The identity of the designer of the Bayeux tapestry

253 THE IDENTITY OF THE DESIGNER OF THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY christine grainge † The scholarly consensus is that the Bayeux Tapestry was certainly worked at Canterbury. Some historians of the early medieval period have long-suspected that it was Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury (rather than Scolland) who designed the political message in the Bayeux Tapestry and the author’s research into British Library Royal manuscript 6C.vi seems to confirm this. It also identifies Lanfranc’s hand in fol. 142v. of this Royal manuscript as being the same hand as in the now lost manuscript Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana Reg. Lat. 237, fol. 67v. which the author saw in the Vatican Library in June 1993 and is reproduced in this article. In a paper read to the Battle Conference in 2012 and published in Anglo-Norman Studies, Howard B. Clarke identified the designer of the Bayeux Tapestry believing ‘almost certainly’ that he was the monk-scribe Scolland from the abbey of Mont-St-Michel.1 The only evidence relevant to this paper for Scolland is in the colophon to an Avranches manuscript which describes Scollandus as ‘shining forth with the whole body of sacred teaching’. The historian J.J.G. Alexander quotes from the colophon to a manuscript for which Scolland was one of six scribes, whose individual hands, unfortunately, cannot be identified: Avranches, Bibliothèque patrimoniale MS 103. This is a manuscript of the Homiles of Gregory the Great, which Alexander dated to ‘before 1072’.2 It was in 1072 that Scolland took up his appointment of abbot at St Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury, and it may be that this dating was too convenient for Clarke and others who seem to have leapt on what they saw as a solution to the problem, and looked no further.3 Clarke thought at the time that he had ‘published all of the necessary joined-up thinking’ to show that the designer was Scolland. At the Haskins Society Conference at Boston College the following year, he gave an interview in which he appeared to change his stance slightly, as he explained that by the use of the word ‘designer’ he meant the person who was responsible for the political message conveyed in the story told in the Tapestry. Herein lies the crux of the matter. This article assumes that there were people who carried out different roles; a mastermind who was responsible for the political message conveyed in the Tapestry, and artists who executed the work pertaining to the main political message with many other helpers – rather like, in a classroom where a Bayeux Tapestry is being made in fabric or paint or both; a teacher organises the work and everyone in the class contributes their bit, for example, the ones that are good at drawing horses, draw the horses. CHRISTINE GRAINGE 254 Unfortunately, other scholars have supported the idea that it was Scolland, installed at Canterbury [in 1072] (where the Tapestry was certainly worked) who was the ‘designer’. The current orthodoxy for a Canterbury provenance for the Bayeux Tapestry was virtually secured by Cyril Hart in another publication of Anglo-Norman Studies in 1999 from the evidence of manuscripts known to be at the abbey at that time whose artistic style is apparent in the work.4 What else is known about Scolland? Certainly, monks from the abbey of Mont- St-Michel came to Canterbury, for Alexander tells us that abbot Rannulfus had sent six ships to Duke William after the Battle of Hastings, and with them went a number of monks from the abbey’.5 Scolland may have been an artist who copied certain figures from several Mont-St-Michel manuscripts, he may even have sketched them himself onto the strips of linen that formed the basis of the Tapestry under the watchful eye of the designer himself. But there is no compelling reason to suggest that he was responsible for the planning of the political message that is conveyed by the Tapestry. His experience, as far as is known, was confined to the abbey of Mont-St-Michel, and as a former monk-scribe and very new abbot he would have been closely supervised in such an important project by his archbishop, Lanfranc. He had been in Canterbury since 1070 and was rather more likely to have designed the political message conveyed in the Tapestry as the following brief description of his career and