 Thank you very much, and thank you to the Society of Antiquities for being very enthusiastic about holding the lecture today. As you have pointed out, there are some links, clear links between the Waddle family of Leake in Staffordshire and the society, which we'll explore as we go along. I would like to say I'm not a scholar of Anglilith Saxon history. My research as the design historian relates pretty much to the 19th and 20th century, so it really is my research is on the facsimile, which we'll get to, but I'll outline, of course, different elements of the history related to the original Bayer tapestry, which was the inspiration for so many people because of its huge importance historically. I've done some little snippets at the top of various slides just to show you how some historical information as we go along. 950 years of history can't be covered in 40 minutes. I will leave out more than I put in. I'm very conscious of this. So we'll start, and I hope you will thoroughly enjoy this story and be inspired to go and have a look at the real thing if you haven't already. Right, where's Leake? Well, it's north of Watford. It is about 30 miles south of Manchester and 15 miles north of the Pottery towns of Stoke-on-Trent. So very clearly outlined by Arnold Bennett in his novels, but so entirely different to the five towns that he writes about. Leake is a very interesting silk town. You develop quite differently from other silk towns such as Macclesfield and Congleton nearby, particularly interesting because of its architecture. The Wardle family of Leake, which inspired many leading figures in art and design to visit the town, many architects of the Gothic Revival era to build in this town, probably more architects than have even built in a city in the same era. So it's fascinating in many different ways, and it's a town that William Morris got to know very, very well when he visited the Wardle family of Leake to learn his first dying skills. And if you travel up this street, you can see here, Morris would have travelled many, many times between 1875 and 1877 when he visited Leake and stayed with the Wardle family in the little house on the left-hand side of this very elegant Hansen street of houses. The house with the red door is where Morris stayed with Thomas and Elizabeth Wardle. Thomas Wardle was, by then, considered to be one of the major dying experts in the country. And it was he who actually block printed by hand Thomas Wardle at William Morris' first 14 designs, many of which now considered to be iconic textiles of the era. This is a whole of the letter in itself, but Morris stayed in this house and he wrote many potent letters from this house that are much quoted in the history of Morris. So it's an important monument to him, and his link with the Wardle family and the Society of Antiquaries is very strong. This very delicate drawing of Morris is done at the time when he was visiting, this is the period when he was visiting Leake often, and I think it's very beautiful. It's one of the nicest ones I've ever seen. So I'll give you some idea if he's a young man, he's in his early 30s, and this is one of his designed snakehead, which was a highly complex design that he persuaded Thomas Wardle then of Dyer to become a printer. Quite a big change for this craftsman to make, and he invested a great deal in all the equipment, in the craft skills that he needed to produce these textiles. This alliance between William Morris and Thomas Wardle was a highly successful one, and Thomas Wardle looked back in it many years later and said it was a very difficult time. They had their differences of opinions, which were well documented basically, but they remained friends until Morris' death. Thomas Wardle visited Kelmscott Manor, so he had done a strong link with the Society of Antiquaries. They were keen fishermen, and they went fishing there, and they had a good time as far as I can tell. The Bayer tapestry was of great interest to Morris, not necessarily because of its design. We don't know that it influenced him in any way as a designer. He was more interested in it as a political document, because it tells the story of a battle which changes the way of life in England. He was concerned, as were many of the people, about what he felt was the norm in Yoke. The restriction put on British life as it was changed by the French invaders, so it affected various aspects of ways of life. It affected literature and the language. We don't know if he ever spoke to the Wardle family about this when he visited their house, but we know certainly he went to see the tapestry with Ben Jones in 1855. Many other very eminent writers and artist Dickens went, Tennyson went and Ruskin as well before the Wardles themselves went to visit it in Normandy. Basically, I think also because it was a political document recording something that was of great interest. At a time in the 19th century when many people were looking back to early history, they became very fascinated by it, and for a lot of people it was a romantic time. It involved kings and queens and battles, but also it changed the way of life in the way that Britain and England was governed. This is Thomas Wardle with, as you can see, 10 of his 14 children just after the period when he'd been working with Willie Morris in Leek. His wife is conspicuously absent. She was quite ill up to the birth of the youngest child, which you can see here at the front. The children became involved in the dying and printing business that evolved to be one of the most highly regarded in the western world really. Thomas Wardle began to supply liberty of London and Breach and Street with huge supplies that died and printed textiles. I'm particularly known for his range of silk from India. There's a very strong link