I was invited to a party this week to mark 40 years of The Independent, the newspaper-turned-content powerhouse where I worked for close to a decade before joining Project Monocle. The event was held at the British Museum. During the soirée, guests were able to nip off to see the Bayeux Tapestry, the near-1,000-year-old, 70-metre-long embroidery that’s in the country on loan from France – and for which securing viewing tickets is almost impossible. So yes please.
The tapestry is displayed flat in a long glass cabinet. There’s a digital screen that also runs its entire length and picks out key moments from this stitched narrative that depicts the story of the Norman invasion of England in 1066. The room is dark. Beautifully lit.
Trouble is, if one person is determined to take in every damn detail, you can get stuck staring at the same panel for a long time. And believe me, there were some very swotty people ahead of me. My former colleague Ruth suggested that we should do a speed read by jumping in wherever we saw a gap. “You know what’s going to happen. Do you really need to see it all?” she asked. Ever the editor, she’s always able to see how to make something more concise. I forbade this move and made her join me in the queue; there would be no fast-forwarding.
One thing that soon stood out, as it were, was the large number of penises depicted. There were some proper whackers on horses but also several gentlemen displaying their knackers like medieval flashers. I imagined an 11th-century embroiderer returning home after a long day crafting the tapestry. “Good day at work, dear?” her husband might enquire. “You won’t believe it; they’ve got me back on horses’ willies. Today, I had to do a real big one and now my wrist hurts. But they’ve promised me arrows next month. I might even get to stick one in someone’s eye… Any gruel left for dinner?”
We’ll go back to the penises in a moment. But just to say that the tapestry is, as you would expect, amazing. It’s like a medieval version of a Netflix series – Stitchflix – in which you get to see the backstory of the invasion, have nice asides about daily life, witness battles, enjoy sufficient killing to keep you engaged.
And, of course, there are several scenes that have gone on to become famous. Yes, when Harold gets an arrow in his eye but also when Halley’s Comet shoots across the sky, though that comet looked more like a shuttlecock to me. But I won’t raise that as an academic challenge.
Back amid the hum of the party, champagne glass in hand, I introduced myself to Grayson Perry, whose famous narrative ceramics and tapestries share a creative lineage with the Bayeux masterpiece. I asked him about its bawdiness, that high penis count. He had wiser thoughts than me and we ended up discussing how it’s all a part of what makes people British and should be embraced. Geoffrey Chaucer, salacious 17th-century cartoons, bedroom-farce plays – there is a long thread that runs through British culture.
Back home, I searched online for “how many penises in the Bayeux Tapestry” (I have an eclectic search history) and discovered that there’s a bit of an academic to-do on the topic. Medieval scholar Christopher Monk set the bar at 94, with 88 equine examples and five gentlemen’s appendages. But now another academic has claimed that what had previously been considered a scabbard is actually one more to add to the willy tally. Monk is not to be budged. He told one media outlet, “If you are not careful, you might fall into the trap of seeing penises everywhere”. Sort of like stumbling into an academic Finnish sauna.
But beyond the headcount debacle, perhaps that’s why people – especially British people – have responded so enthusiastically to the tapestry. In its panels, we see echoes of ourselves: not just a history lesson but a reminder that some things about us haven’t changed much at all.
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