I saw this. It was done by Victorian embroiderers, and was amazing, but the part I remember is one of the incidental characters. In the original, he was quite conspicuously nude; in the reproduction he was given a pair of shorts.
Victorian embroiderers in 1088 when Odo, the Archbishop of Bayeux and half brother of William the Bastard/Conqueror, commissioned it to have it hung in the cathedral?
The tale was that it had been created by Queen Mathilde and her ladies in waiting, which of course was not true ... it was made by professional embroiderers, but long before the reign of Queen Victoria.
When Odo fell out of favor with William, the tapestry was folded and stored in a cedar box, opened each year for inventory. This is why it is so well preserved ... as opposed, for instance, to the massive Apocalypse Tapestry in Anjou that was used to protect orange orchards from frost.
> in the reproduction
The original is visible behind plexiglass in Bayeux. There is also a canvas reproduction -- I saw it in 1997 and don't recall whether it was bowdlerized.
P.S. Ah, I missed that it has been temporarily relocated from Bayeux to the British Museum. It will return to Bayeux within a year.
> Victorian embroiderers in 1088 when Odo, the Archbishop of Bayeux and half brother of William the Baster/Conqueror, commissioned it to have it hung in the cathedral?
They are talking about the subject of the story, which is a reproduction made in 1886.
Was just reading one of his posts earlier while having lunch, only a few miles from that very clock tower, the one in the post here. Other side of the capital!
I live near Boston, and every winter the city needs to deal with tons and tons of snow removed from the streets. The easiest solution is to dump it in Boston Harbor, but the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection banned that in 1997 (as part of cleaning up the Harbor). The solution: pile the snow up in vacant lots and let it melt into the Harbor. What's the difference? Dunno...
