The Back of the Embroidery Model · not a facsimile

modelled fragment

Shown without turning: the face, then the reverse in register.

Face 000% turned Reverse

turn it over

Turn the cloth first. Then choose a thread: it stays lit while the others fall back — on the face and on the reverse at once.

After the turn

Turn it over and the picture becomes structure.

What you have been turning is a model built from the documented technique of the Bayeux embroidery: wool worked onto a plain-woven linen ground, shapes filled with laid threads that small couching stitches hold down, contours and letters drawn in stem stitch, panels seamed, losses later re-worked. On the face those readings are pictures. On the reverse, in this model, the same threads read as the working that carries them.

Nothing on the face holds itself up.

An interpretation offered by this model — a way of reading what you turned, not a documented statement about the object.

ObjectDocumented

It is an embroidery, not a tapestry

A tapestry is woven, its image formed as the cloth is made. The Bayeux Tapestry is embroidered: wool yarn stitched onto a ground of plain-woven linen that already existed before the first stitch. It is roughly 68 metres long and about half a metre high, dated to the 1070s — within living memory of the events it shows — and kept at the Musée de la Tapisserie de Bayeux in Normandy. It was inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in 2007.

Its end is missing. Whatever was worked beyond the last surviving stitches is gone, and the closing section as displayed includes later restoration.

MaterialsObserved

A small palette, two stitches

Dye analysis identifies madder, woad and weld as the principal sources of its wool colours — reds, blues, yellows, and the greens obtained by dyeing one over the other. A small number of shades carries the entire work.

Two stitches do almost everything. Stem or outline stitch draws every contour and every letter of the Latin inscription. Laid-and-couched work fills the bodies, ships, horses and buildings: threads laid across the shape, a second set laid over them, and short stitches tacking the whole down. Because the laid threads float on the face, the reverse of a filled area is not a filled area at all.

The reverseDocumented

The back has been seen, and recorded

This is not a hypothetical surface. During the conservation campaign of 1982–83 the embroidery was examined in detail and its reverse photographed; the technical study published from that work remains the principal account of the stitching, seams, thread ends and repairs as they actually exist on the cloth.

That record is what makes an honest model possible — and what marks its limits. The structural behaviour shown here (couching visible on the back, floats between areas of one colour, seam allowances, later work sitting over old) follows the documented technique. The particular scene, the particular routes and the placement of the repair do not correspond to any specific passage of the Bayeux embroidery.

MakersNot recoverable

No document names anyone who made it

The long-repeated story of Queen Matilda and her ladies is later legend, not evidence. Scholarship most often places the work in England, with Canterbury frequently proposed on stylistic and textual grounds, and the commission commonly associated with Bishop Odo of Bayeux — an attribution that is well argued rather than proven.

The scale of the thing, and the consistency of its stitching across tens of metres, imply an organised workshop and many hands working to a shared design. How many, of what status, of what gender, under whose direction: none of this is recorded. This model will not supply an answer the evidence does not hold. What the cloth does preserve of those people is not their names but their decisions — where to start a thread, where to carry it, how hard to pull.

MaintenanceObserved

Nine hundred years of being handled

A condition survey carried out for the Bayeux Museum in 2020 recorded tens of thousands of stains and thousands of holes, thin places and areas of wear across the cloth — the ordinary accumulation of being rolled, hung, carried, mended, backed, displayed and looked at. Later linings and later stitching have been added to keep it whole.

Some of that intervention is now itself historical evidence. Nineteenth-century restoration reworked losses and, in places, made choices about what the missing stitches had shown. Distinguishing original wool from restoration wool is a routine part of studying the object, and it is done from the material: dye, twist, thread thickness, and how the stitching sits in relation to what is underneath.

This modelInterpretive

Where the documentation stops, the model stops claiming

The fragment above was drawn for this page. It is not a facsimile of any part of the Bayeux embroidery, not to scale, and no measurement should be taken from it. Its lettering is invented; its ship is generic; its repair patch is placed for legibility. It exists for one purpose: to let the relation between a visible surface and its hidden support be handled rather than described.

Sources consulted

Musée de la Tapisserie de Bayeux (Bayeux Museum) — published object description, dimensions, materials and conservation documentation.
Isabelle Bédat & Béatrice Girault-Kurtzeman, “The Technical Study of the Bayeux Tapestry,” in P. Bouet, B. Levy & F. Neveux (eds), The Bayeux Tapestry: Embroidering the Facts of History (Presses universitaires de Caen, 2004) — the technical account arising from the 1982–83 examination, including the reverse.
UNESCO Memory of the World Register — “Bayeux Tapestry,” inscribed 2007.
Alexandra Lester-Makin, The Lost Art of the Anglo-Saxon World: The Sacred and Secular Power of Embroidery (Oxbow Books, 2019) — early medieval embroidery technique, workshop practice and the limits of what stitching can tell us about makers.
Gale R. Owen-Crocker (ed.), scholarship on the Bayeux embroidery’s inscription, alteration and nineteenth-century restoration.