[Ravensfort] La Tapisserie de Bayeux

[David R. Hoffpauir]

http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi1905.htm


I've been saving this episode for a special occasion.  That occasion is now here.  I'm proud to say.  

Heralded forth, the Battle of Hastings defines so much in our psyche as 'SCAers'.  You could ask most any of us when Guttenberg first used his printing press and get nothing but a blank stare, but ask "What happened in 1066?" and you'd get a fairly accurate answer all around.

Why is that?  I think that one reason is our romance for war.  Certainly as SCAers we are caught up in such things.  Another reason is 'La Tapisserie de Bayeux'.  What a snap shot!  Nothing compares to it from so early in history.  Not only does it play like a movie, it speaks to us on human terms.  We see bits of history, ships, thrones, armor, hammers, saws, stirrups, tables with bowls of fruit and those things come alive in our imagination.  Fire us to that reality.  Absorb us in that time and in that era.

So, in its presence, are we just anachronists with a comic book?  Maybe.  It's hard, likely impossible, to separate our modern selves from the images we see around us.  We are bombarded with them.  In these times, we are visual creatures very much use to books, pictures, television, movies and such.  But as Anachronists, we lack something from the times we romaticise.  That something is exactly the same breath of images we are use to in the modern mind.  Then comes the jewel, that intrigueing scrap, 231 feet long by 21 inches wide, 'La Tapisserie de Bayeux'.  Simple, primative and yet wonderfully sophisticated.  Subtly, reality shifts.  Time slips.  In it we see not only a story, but we see the hands from which it was made.  In it, all of history, our desire, our collective SCA imagination, comes alive.  

regards,
dsd
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