pastan white patronage bt 546108

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Problematizing Patronage: Odo of Bayeux and the Bayeux Tapestry 1

elizabeth carson pastan & stephen d. white

The examination of familiar arguments from visual and textual evidence that Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, was the patron of the

Bayeux Tapestry leads us to ask what role, precisely, he played in the medi-eval embroidery’s creation. Undeniably, arguments can be made in support of the case for Odo’s patronage, which was developed in the nineteenth century and achieved canonical status in the 1957 volume on the Bayeux Tapestry edited by Sir Frank Stenton.2 As Earl of Kent and an influential figure in the county’s chief town of Canterbury, where most scholars agree the Tapestry was designed, Odo seemed to proponents of this theory to be exceptionally well positioned to commission it. Odo’s patronage seemed all the more plausible because his reputation as ‘an ambitious, acquisitive and arrogant baron-prelate’ made it easy to think of him as commission-ing a work of art that glorified him, and virtually impossible to imagine anyone else who would have wanted to do so.3 Odo’s putative patronage of the Tapestry also provided a way of accounting for not only his multi-ple appearances in it, but also the inclusion of people and places associated with him. In addition, the chronology of Odo’s life offered opportunities to anchor the embroidery’s creation to precise dates. One such candidate is the year 1077, when he could have brought the Tapestry to Bayeux for his new cathedral’s dedication. Another is 1082, when his imprisonment either would have compromised his ability to commission the Tapestry or made it all the more important for him to have his participation in the Conquest dramatized in a public monument.4 Finally, since Odo was King William I’s half-brother and profited enormously from the Norman take-over of England, he seemed an excellent candidate to commission what scholars generally interpreted as a celebration of the Conquest.

1 The authors gratefully acknowledge support for research on this project from the University Research Committee, the Institute for Critical International Studies, and the Program for Collaborative Research in the Humanities at Emory University.

2 On how Odo’s patronage resolves numerous questions about the embroidery, see Francis Wormald, ‘Style and Design’ , in The Bayeux Tapestry: A Comprehensive Survey, 2nd edn, ed. Sir Frank Stenton (London, 1965), pp. 25–36, at pp. 33–4; N. P. Brooks and H. E. Walker, ‘The Authority and Interpretation of the Bayeux Tapestry’ , Anglo-Norman Studies 1 (1978), pp. 1–34; rpt. in The Study of the Bayeux Tapestry, ed. Richard Gameson (Woodbridge, 1997), pp. 63–92, at pp. 76–8. See also Lewis in this volume.

3 Brooks and Walker, ‘Authority and Interpretation’ , p. 68. 4 David Bates, ‘Odo, earl of Kent (d. 1097)’ , in Oxford Dictionary of National

Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/20543 (accessed 2 August 2008); David Bates, ‘The Character and Career of Odo, Bishop of Bayeux (1049/50–1097)’ , Speculum 50 (1975), pp. 1–20.

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2 the bayeux tapestry: new interpretations

This is a tidy picture. However, it has already become the subject of scrutiny, criticism, and revision, particularly among those who have ques-tioned whether the Tapestry carries the triumphalist Norman message that their predecessors routinely found in it. To explain its narrative perspec-tive, scholars over the last two decades have proposed alternative patrons and production sites, imputed elaborate narratological strategies to its designer, discovered sub-texts undercutting its main message, found differ-ent messages in it for Norman and English viewers, and pushed its date back to within a year or two of 1066, when the Norman perspective on the Conquest supposedly differed from what it later became.5 Though varying in approach, these new studies all reflect a deeper concern that previous scholarship cannot explain why the Tapestry unfolds as it does, whether because of its apparent concessions to a ‘pro-English’ perspective, its ‘even-handed’ view of the Conquest, its ironic commentary on the Normans and possibly the English as well, or its depiction of events in which Odo had no stake. We submit that all these revisionist hypotheses share one chief weak-ness: a failure to look critically at the particular model of patronage that

5 For alternative patrons, see Andrew Bridgeford, 1066: The Hidden History in the Bayeux Tapestry (New York, 2005), who proposes Eustace II of Boulogne as patron; and Carola Hicks, The Bayeux Tapestry: The Life Story of a Masterpiece (London, 2006), esp. pp. 22–39, who argues for Edith, widow of King Edward and sister of Harold II, as uniquely well positioned to view the Conquest even- handedly. On production sites, Wolfgang Grape, The Bayeux Tapestry: Monument to a Norman Triumph, trans. David Britt (Munich, 1994), argues for Normandy as the site of production, while George Beech, Was the Bayeux Tapestry Made in France? The Case for Saint-Florent of Saumur (New York, 2005), proposes the abbey of Saint-Florent in addition to identifying William I, a friend of this community’s abbot, as the patron. Pierre Bouet, ‘Is the Bayeux Tapestry Pro-English?’ , in The Bayeux Tapestry: Embroidering the Facts of History, ed. Pierre Bouet, Brian Levy, and François Neveux (Caen, 2004), pp. 197–215, at p. 214, proposes no site of production but believes that both insular and Continental artists designed the ‘programme of iconography’ . On narratology, Suzanne Lewis, The Rhetoric of Power in the Bayeux Tapestry (Cambridge, 1999), identifies the designer’s strategy as that of initially withholding from the viewer the work’s propagandistic signifi-cance; and Laura Ashe, Fiction and History in England, 1066–1200 (Cambridge, 2007), p. 44, maintains that the Tapestry ‘presents itself, inevitably disingenu-ously, as the historia, the actual signification of events’ . Those arguing that an ‘English’ subtext subverts the Tapestry’s overtly pro-Norman message include: David J. Bernstein, The Mystery of the Bayeux Tapestry (London, 1986); Bernard S. Bachrach, ‘Some Observations on the Bayeux Tapestry’ , Cithara 27 (1987), pp. 5–28; Richard Wissolik, ‘The Saxon Statement: Code in the Bayeux Tapestry’ , Annuale medi aevale 19 (1979), pp. 69–97; Emily Albu, The Normans in their Histories: Propaganda, Myth and Subversion (Rochester, NY, 2001), pp. 88–105; Gail Ivy Berlin, ‘The Fables of the Bayeux Tapestry: An Anglo-Saxon Perspective’ , in Unlocking the Wordhold: Anglo-Saxon Studies in Memory of Edward B. Irving, Jr., ed. Mark C. Amodio and Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe (Toronto, 2003), pp. 191–216; Meredith Clermont-Ferrand, Anglo-Saxon Propaganda in the Bayeux Tapestry (Lewiston, NY, 2004). Finally, Pierre Bouet re-dates the Tapestry to 1067–8, when William I was supposedly following a policy of ‘reconciliation’ with the English (‘Is the Bayeux Tapestry Pro-English?’ , pp. 213–14), and François Neveux, ‘The Cerisy Colloquium: Conclusions’ , in Embroidering the Facts, ed. Bouet et al., pp. 403–10, at p. 405, thinks it may well have been completed before the end of 1067.

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pastan & white: problematizing patronage 3

has long been built into studies of the Tapestry and continues to control how scholars view it. This model is premised upon a notion of the patron as someone who both determines the content of a work of art and aggressively inserts himself into it. Since this model – in which the work of art is a car-rier of the patron’s personal, ideological, or political agenda – is ultimately derived from the study of Renaissance art, its incorporation into studies of medieval art merits close scrutiny.6

Accordingly, this study will first examine the model of patronage upon which the argument for Odo’s close involvement in designing the Bayeux Tapestry depends, and will show how it has determined what scholars see in the embroidery and how they explain it. We then analyse scenes in the Tapestry for which the conventional view of Odo’s patronage cannot easily account. Next, we contest the view that only Odo’s intervention allows us to understand why the Tapestry includes images of several figures, among them the bishop himself, by proposing an alternative explanation based on a different model of patronage. Finally, the conclusion briefly reassesses the role played in the Bayeux Tapestry’s creation by the monastic community of St Augustine’s, Canterbury, which has long been identified as the most likely site of its design by monastic artists carrying out Odo’s commission.

Models of patronageFew works on the medieval patron are as influential as Erwin Panofsky’s study of the writings of Suger on the mid-twelfth-century rebuilding of the abbey church of Saint-Denis, over which he presided as abbot. In his intro-duction to this text, Panofsky characterized Abbot Suger as a man who ‘pro-jected his ego into the world that surrounded him until his whole self had been absorbed by his environment.’ 7 As evidence of the abbot’s ‘passionate will to self-perpetuation’ , Panofsky noted the numerous inscriptions that mention him by name and the portraits of him ‘strategically disposed’ along the central axis of the renovated abbey.8 In addition to being ‘enormously vain’ ,9 Panofsky’s Suger is a hands-on patron, who not only ‘summons other men’s work into being’ ,10 but also concerns himself closely with the details of the work’s production. Indeed, Panofsky concluded, ‘it would seem that very little was done without at least his active participation’ .11

6 Jill Caskey, ‘Whodunit? Patronage, the Canon and the Problematics of Agency in Romanesque and Gothic Art’ , in A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, ed. Conrad Rudolph (Oxford, 2006), pp. 193–212, at p. 193.

7 Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of Saint-Denis and its Art Treasures, ed. and trans. Erwin Panofsky (Princeton, 1979), p. 30.

8 Abbot Suger, ed. Panofsky, p. 29. On these twelve images of Suger, now see Clark Maines, ‘Good Works, Social Ties and the Hope for Salvation: Abbot Suger and Saint-Denis’ , in Abbot Suger and Saint-Denis, ed. Paula Gerson (New York, 1986), pp. 76–94.