with India, which again is another lecture. These people, it's very important to point out, while they're living in a market town in Leek, which is also a silk town surrounded by beautiful countryside, they are not backwardsmen. These people are, Thomas Wardle and his wife, highly integrated with all the major societies in London. They had many strong links with most of the arts and commercial societies in the capital, and they thought globally. Leek became a successful dying centre, particularly because of the qualities of the water of the River Churnet, which flows around the town, and the river flows down from the Staffordshire mollans, which is very wild still, very beautiful, full of limestone, and it's thought that the minerals from the stone added an important element to the dying process, helped to fix the dying in a way that made it become a centre, really one of the best centres of dying in Europe. So this is what undoubtedly attracted Morris to go there. Elizabeth Wardle was one of the main characters in this story. By the time we get to 1875, and Morris is visiting her home often, her and her 10 surviving children, and Morris writes about the children. It's been very boisterous, obviously, but he writes about them very fondly in a number of his letters. By the time he is in Leek, she has already worked with three major Gothic revival architects who are building there. So we're talking about George Gilbert, Scott Jr, John Dundee setting, and Richard Normanshaw, all commissioned to build in this very small town, all of whom are interested in embroideries for the buildings which they design, which are stitched by Elizabeth Wardle and local women. So they are used to working on large-scale site-specific pieces, doing very fine work indeed, and very detailed work indeed, using silks-and-gold threads. Thomas Wardle would have known this courtyard outside very well, because by the time he is a young man in his 30s, he's become a fellow of two societies, a fellow of the Geological Society, where he did a great deal of work on fossils. He somehow was infinitely curious about all aspects of life, including what lay beneath his feet, and Staffordshire Derbyshire at Borders, where he lived, is very rich in pickings, and so he earned fellowship of Geological Society, and later he gained fellowship with Royal Society of Chemistry. So he would have not been amazed if he didn't visit this building, given the nature of his interest in the arts as well. And he was a man who was running a very, very busy business. He is doing a huge amount of research of his own into the wild sorts of India, and the dice-stuffs of India, and that he could come to an expert in the fields. He didn't sleep, I don't think. He couldn't have done that. He also, I think it's important to note, he had a shop in New Bond Street, this one here, the statue's outside, and it's obviously still here today, but you've got three statues to one of the, slide here's, half hidden, which have up to sign of commerce written on them, which completely sums him up. And so he's selling his own products there. He's arrived about that time in Commercy with William Morris, and with Liberty of Regent Street. So highly sophisticated people who prefer to stay and live in league, that stay very involved with the town and its activities as well. Now, the Bay of Tapestru, which becomes a subject of great interest in the 18th, 19th century, is housed in this building now in Normandy. It's 70 metres long by 50 centimetres, and I just bought a small souvenir strip back from Normandy Luture, and we've had to fold it over twice to make it fit this table even at this scale. It wouldn't need a room twice the size of this one to display it, but its size is, of course, one of its great interests. But it also presents the people of Lee Commerty have accidentally offered it with great problems that you might imagine, logistical problems. Now, in summary, it tells the story in a cartoon format of Harold Hill of Wessex. As you can see, he left the Saxon Army as the Battle of Hastings in an attempt to defeat the normal invasion of England. Now, this is one version of the events. Scholars of the Anglo-Saxon period would say there aren't many other versions, but just not absolutely certain what they are. It's a long time ago, but this is the only pictorial version of events, and it's felt to be fairly faithful in its depiction, but it's evoking a battle rather than giving a concrete version of it, and it does this very, very well indeed. Sorry about that, clearly, at the start, when I was supposed to take photographs in Beir, but it gives you some sort of idea of the scale of it. It's about 20 inches wide, which is half the width of the stretch of linen. It is not a tapestry, it is an embroidery, so that has to be made clear. The figures in it are not woven in. They're stitched in wool onto a linen ground. So we have wool and linen, both staple yarns in England. Whilst we don't know who commissioned it, i.e. who paid for it, and we don't know who the designers were, and we don't know who the embroiderers were either, the scholarly opinion actually indicates it is of Englishmake. Canterbury and Winchester are thought to be the most likely places where it was produced as they had noted embroidery workshops in 1066 and just after the battle. So the battle tells the story again from 1064 to 1666. It tells us of the lead up to the battle, and it takes us through the battle and the final invasion of England. It has produced many, many conferences. It has produced libraries of works for centuries to have been discussing its likely origin and its meaning. At the moment we are clear about many, many points of interest. But I think it is generally agreed by the scholars that it is the work of the most