achievements underlines (Fig. 1). The Mastermind Lanfranc was someone well-known who had a wide experience of influencing people and conveying complex political messages before he arrived in England and, significantly, became Duke William’s spiritual adviser. ‘To him he committed the guidance of his soul,’ wrote the chronicler William of Poitiers who was a chaplain in William’s household.6 Fig. 1 Image of Lanfranc (Bodley MS S569, fol. 1). THE IDENTITY OF THE DESIGNER OF THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY 255 Lanfranc lived and worked at the Norman abbey of Le Bec for more than twenty years, from 1042-1063, where he became a renowned teacher, both of the monks and in the external school of the sons of the Norman aristocracy where he moved in the orbit of both Duke William and the papacy. He went on to become the abbot of St Etienne, Caen, at the time when Duke William was developing Caen as his political and economic capital. Lanfranc who, after his debate with Berengar about the nature of the Eucharist had established a reputation for himself as the foremost European scholar was chosen by King William I in 1070 to be Archbishop of Canterbury. Lanfranc as scholar, monk and archbishop is the subject of a recent biography by Cowdrey.7 Lanfranc of Bec is the title of an established biography by Margaret Gibson which emphasizes his personal calling as monk and his work as a scholar.8 He was the subject of a conference at Cerisy-la-Salle in 2010, the fruits of which were published.9 A.J. Macdonald in 1926 was one of Lanfranc’s earliest biographers writing in English.10 He took a relatively all-round, modern approach to his subject considering Lanfranc’s life and work in relation to the rise of scholasticism, the eucharistic controversy, Gregorian Reform and the Norman Conquest of England. Somewhat before his time, Macdonald spotted that Lanfranc was the first medieval ecclesiastic to act as a statesman in the sphere of practical politics.11 Lanfranc was born in Pavia in Lombardy in north Italy around 1010. His father was ‘said to be of the order of those who declared the rights and laws of the city’,12 perhaps a lawyer, as Lanfranc became at one time in his life – but he was a man of many parts and each biographer chose particular aspects of his life to emphasize, be it lawyer, monk, scholar, theologian or politician, someone with political intelligence. He was educated in Italy in the liberal arts, the trivium, comprising grammar, the meaning and use of words, dialectic or logic for discussion and disputation, and rhetoric, for eloquence in argument and persuasion. He went on to study the quadrivium, involving geometry, arithmetic, astronomy and music but the work for which he became widely known all over Europe was his skill in discussion and disputation based on dialectic. He left Italy about 1030, probably because of political unrest that had swept through Lombardy. He with a group of others crossed the Alps and spent some time in Burgundy and the Loire valley before establishing himself as a teacher in Avranches perhaps drawn by the possibility of contact with the abbey of Mont-St-Michel with its Lombard abbot Suppo and its growing reputation for the copying of superbly decorated manuscripts.13 Indeed Gibson asserted, ‘Both as a scholastic centre and as a source of patronage Mont- St-Michel looks like one of the missing pieces in the Lanfrancian jigsaw’.14 Perhaps because of the laxity of the religious life at Mont-St-Michel, Lanfranc moved on after 1040 to become a monk at the newly founded abbey of Bec to which it seems that he was attracted because of the asceticism of the life for at that time it was ‘the poorest and most wretched house in Normandy’. The monks under abbot Herluin lived their lives as communities of desert monks of old; their lives were lives of prayer and work in the fields to provide for the newly growing community and for three years, according to Bec tradition, Lanfranc lived a life of solitude and seclusion. In 1045 abbot Herluin of Bec appointed Lanfranc his prior – the previous prior so we are told was non litteratus. The question of literacy in Latin (or indeed in English or French) by eleventhCHRISTINE GRAINGE 256 century people in England and Normandy is fundamental to our understanding of the times and particularly of how the Bayeux Tapestry was conceived by its designer and ‘read’ by priest and people. As there