9 Abbot Suger, ed. Panofsky, p. 29.10 Abbot Suger, ed. Panofsky, p. 1.11 Abbot Suger, ed. Panofsky, p. 36.

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Influenced by Panofsky’s study, subsequent scholars have exaggerated both Suger’s creative role in rebuilding his abbey and the originality of his projects and their influence on others.12 This historiography led Madeline Caviness to observe that ‘the power of Suger’s textualization of the Saint-Denis projects, the availability of this text to modern scholars, and the allure of having a name that could displace anonymity, must have contributed to these easily repeated claims’ .13 To be sure, numerous scholars have since persuasively argued that Panofsky overemphasized Suger’s actual agency at Saint-Denis,14 including Peter Kidson, who narrowed the abbot’s role to that of an ‘indefatigable provider’ .15 Others have challenged Panofsky’s portrayal of Suger as a man driven by the ‘urge to grow by metempsychosis’ and a consuming need for self-aggrandizement.16 But they have never com-pletely effaced Panofsky’s image of Suger as a patron who, by his intimate involvement in the art and design of Saint-Denis, projected his own ego onto them. Ultimately, Panofsky’s portrait of Suger has enjoyed staying power because it enlarges upon a Renaissance model of what a patron should do, namely, conceive the programme, oversee its execution in detail, and, through it, shamelessly glorify himself. Drawing on fifteenth-century con-tracts for panel paintings, Michael Baxandall has defined the Renaissance patron as a ‘client’ , ‘an active, determining and not necessarily benevolent agent in the transaction of which the painting is the result’ .17 This kind of patron aimed to control the artist as he allotted funds in ways that affected the character of the painting, withholding them if he was not satisfied, and specified how much personal attention the master himself (tutto di sua mano), rather than assistants, would expend on the work.18 It is noteworthy,

12 See for example, Emile Mâle, ‘Enrichment of the Iconography: Suger and His Influence’ , in Religious Art in France: The Twelfth Century, ed. Harry Bober, trans. M. Mathews (1922; Princeton, 1978), pp. 154–86.

13 Madeline Harrison Caviness, ‘Reception of Images by Medieval Viewers’ , in A Companion to Medieval Art, ed. Rudolph, pp. 65–85, at p. 66.

14 Arthur Watson, ‘Suger and the First Tree of Jesse’ , in The Early Iconography of the Tree of Jesse (London, 1934), pp. 77–82; Stephen Gardner, ‘Two Campaigns in Suger’s Western Block at St.-Denis’ , Art Bulletin 66 (1984), pp. 574–87; Conrad Rudolph, Artistic Change at St-Denis: Abbot Suger’s Program and the Early Twelfth-Century Controversy over Art (Princeton, 1990), pp. 32–47, 73; Charles M. Radding and William W. Clark, Medieval Architecture, Medieval Learning: Builders and Masters in the Age of Romanesque and Gothic (New Haven, 1992), pp. 63–76; Lindy Grant, Abbot Suger of St-Denis: Church and State in Early Twelfth-Century France (London and New York, 1998), pp. 26–31, 238–74.

15 Peter Kidson, ‘Panofsky, Suger and St Denis’ , Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 50 (1987), pp. 1–17, at p. 10.

16 Abbot Suger, ed. Panofsky, p. 32; Maines, ‘Good Works, Social Ties’ , argues that Suger’s images are not self-display, but penitential.

17 Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford, 1972), p. 1.

18 Nor is this process confined to Italy. See Eamon Duffy, ‘Late Medieval Religion’ , in Gothic Art for England, 1400–1547, ed. Richard Marks and Paul Williamson, ex. cat., Victoria & Albert Museum (London, 2003), esp. p. 60.

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however, that even within the culture that produced these painting con-tracts, Baxandall saw differences posed by certain media. He distinguished between the close relationship of client to panel painter and the more dis-tant relationship of client to artists involved in a necessarily more complex and collectivized form of artistic production such as a monumental fresco cycle.19

However useful Baxandall’s model of the patron-client may be for study-ing fifteenth-century Italian panel painting, reflexively invoking it in studies of medieval art is risky. As Jill Caskey explains, ‘medieval sources yield more complexity and often less certainty … than our habitual use of the mono-lithic term “patron” might imply’ .20 Despite the frequency with which stud-ies refer to medieval patrons, we know precious little about medieval com-missions and workshop organization.21 C. R. Dodwell’s investigations into Anglo-Saxon patronage of the arts established that in Latin texts, the per-son who commissioned a work is frequently portrayed as the one who ‘made’ the work of art, whether or not there was any likelihood of that person’s manual contribution to the finished product.22 Moreover, the extant Anglo-Saxon sources deal almost exclusively with monastic craftsmen and persons of social prestige associated with a monastic community, including abbots, bishops, and most especially saints, such as St Edith or St Dunstan.23 The inherent limitations of these extant textual references for understanding a work like the Bayeux Tapestry is demonstrated by the fact that most of the references to embroidery specify working in gold thread, and often with pearls and gems,24 by which standard the coloured wool thread and plain linen ground of our work is austere, or in Dodwell’s words, ‘quite ordinary’ .25

What we can glean from available sources suggests that the patronage of monumental art was unlikely to resemble the kind of patronage dis-cussed by Baxandall and Panofsky. A very different model of patronage can

19 Baxandall, Painting and Experience, pp. 20–6.20 Caskey, ‘Whodunit?’ p. 197.21 Kay Staniland, Medieval Craftsmen: Embroiderers (London, 1991), pp. 27–32,

discusses fourteenth-century royal accounts. In another medium known for multiple, collaborative stages, see the questions raised about workshop organiza-tion in Michael W. Cothren, ‘Suger’s Stained Glass Masters and their Workshop at Saint-Denis’ , in Paris, Center of Artistic Enlightenment, ed. George Mauner et al., Papers in Art History from Penn State University 4 (University Park, PA, 1988), pp. 46–75, esp. 51–4. See also Enrico Castelnuovo, ‘The Artist’ , in Medieval Callings, ed. Jacques Le Goff, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago, 1990), pp. 211–41; Walter Cahn, ‘The Artist as Outlaw and Apparatchik: Freedom and Constraint in the Interpretation of Medieval Art’ , in The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, ed. Stephen K. Scher, ex. cat, Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, May 8 – June 22 (Providence, RI, 1969), pp. 10–14.

22 C. R. Dodwell, Anglo-Saxon Art: A New Perspective (Ithaca, 1982), pp. 48–50, 69–70. On Gislebertus, often assumed to be a medieval artist, see Linda Seidel, Legends in Limestone: Lazarus, Gislebertus, and the Cathedral of Autun (Chicago, 1999), pp. 13–32, 159.

23 Dodwell, Anglo-Saxon Art, pp. 48–56.24 Dodwell, Anglo-Saxon Art, pp. 44–5, 70–2, 78, 129–45.25 Dodwell, Anglo-Saxon Art, p. 139.

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be extrapolated from George Wingfield Digby’s foundational study of the production of the Bayeux Tapestry. In it, Digby discussed two texts – the tenth-century life of St Dunstan and a fifteenth-century work from France – that allow us to imagine a collaborative process involving several different people, none of whom corresponds to the Renaissance client.26 First, there was the person – call him a ‘benefactor’ , to avoid confusion – who commis-sioned the work, provided funds for it, and specified the theme in general terms (‘Give me the story of the Norman Conquest’). Second, there was the author or iconographer, who developed the theme into a full-scale pro-gramme and composed the accompanying text. (‘Let’s begin the narrative with this scene, juxtapose these episodes with some Aesopian fables, and conclude here.’) Third, there was a designer, who translated into visual form the concept proposed by the patron and fully developed by the iconogra-pher. (‘Using the following colours, we’ll adapt the Last Supper composi-tion for this banquet, that Old Testament burial here, and incorporate the inscription up here.’) There were also artists to draw the detailed cartoon (especially critical if various lengths of the approximately 230-foot-long whole were being sent out to different workshops for simultaneous stitch-ing). Finally, to undertake the actual embroidery, there were stitchers, who were generally, but not exclusively, female.27 Because in this scenario the benefactor might do no more than commission and specify a subject for the work of art, the model of patronage built into it differs radically from the one that Panofsky invoked and that Baxandall later analysed.28 Here the iconographer, designer and artists involved in the physical creation of the embroidery work independently of the benefactor and without detailed directives from him. In fact, comparison of the two models of patronage just considered makes it clear how thoroughly previous scholars transformed a plausible hypothesis that Odo of Bayeux was somehow implicated in the Tapestry’s creation into the contestable theory that he did much more than Digby’s patrons do, by determining its message and the substance of particular

26 George Wingfield Digby, ‘Technique and Production’ , in The Bayeux Tapestry, ed. Stenton, pp. 37–55, at pp. 43–4, citing ‘Sancti Dunstani Vita Auctore B’ , in Memorials of Saint Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury, ed. William Stubbs, Rolls Series (London, 1874), pp. 20–1; and drawing from Pierre-Philippe Guignard, ‘Mémoires fournis aux peintres charges d’exécuter les cartons d’une tapisserie destinée à la collégiale Saint-Urbain de Troyes, représentant les légendes de St Urbain et de Ste Cécile’ , Mémoires de la Société d’Agriculture, Sciences et Arts de l’Aube 15 (1849–50), pp. 421–534. On Digby’s examples, see Berlin, ‘The Fables of the Bayeux Tapestry’ , pp. 191–2. Mildred Budny, ‘The Byrhtnoth Tapestry or Embroidery’ , in The Battle of Maldon, ad 991, ed. Donald Scragg (Oxford, 1991), pp. 263–78, underscores the patronage and production possibilities that lie behind the twelfth-century notice of the famed textile given to Ely.

