Bayeux, Biography & Biology

by Vincent Guy   

It’s a bonanza year for the Bayeux. Currently on show at the British Museum, it’s being seen in England for the first time in almost a thousand years. And let’s get something straight before we go any further: the Bayeux Tapestry is no such thing. It’s an embroidery, but it has always been known by the T-word.

And it’s a hot ticket. Every issue of entry tickets has been sold out within hours. Should I go? Well, it’s not really a thing of beauty in my eyes, nor is it really my history period either. But wait a moment: my family is featured on it. Yes, my name is Guy and since I was a wee lad I’ve had this picture in my mind of some bishop called Guido depicted with the subscript “Hic Guido est”–“Here is Guido”,  Guido being Latin for Guy. I wrote a while back in these columns that it was actually an illusion of youthful memory; hic Guido non est. But amid the current flurry of publicity, I looked again. My photo shows a print in concertina form of the Bayeux Tapestry and, as every English schoolboy knows, it’s about the Battle of Hastings. But around 13% of its length really is about a chap called Guido (Tapestry length 68.3 metres, Guido story 8.9 metres). How come?

In his youth, Harold Godwinson, the future King of England, had gone raiding or touring towards northern France. Things went pear-shaped, his ships grounded and abandoned. He got captured by none other than a guy called Guido (in the tapestry spelt “Wido”). This Guido was a vassal of William, Duke of Normandy, later conqueror and king of England. He offered his prisoner to William– at a price. William paid Guido the ransom he demanded, and Harold became one of William’s trusted supporters, joining his entourage on various rampages around the place. Proceedings had included Harold swearing an oath of loyalty, fealty, vassalage to William.

Eventually, Harold was allowed to return to England. A little later King Edward, the so-called Confessor, died and the Witenagemot, the council of wise men, decided Harold was the best bet to put on the English throne. Harold was happy to take the job on but seems to have forgotten that he was a sworn vassal to William across the water.

William had not forgotten, waxed furious and promptly prepared an invasion, landing on the Kent Coast. In the ensuing battle Harold received the legendary arrow in his eye or was shredded by Norman swordsman. Both versions appear on the tapestry; although the arrow turns out to have been a late addition made around 1800.

A sideshow which doesn’t feature on the tapestry is the attempted invasion by Harald Hardrada from Norway. He landed in Yorkshire; Harold and his English army finished Hardrada off before marching south to confront William and his lusty lads. The English army were probably exhausted by battling the Norwegians and the forced march of more than 200 miles to the Kent Coast. The whole affair was something of an internecine tribal war; all these characters were Norsemen, Normans, Normands.

Digression: not all Norsemen were Vikings. “Viking“ applies when they were kitted up for action: raiding, marauding, conquering. “Norse” with its variants describes the ethnic group. And, whether Vikings or plain Norsemen, they did not have horns on their helmets. They first sported those in 1876 for the staging of Wagnerian opera, to make them more visible on a crowded stage.

Amongst the ‘great men’ mentioned so far, Hardrada was the purest Norseman; he’d seen action in almost every corner of Europe from Denmark to Constantinople. William’s lot had arrived in France a couple of centuries before and gone native, adopting the French language. Harold, our Anglo-Saxon hero, had a Norse mother. King Edward had spent 30 years of his early life in exile in - where else? - Normandy. My supposed ancestor Guido is harder to track down in ethnic terms but the chances that he had Norse blood in him are pretty high.

To call him “my supposed ancestor” is no more than a phrase. Except for Edward the Confessor who had no children, all these characters were probably my ancestors. The same would go for anyone alive at that time, provided they had offspring. The way genetic descent works, anyone around now who has anything English about them is highly likely to be descended from the whole of that small population of England at that time. My mother was Jewish, so it’s a fair guess I’m a descendant of Abraham. And even the billion and more Chinese alive today are descendants, like you and me, of a few dozen adventurous types who wandered out of Africa many thousands of years ago.