is no evidence that Lanfranc learnt to speak the English language15 he may have thought that the best way of communicating with the people was through pictures and coloured headlines! This very important and unconsidered aspect of the Bayeux Tapestry will be enlarged upon later. With Lanfranc as prior, Bec grew in material wealth through gifts to the community and it was at Bec that Lanfranc came to realise the value of Benedictine monasticism, life lived in a community according to the Rule of St Benedict16 which came to be at the heart of his life’s work and formed the basis of his later Monastic Constitutions.17 In accordance with the Rule, as well as a claustral school Lanfranc developed an extra-claustral school which attracted some of the most celebrated masters of the schools of Latin learning and where many sons of wealthy Normans were educated. His teaching at Bec seems to have been mainly with external pupils whose fees, paid to Lanfranc, were used for new monastic buildings at Bec. Thus, Lanfranc rose into the orbit of Duke William and, indeed, of the papacy for in 1059 Pope Nicholas II sent to Bec some favoured imperial and papal chaplains for Lanfranc to instruct in the arts of dialectic and rhetoric. Lanfranc became well thought of by the papacy and well-known as a dialectician as well as for his studies of the Bible and was building up at Bec a network of monks who followed him later to England. One such was Anselm, who followed him as prior of Bec and later as Archbishop of Canterbury, and Gundulf (1077- 1108) who became bishop of Rochester. As Cowdrey states there is slight evidence for Lanfranc’s involvement in the political affairs of the Duchy whilst he was at Bec.18 Duke William from the start ruled his Duchy through Church Councils and as Lanfranc became renowned as a teacher and a scholar at Bec, perhaps the foremost scholar in t he Duchy. In 1063 Lanfranc became abbot of Saint-Etienne a newly-founded abbey at Caen which Duke William, who had only recently gained control over the entire duchy of Normandy, was seeking to establish as a political and ecclesiastical centre second only to Rouen. The abbey was placed under papal protection, meaning that that neither the abbey nor its lands were subject to diocesan control. This is particularly relevant because Caen was in the new diocese of Bayeux, established only in 1011, where Odo of Bayeux was bishop from 1049. Through this papal protection for his abbey Lanfranc was in regular contact with the papacy as well as through his papal missions to Rome and it is generally established that the pope concerned, Alexander II, gave his blessing to the Norman Conquest of England – indeed the papal standard appears in the Bayeux Tapestry. But there is no direct evidence that Lanfranc played any part in Duke William’s preparations for the invasion of England and tenuous evidence of his attendance at Councils, although we know that he had become well thought of in ducal circles, and clearly William would have not made him Archbishop of Canterbury in 1070 had he not had the utmost faith in his commitment to himself personally, and to the Norman Conquest of England. THE IDENTITY OF THE DESIGNER OF THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY 257 The Abbey of Mont-St-Michel For convincing arguments for Lanfranc’s involvement with and backing for Duke William’s invasion of England it is necessary to look to the Bayeux Tapestry itself about which so much has been written since the proceedings of the Conferences in Caen and the British Museum were published in 2004 and 2011.19 The Tapestry has been much dissected without, it seems, any advance in identifying the mastermind who designed it and scholars generally have overlooked the early manuscripts of Mont-Saint-Michel. However, a step forward was taken in the study of the Bayeux Tapestry at the British Museum conference. A paper given by David Spear entitled ‘Robert of Mortain and the Bayeux Tapestry’ argued that the name Robert of Mortain who is depicted in the Tapestry carrying the standard of St Michael should be substituted for that of Eustace of Boulogne whose relationship with the Bayeux Tapestry may be based on a misreading.20 This new interpretation brought the abbey of Mont-St-Michel back into the spotlight where it clearly belongs. It is nearly fifty years since Alexander published a book written in English about the extensive illuminated manuscripts from the tenth century onwards conserved in the abbey of Mont-St-Michel which contains fifty manuscript plates, all dated, together with a short history of the abbey. These illuminated manuscripts from Mont-St-Michel have been accessible to scholars since 1970 but have lain uncited, if not unvisited and untouched by English scholars. This situation continued, in the main, even after Dosdat,21 writing in French, published some of the early illuminated manuscripts in full colour. These manuscripts are relevant to the question of who designed the Bayeux and indeed are relevant to the verification of the involvement of personnel from the abbey of Mont-St-Michel with both the Norman Conquest of England and the design of the Bayeux Tapestry. In July 1992 the author worked for a short time in Avranches Bibliothèque Patrimoniale, the library to which the Mont-St-Michel manuscripts had been moved at the time of the French Revolution. She looked first at their earliest manuscript, Avranches MS 50, made in 980, to celebrate the refounding of the abbey by Duke Richard I of Normandy in 962, and noted that on the first folio it showed the archangel St Michael wearing a Norman-style helmet, receiving an account of meetings in early Rome between Clement, James and Peter. He is standing with his foot on a representation of the abbey, fighting off a devil. This is the hitherto unrecognised representation of the abbey that is depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry.22 The author went on to look at other Mont-St-Michel manuscripts written between 1040 and 1066, and realised that some of them had been used as templates for scenes in the Tapestry; the scenes that portrayed five characters, Edward the Confessor, Duke William, Bishop Odo, Robert of Mortain and Guy of Ponthieu. The scriptorium at Mont-St-Michel experienced a golden age between 1050- 1075.23 It is, of course, only manuscripts made before 1066 that concern us for these are the ones in which figures occur that may have been copied in some way into the Bayeux Tapestry. However, within the ‘golden age’ the abbey had its ups and downs. Between 1055 and 1057 after the election of abbot Rannulfus (Renouf of Bayeux in some sources) who had the support of Duke William in his election, several monks, supporters of the exiled Lombard abbot Suppo (1033-48, died 1061) who had been deposed, seemingly the intellectual élite, left the abbey, moving to CHRISTINE GRAINGE 258 the small tidal island of Tombelaine a few kilometres north of Mont-St-Michel. According to Dosdat,24 that exodus left only the artists remaining at the abbey. The Avranches manuscripts dated before 1066 that were known to the designer of the Bayeux Tapestry include MS 75, MS 90 and MS 72 which are dated 1040- 1055. These manuscripts are illustrated by Dosdat.25 For if the seated positions of the powerful figures in the Bayeux Tapestry are examined, Edward the Confessor in the first scene, Duke William, Bishop Odo, Robert of Mortain, even Guy of Ponthieu (when he has Harold in his clutches) we see that they are seated on fairly elaborate throne-like chairs with knees wide apart and feet (not crossed) but placed firmly on footstools or the like (Fig. 2). These seated powerful figures were not afterthoughts, appendages, which could have been added to the embroidery in later centuries, as brooches, pennant flags or tassels, for example, but were basic to the design of the Tapestry. They were planned from the start – from the sketching of the cartoons on the strips of linen. Compare these with the author’s tracings of the seated figures of early Fathers of the Church, Gregory and Augustine, in manuscripts written and illuminated in Mont-St-Michel which would have been there for scribes and artists to see whilst they were working in the scriptorium there, together with the famous Pentecost Sacramentary (New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS 641, fol. 80v.) made at Mont-St-Michel between 1050 and 1065.26 In the Sacramentary the four figures in the foreground all sit with knees wide apart whilst gazing upwards towards the coming of the Holy Spirit.27 This seated position of powerful figures, with knees wide apart, man-spreading in modern parlance, appears to be a characteristic of Mont-St-Michel manuscripts in the two decades before 1066 and it would seem to suggest that the designer of the Bayeux Tapestry replicated these figures of early Fathers of the Church to convey his political message. Fig. 2 The seated positions of the three powerful figures in the Bayeux tapestry from the Avranches manuscripts. THE IDENTITY OF THE DESIGNER OF THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY 259 The Bayeux Tapestry, Lanfranc’s Teaching Aid? If clearer evidence of Lanfranc’s responsibility for the overall concept of the Bayeux Tapestry, for what qualities should we be looking in such a designer? The answer is a deeply religious man of sensibilities who was very politically astute. A man who chose to move on from the abbey of Mont-St-Michel because the religious life at Mont-St-Michel was not satisfying enough although he may have loved the abbey where the daily work centred on copying and decorating manuscripts written by the early fathers of the church. Lanfranc was a man who, as Cowdrey wrote, ‘responded at each stage of his career to the circumstances in which he was currently called upon to act’.28 A man who at least for a while was drawn to the ascetic life at the heart of the frugal beginnings of the abbey of Bec, as the desert monks of old. A man who as prior came to value life in a community that followed the Rule of St Benedict and eventually, when Archbishop of Canterbury to issue his own stricter Monastic Constitutions. A man who understood the abilities and needs of the less advantaged in society and who, like Pope Gregory the Great, cared about them deeply and longed for all to understand the Word of God and the moral teachings in bible stories of old.29 It can be imagined that when he was directing artists and embroiderers in their work on the Tapestry he would take opportunities to teach clergy and laity, whether English or Norman, according to the teaching of the Reform Papacy,30 to emphasize the importance of clerical celibacy (thus the inclusion of Ælfgyva and the Cleric)31 and the wrongness of simony (thus the strange twisted puppet-like depiction of Harold crowned by an illegally consecrated Archbishop, Stigand, who was guilty of simony); and the folly of breaking an oath of allegiance to Duke William (Harold’s broken oath sworn on holy relics at Bayeux), and questioning the role of the Papacy in its leadership of the Christian Church. Some observers, noting that bishop Odo – attired in armour – encouraged and rallied his men, feel that the warlike nature of the Tapestry and the detail of the battle of Hastings itself means that it could not have been intended for display in a church. This is not to see it with eleventh-century eyes. Trial by battle was a common way of settling feuds in the early middle ages and was formally introduced in the Laws of William I after 1066. Scholars continue to search for meaning in ‘Ælfgyva and the cleric’, and the Tapestry may have made examples of contemporary well-known people known to the large group of artisans working on the Tapestry, but the message that the designer intended to convey was of the importance attached to clerical celibacy in the Norman Church at the time, and of the reform the designer hoped to bring to the English Church. After the conquest Lanfranc wanted the English to understand the justification for the Norman Conquest of England and to understand the need for reform in the English Church which, perhaps, with Harold’s broken oath sworn on relics, and Stigand’s irregular consecration, had lost a little of the vitality and rigour and morality that it had in the age of Dunstan and Regularis Concordia.32 The author feels, like Gameson,33 that the Tapestry was deeply religious and moral in intent and that this would have been obvious to eleventh-century people. Made in Canterbury, under the patronage of Odo, Bishop of Bayeux and Earl of Kent it was probably planned for display in Bayeux Cathedral, until Odo was exiled CHRISTINE GRAINGE 260 by King William and imprisoned in Rouen. The designer, after setting the scene, showing an elderly, bearded Edward the Confessor sitting on his throne in his palace instructing Harold to travel to Normandy to inform William that he should be his successor, sketches out the story on the canvas and sketches in the five principal characters involved. We know these are Edward the Confessor, Duke William, Bishop Odo, Robert of Mortain and Guy of Ponthieu because – following the artistic style of the abbey of Mont-St-Michel in their tenth and eleventh century manuscripts portraying early Fathers of the Church, particularly Augustine and Gregory – they are depicted, as has been said, in the seated position of powerful figures, with knees wide-apart. They are seated on elaborate throne-like chairs with feet (not crossed) but placed firmly on footstools or the like. These seated, powerful figures were basic to the design of the Tapestry, sketched out first on the linen. The Hand of God hovers over King Edward’s body as he is conveyed to Westminster Abbey. Gameson has considered the form, language and function of the display script in the inscriptions to perfection, although he has not related them to the very largely pre-literate eleventh-century viewers.34 Alexander in 1970 published many Plates showing ‘display script’ as executed at Mont-St-Michel, and Dosdat has shown them coloured as in the Bayeux Tapestry. A largish group of artists and embroiderers, English, Norman and Breton are likely to have worked parts of the Tapestry that were of less import. Some of the somewhat risqué, certainly secular, subtext in the borders may have been beyond the designer’s control as there was still much animosity between Norman and Englishman, even in Canterbury where the Tapestry was being worked. conclusion It is proposed that it was Lanfranc and not Scolland who designed the Bayeux Tapestry. Indeed, he chose to tell us this later, in 1085, by means of a manuscript, parts of which he copied himself, in his beautiful, distinctively even, very upright hand, in which the strokes rise sharply from the feet of the minims. He always used a pale brown ink. He carried out this work in the scriptorium at Rochester. The title of this manuscript is London, British Library Royal manuscript 6C.vi. The main part of the book, ff. 6-258 is Pope Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Latin, parts 4-6, books 17-35, which is a commentary on the latter part of the book of Job. A quire, ff. 1-5 containing the relevant part of the book of Job and written in a 13thcentury hand was prefixed to the manuscript later. This manuscript book has been recognized as Lanfranc’s since the late medieval period when his name was written in. It stands out as a jewel from other manuscripts copied in Rochester’s ‘energetic although primitive scriptorium’35 around this time because of its beautifully prepared and presented folios and the series of distinctly decorated Norman initials, some historiated, some zoomorphic, all coloured with rich pigments that has been noted by several art historians.36 The fact that this series of decorated initials appears to tell the story of the Norman Conquest was first noticed by the author in 1993.37 One decorated initial on folio 142v. is a stylised representation of the nimbed eagle of St John with turned head perched securely on a bible. The author believes that this folio is written by the same hand that wrote folio 67v. THE IDENTITY OF THE DESIGNER OF THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY 261 of a now missing manuscript previously held in the Vatican Library, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana Reg. Lat. 237 that she saw there in 1993 which has the title Incipit epistula Domini Lanfranci Cantuarensis Archiep̄i ad Berengarium. The folio from the Vatican manuscript, written by Lanfranc when he was abbot of Caen,38 recording his debate with Berengar, shows display script with similar red and green use of colour as London, British Library Royal manuscript 6C.vi (Fig. 3) and the later inscriptions in the Bayeux Tapestry from the feast before the battle onwards. Both folios are written in a protogothic script; the letter, of course, is written in one column and the Moralia in two. Lanfranc understood that it was in the nature of man to question then ignore and eventually reject the word of God if it did not suit, and towards the end of his life, when the English were still rebelling against their Norman oppressors, he chose to have the second part of Gregory’s Moralia in Job copied in the scriptorium in Rochester, where his old friend from Bec, Gundulf had been appointed bishop. Lanfranc, towards the end of his life, by means of this manuscript, was having a last attempt to persuade English people to accept the Norman Conquest because he thought that it had been and continued to be the will of God, what He wanted for the English Church. He chose the text of the second part of the Moralia because, in that part of the work, the story and the beginnings of the chapters were perfectly suited for the telling of the story of the Conquest in pictures as in the Bayeux Tapestry. For the beginnings of chapters Lanfranc used histo in two Fig. 3 The records of Lanfranc’s debate with Berengar in two manuscripts (British Library Royal MS 6C.vi fol.142v and Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana Reg. Lat. 237 fol. 67v.) CHRISTINE GRAINGE 262 vibrant pigments to attract both semi-literate clergy and illiterate people and it is clear from these well-thumbed leaves that these were most viewed. Perhaps this viewing was just in Rochester Cathedral, perhaps it was taken to Canterbury as well, because it is likely that the Bayeux Tapestry itself may have been removed from St Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury and taken to Bayeux in 1082 when Odo was exiled by King William I and imprisoned in Rouen – and the Rochester manuscript was conceived to be used in its stead. The palaeography used in the rubrication around the areas of the decorated initials is identical to that used in the embroidery on the Bayeux Tapestry and the colours used are the same, red and green, firstly in alternate short lines in the manuscript, then in almost alternate red green letters, as in the embroidered inscriptions on the Tapestry. This Rochester manuscript has its provenance secured by certain abbreviations used at that time in the Rochester scriptorium. The manuscript has been redated by the author to the 1080s because it includes a Byzantine-style miniature of Pope Gregory VII in a historiated initial wearing a black beaded halo denoting his death which was in 1085.39 Lanfranc died in 1089. If we look through the complex web that historians over the centuries have imposed on the meaning of the Tapestry and look only at its nub, we are able to reach the original sketches drawn on the strips of linen that, as we have seen, were copied from manuscripts from Mont-St-Michel. Through the Tapestry we can almost touch the core people who carried out the enormous early medieval undertaking that was the invasion and conquest of England in 1066. These were the people, Duke William and his two half-brothers, Bishop Odo and Robert of Mortain, together with Guy of Ponthieu, who put their personal wealth, the lives of their men, and the largest numbers of ships into the enterprise.40 We have had to look even more deeply to discover the mastermind who headed this enterprise because of his desire to expand and reform the Church. Lanfranc, medieval statesman indeed, saw the necessity to provide graphic evidence to attract ordinary eleventh-century people to the Tapestry so that they could understand the rightness of what had happened. The Tapestry was conceived by him as historical evidence par excellence for the Norman Conquest of England (if marred over the centuries by the need for repair, opening the way for those who sought to destroy its integrity). He conceived the idea of having the second part of Gregory’s Moralia copied in the Rochester scriptorium, a decade later, to repeat the message related in the Tapestry, through an iconographic theme in the manuscript’s principal decorated initials and in its rubrication. In our consideration of the Bayeux Tapestry as historical evidence the identity of the artists who executed the work is of secondary importance to the identity of the man who designed the political message. acknowledgement The author is grateful to Professor Emeritus David S. Spear, Department of History, Furman University, for suggestions as to reading and for commenting on early drafts of this paper. THE IDENTITY OF THE DESIGNER OF THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY 263 endnotes 1 Howard B. Clarke, 2012, ‘The Identity of the designer of the Bayeux Tapestry’, Anglo-Norman Studies XXXV, The Boydell Press, pp. 119-139. 2 Alexander, J.J.G., 1970, Norman Illumination at Mont-St-Michel, pp. 17-18, 222. Scolland was one of the four scribes from Mont-St-Michel who became abbots of English religious houses after the Norman Conquest of England. Avranches MS 103 St Gregory the Great Homilies, 1072, p. 222. 3 E.g., Paston, E.C. and White, S.D., 2014, The Bayeux Tapestry and its Contexts: A Reassessment, The Boydell Press, Woodbridge; Rowley, T., 2016, An Archaeological Study of the Bayeux Tapestry, Pen and Sword Books Ltd, Barnsley. 4 C. Hart, 1999, ‘The Bayeux Tapestry and the Schools of Illumination at Canterbury’, Anglo- Norman Studies XXII, pp. 117-168. 5 Alexander, 1970, p. 17. 6 Foulon J.H., 2018, ‘The Foundation and Early History of Le Bec’, in Pohl, B. and Gathagan L.L. (eds), A Companion to the Abbey of Le Bec in the Central Middle Ages (11th - 13th Centuries) (Brill, Leiden and Boston), pp. 11-37, at p. 13. 7 Cowdrey, H.E.J., 2003, Lanfranc, Scholar, Monk and Archbishop, OUP. 8 Gibson, M., 1978, Lanfranc of Bec, OUP. 9 Barrow, J., Delivré, F. and Gazeau, V. (eds), 2015, Autour de Lanfranc (1010-2010): Réforme et réformateurs dans L’Europe du Nord-Ouest (XIe-XIIe siècles), Presses universitaires de Caen. 10 MacDonald, A.J., 1926, Lanfranc: a study of his life, work and writing, Oxford, 2nd edn 1944. 11 Macdonald, 1926, pp. 267-268; Cowdrey 2003, p. 191; Barrow et al., 2015. 12 Gibson, 1978, quotes Vita Lanfranci cap. 1. 13 Alexander, J.J.G., 1970, pp. 1-21 and Plates 1-55; Bouet, P. et Dosdat, M., 1999, Manuscrits et Enluminures dans le monde normand (Xe-XVe siècles), Office Universitaire d’études Normandes, Université de Caen. 14 Gibson, 1978, p. 21. 15 Gibson, 1978, p. 184. 16 Trans. McCann, J., 1970, The Rule of St Benedict, Sheed and Ward Ltd. 17 Knowles, D., 1951, The Monastic Constitutions of Lanfranc: Nelson’s Medieval Classics, London. 18 Cowdrey, 2003, p. 37. 19 The Bayeux Tapestry: Embroidering the Facts of History, Proceedings of the Cerisy Colloquium (1999), eds. Bouet, P., Levy, B. and Neveux, F., Presses Universitaires de Caen; The Bayeux Tapestry: New Approaches, 2011, Proceedings of a Conference at the British Museum, eds. Lewis, M.J., Owen- Crocker, Gale R. and Terkla, D. (Oxbow Books); Foys, M.K., Overbey, K.E. and Terkla, D. (eds), 2019, The Bayeux Tapestry: New Interpretations (The Boydell Press, Woodbridge). 20 Spear, D.S., 2011, ‘Robert of Mortain and the Bayeux Tapestry’, in Lewis, M.J., Owen-Crocker, G.R. and Terkla, D. (eds), The Bayeux Tapestry, p. 15. 21 Dosdat, M., 1991, L’enluminure romane au Mont Saint-Michel Xe-XIIe Siècles, Association des Amis de la Bibliothèque D’Avranches/Éditions Ouest-France. 22 Alexander, 1970, Plate 17b. 23 Dosdat, M., 1991, ‘L’Âge D’Or du Scriptorium Montois’, in L’enluminure romane au Mont Saint-Michel Xe-XIIe Siècles, pp. 51-61. 24 Ibid., p. 52. 25 Ibid., pp. 53, 57 and 59. 26 Ibid., p. 60. 27 Ibid., p. 60. 28 Cowdrey, 2003, p. 224. 29 Pope Gregory the Great said ‘painting is used in churches so that those who do not know letters may at least by looking on the walls read what they cannot read in books’, Patrologia Latina, vol. 77, col. 1027, Epistula CV. CHRISTINE GRAINGE 264 30 The Reform papacy refers to the papacy of Alexander II. 31 Moore, K., 2015, ‘Ælfgyva and the Cleric of the Bayeux Tapestry’ Foundations, 7, pp. 79-124. There is a long historiography concerning Ælfgyva and the cleric. This article is but the latest. All of them see Ælfgyva as cloistered, and hence celibate; most of them see some sort of sexual scandal implied. 32 Cowdrey, 2003, p. 229. 33 Gameson, R., 1997, ‘The Origin, Art, and Message of the Bayeux Tapestry’, in R. Gameson (ed.), The Study of the Bayeux Tapestry (Boydell Press), p. 174. 34 Gameson, 1997, pp. 181-190. 35 Gullick, M., ‘Manuscrits et Copistes Normands en Angleterre (XIe -XIIe siècles)’, in Bouet, P. and Dosdat, M. (eds), Manuscrits et enluminures dans le monde normand (Xe-XVe siecles) (Caen: Presses Universitaires, 1999), pp. 83-93 (p. 88). 36 Kauffmann, C.M., 1975, Romanesque Manuscripts 1066-1190 (London, Harvey Miller), no. 16; Waller, K.M., 1984, ‘Rochester Cathedral Library: an English book collection based on Norman models’ in Foreville, R. (ed.), Les Mutations socio-culturelles au tournant des 11e-Xiie siècles (Paris), pp. 237-50. 37 See Grainge, C., 1993, ‘A Rochester Manuscript used as Norman Propaganda to Justify the Norman Conquest of England: British Library Royal Manuscript 6C. vi’, Friends of Rochester Cathedral Report, pp. 12-19. 38 Gasper, E.M., ‘Theology at Le Bec’, Ch. 8, in ‘A Companion to the Abbey of Le Bec in the Central Middle Ages (11th -13th Centuries)’ (Brill, Leiden/Boston), p. 215. 39 See Grainge, C., 2020, ‘A Late Eleventh-Century Rochester Manuscript apparently echoing the Political Message of the Bayeux Tapestry,’, Archaeologia Cantiana, cxli, pp. 293-312. 40 See ‘The Ship List of William the Conqueror’, in van Houts, E.M.C. (ed.), 1987, Anglo-Norman Studies X, (Woodbridge), pp. 59-83.