27 Dodwell, Anglo-Saxon Art, pp. 46, 53, 70–2. On p. 57 n. 98 he observes that St Aldhelm’s treatise on virginity, sent to the nuns of Barking at the end of the seventh century, uses metaphors from weaving and needlework. See Aldhelm: The Prose Works, trans. Michael Lapidge and Michael Herren (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 65, 71–2.

28 Note that Digby, ‘Technique and Production’ , p. 52, mentions Odo only at the very end of his chapter.

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scenes in it. Odo as patron is turned into an explanatory principle for any features in the work of art that the interpreter deems relevant, which begs the question of how a work authored, designed and produced by others could bear such a strong imprint of this particular patron’s singular agenda.

Finding OdoIndeed, the figure of Odo that lurks in the background of many Bayeux Tapestry studies is not unlike Panofsky’s Suger: both portraits presuppose a micro-managing patron-client. Of the numerous scholars who cast Odo in this role, David Bernstein provides the most complete justification for this widely held point of view.29 Like others, he cites the inclusion of sev-eral images of the bishop himself, and one each of Norman milites called Wadard and Vital, to argue that Odo not only commissioned the Tapestry but also required its designer to magnify his own role in the Norman Conquest and include two of his men.30 However, Bernstein casts the argu-ment in more explicitly personal and psychological terms by using previous historians’ pejorative characterizations of Odo as grounds for assuming that, like Panofsky’s Suger and Baxandall’s Renaissance client, he forcefully pro-jected himself onto the work of art. A critical scene for Bernstein’s analysis of Odo’s patronage is the one of ship building (Colour Plate 19), which, through the garland of gestures culminating in the poised broad-axe on the right, dramatically depicts the decision made in Normandy to build ships for the invasion of England.31 For Bernstein, the scene is a prime example of how Odo projected his ‘not inconsiderable ego’ 32 onto the Tapestry because here, he claims, the Bishop of Bayeux appears for the first time in the role of directing the Norman invasion – something that no surviving text attributes to him.33 However, Bernstein’s interpretation of the scene is at odds with the inscription, which says nothing about Odo, but simply states, ‘Here Duke William ordered ships to be built’ . How then does Bernstein turn the ship-building scene into one deter-mined by Odo’s desire to glorify himself? First, he simply states as estab-lished fact that the artist’s dilemma was to depict Odo ‘in ways that would flatter his enormous ego, while not giving offence to the sensibilities of the

29 Bernstein, Mystery, pp. 136–43.30 Bernstein, Mystery, p. 30 and n. 15. On Wadard and Vital, see infra pp. 22–3, 26–9.31 BTDE, panel 80 / Wilson, pls. 34–5.32 Bernstein, Mystery, p. 143; see also pp. 34–6, 141–3.33 A representative list of scholars identifying Odo in this scene includes: Brooks

and Walker, ‘Authority and Interpretation’ , p. 68, who state that Odo ‘even appears to suggest the plan for the invasion of England’; David M. Wilson, The Bayeux Tapestry (London, 1985), p. 184, but see p. 212; Grape, The Bayeux Tapestry, p. 54; Richard Gameson, ‘The Origin, Art, and Message of the Bayeux Tapestry’ , in The Study of the Bayeux Tapestry, ed. Gameson, pp. 157–211, at p. 176; Lewis, Rhetoric of Power, pp. 117–19; Lucien Musset, The Bayeux Tapestry, trans. Richard Rex (Woodbridge, 2005), p. 182; Michael John Lewis, The Archaeological Authority of the Bayeux Tapestry, British Archaeological Reports, British Series 404 (Oxford, 2005), p. 4.

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royal brother who shares the stage’ .34 Second, by positing that ‘the picture does not illustrate what the words say’ ,35 Bernstein can subordinate the inscription’s reference to William’s command to his own view that the cleric, not the duke, is the truly commanding figure in the scene. Third, he discov-ers an ‘ironic’ visual emphasis given to Odo, whom he identifies as the figure between William and the craftsman, on the grounds that this cleric’s face is strongly defined, his attire boldly coloured, and his body elevated above William’s.36 Fourth, Bernstein asserts that in this instance, the artist satisfies Odo’s demand for glorification by deliberately excluding from the scene the many laymen and churchmen who offered Duke William advice, according to William of Poitiers, and by replacing them with one bold bishop, who virtually usurps the duke’s power of command at the very moment when the invasion of England is being planned.37 Finally, Bernstein naturalizes the notion that Odo actually appears in the ship-building scene by treating it as pendant to the later council of war scene where, in another enclosed structure, Bishop Odo, William, and Robert of Mortain are all named by inscription (Colour Plate 21).38

In order to argue that the designer, at Odo’s insistence, intended for the tonsured figure in the ship-building scene to represent Odo, Bernstein must engage in a subjective mode of analysis. This includes working from an a priori assumption of Odo’s egotistical patronage, disassociating the inscription from the accompanying pictorial images, and positing that the designer used William of Poitiers’s narrative as the Tapestry’s script but with parts suppressed and additions made for the sake of glorifying Odo. Bernstein even attributes engagement with colour and compositional detail to the patron, as though the bishop himself had stood over the seamstress demanding a higher thread count while somehow failing to get his name into the inscription.39 Finally, Bernstein draws an analogy between the ship-building scene and the council of war scene, which is not a true visual paral-lel, but one determined by his guiding assumption that the patron insisted on inserting himself into the narrative. Though both scenes feature a small group of figures in a framed interior setting, the analogy fails to convince, since the council of war scene is not parallel with respect to the number of figures, actions or inscriptions, and it takes place on the other side of the Channel, ten episodes later.

34 Bernstein, Mystery, p. 136.35 Bernstein, Mystery, p. 136.36 Bernstein, Mystery, p. 137.37 The Gesta Guillelmi of William of Poitiers, ed. and trans. R. H. C. Davis and

Marjorie Chibnall (Oxford, 1998), pp. 100–3, states that although the duke consulted with bishops, abbots, and ‘outstanding men of the secular order’ , his own ‘wisdom’ always prevailed in the end; the same text also notes that ‘under his prudent direction ships were built’ (pp. 102–3).

38 BTDE, panel 113 / Wilson, pl. 48.39 For the argument that some patrons were engaged by issues of style, see Ernst

Kitzinger, ‘The Gregorian Reform and the Visual Arts: A Problem of Method: The Prothero Lecture’ , Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 22 (1972), pp. 87–102, at pp. 100–1.

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By turning to the two scenes that name and depict Odo, namely the council of war (Colour Plate 21) and his appearance in the battle (Colour Plate 29), we can better understand the artistic strategies used in the ship-building scene.40 In both of the inscribed scenes, there is a reciprocity of inscription and pictorial narrative, even down to the pointing gesture of the figure in the adjacent banqueting scene.41 This gesture calls attention to the fact that the bishop giving the benediction at the meal is connected to the inscription naming odo episcopus in the council of war scene next to it. Moreover, since blessing food and drink, joining in a council of war, and appearing in battle with William are all activities in which Odo was likely to have engaged, there is no need to invoke Odo’s imperious demands to explain them. Although no textual account mentions these three activities specifically, William of Poitiers states that Odo was among the clerics and monks who ‘prepared for the combat with prayers’ .42 When speaking gener-ally of the bishop, William also writes that Odo ‘helped in war by his most practical counsels as far as his religion allowed [and that he] was singularly and most steadfastly loyal to [his brother William], whom he cherished with so great a love that he would not willingly be separated from him even on the battlefield’ .43 Obviously, these passages do not prove that Odo did any of the things the embroidery shows him doing. They do, however, indi-cate that the bishop himself was not the only person who could have imag-ined these scenarios. If this is true, then there is no need to insist that the Tapestry’s inclusion of images of Odo can be explained only by the hypoth-esis that he acted as the Tapestry’s patron in the style of Panofsky’s Suger. And indeed, it is his alleged presence in the ship-building scene that sets up the premise for reading as inappropriate or vainglorious the Tapestry’s inclusion of these scenes where he is named. In fact, there is no compelling reason to think that the cleric in the ship-building scene was intended to be Odo, and the circular method of analysis used to reach this conclusion is highly debatable. For certain view-ers, the clerical figure might evoke, in general terms, the duke’s consulta-tion of churchmen about whether to invade England; but within the scene’s compressed pictorial language, the figure simply operationalizes the duke’s command to build ships by speaking directly to the shipwright with the broad-axe.44 Moreover, the Tapestry’s use of clear, declamatory language

40 For Odo in battle, see BTDE, panels 158–9 / Wilson, pls. 67–8.41 As noted in O. K. Werckmeister, ‘The Political Ideology of the Bayeux Tapestry’ ,

Studi Medievali 17 (1976), pp. 535–95, at p. 579, n. 237; Bernstein, Mystery, pp. 140–1; and most recently, Gale R. Owen-Crocker, ‘The Interpretation of Gesture in the Bayeux Tapestry’ , Anglo-Norman Studies 29 (2006), pp. 145–78, at p. 149.

