The Historical Works of Hilaire Belloc. Hilaire Belloc
The object of all this kind of work in every age where it has flourished (and such ages cover nearly the whole of human history) is to establish a record. The motive is “lest the deeds of those great men, our fathers, should perish.” Now, there are a hundred ways of satisfying that motive more or less. The one that first occurs to us to-day is of course Inscription. But Inscription suffers from two faults: first, it is not universal; secondly, it is jejune.
It is not universal, because the written characters and the language which they express cannot be universal. They may be lost, or they may become provincial and neglected. It is jejune because full experience is not to be crowded into even an excess of words. You will find in Normandy (not a day’s walk from Bayeux, by the way) a very long inscription to a local personage of the third century. It is in Latin—that is, in the most universal of literary mediums—and yet it has served principally for the quarrels of archæologists. There is no prime term in any early inscription that will not serve for such a quarrel, simply because language is an imperfect symbol. You are pleased to understand to-day the inscription upon a bronze tablet let into the wall of a public building and thus inscribed:
“This Foundation Stone was laid by the Rev. Charles Woodle, M.A., on the occasion of the Second Jubilee of Her Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria.”
You understand what it means. A few centuries hence (if the language has survived), one determining symbol after another will be a matter of dispute. Men will be arguing what “Rev.” means, what “M.A.”; perhaps what “Jubilee,” what “Gracious”—and all the rest of it. The word “Foundation” will give them a good deal of trouble.
What is the alternative? If record by verbal symbol is so imperfect and if all symbol must be sensual, what other sense can we approach? Humanity has never made anything of the symbolism of music, and never will. It is not fixed. There remain only the eye and the picture meant for the eye. Now in a picture, however rude or however perfect, whether in the flat or the round, you get the most permanent record. All humanity except our time has understood that. The appeal to the eye is at once the most universal, and can be with the least expense of effort the most detailed. Our own time will probably suffer more through the neglect of this than through any other of our neglects, and posterity will ignore us most through our lack of pictorial symbol. It does not tell a future age anything to paint a picture of cows at a ford. It tells a future age very little to paint a picture of the Coronation, but to make a bas-relief of one policeman holding up one motor-bus, one man selling newspapers to one other man, and so on, all along a frieze, would be to leave a record of London, and a record which would be independent of the vitality of alphabets and idioms.
Now, this kind of record demands a Convention; in other words, it must be symbolic much more than it is mimetic, and that is the note you get in the work preserved at Bayeux. Not the reproduction of things seen, but the perpetuation of their ideas: a few figures standing for a host: an emblem defining a man: an episode noticed to its simplest terms.
Now as to the authenticity of, or to be more accurate the date of, this famous document. The more slipshod, earlier, and picturesque historians, with their touch of charlatanism and their eye upon the public (notably Freeman), naturally desired to believe, and even more naturally said, that the embroidery now preserved at Bayeux was exactly contemporary with the Conquest.
We must not include in our criticism or our blame such men as Napoleon, who, after all, did not pronounce himself, but took what he was told; nor men not professedly historians who carried on the tradition that the work came from the needle of William the Conqueror’s wife and her ladies. An unhistorical statement proceeding from one who does not profess acquaintance with the bases of history cannot be seriously criticised. But, as the legend that the Bayeux embroidery is actually contemporary with the Invasion of England has been erected into a sort of University dogma and propagated through English schools and text-books, it is as well to point out to my readers the nature of this simple error.
The Battle of Hastings was fought on the 14th of October 1066. The Bayeux Tapestry is later than the First Crusade, the climax of which campaign was the capture of Jerusalem on July 15, 1099.
It is as certainly later than the First Crusade as a picture of a man in trousers and a top-hat is later than the French Revolution. How much later it is than the First Crusade we cannot yet say, and perhaps will never be able to say. We can say (just as we can say about the gentleman in the trousers and the top-hat) that it is quite appreciably later than the turning-point in history chosen for our fixed date of change. It was the French Revolution which disturbed, woke up, rearranged society. Attaching to that big business any number of external expressions may be discovered—quasi-democratic parliaments, the modern post-office, conscript armies, &c. &c., but the historical date is 1789-1795. One of the products or marks of the change is the change in costume. Even an expert in the distant future might be puzzled to tell you whether the engraving of a man in trousers and a top-hat was twenty or thirty or forty or fifty years later than 1795. But he could be absolutely certain if a proper knowledge of the past had survived that it was some few years, say ten or fifteen years, or, even better, twenty years later than the conclusion of the Revolutionary upheaval.
Now, so it is with the Bayeux Tapestry and the First Crusade.
The dates of the First Crusade are 1096-99. It was accomplished from thirty to thirty-three years after the Battle of Hastings. William was dead some time; men who, as boys, had deployed upon Telham Hill, and charged up the slope of battle were grizzled, were between fifty and sixty, when that squire from Sourdeval first leapt upon the wall of Jerusalem. But the effect of a great change, its external effect in habiliment and the rest, takes some few years to work, and early as we may put the Bayeux Tapestry, we cannot put it earlier than a date in which men who may in youth have seen the fight at Hastings were certainly old, even if they survived to give their testimony.
In rough figures, there must be an interval of at least fifty years. It is more probable that the interval was of greater length than that—but fifty years is the minimum.
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,