incredible design, and as the design historian, I think it is phenomenally interesting, and you'll be able to have a look at how a designer managed to cover 70 metres of activity and hold the scale of battles and different aspects of daily life together. What devices did this designer or designer use? And it is incredibly sophisticated. It has no perspective. It doesn't deal with three-dimensionality. It is a linear story, and it takes you a good 20 minutes to transverse from left to right to cover the whole length of it, walking very slowly, and you cannot take in the wealth of detail that is displayed there. It's of three different elements, really. You have a central panel that displays the main action, and you have borders, top and bottom, which gives you additional information if you can decode that information. Many scholars have tried. It's thought to be influenced by classical freezes on Roman buildings, although we have no idea whether a designer ever saw anything of that nature, and probably hugely influenced by illuminated manuscripts, then held in category. So very, very strong indication that that is probably where the designer operated. But we don't know. Now, as you've heard in the introduction, the Society of Antiquaries commissioned a reproduction of the tapestry. At a time when printing technology was changing, they actually commissioned a reproduction to be done as an engraving, and we can see here evidence of that in this volume that's been brought down for you. It is a third of the original size, beautifully hand-coloured, and it's involved quite a number of trips to France on the behalf of the engraver and also the person who calls in the various sections faithfully. Charles Stottart was the draftsman and Bissiere the engraver, and they have to keep going backwards and forwards to France to keep how they colour match this, I don't know. By then, of course, the tapestry is hundreds of years old. It's had a very difficult life and it was used in difficult circumstances, stored badly, it had to be repaired. So they managed somehow to get hold of it and to colour exactly different, each of the 58 scenes that then survived. There were probably more, probably 60, we don't know. And what I find very interesting is the textile history is they took wax impressions of the surface of it so that we can tell from those how the wool yarn would use, how it was stitched, and below the engraving there, you can see a detail of the horse's head. You've got this engraving on paper. And then below that, the stitch detail. And the people who stitched it, we don't know if they're men or women, probably teams of both used two stitches only. So they fill in the main body of every character, every building, every horse, every other animal with a stitching technique that is very simple and allows you to cover a lot of ground very quickly. That is then outlined in contrasting colour in every single case. The use of the stitch, the use of colouring throughout this piece without 70 metres of it, is absolutely extraordinary. The command of detail and the command of texture is wonderful. And through two stitches, and using one yarn of wool only, they can convey houses and trees and horses and people and armour and cooking utensils and the sea and just about everything. This is a feat of this extraordinary design. And I wonder whether the designer worked closely with the stitches to organise the colour schemes that also holds this very difficult composition together because the use of colour and how it is manipulated is incredibly interesting. So, as I say, you'll have a central section where the activity takes place and then there are borders showing different activities such as this pharming agricultural scenes of quite recognisable animals. So you have a donkey cart, you've got horse drip, you're pulling a plough, a farmer selling seeds and so on. And it's become a source of information for historians on daily life as well as the historical meaning of the battle itself. You also have other strips running along which are composite animals and scenes from esophable as well. Some of which reflect on the activity that's going on in the centre band. Others, we've no idea whether it's not or it's possible to say. But scenes from battles is certain points below far into the lower borders as you can see here if there's no room in the central panel to hold all the action. And the other thing that's very interesting design-wise is the use of trees because there's certainly a part of the designer to depict things very realistically. You can actually see exactly without the use of three-dimensional means what animals are being portrayed, what they're doing, except for the trees that are all incredibly stylised. And they're used to break up the scenes of activity at certain points. Otherwise, without them, one scene flowing in horses and cavalry are travelling great distances would have no break at all. And so they're used as a way of dividing scenes off one from another. But why they're not more realistically portrayed? We don't know. We thought that the designer was very well acquainted with shipbuilding because these scenes of activity which involve the French getting ready to actually invade England are very true up to life. The shipbuilding scenes are thought to be exactly right. But I'm also interested in use of colour. And I even found myself at one point actually counting the strikes on the hulls of the different ships to see what was going on and couldn't find any two that were the same. So you've got realistic life and built up to the major battle going on. But you've also got a designer who's very interested in how three or four colours can be manipulated. And it provides somewhat a carnivalesque theme in way, although this is very serious