42 Gesta Guillelmi, pp. 124–5.43 Gesta Guillelmi, pp. 166–7.44 Whereas our analyses concern the authorial intent, namely the degree to which

Odo might have determined the message and detail of this scene, other scholars interested primarily in reception have suggested ways in which the beholder might have inferred Odo’s presence in this scene. For example, a certain way of display-ing the embroidery, as argued by Gale R. Owen-Crocker, ‘Brothers, Rivals, and the Geometry of the Bayeux Tapestry’ , in King Harold II and the Bayeux Tapestry,

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and imagery to identify Odo by name in two later inscriptions and three later scenes set in England, on the eve of the battle and during it, makes it impossible to explain why Odo would not have insisted that an inscrip-tion identify him in his first appearance on the entire Tapestry, at which point he has not been introduced in name or deed and is thus literally not in play in the unfolding narrative. The assumption that the Bayeux Tapestry was purposefully designed to magnify, even exaggerate, Odo’s involvement in the Conquest by casting him in important but improbable roles loses much of its plausibility if there is no reason to think that he even appears in the ship-building scene, much less plans the invasion of England. If this image is discounted, it is questionable whether the Tapestry ever casts Odo in a role so improbable that only his micro-managing patronage can explain it. What kind of a patron was Odo? This brief discussion has already used several terms to refine the vague, speculative and ‘monolithic’ notion of a patron. At one end of the spectrum of possibilities is the Renaissance client, who micro-manages a work to his personal glorification. This model, we contend, does not fit Odo’s role in the Bayeux Tapestry. Even scholars who would like to insist on his egotistical interventions in some scenes are forced to admit that ‘he got more than he bargained for’ in others, a contention we will analyse in the next section by looking at a scene that does not adopt an overtly Norman partisan perspective.45 At the other end of the spectrum is the benefactor, who instigates or contributes financially to a work of art, without assuming the role of author or designer. It is reasonable to view Odo in this second role. Doing so acknowledges his involvement with the monumental embroidery, without assuming that he egotistically inserted himself into the project by controlling all its details.

An Odonian perspective?Beyond contesting the view that Odo’s verifiable appearances on the Tapestry can be explained only by casting him in the role of a Renaissance client, it is also important to ask whether his alleged interventions in its design necessarily extended to dictating a pro-Norman account of the

ed. Gale R. Owen-Crocker (Woodbridge, 2005), pp. 107–23; or recitation by an interlocutor, as discussed by Richard Brilliant, ‘The Bayeux Tapestry: A Stripped Narrative for their Eyes and Ears’ , Word & Image 7 (1991), pp. 98–126, might encourage the viewer to locate Odo in this scene. Moreover, a contemporaneous beholder who knew that Odo gave the second largest number of ships (after his brother Robert of Mortain), as explained in Elisabeth M. C. van Houts, ‘The Ship List of William the Conqueror’ , Anglo-Norman Studies 10 (1987), pp. 159–83, and developed in Shirley Ann Brown, ‘Why Eustace, Odo and William?’ , Anglo-Norman Studies 12 (1989), pp. 7–28, at pp. 22, 26, might also deduce his presence in the scene.

45 Bernstein, Mystery, pp. 112, 163–4, and Bachrach, ‘Some Observations on the Bayeux Tapestry’ , p. 6, both make this statement. Note the similar language in Herbert L. Kessler, ‘A Lay Abbot as Patron: Count Vivian and the First Bible of Charles the Bald’ , in Committenti e Produzione Artistico-Letteraria nell’Alto Medioevo Occidentale (4–10 April 1991), Settimane di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo 39 (Spoleto, 1992), pp. 647–79, at p. 674.

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Conquest to the designer, who, ‘[e]ven had he so wished’ , as Stenton put it, ‘could do no other than follow the tale most acceptable to his patron’ .46 To show that the Tapestry is a triumphal monument to the Norman Conquest, scholars have cited its many similarities to early Norman accounts of the Conquest by William of Jumièges and William of Poitiers, both of whom justified Duke William’s claim to the English crown while telling of Harold’s journey to the Continent in c. 1064–5. If Odo of Bayeux was directly engaged in the Tapestry’s design, one would expect that, like these Norman narratives, the embroidery would give emphatic, unambiguous support to William’s right to become king of the English. Yet, as various scholars have noted, several scenes on the Tapestry that could support this claim fail to do so.47

Consider, in particular, the opening scene showing an interview with King Edward (Colour Plate 1).48 When this scene is glossed as showing the king sending Harold on a diplomatic mission to Normandy, it repre-sents the most important element in the case that the duke, not Harold, was Edward’s legitimate successor.49 William of Poitiers and William of Jumièges both stated that King Edward sent Harold as his envoy to the Continent to confirm his prior appointment of Duke William as his heir.50 Under this interpretation, the scene would establish the motivation for the

46 Sir Frank Stenton, ‘The Historical Background’ , in The Bayeux Tapestry, ed. Stenton, p. 9.

47 According to Bernstein, Mystery, pp. 114–23, the Tapestry does not fully support William’s claim to the throne in the scenes showing King Edward’s initial inter-view with Harold, Harold’s oath to Duke William, or Edward on his deathbed. Others who note places where the Tapestry fails to follow a Norman storyline include Brooks and Walker, ‘Authority and Interpretation’ , pp. 71, 72–6; Gameson, ‘Origin, Art, and Message’ , pp. 202–5; Albu, Normans in their Histories, pp. 88–90.

48 BTDE, panels 1–2 / Wilson, pls. 1–2. The drawings first published in Bernard de Montfaucon, Les Monumens de la monarchie françoise, 5 vols. (Paris, 1729–33), vol. 1, pp. 371–9, show that the Bayeux Tapestry was in a compromised condition at the time of its modern discovery. For a complete electronic version, see the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art in Paris (INHA), see http://bibliotheque-numerique.inha.fr/searchresults.cfm?cfid=23147&cftoken=94140013&isp=1&ism=0&isv=0&ispdf=3&str=montfaucon. See also the documentary photographs taken under the German Ahnenerbe in June–July 1841 in Sylvette Lemagnen, ‘The Bayeux Tapestry under German Occupation’ , in Embroidering the Facts, ed. Bouet et al., pp. 49–64 and, at pp. 57–8, figs. 5–8. While these images raise concerns about the condition of the beginning of the embroidery, the fact that most textual narrative accounts begin a new narrative unit with Harold’s journey suggests that this would be both a logical and familiar place to begin. See William of Jumièges, The Gesta Normannorum Ducum of William of Jumièges, Orderic Vitalis, and Robert of Torigni, ed. and trans. Elisabeth M. C. van Houts (Oxford, 1992), pp. 68–9. In addition, Owen-Crocker, ‘Brothers, Rivals’ , p. 118 n. 46, remarks that the identification of Harold by full title (as ‘Dux Anglorum’) in the second scene of the embroidery suggests that he has only recently been introduced.

49 On William’s claim, see George Garnett, Conquered England: Kingship, Succession, and Tenure, 1066–1166 (Oxford, 2007), esp. chap. 1, ‘The Justification of the Conquest’ , pp. 1–44.

50 Gesta Guillelmi, pp. 21, 69; William of Jumièges, Gesta Normannorum Ducum, vii.13 (31), pp. 2.158–2.161.

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entire narrative to follow, in which the duke invades England and seizes his rightful inheritance. However, the opening scene in the Tapestry has no inscription explaining Edward’s conversation with Harold, let alone Harold’s journey across the Channel that follows.51 Its most striking fea-ture, namely the large seated king referred to in the inscription, is rendered deftly as a much more aged man than the two nimble figures standing to his side, a juxtaposition that obliquely raises the question of succession.52 Though not named by inscription, the other principal figure is clearly iden-tified as Harold by the emphatic gesture in the very next scene pointing to his name.53 Not even Edward and Harold’s gesture – touching their right index fingers – clinches the significance of what is taking place.54 Instead, the scene in general and this gesture in particular tease us with specificity on which they fail to deliver.55

51 Later accounts identified different purposes for Harold’s trip and sometimes expressed uncertainty about why he went. Eadmeri Historia Novorum in Anglia, ed. Martin Rule, Rolls Series (London, 1884), p. 6; Eadmer of Canterbury, History of Recent Events in England: Historia Novorum in Anglia, trans. Geoffrey Bosanquet (London: Cresset Press, 1964), p. 6, states that Harold went to Normandy to free his brother and nephew who were held hostage. William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum: The History of the English Kings, 2 vols., ed. and trans. R. A. B. Mynors, completed by R. M. Thomson and M. Winterbottom (Oxford, 1998–9), pp. 416–17, suggests that Harold may have been on a fishing trip and blown off course; here, William also refers to multiple stories circulating by introducing his account with the phrases ‘Some say’ and ‘others maintain’ and only claims that his version ‘looks very close to the truth’ .

52 According to William of Poitiers, Gesta Guillelmi, line 1.41, pp. 68–9, Edward thought his own death was ‘near at hand’ .

