Could Duke Phillip the Good of Burgundy have owned

the Bayeux tapestry in 1430?

An entry in the Inventory of the Bayeux cathedral treasury records that in 1476 the church owned the following:

Item une tente tres longue et estroicte de telle a broderie d'ymages et

escripteaulx, faisans representation du Conquest d'Angleterre, laquelle

est tendu environ la nef de l'église le jour et par l'octave des reliques (l).

Not until the 1720 's did scholars first find and appreciate the potential importance of this brief entry. Several had just become aware of a Conquest of England embroidery in the Bayeux cathedral treasury which was exhibited every year at the feast of relics, and had begun to suspect that it might be a near contemporary witness to the events of 1066. One of them, M. Lancelot came upon this brief description in the cathedral archives in the course of searching for earlier references to the hanging (2). At the time he had no doubts that this entry refered to the tapestry he was then studying and all later experts are in agreement with him. Since no earlier one has yet been found this remains the oldest certain reference to the Bayeux Tapestry.

Not long before this, in 1430, an entry in the inventory of the more than 50 tapestries then in the possession of Duke Phillip the Good of Burgundy reads as follows:

Ung grant tapiz de haulte lice, sans or, de l 'istoire du duc Guillaume de

Normandie, comment il conquist l 'Engleterre (3)·

George T. Beech Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo

(1) Archives départementales du Calvados. Caen. Évêché de Bayeux. Inventaire du trésor de la cathédrale de Bayeux, ms. 199, p. 95. (2) Edward A. Freeman, "The Authority of the Bayeux Tapestry", in The Norman Conquest of England; its causes and results, Oxford, 1869, III, 564-65. (3) Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Collection des 500 de Colbert, t. 127, fol. 127v; Inventaire original des joyaux, tapisseries, livres et vaisselle de Philippe le Bon duc de Bourgogne à Dijon. "XVe siècle; papier; 180 feuillets; 305 sur 215 ml; relié maroquin rouge aux armes de Colbert; entouré du double collier des Ordres", Charles De La Ron- CIÈRE, Catalogue des Cinq Cents de Colbert, Paris, 1908, 101. This was first published by le Comte DE LABORDE, Les ducs de Bourgogne. Etudes sur les lettres, les arts et l 'industrie pendant le XVe siècle et plus particulièrement dans les Pays-Bas et le duché de Bourgogne, Paris, 1857, II, p. 270; later by W. G. THOMSON, A History of Tapestry from the earliest times until the present day, London, 1973 (3rd ed.), p. 91-94; and recently by Anna Rapp BURl and Monica Stucki-SchÜRER, Burgundische Tapisserien, München, Hirmer, 2001, p. 460.