and very violent battle. But he's portrayed the ships using three or four colours only. And it's also a great use of a beautiful curving line which we can see later when the ships start to cross the channel. So we have the French preparing to invade England for all sorts of very historical reasons. We have the English already in battle in Yorkshire and expecting great trouble. We have no scenes in this tapestry that depict the English preparation. But we know that in Yorkshire we know that armies have to travel down to the south coast to fight off the invaders. We have scenes of feasting going on. So food preparation here for the army. This is the French army. I mean, no it is because the designer is depicting the French as men without moustaches with her that's cut high very high at the back where the English have flowing logs on facial hair. So this is quite an introvert, but you can't actually tell who's who because they are all fighting each other. Haley's comet is depicted logged as an event that actually happened and it's seen as a sign of grateful voting actually on the part of the soldiers who are all pointing at it as you can see and looking quite scared. So they changed their plans because of the sighting of Haley's comet which is logged at a certain date. So there are certain ways of confirming what went on. So as well as the Society of Antiquaries commissioning a whole set of engravings the Department of Science and Art in 1873 commissioned a set of photographs to be taken which involved and many trips to France also. But it gave a full size copy of the tapestry as it was in France and the photography is phenomenal it shows the weave of the linen ground it shows where various reperth have taken place and it is still in what is now the VNA in 20 roles as it would have been in the beginning and very fragile as you might imagine. They had two sets of these images on display at South Kensington Museum for many years on a drum-like mechanism with a handle so the public could unroll it when they were in one of the departments and have made variably this mechanism break down never to be repaired. But in fact the photographs were bagged onto linen and were lent to the Wardle family of Leek in the house we saw living in that house and they were able to borrow them from South Kensington Museum to copy. You can see from these drawings here the repairs that have gone over the years in France as they need this huge tapestry was fairly badly treated over many years. Elizabeth Wardle was able to use members of her stitching community to copy these photographs. Now they were allowed to do that because we had a very great relationship with South Kensington Museum that our then director was a friend of the Wardle family. They had already purchased many examples of leek embroidery to display in the museum as examples of how one can use India's dice stuffs and India's wild silk. It was a museum of trade very much then and it was to encourage trade with India that they would display these things and they were getting examples of the best stitching techniques using Indian wild silks from Leek and so there was to be an agreement between them that they could borrow these. How they were transported to Leek we don't know and what's evident here you can see in one of the lower borders is a depiction of nudity which was great cause great distress at the time. The more graphic details have been scrapped off the surface of the photograph because they were pretty detailed and there's quite a few examples of these throughout board activity which as we know is one of the often more and savoury aspects of war which is daily life as well. By the time that Elizabeth Wardle had decided having been to be with her husband Thomas and having seen the copies of the Bayer tapestry at South Kensington Museum that England should have a copy of its own they have possibly moved to this rather larger Georgian house where they stayed although we don't quite know but even then I think the logistics of borrowing 20 rolls of fragile photographs on the museum having somebody from Leek a younger art student copy every single detail of the 70 metres copying the colours as well and she said they were done as closely as possible to the original as it was seen at that time and in a house full of children we don't know we're just absolutely no idea of how this was organised but it was a feat often as tremendous skills on Elizabeth Wardle's behalf she must have had a major overall plan when she conceived the notion of copying the Bayer tapestry and she must have had fairly other detailed plans that came into play as time went on she was able to organise 35 women most of whom live locally most of whom had worked on ecclesiastical embroideries major architects but not all of them some lived in London some lived in Derbyshire others lived in Macclesfield in Cheshire now try to understand how you get a bunch of 35 people together that they have the appropriate skills that you need to do work of such importance is beyond my understanding I don't know how they organise the transference of knowledge really in terms of what colour to use and what point in this very detailed scene of the scene we don't know because we'd have no records at all apart from a very small envelope I found in the local history library in Leig which had this tiny scrap of paper a little this on it which was then scratched down showing things like horses left leg her blue shoes yellow and different women I feel must have looked at that particular section they were assigned to stitch out of the 58 scenes and made notes of what colours went where in handwriting on this particular paper we can see our lines of little parts of buildings and feasting here not all of them so this is one way of transferring