Tomorrow will be our D-Day tour, but the agenda today was the Bayeux tapestry, which was remarkable. It is a 70 yard long, nearly one- thousand year old piece of wool embroidery on linen that has been preserved since shortly after the Battle of Hastings in 1066. To refresh your French and English history, this battle was between William the Bastard, heir to the British throne, but a Norman (French) person and Harald, pretender to the English throne. The panels are numbered and show in remarkable detail why the battle occurred, how William prepared for it, how the battle was fought and how it ended. It's sort of like a very intricate, very long ongoing cartoon. After William won the battle he became William the Conquerer, King of England. (So, the way to go from bastard to king is to win a significant battle. :-) )My Knot Club needlework friends will understand how long it must have taken and with what skill it required to make this tapestry. It was intended to be hung periodically in the cathedral here in Bayeux to teach the illiterate masses about the battle. While photography in the museum is forbidden, these are a couple of photos of very small panels of the tapestry duplicated in the gift shop so that you can see what I mean about how it is designed.
This is the Bayeux cathedral, where the tapestry was to be hung.
Near the cathedral is the museum of lace, which displays the process of creating bobbin lace. The lace is intricate and composed of thousands of tiny knotted threads, produced by weaving thread-filled bobbins over, under and around other bobbins. Bayeux was the center of lace making in France, much as Bruges was in Belgium.
Tonight we ate regional specialties of Normandy. Most famous are things made with apples ( cider, Camembert cheese and Calvados, which is a liqueur made from apples). No group dinner tonight.
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