53 Owen-Crocker, ‘Interpretation of Gesture’ , pp. 147–9.54 Owen-Crocker, ‘Interpretation of Gesture’ , p. 152 suggests a touch of farewell, or

more wishfully, endowing with plenipotentiary powers.55 Similarly, the deathbed scene does not make a convincing case for Harold’s claim

to succeed Edward as king. Instead, it can be interpreted as showing Edward com-mending his wife Edith to Harold’s care, as in the Vita Ædwardi, or as picturing Harold accepting a bequest of the kingdom that he ought have refused on account of his previous oath to Duke William. Moreover, if one were to interpret the gesture in the opening scene as a sign of Edward’s making and Harold’s receiving a grant of some kind, and were then to place a parallel construction on the similar gesture in the later scene showing King Edward on his deathbed, the net effect would be to endorse the view that on this earlier occasion Edward conveyed some-thing to Harold. However, the depiction of Edward making a deathbed bequest to Harold would have complicated the task of legitimating William’s claim that he and not Harold was Edward’s legitimate successor, because it is incompatible with asserting, as William of Jumièges (Gesta Normannorum Ducum, pp. 160–1) does, that Harold had simply usurped the throne. Why would Odo of Bayeux have introduced or tolerated this complication in a Norman triumphal monument, along with the additional problem that the opening scene does not indicate that Edward expressly sent Harold to designate William as his heir? For a description closely resembling the one on the Tapestry, see Frank Barlow, ed. and trans., The Life of King Edward, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1992), pp. 118–19, 122–3 (hereafter: Vita Ædwardi). See also Brooks and Walker, ‘Authority and Interpretation’ , pp. 73, 80; Gameson, ‘Origin, Art, and Message’ , pp. 192–5; Musset, The Bayeux Tapestry,

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To account for the Tapestry’s failure to explain the initial meeting between Edward and Harold and the latter’s subsequent journey, some scholars have remarked that pictorial language is necessarily ambigu-ous, since it cannot portray the motives for actions, let alone present the consecutive detail of a written narrative.56 However, there are contempo-raneous examples of text and imagery that the designer could have used to explain Edward and Harold’s opening interview, if he had desired to do so. Specifically, the Carmen de Hastingae Proelio refers to a ring and a sword that King Edward sent to Duke William through Harold, as mate-rial tokens confirming Edward’s designation of William as his heir.57 In this text, as in many documents of the period, tangible objects are used to embody agreements and promises.58 Similar motifs are used pictori-ally in the English manuscript known as the St Albans Psalter from the first quarter of the twelfth century. In the coloured line-drawing from the Psalter that prefaces the poem of the ‘Life of St Alexis’ (Figure 1), the saint bestows gifts of his sword-belt and ring on his wife, from whom he is departing. These gifts, which are very like the tokens the Carmen says Edward had Harold deliver to Duke William, are mentioned in both the coloured captions over the central turret and the verses that follow.59 This visual symbolism is thus part of the contemporaneous repertoire, on which the designer could have drawn if he had sought to make that kind of clear declaration.60 But the Bayeux Tapestry eschews such clarity: no token or gift is given by King Edward to Harold.

p. 166; H. E. J. Cowdrey, ‘King Harold II and the Bayeux Tapestry: A Critical Introduction’ , in King Harold II and the Bayeux Tapestry, ed. Owen-Crocker, pp. 1–15, at p. 8; Elizabeth Carson Pastan, ‘Montfaucon as Reader of the Bayeux Tapestry’ , in Medieval Art and Architecture after the Middle Ages, ed. Janet T. Marquardt and Alyce Jordan (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2009).

56 See, for example, Stenton, ‘Historical Background’ , pp. 14–15, 22; J. Bard McNulty, Visual Meaning in the Bayeux Tapestry: Problems and Solutions in Picturing History (Lewiston, 2003), p. 3, pp. 11–21.

57 The Carmen de Hastingae Proelio of Guy Bishop of Amiens, ed. and trans. Frank Barlow (Oxford, 1972), lines 295–6, pp. 18–19: ‘Anulus est illi testis concessus et ensis, / Que per te nosti missa fuisse sibi’ . According to Barlow, ‘If Harold’s mission to the Continent in 1064/5 … was to renew a promise made by Edward to William, he would, most likely, have taken some significant tokens. The ring and sword were the first two of the five coronation regalia.’ Barlow, ‘Introduction’ , pp. xxiv–xlii, argues persuasively for dating the text to within about four years of Hastings.

58 For the practice in general, see Stephen D. White, Custom, Kinship, and Gifts to Saints: The ‘Laudatio Parentum’ in Western France, 1050–1150 (Chapel Hill, 1988), pp. 31–7, esp. n. 101, with further bibliography and examples of staffs, knives, hammers, and books that could physically represent gifts.

59 http://www.abdn.ac.uk/stalbanspsalter/english/commentary/page057.shtml for the image; and http://www.abdn.ac.uk/stalbanspsalter/english/translation/trans057.shtml for the text.

60 Also see C. R. Dodwell and Peter Clemoes, The Old English Illustrated Hexateuch, Early English Manuscripts in Facsimile 18 (Copenhagen, 1974), p. 28 and fols. 56r and 57r, for similar images in this mid-eleventh-century manuscript produced in Canterbury, where the identifying tokens of Judah’s staff, bracelet, and ring

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The opening interview, which could insist on a pro-Norman political message but does not, suggests that the Bayeux Tapestry does not clearly present what one writer has called ‘an Odonian view of the Conquest’ .61 This has posed a dilemma for scholars who insist on Odo’s micro-managing patronage, because even a negligent patron could surely attend to the mes-sage woven into the opening scene of the Tapestry.62 It is unthinkable that

save Tamar from death. We acknowledge with gratitude the kindness of Julian Harrison, Curator of Manuscripts at the British Library, who allowed Elizabeth Pastan to consult the Hexateuch in the original.

61 J. Bard McNulty, The Narrative Art of the Bayeux Tapestry (New York, 1989), pp. 76–7.

62 For a different view, see Bernstein, Mystery, p. 164, and Bachrach, ‘Some Observations on the Bayeux Tapestry’ , pp. 7–9.

1. Saint Alexis bestowing his sword-belt and ring on his wife. The Saint Albans Psalter, c. 1125, Hildesheim, Dombibliothek, ms St. God. 1, fol. 57

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Odo, the Earl of Kent and the Conqueror’s half-brother, would not have insisted that the very beginning of the embroidery carry a clear and force-ful demonstration that William had a strong and even indefeasible claim to the throne. Because the Tapestry’s shortcomings as an overtly pro-Norman political statement are incompatible with the notion that Odo controlled the message, we must therefore assign agency in designing it, not to Odo, but to others.

Odo and his creaturesEven among those who acknowledge the difficulties involved in determin-ing the Bayeux Tapestry’s narrative perspective, the image of Odo as the egotistical, controlling patron has endured because scholars have long assumed that only what Stenton called ‘the necessity of satisfying [this] formidable patron’ could explain other features of the Tapestry, notably its favourable depiction not just of the bishop himself, but of two men called Wadard and Vital.63 When nineteenth-century scholars first developed this model of Odo’s patronage, and when their successors in the twenti-eth century endorsed it, they never considered other ways of accounting for the images of these three men on the Tapestry. Instead, they evidently took it for granted that the Bishop of Bayeux was so odious a figure, and Wadard and Vital so closely tied to him, that without his special direc-tion, no one authoring and designing the Tapestry would voluntarily have represented him favourably or even considered depicting his two creatures. Recent scholarship, however, has undercut this assumption by presenting

63 Stenton, ‘Historical Background’ , p. 23. For the identification of Wadard, Vital, and, in some cases, Turold as tenants in Kent of Odo of Bayeux, see e.g. Thomas Amyot, ‘Observations on an Historical Fact Supposed to be Established by the Bayeux Tapestry’ , Archaeologia 19 (1821), pp. 88–95; Henry Ellis, A General Introduction to Domesday Book (London, 1833), p. 404 n. 1; Edward A. Freeman, ‘The Authority of the Bayeux Tapestry’ , Appendix A, The History of the Norman Conquest of England, vol. 3, The Reign of Harold and the Interregnum, rev. edn (New York, 1873), pp. 377–85, at pp. 380–1; Henri Prentout, ‘Essai d’identification des personages inconnus de la Tapisserie de Bayeux’ , Revue historique 176 (1935), pp. 14–23; trans. as ‘An Attempt to Identify Some Unknown Characters in the Bayeux Tapestry’ , in The Study of the Bayeux Tapestry, ed. Gameson, pp. 21–30, at pp. 25–30; Stenton, ‘The Historical Background’ , pp. 9–24, at p. 21 and n. 16; Wormald, ‘Style and Design’ , p. 33 and n. 39; Werckmeister, ‘Political Ideology’ , pp. 580, 583, 586–7, where Werckmeister proposes unconvincingly that Turold, Wadard, and Vital were the Tapestry’s patrons; Brooks and Walker, ‘Authority and Interpretation’ , p. 68 and nn. 22–3. Like Werckmeister, Brown, ‘Why Eustace, Odo and William?’ , pp. 7–28, at p. 26, proposes that Odo’s three tenants commissioned the Tapestry while he was in prison. Since Stenton, ‘Historical Background’ , p. 24 n. 2, and Musset, The Bayeux Tapestry, p. 112, doubt whether the figure on the Tapestry with the very common name of ‘Turold’ can be confi-dently identified with anyone of the same name in Normandy or post-Conquest England, we follow Gameson, ‘Introduction’ , in The Study of the Bayeux Tapestry, ed. Gameson, pp. ix–xiii at p. xi, in focusing only on Wadard and Vital. On Wadard, see Stephen D. White, ‘Hic est Wadard: Tenant of Odo of Bayeux or Miles of Saint Augustine’s, Canterbury?’ (forthcoming).

