THE ALTERNATION BETWEEN PRESENT

AND PAST TIME IN THE TELLING

OF THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY STORY

George Beech

Prof. emer. medieval history, Western Mich. U., Kalamazoo, MI.

When an anonymous artist designed the Bayeux Tapestry shortly after the Norman conquest of England he presented some of the action as taking place in the present time and some in the past. This becomes clear through his use of the present and the present perfect verb tenses in the inscriptions accompanying the visual scenes. Thus the inscription for the coronation scene of Harold reads, "Hie dederunt Haroldo coronam Regis ", "Here they have given Harold the crown of the king", and describes this as already having taken place. Then the next scene pictures Harold sitting crowned on the throne and the inscription tells us, "Hie residet Harold rex Anglorum ", "Here sits Harold king of the English". This sequence ends three scenes later with a portrayal of an English boat sailing to Normandy with an inscription reading "Hie navis Anglica venit in terrain Willelmi ducis ", "Here an English ship has come to the country of Duke William".1 In the first and the third of these inscriptions the author looks upon the crown giving and the voyage as completed actions of the past as an historian would do, but the second one, Harold seated on his throne, he presents as taking place right now as he looks on. Had he been consistent in his use of verb tenses, the second inscription would read "Here Harold was sitting (or, sat) as king of the English", not "is sitting".

Far from being an isolated case this switching of tenses, or time periods, in the portrayal of actions and events occurs repeatedly throughout the entire tapestry and can hardly have resulted from carelessness on the part of the author of the inscriptions but must have been part of his plan for presenting the story of the Conquest of England. Scholars of the Tapestry are aware of this trait but to my knowledge not many have commented on it or attributed any importance to it2. However, as I will explain in what follows, my analysis of

1 Although venit might be translated as "is coming" instead of "has come", I believe that here the author is using it in the present perfect tense. See below p. 20. 2 "In terms of their tense, the narrative inscriptions seem to be fairly divided between the perfect and the present (or the historic present)... There is no obvious rationale behind the