Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

Gradually the immediate flurry of activity and souvenir hunting died down. Peace became, at
last, an established fact and sustained Anglo-French collaboration in antiquarian investigations
became possible.
The Bayeux Tapestry
The documenting of the Bayeux Tapestry was, as has already been explained, the Society
of Antiquaries’ principal contribution to the active antiquarianism of the period. The Abbé de la
Rue’s paper, published in Archaeologia in 1814, prompted one member, Dawson Turner’s
Yarmouth neighbour, friend, business partner, fellow antiquary and MP, Hudson Gurney (1775-
1864) to join the cross-Channel rush and go to Bayeux to inspect it for himself. He reported to
the Society on 4 July 1816 that he had found the Tapestry, with some difficulty, and that it was
kept ‘coiled round a machine, like that which lets down the buckets to a Well’. 61 He had had an
opportunity to study it for several hours ‘drawing it out at leisure, over a table’. 62 His conclusion
was respectfully different from that of ‘our very learned and distinguished correspondent’ de la
Rue. 63 He believed that the Tapestry was of the same date or made very soon after the events it
depicted. The Abbé had based his argument that the embroidery was later and made in England
largely on documents, including the negative evidence of wills and historical accounts that
should, he thought, have mentioned it if it had existed. He had also argued, drawing on his
expertise in literary history, that the fables of Aesop which are worked into the borders were not
known in northern Europe at the time of the Conquest.
Hudson Gurney, reflecting his own, typically British antiquarian preoccupations, started
from the architecture depicted in the various scenes, applying immediately the other observations
he had made on his visit to Normandy. ‘In the many buildings therein portrayed there is not the
trace of a pointed arch…but there is the square Norman buttress flat to the wall, and the square
61 Archaeologia, 18,(1817) p.359.
62 Archaeologia, 18, (1817), p.359.
63 Archaeologia, 18, (1817), p.361.
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