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Odo as a complex figure and both Wadard and Vital as men of standing in post-Conquest Kent. The image of Odo as so wildly ambitious, egotistical, treacherous, and addicted to plunder that he was universally reviled clashes with modern scholarship on the trial of Penenden Heath, which is no longer seen, as it once was, as ‘the attempt of the pious, reforming cleric Lanfranc to save his church from the spoliation of the rapacious Odo’ .64 The same negative image clashes with the nuanced study of Odo by David Bates, who not only finds ‘the evidence for Odo’s supposed brutality and encroachments on church lands … insubstantial’ , but also represents the bishop as a generous patron of selected laymen, clerics, and monks, without whose support, one assumes, Odo could never have gained so much power or maintained it as long as he did.65

Finally – and directly relevant to the question of the Tapestry’s patron-age and design – the theory that Odo had to demand glorification from the Tapestry’s designer is very difficult to reconcile with evidence about his associations with the monastic community at St Augustine’s, Canterbury, whose members would have needed no directives from him to represent him favourably on the Tapestry. From around 1070 onwards, Odo actively sup-ported the monks of St Augustine’s with quit-claims and gifts of important properties in return for prayers for his soul.66 Prior to his imprisonment in 1082, he was also the abbey’s primary protector.67 Furthermore, by advising Abbot Scolland and his monks on moving St Hadrian’s sarcophagus, Odo also participated in the process (initiated by this abbot and completed by Abbot Guy in 1091) of translating the relics of Augustine and other saints into the abbey’s new church.68

64 Alan Cooper, ‘Extraordinary Privilege: The Trial of Penenden Heath and the Domesday Inquest’ , English Historical Review 116 (2001), pp. 1167–92, at p. 1187. For accounts of the trial, see Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum: The Acta of William I (1066–1087), ed. David Bates (Oxford, 1998), no. 69, pp. 315–26. David Bates, ‘The Land Pleas of William I’s Reign: Penenden Heath Revisited’ , Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 51 (1978), pp. 1–19, rejects ‘the accepted view’ that the trial was a response to the depredations of Odo and his men after the Norman Conquest (p. 14) and attributes pejorative characterizations of Odo in late eleventh-century accounts of the trial to the need at Christ Church to find ‘a culprit … to explain the necessity for [the trial] and the suitability of ‘the discred-ited and exiled Odo, bishop of Bayeux and earl of Kent’ for this role (pp. 18–19).

65 On Odo’s patronage of clerics, see Bates, ‘Character and Career of Odo’ , pp. 11, 13.66 On Odo’s gifts and quit-claims to St Augustine’s, see Emma Cownie, Religious

Patronage in Anglo-Norman England, 1066–1135, Royal Historical Society Studies in History, New Series (Woodbridge, 1998), p. 102 and nn. 35–6; Ann Williams, ‘The Anglo-Norman Abbey’ , in St Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury, ed. Richard Gem, English Heritage Book (London, 1997), pp. 50–66, at p. 59.

67 Williams, ‘Anglo-Norman Abbey’ , p. 59.68 See Brooks and Walker, ‘Authority and Interpretation’ , p. 77, citing Goscelin of

Saint Bertin, Libellus de adventu Beati Adriani abbatis in Angliam ejusque virtu-tibus (British Library, ms Cotton Vespasian b.xx, fol. 243v). See also Gameson, ‘Origin, Art, and Message’ , p. 171; Williams, ‘Anglo-Norman Abbey’ , p. 55; Lewis, Archaeological Authority, p. 11, n. 82; Gem in St Augustine’s Abbey, ed. Gem, pp. 114–15.

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Odo may also have served as a mediator between the abbey and poten-tial lay benefactors, including the king. He made one of his own gifts to St Augustine’s for William’s soul as well as his own and participated in sev-eral of the king’s conveyances to the abbey.69 William also made his own gifts in return for the monks’ prayers.70 William’s obit, like Odo’s, appears in St Augustine’s Martyrology, as does an obit for his wife, Queen Matilda.71 After Odo’s release from prison in 1087, following the deaths of both William and Scolland, he continued his association with the monastery by attending Lanfranc’s installation of Abbot Guy.72 The inclusion of Odo’s obit in the abbey’s Martyrology after his death at Palermo in 1097 confirms that he was still remembered in the monks’ prayers, in spite of having been exiled by William II.73

Odo must have facilitated the process of integrating several men holding land from him in Kent into what Ann Williams aptly calls St Augustine’s ‘local social network of mutual support’ .74 However, the creation of this network – which was essential to the abbey’s fortunes after 1066 – presup-posed that each member of it would establish a reciprocal relationship with the monks for himself, and often for some of his kin as well. In doing so, he might become a miles of the abbot; a frater of the monks – that is, a member of the confraternity; a monachus ad succurendum who came to the abbey to die in a monastic habit; or even a monk of St Augustine’s.75 Among the men holding land from Odo who formed such associations with St Augustine’s were both Wadard and Vital. If the monks had good reasons for depict-ing Odo favourably on the Tapestry, they also had grounds for including named images of these two men on it.76 Since the nineteenth century, the use of Domesday Book entries to identify Wadard and Vital merely as Odo’s ‘tenants’ , ‘vassals’ , or ‘retainers’ has been essential to the case for his

69 See Regesta, nos. 82 (1070–2 or 1070–5), 83 (14 July 1077), 84 (1070–1082/3), 85 (1070–1082/3).

70 Williams, ‘Anglo-Norman Abbey’ , p. 59; Cownie, Religious Patronage, p. 103.71 Martyrology, British Library, ms Cotton Vitellius c.xii, fol. 140v. For the obit for

‘Mathildis Regina Anglorum’ , see Martyrology, fol. 127v.72 Williams, ‘Anglo-Norman Abbey’ , p. 54.73 Martyrology, British Library, ms Cotton Vitellius c.xii, fol. 114v. On Odo’s obit,

see Brooks and Walker, ‘Authority and Interpretation’ , p. 77; Bernstein, Mystery, p. 54, Gameson, ‘Origin, Art, and Message’ , p. 171.

74 Williams, ‘Anglo-Norman Abbey’ , p. 61. Regesta, nos. 86 (1070–82/3) and 87 (1070–82/3). On grants of confraternity to men holding land of Odo, see Hirokazu Tsurushima, ‘The Fraternity of Rochester Cathedral Priory about 1100’ , Anglo-Norman Studies 14 (1991), pp. 313–37, at p. 33. On confraternity in England, see The Liber Vitae of the New Minster and Hyde Abbey, Winchester, ed. Simon Keynes (Copenhagen, 1996), ‘Introduction’ , pp. 15–132, esp. pp. 54–61; Jan Gerchow, Die Gedenküberliferung der Angelsachsen: mit einem Katalog der libri vitae und Necrologien, Schriftenreihe des Instituts für Frühmittelalterforschung der Universität Münster, vol. 20 (Berlin, 1988), pp. 3–84.

75 On Normans who became monks at St Augustine’s, see Cownie, Religious Patronage, pp. 102–3.

76 For Wadard in the Tapestry, see BTDE panel 107 / Wilson, pl. 46; for Vital, see BTDE panel 128 / Wilson, pl. 55.

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micro-managing patronage of the Tapestry, because scholars assumed that no one else could have had any interest in these two men. However, recent scholarship provides grounds for challenging this assumption by showing that Wadard and Vital cannot plausibly be described as men totally sub-ordinated to the bishop. Each became associated with St Augustine’s inde-pendently of Odo during Scolland’s abbacy. Vital, a merchant of means, held land ‘in fief ’ from Scolland,77 who granted him confraternity at the abbey after he helped to transport building stone from Caen for the new abbey church.78 His obit appears in the Martyrology,79 which also notes the death of his son Haimo, another frater of St Augustine’s.80

Wadard’s ties to this community are documented in various texts. Domesday Book for Kent and the so-called Excerpta of St Augustine’s show him holding land from Scolland and the monks in return for rent and tithes,81 and the early twelfth-century Noticia terrarum of the same house indicates that he had been an enfeoffed knight in the abbey’s honour.82 According to William Thorne’s late thirteenth-century history of the abbey, Wadard assumed this position in 1079, when Scolland granted a life- interest in lands pertaining to Northbourne to Wadard the miles in return for an annual rent of thirty shillings and tithes on all his goods.83 Moreover, a fuller record of this conventio in a late thirteenth-century cartulary copy shows that relations of mutual support between Wadard and St Augustine’s

77 Adolphus Ballard, ed., ‘An Eleventh-Century Inquisition of St. Augustine’s, Canterbury’ [henceforth Excerpta], in The British Academy Records of the Social and Economic History of England and Wales, vol. 4 (1920; rpt. Munich, 1981), part 2, pp. 1–33, at p. 19. On Vital, see Hirokazu Tsurushima, ‘Salmon, Herring, Oysters, and 1066’ , Anglo-Norman Studies 29 (2006), pp. 193–213, at pp. 207–12; and, for references to Vital in Domesday Book, see K. S. B. Keats-Rohan, Domesday People: A Prosopography of Persons Occurring in English Documents, 1066–1166, vol. 1: Domesday Book (Woodbridge, 1999), p. 443 (‘Vitalis de Canterbire’).

78 Williams, ‘Anglo-Norman Abbey’ , pp. 60–1. For the story of the building stone, see Goscelin of Saint Bertin, De miraculis Sancti Augustini, British Library, ms Cotton Vespasian b.xx, fols. 61–85, at fols. 69–70v; for a summary, a commen-tary, and a transcript, see Richard Gem, ‘Canterbury and the Cushion Capital: A Commentary on Passages from Goscelin’s De Miraculis Sancti Augustini’ , in Romanesque and Gothic: Essays for George Zarnecki, ed. Neil Stratford (Woodbridge, 1987), pp. 83–101, at pp. 83–5, 88–93, 98–100; see also Tsurushima, ‘Salmon, Herring, Oysters’ , pp. 209–11.

