the three shields that appear have some mark. There is no need to labour the point, nor even to point out the elaborate design upon one of the shields portrayed in the pursuit of the defeated army. It is evident that we are dealing with a work produced at a time when it was thought normal that any man of distinction should carry his mark upon his shield, and, I repeat, to think that normal was the state of mind of the middle twelfth century at earliest and not of the mid-eleventh century at all. There is just one good argument and only one for the contemporary character of the document; that argument is the argument from tradition. It is an argument to which I shall always offer the greatest reverence, particularly as it has been particularly despised by the superficial but popular University historians of the last century. Tradition is certainly the binding element in social memory, and if one could discover an active tradition that the embroidery of Bayeux had been made by the wives of those who fought at Hastings, though existing evidence not traditional would compel us to reject that tradition in its absolute form, yet it would be our duty to consider closely how the tradition arose and what it might mean—for instance, it might mean that the existing work was the adaptation of an earlier work. But, as a fact, the tradition is not old. It was not of popular but of academic, and therefore of worthless, origin. The later Middle Ages seem to have known nothing of it; the Chapter of the Cathedral, which was the conservator of the document, bears no testimony of the sort. To call the Bayeux Tapestry “Queen Matilda’s Tapestry” seems to have been nothing but the guesswork of an antiquarian don. Let us leave it at that. Another evidence of date is the fact (to which I shall make continual allusion in the text) that the Bayeux Tapestry follows fairly closely the _Roman de Rou_, Wace’s poem describing the Conquest; and that poem cannot be earlier than the middle of the twelfth century—it is usually put as late as the last third of the twelfth. Not only is Wace followed, but certain other authorities which help to date the production. Now this would be quite conclusive but for one rebutting argument, the value of which I leave to the judgment of the reader. The written sources which the Tapestry appears to follow would repose upon certain common traditions, memories, and earlier documents, and the Tapestry might be imagined to repose upon the same. But the general rule in tracing the sources of human work of this sort is that the written account precedes the pictorial and serves as a basis for it, while the convergence of this evidence with the evidence of accoutrements and dress leaves little doubt. We have in the Bayeux Tapestry something certainly later than 1140,[1] almost certainly later than 1150, probably as late as 1160, but, on the other hand, certainly prior to the date 1200. Footnote 1: