hand-woven pictured hangings and coverings discussed in
this book; arras, gobelins, _toile peinte_, etc. In English, tapestry
may mean almost any decorative stuff, and so comes it that we speak of
the wonderful hanging which gives name to this chapter as the tapestry
of Bayeux (plates facing pages 242, 243 and 244), when it is in
reality an embroidery. But so much is it confused with true tapestry,
and so poignantly does it interest the Anglo-Saxon that we will
introduce it here, even while acknowledging its extraneous character.

To begin with, then, we say frankly that it is not a tapestry; that it
has no place in this book. And then we will trail its length through a
short review of its history and its interest as a human document of
the first order.

In itself it is a strip of holland--brown, heavy linen cloth,
measuring in length about two hundred and thirty-one feet, and in
width, nineteen and two-thirds inches--remarkable dimensions which are
accounted for in the neatest way. The hanging was used in the
cathedral of the little French city of Bayeux, draped entirely around
the nave of the Norman Cathedral, which space it exactly covered. This
indicates to archeologists the original purpose of the hanging.

On the brown linen is embroidered in coloured wools a panoramic
succession of incidents, with border top and bottom. The colours are
but eight, two shades each of green and blue, with yellow,
dove-colour, red and brown.

This, in brief, is the great Bayeux tapestry. But its threads breathe
history; its stitches sing romance; and we who love to touch
humorously the spirits of brothers who lived so long ago, find here
the matter that humanly unites the Eleventh Century with the
Twentieth.

The subject is the conquest of England by William the Conqueror in
1066. That is fixed beyond a doubt, so that the precious cloth cannot
trail its ends any further back into antiquity than that event.
However, even the most insatiable antiquarian of European specialties
is smilingly content with such a date.

Legend has it that Queen Matilda, the wife of the conqueror, executed
the work as an evidence of the devotion and adulation that were his
due and her pleasure: There are lovely pictures in the mind of Matilda
in the safety of the chambers of the old castle at Caen, directing
each day a corps of lovely ladies in the task of their historic
embroidery, each one sewing into the fabric her own secret thoughts of
lover or