The Sex Scandal in the Bayeux Tapestry
In the middle of the most famous embroidery in English history, the story of 1066 suddenly stops. Harold and William are deep in conversation in a Norman palace, and right beside them a woman stands in a doorway carved with dragons. A priest reaches through and touches her face. Above them the embroiderers stitched her name, Ælfgyva, in a caption that breaks off mid-sentence without a verb. Underneath, in the border, a naked man crouches in exactly the same pose as the priest.
She is the only woman named in the whole main story of the Bayeux Tapestry, and nobody knows who she was. Everyone who saw it in the eleventh century seems to have understood the joke. We’ve spent three hundred years trying to work it out.
In this episode of Highly Improper, Zac and Lucy go looking for Ælfgyva. Was she a bride being traded across the Channel as part of Harold’s deal with William, or Emma of Normandy, twice Queen of England and the subject of a scandal involving a bishop and nine red-hot ploughshares? Could she have been the mother of Cnut’s sons, rumoured to have passed off a priest’s child and a shoemaker’s child as royal heirs, or an abbess abducted by Harold’s notorious older brother? Or was she the daughter of a married English priest, stitched into the tapestry so that the Normans could mock her father?
Along the way we look at what the tapestry actually is (it isn’t a tapestry), who probably made it and why, and why its borders are full of peacocks, fables and naked men. We also get to the Oxford historian who counted the tapestry’s penises, the scholarly row over whether there are ninety-three or ninety-four, and the Victorian embroiderers who quietly gave everyone underpants.
🎧 LISTEN TO THE FULL SERIES Search for Highly Improper wherever you get your podcasts.
📚 FURTHER READING David M. Wilson, The Bayeux Tapestry (1985) Gale R. Owen-Crocker (ed.), King Harold II and the Bayeux Tapestry (2005) Carola Hicks, The Bayeux Tapestry: The Life Story of a Masterpiece (2006) Michael Lewis, The Real World of the Bayeux Tapestry (2008) Keith Moore, “Ælfgyva and the Cleric of the Bayeux Tapestry”, Foundations 7 (2015)
Who do you think Ælfgyva was? Tell us your theory in the comments, and how you’d finish the sentence.
We’ll see you there. Do try to behave.
Tags: Highly Improper, Present History, Bayeux Tapestry, Bayeux Tapestry mystery, Bayeux Tapestry scandal, Ælfgyva, Aelfgyva, Ælfgyva and the cleric, Bayeux Tapestry naked man, Bayeux Tapestry secrets, Emma of Normandy, Ælfgifu of Northampton, Harold Godwinson, William the Conqueror, Norman Conquest, 1066, Battle of Hastings, Anglo-Saxon England, medieval scandal, medieval history podcast, history podcast, British history
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