The Collected Works of Hilaire Belloc. Hilaire Belloc

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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, if we may judge by the seals and manuscripts (which with very rare sculptural examples are our sole evidence), is a twelfth-century and not an eleventh-century sceptre. This note on costume is true even down to the details of the shoes upon the feet; they are the shoes of the middle of the twelfth, not of the end of the eleventh century.

      Now turn to something upon a larger line, though not more conclusive: the adornment of the shield.

      I am here upon very vague ground, and I know it. But I think that ground, though vague, has limits inferior and superior. The custom of adorning the shield with distinctive marks which might be recognised in battle, is of course as old as the world—or at least as old as the profession of arms. But something ritual and regular attaching to this habit, something which made it part of society and a wheel within the machinery almost of law and certainly of social habit, is the creation of the Crusades.

      A modern parallel will make my point clear. A cheque is something belonging to the nineteenth century, especially the latter part of the nineteenth century. Orders for payments signed in various ways are very much older. But a cheque is a cheque. It is something crystallised and developed in what is now a fixed and a final form. So with armorial bearings. Bring me some new document which shows that Charlemagne himself had the sun or the moon painted upon his shield, and I shall not be surprised; but I do know that the regular portraiture of such and such emblems to represent such and such people, and the common habit among great families of always having such, is posterior to and not prior to the Crusading march: it was indeed, in the main, a product of the Crusading march.

      Now, the Bayeux Tapestry, though it shows us most of the shields without such signs (for most of them were the shields of common knights), yet shows the shields of leaders regularly adorned with distinctive bearings; note, for instance, the four lords who come from Guy of Ponthieu to take Harold prisoner. Each of these shields carries an armorial bearing. The two heralds or messengers, men presumably of position, who ride to tell William the overlord that Guy has captured Harold, are similarly distinguished. Those in the immediate suite of the sovereigns or quasi-sovereigns show the mark, as when Harold is interviewed by William. One principal shield is hung upon the first two ships of those which sail for England for the Conquest, and each has armorial bearings. Nor need the reader be surprised at the number of shields which have none, if he will consider how large a proportion are seen in reverse—that is, from the inside—the side where the shield was held by the arm, the side which was turned towards the body. For where the artist describing a fight shows us the right arm with its weapon, and therefore the left arm holding the shield from within, he cannot let us know whether the shield was ornamented or no. But turn to the scenes where the fight is upon the defensive, as, for instance, that showing Harold’s resistance to the Norman charge, there you at once get the leaders with their pictured shields marking the distinction of rank; or again, where the Norman charge in the next panel is shown getting home into the Saxon axes—there you have two shields СКАЧАТЬ