79 Martyrology, fol. 139r, where Haimo’s father Vital is not, however, identified as a frater.

80 Martyrology, fol. 132r.81 See Keats-Rohan, Domesday People, 1: p. 444; Excerpta, pp. 21, 22, 24.82 ‘The White Book of Saint Augustine’s’ , Kew, National Archives, e164/27, fol. 12v:

‘milites feofati in suprascripta terra & in honore sancti Augustini’ . On the surviv-ing cartularies of Saint Augustine’s and other texts including charters of the abbey, see S. E. Kelly, ed., Charters of St Augustine’s Abbey Canterbury and Minster-in-Thanet, Anglo-Saxon Charters, vol. 4 (Oxford, 1995), pp. xxxvii–lxix.

83 ‘White Book’ , fol. 2. Hirokazu Tsurushima, ‘Feudum in Kent c. 1066–1215’ , Journal of Medieval History 21 (1995), pp. 97–115, at p. 106, citing William Thorne, De rebus gestis Abbatum Sancti Augustini Cantuariae, in Historiae Anglicanae Scriptores, vol. 10, ed. Roger Twysden (London, 1652), col. 1789.

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were more personal and more significant than Thorne’s abstract of the agreement indicated. In addition to rendering tithes and rent, Wadard was to ‘serve the abbot and brothers faithfully [fideliter] as their miles’ – a pro-vision suggesting that he may have sworn an oath or oaths of fidelity to Scolland. In return, the monks granted Wadard the privilege of burial in their cemetery, close to the abbey’s relics, and, by implication, confraternity with the monks.84

Wadard and Vital, like Odo of Bayeux, were remembered not only by name in the prayers of the monks of St Augustine’s but also by being memorialized on the Bayeux Tapestry. Indeed, the list of people who are named on the Tapestry and remembered at the monastery includes more than these three men. This list suggests that the Tapestry’s political ideology is not Norman, much less Odonian or English, but rather Anglo-Norman, as inflected by the historical experience and monastic perspective of St Augustine’s.85 It includes Edward, King of the English; Harold, King of the English; William, Duke of Normandy, later King of the English; Stigand, Archbishop of Canterbury;86 Wadard, miles of St Augustine’s; Odo, Bishop of Bayeux; and Vital, frater of St Augustine’s. The list may also include the ‘Eustacius’ probably depicted on the Tapestry, since the Martyrology includes an obit for a ‘Eustachius frater noster’ .87 It is even conceivable that the Tapestry’s Ælfgyva is one of five or more women of that name whose obits are in the Martyrology, each of them designated as ‘soror nostra’ .88 Furthermore, the overlap between those depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry and those remembered in the monks’ prayers is even more extensive than the previous lists suggest. Since many Kentishmen died at Hastings and since, for the day of the battle (14 October), the Martyrology notes not only the death of Harold, King of the English, but the deaths of ‘many of our brothers’ [‘quamplurimi fratres nostri’], the monks of St Augustine’s were evidently obligated to remember in their prayers not just all or almost all of the named figures on the Tapestry, but also the many English dead who were counted their brothers (Colour Plate 31).89

84 British Library, ms Cotton Julius d.ii, fol. 107v: ‘Ipse autem serviet abbati & fratri-bus fideliter sicut miles eorum.’

85 On the Tapestry as ‘Anglo-Norman’ see Stenton, ‘Historical Background’ , p. 11; Gameson, ‘Origin, Art, and Message’ , pp. 173–4; Neveux, ‘Conclusions’ , p. 406.

86 BTDE, panel 72 / Wilson, pl. 31 (see Colour Plate 18). On the image of Stigand on the Tapestry, see Barbara English, ‘The Coronation of Harold in the Bayeux Tapestry’ , in Embroidering the Facts, ed. Bouet et al., pp. 349–81, at pp. 377–8. Neveux, ‘Conclusions’ , p. 405, cites this discussion as evidence that the Tapestry ‘could not have been completed later than 1070’ .

87 BTDE, panels 160–1 / Wilson, pl. 68. Martyrology, fol. 118. 88 BTDE, panel 39 / Wilson, pl. 17 (see Colour Plate 7). For obits of women called

‘Ælfgyva’ or ‘elfgiua’ , see Martyrology, fols. 115v, 123, 123v, 128v, 141. The obit for 11 May (fol. 128v) is for Ælfgyva, abbess of Barking, as noted in David Knowles, C. N. L. Brooke and Vera C. M. London, The Heads of Religious Houses in England and Wales, 940–1216, vol. 1, 2nd edn with new material by C. N. L. Brooke (Cambridge, 2001), p. 208.

89 BTDE panels 168–71 / Wilson, pls. 70–2. Martyrology, fol. 145v. Obits for ‘rex Harold’ and ‘rex Haraldus anglorum’ , respectively, are also found in the ‘Liber

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If fewer than ten images said to relate to Odo of Bayeux can make a case for the bishop’s patronage of the Bayeux Tapestry, then more than three score images of English and Norman beneficiaries of prayers by the monks of St Augustine’s should make a case for the hypothesis that this monas-tic community consistently played a more directive role in determining the Tapestry’s meaning than previous scholarship has allowed for.

St Augustine’s, CanterburyDown to the present day, the case for connecting the Bayeux Tapestry to St Augustine’s, Canterbury, has consisted of three main arguments.90 First, scholars have found evidence for the embroidery’s English provenance in Anglo-Saxon elements of the inscriptions and England’s well-developed and much-admired tradition of embroidery. Second, they have noted sty-listic relationships between the images on the embroidery and those to be found in Canterbury manuscripts. Canterbury was known for manuscript decoration of exceptional quality, still attested to in such post-Conquest works as St Augustine’s Martyrology (British Library, ms Cotton Vitellius b.xii) and its Passionale (British Library, ms Arundel 91).91 The strength of these artistic traditions, and the evidence, stylistic and iconographic, of parallels to the Bayeux Tapestry, have led many scholars to believe it was designed in Canterbury.92 Finally, clear evidence of close, amicable ties

vitae’ of Thorney Abbey (Gerchow, Die Gedenküberliferung, p. 326) and a necrol-ogy from Ely (Gerchow, Die Gedenküberliferung, p. 349). For an obituary list for Christ Church, Canterbury, that merely notes 14 October as the anniversary of those who died at Hastings, see Robin Fleming, ‘Christchurch’s Sisters and Brothers: An Edition and Discussion of Canterbury Obituary Lists’ , in The Culture of Christendom: Essays in Medieval History in Commemoration of Denis L. T. Bethell, ed. Marc Anthony Meyer (London, 1993), pp. 115–53, at p. 142.

90 See Brooks and Walker, ‘Authority and Interpretation’ , pp. 71–8.91 C. M. Kauffmann, Romanesque Manuscripts, 1066–1190, A Survey of Manuscripts

Illuminated in the British Isles vol. 3 (London, 1975), cat. nos. 18 and 17, respec-tively, pp. 61–2.

92 The list of scholars who infer that the Bayeux Tapestry was made in Canterbury, and most likely at St Augustine’s, includes: Wormald, ‘Style and Design’ , pp. 32–3; Dodwell and Clemoes, Old English Illustrated Hexateuch, pp. 71–3 and pls. 10–13; Brooks and Walker, ‘Authority and Interpretation’ , pp. 71–8; Bernstein, Mystery, pp. 37–81, esp. 46; Jennie Kiff, ‘Images of War: Illustrations of Warfare in Early Eleventh-Century England’ , Anglo-Norman Studies 7 (1984), pp. 177–94, esp. 190–2; Gameson, ‘Origin, Art, and Message’ , pp. 169–73; Cyril R. Hart, ‘The Canterbury Contribution to the Bayeux Tapestry’ , in Art and Symbolism in Medieval Europe: Papers of the ‘Medieval Europe Brugge 1997’ Conference V, ed. Guy de Boe and Frans Verhaeghe (Zellik, 1997), pp. 7–15; Cyril R. Hart, ‘The Bayeux Tapestry and Schools of Illumination at Canterbury’ , Anglo-Norman Studies 22 (1999), pp. 117–67; Maylis Baylé, ‘The Bayeux Tapestry and Decoration in North-Western Europe: Style and Composition’ , in Embroidering the Facts, ed. Bouet et al., pp. 303–25, esp. p. 306; Gail R. Owen-Crocker, ‘Reading the Bayeux Tapestry through Canterbury Eyes’ , in Anglo-Saxons: Studies Presented to Cyril Roy Hart, ed. Simon Keynes and Alfred P. Smyth (Dublin, 2006), pp. 243–65, at pp. 243–4. Even Beech, Was the Bayeux Tapestry Made in France?, who argues

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between Odo of Bayeux and St Augustine’s make it virtually certain that Odo would have commissioned the Tapestry from this abbey rather than Christ Church, with which his relations throughout his lifetime were less than cordial, if not openly hostile. Some of those subscribing to the view that St Augustine’s accepted a commission from Odo to design the Bayeux Tapestry have also found grounds for thinking that the monks played an active role in its creation by including, here and there, motifs that undercut the Norman message.93 But it was difficult to make sense of these insights or other previously noted indications that the Tapestry failed to endorse a Norman triumphal mes-sage while adhering to the conventional model of Odo’s patronage. However, the finding that the monks of St Augustine’s were praying for both English and Norman figures depicted on the embroidery suggests that they were centrally involved in determining its meaning. Recent scholarship on the post-Conquest history of the abbey has estab-lished that St Augustine’s was fully capable of authoring, designing and overseeing the Bayeux Tapestry. It had the necessary financial resources, administrative infrastructure, and vision. As Richard Emms explains, the monks ‘had to come to terms with the new order and preserve important traditions from the past’ .94 By almost any measurement – artistic, finan-cial, and political – they succeeded. A key to their successes was William I’s appointment of Abbot Scolland, a scholar and accomplished scribe from Mont-Saint-Michel, which was arguably the Norman religious community with the strongest artistic traditions of its own. Scolland quickly assumed a position of primacy among English abbots, involving himself directly in administering the abbey’s landed inheritance and expanding its revenues, and playing a leading role in promoting and defending his monastery’s interests in disputes with Archbishop Lanfranc and the monks of Christ Church.95 At the same time, he promoted several ambitious projects aimed

for production in the Loire valley (pp. 96–9), concedes a ‘profound’ Canterbury influence in the design.

