not even linger upon one part of the evidence, which is very striking—the fact that the length of the Tapestry exactly coincides with the contour of the nave of Bayeux Cathedral, upon which it was annually hung. And my reason for not pressing this point is that we have no definite evidence upon the date of the nave of Bayeux. Let me make myself clear. We know, of course, that the Gothic is roughly the product of the Crusades. We know that the Romanesque is roughly the pre-Crusade architecture. A man has but to see the interior of Bayeux Cathedral (as I did at Mass three or four months ago during my inspection of this document) to see that that nave is a product of the Transition. But short of documents telling us exactly when the ground plan of the nave was drawn up, we cannot establish a date within fifty years. What adds to our ignorance is the fact that your later work was nearly always and throughout Europe modelled upon your earlier work. Consider, for instance, all the discussion with regard to the extension of the western end of Chartres; or consider the massive Romanesque foundation and pillars of Notre Dame in Paris, with its Gothic superstructure; consider the accident by which we owe the Gothic unity of that monument to the fire which happened to destroy in 1218 the original Romanesque apse. Had evidence of dates not survived in the case of Notre Dame we might be out by anything between fifty and seventy years. So with Bayeux. The correspondence of the length of the Tapestry to the length of the nave proves that the Tapestry was at least not earlier than the nave, but we do not know that the nave may not have been of just that length _before_ some process of rebuilding. No; the evidence that the Bayeux Tapestry is later than the Battle of Hastings and the reign of William the Conqueror is of a simpler and more conclusive kind, and resides in the idea the artist had of men’s accoutrements—dress and arms. Let me detail these. First, Edward the Confessor bears a crown marked by the fleur-de-lis. Now the fleur-de-lis thus marked upon the crown is a matter of the twelfth century, not of the eleventh—just as is the oriflamme. The sceptre, if we may judge by the seals and manuscripts (which with very rare sculptural examples are our sole evidence), is a twelfth-century and not an eleventh-century sceptre. This note on costume is true even down to the details of the shoes upon the feet; they are the shoes of the middle of the twelfth, not of the end of the eleventh century. Now turn to something upon a larger line, though not more conclusive: the adornment of the shield.