Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #295517 in Books
• Published on: 2006-04-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 354 pages

Customer Reviews

Author sheds light on an ancient mystery
Andrew Bridgeford's "1066, the Hidden History of the Bayeux Tapestry", brings fresh interpretation to an amazing, mysterious piece of cloth. This strip of linen seventy meters (230 feet) long, presents an account of events leading up to William the Conqueror's successful invasion of England. The traditional interpretation is that the Tapestry was a costly trophy commissioned by a Norman baron or bishop celebrating the Norman victory. Bridgeford disputes that view. He finds conflicting messages, messages that tend to support the French, rather than the Norman, point of view. He even finds support for the English, and perhaps a challenge to Duke William's right to the English throne. Such messages would have been punished by death, and whoever commissioned and stitched the Tapestry would have taken great risks. Nevertheless, the ambiguous message was embroidered less than a decade after William's invasion.

What were the real intentions of the sponsor who dictated the images and message stitched into the Bayeux Tapestry? The Tapestry (an embroidery, really) was originally longer, but the final scenes are missing. Did fire, damp or rats carry the ending away? Or did fear suborn courage, causing an unknown hand to cut off a dangerous truth in a deadly world? That is one of a thousand mysteries inhering to the Bayeux Tapestry.

Nor is that all. The Tapestry brings us a dwarf who may have been a founding father of French literature; and reminds its contemporary viewers of an unlovely tale, of two queen-mothers thrusting their several sons forward, sometimes fatally, in their own lust for royal power. Why? How do these sub-plots relate? It has been an abiding mystery, one for which Andrew Bridgeford may have supplied - if not the missing end of the cloth - then at least several answers.

By Robert Fripp, author,
Power of a Woman: Memoirs of a Turbulent Life: Eleanor of Aquitaine

A Tapestry, Well Woven

Everyone knows about the Bayeux Tapestry, or do they?

If you are really interested in the Bayeux Tapestry and the period of history covering the conquest of England, then this is the book for you.

A work of exquisite detail the tapestry has preserved the glory of the Norman Conquest for later generations to see. If you know what you are looking for it reads like a book.

The tale of the battle of Hastings, the death of Harold and the ascendency of Duke William are indelibly woven into the fabric of the tapestry for all to see.

The validity of many of the deeds depicted by the tapestry is brought into question by the author of the book Andrew Bridgeford. The tapestry is a pictorial story of courage and deceit and the pageantry of the age, but is everything as it appears to be.

The quality of the research and the excellent story-telling is a joy to readers of history. The book contains may photographs of the tapestry and I enjoyed it immensely