93 For example, recent scholars have argued that motifs from Canterbury manu-scripts were selected with an eye to the ironical commentary their original context would bring to the Tapestry’s imagery. See Owen-Crocker, ‘Reading the Bayeux Tapestry’ , p. 264, and Sarah Larratt Keefer, ‘Body Language: a Graphic Commentary by the Horses of the Bayeux Tapestry’ , in King Harold II and the Bayeux Tapestry, ed. Owen-Crocker, pp. 93–108, esp. 101–5.

94 Richard Emms, ‘The Historical Traditions of St Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury’ , in Canterbury and the Norman Conquest: Churches, Saints and Scholars, 1066–1109, ed. Richard Eales and Richard Sharpe (London, 1995), pp. 159–68, at p. 159.

95 On Scolland’s appointment and abbacy, see C. E. Woodruff, ‘Some Early Professions of Canonical Obedience to the See of Canterbury by Heads of Religious Houses’ , Archaeologia Cantiana 37 (1925), pp. 53–72, at p. 60; Richard Emms, ‘The Early History of Saint Augustine’s Abbey’ , in St Augustine and the Conversion of England, ed. Richard Gameson (Stroud, 1999), pp. 410–27, at p. 423; Emms, ‘Historical Traditions’ , pp. 160–1; Paul Hayward, ‘Gregory the Great as “Apostle of the English” in Post-Conquest Canterbury’ , Journal of Ecclesiastical History 85 (2004), pp. 19–57, at pp. 31, 35–40; Williams, ‘Anglo-Norman Abbey’ , pp. 50–2. On Scolland at Mont-Saint-Michel and the books he probably brought from there to St Augustine’s, see J. J. Alexander, Norman Illumination at Mont

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at enhancing the abbey’s reputation. In particular, he planned to rebuild the abbey and have the relics of its English saints translated into the new church. Both projects remained unfinished at Scolland’s death, but the suc-cessful completion of each a few years later can be credited largely to his leadership. Moreover, their success had effects that extended beyond the monastic community to enhance St Augustine’s influence and prestige. The abbey church, though undertaken after the rebuilding of Christ Church, did not copy the earlier cathedral but used a distinctive ambulatory design in the hemi cycle that facilitated access to the chapels with their newly trans-lated relics and itself became ‘possibly even the single most important model for the subsequent development of Anglo-Norman Romanesque architec-ture’ .96 St Augustine’s also served as a model for the translation ceremonies themselves. The abbey, according to Richard Sharpe, ‘was so successful in its staging and presentation of the 1091 translation that it set a model … for such events in England’ .97

This esteemed Anglo-Saxon monastery’s success during Scolland’s abbacy in retaining and even enhancing its status under the new Norman regime also accounts for another feature of the Bayeux Tapestry that Odo’s patronage cannot explain: what has been termed its ‘even-handedness’ . The Tapestry fails to impugn either the English, as Norman authors did, or the Normans, as several texts written from an English perspective did. The embroidery does not overtly vilify any of the English it depicts by name, in the manner of the texts that resemble it most closely in terms of narrative structure, namely the Gesta Normannorum Ducum of William of Jumièges and the Gesta Guillelmi of William of Poitiers. In contrast to William of Poitiers, for example, the Tapestry’s designer refrained both from portraying Harold II as a perjurer, traitor, fratricide, or tyrant,98 and from condemn-ing the English who fell at Hastings as traitors to their rightful lord who died deservedly.99 At the same time, however, the Tapestry represents and explains the Norman Conquest very differently from authors who wrote about it from a English perspective.100 As we have seen, the Tapestry never

St Michel, 966–1100 (Oxford, 1970), pp. 17–18, with bibliography; and Gameson, ‘English Manuscript Art in the Late Eleventh Century: Canterbury and its Context’ , in Canterbury and the Norman Conquest: Churches, Saints and Scholars, 1066–1109, ed. Eales and Sharpe, pp. 106, 110, 117–18.

96 Richard Gem, ‘The Anglo-Saxon and Norman Churches’ , in St Augustine’s Abbey, ed. Gem, pp. 90–122, at p. 120.

97 Richard Sharpe, ‘The Setting of St Augustine’s Translation, 1091’ , in Canterbury and the Norman Conquest, ed. Eales and Sharpe, pp. 1–13, at p. 4.

98 For denunciations of Harold, see Gesta Guillelmi, pp. 76–9, 100–1, 114–15, 122–3, 140–3.

99 For disparaging comments on the English, see Gesta Guillelmi, pp. 68–9, 100–1, 126–7, 130–1, 132–3, 136–7, 138–9. According to William of Poitiers, Gesta Guillelmi, pp. 142–3: ‘It would have been right for the flesh of the English, who through so great an injustice had rushed headlong to their death, to be devoured by the mouths of the vulture and the wolf, and for the fields to have been covered with their unburied bones.’

100 Accounts of the Conquest from a so-called ‘English’ perspective include: The Chronicle of John of Worcester, vol. 2: The Annals from 450 to 1066, ed. R. R.

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endorses the position that Harold had a rightful claim to succeed Edward or views the invasion as assault on England.101 After Harold’s accession to the throne, the narrative shifts to depicting the Norman preparations for the invasion, the Channel crossing, and the events that immediately fol-lowed the landing; but in these scenes the Normans are by no means for-eigners spilling English blood, as they are in one of the sources unfavour-ably disposed toward them.102

Why would an embroidery designed at St Augustine’s, Canterbury, have maintained such a careful balance between the two opposing viewpoints? One likely reason is that the abbey’s material fortunes after 1066 depended on retaining as much as possible of its landed inheritance from the pre-Conquest period, recruiting new local benefactors from newly established Norman families such as Vital’s, striking bargains with Kentish landholders such as Wadard about the apportionment of profits from the estates they held from the abbey, and securing new gifts from King William and Odo of Bayeux. In addition, the abbey needed as much help as it could get from both king and earl in confirming or recovering lands given or confirmed to them by pre-Conquest patrons, including King Edward and King Harold, whom the monks of St Augustine’s recognized as ‘rex Anglorum’ long after he had been posthumously transformed into a usurper.103

At this abbey, publicly adopting either a resentfully ‘pro-English’ view of King Harold’s defeat by the upstart William and his foreign forces or a triumphantly ‘pro-Norman’ view of the duke’s glorious triumph over the perjured usurper Harold and his perfidious English supporters was a losing proposition. Emphatic demonstrations of the righteousness of William’s claim to be king and strong denunciations of Harold’s usurpation would have been as out of place on the Bayeux Tapestry as would images or inscriptions that directly called into the question the legitimacy of Norman rule or proclaimed Harold’s right to be king. Neither strategy, moreover, made any sense during the abbacy of Scolland. Virtually all of the projects he initiated had what might be called an historical dimension, because they involved translating the community’s English spiritual capital into a form that would give it both legitimacy and honour in a kingdom ruled by Normans and other non-Englishmen, including their own abbot. As a result, at St Augustine’s, as on the Bayeux Tapestry, linking the English past with the Anglo-Norman present required both acknowledging the rupture created by the Norman Conquest and moving forward from it. What kind of patronage would one therefore envision for the Bayeux Tapestry? Odo’s position, wealth, and documented relationship with St Augustine’s suggest that he was well placed to serve as a benefactor of the

Darlington and P. McGurk, trans. Jennifer Bray and P. McGurk (Oxford, 1995), pp. 598–607; The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition, vol. 7: MS. E, ed. Susan Irvine (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 86–7; Vita Ædwardi, pp. 108–11.

101 See Chronicle of John of Worcester, pp. 600–1; Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, vol. 7: MS. E, p. 197.

102 Vita Ædwardi, pp. 108–9.103 See Garnett, Conquered England, pp. 1–44.

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Tapestry. But it is not necessary to cast him in the role of a micro- managing and egotistical client in order to account for his appearances there, let alone the appearances of St Augustine’s miles Wadard or its frater Vital. Moreover, the manner in which key scenes with political implications are depicted, as well as the way in which the battle itself is shown, make more sense when viewed from the perspective of St Augustine’s, particularly in light of the artful political balance that the monastery maintained during Scolland’s abbacy. Finally, if admitting St Augustine’s active role in author-ing and designing the Bayeux Tapestry offers a reasonable explanation for all the persons, perspectives and production issues required of any theory of patronage, are there not other features of the embroidery not usually addressed, including the relentless depiction of all the dead, the appearance of Mont-Saint-Michel, and, indeed, the austerity of the chosen medium, that the abbey’s agency might equally well explain?

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