knowledge on what colours exactly went where there were eight shades of wool died by Thomas Warden who by then was the world's greatest expert on natural dyeing and he was going back and researching and done this with Ronnie Morris as well looking at natural dyes as they would have been used then in the time of the original there was a young woman called Lizyanne who traced the photographs of the land from South Kensington Museum each part of which would have to be pin-crit through paper to transfer the design to the lemon ground using little puffs of chocolate as it was then then all the details would then have to be filled in and they completed the whole task within a year Elizabeth Wardell also wrote a guide to the Bayer tapestry in which she explains what is happening in each of the different 58 scenes it's taken from a much larger work by Collingwood Bruce but practical woman that she was this is quite a small piece about this big which would have been pocket-sized so you'd been able to hold it quite clearly in front of each scene of action in the tapestry and know what's going on otherwise you might know it's a battle you wouldn't necessarily know whether it was the French or the English or whatever and what other things were happening in that scene without her a lovely guide The use of colour is amazing the facial expressions are amazing different scholars have spent a lot of time just looking at the facial expressions on the figures which are very real they tell details of different physiognomies really but it's possible to work out that and I don't know if this is the designer because nobody does on whether it's the needle woman but using four colours on the whole you will find in groups such as this no two tunics are the same worn with different colour holes different coloured shoes belts and hats and there's a method of colour control that goes from end to end of this tapestry in this way so you can distinguish different figures if you want to trace the act of a particular king or knight but also it's a use of colour that holds a very complicated and lengthy history together by this harmonious use of mainly four colours and every colour that's used to depict let's say a tunic will have a contrasting colour outlining it and that's repeated end to end so the understanding of colours and how colours interact with each other is extraordinary I mentioned the curving line before and it's particularly evident in this scene of boats crossing the channel this is the French sailing for England but the curving line of the sails is echoed in the shields of the cavalry on the boats here where they've hung them over the side this sort of almond shaped scenes the scenes on the holes of the boats and echoed in the water as well it is incredibly elegant it's a very sophisticated understanding of the use of line with colour and Ruskin writes about the use of water the depiction of water here and likens it to scenes he's seen in Egyptian wall paintings he was so admiring of this work and its designs particularly its design elements one major difference between the copies that was made by the 35 women in League and the original tapestry is the blue border at the bottom of each scene and Elizabeth Woodall and the women who worked each particular section of this have signed their names so we know who did what and that's interesting we don't often hear about anonymous needle women but in the case of League they were always identified their work was known in the town who did what and that continues here which is I think a great acknowledgement of the standard of the women's work literature we've got more of the same I have here a copy of the textile society journal Tech through to have a look at two of the articles here by great scholars of Anglo-Saxon history and one is talking about the buildings and one is talking about the four fools that she's spotted so we want to have a look at why the buildings are like this and what they perhaps might mean it's a very detailed and scholarly article other things going on in the border just these three things so these are all the League copies people ask why have we got horses in blue and yellow and horses in red and it's been suggested that this is done because there is no use of perspective but colour does give you some indication of distance but it also distinguishes one animal from another otherwise there would be one sort of murky mass of grey and brown so it's partly an aesthetic thing but it's partly also the fact that these steeds are important the Normans were great cavalrymen very proud of it and their animals they depicted although not in great detail it's acknowledged that the designer had a great understanding of horsemanship by the way he's depicting their movements and so on now why did Elizabeth Will do this we know that as I've mentioned she'd worked with some major architects including Richard Normashaw one of his main churches was built in Leek and this is one of the only alter front who is the only alter front he ever designed for his buildings so they were working in sections when they stitched alter front such as this they were not as similar to the format of the tapestry scenes then 8 to 10 feet wide highly detailed highly symbolic using lettering plant forms and other forms and requiring a great deal of needlework skills they were far finer than that used in the tapestry in this particular detail from an alter front designed by John Dundee setting you can see architectural features you can see that Pelican feeding her young in great detail and stitched very finely but also interestingly at the top of this body of work you'll find that the women had stitched their names in acknowledgement way before they embarked on the tapestry copy in 1885 so it's a tradition that was alive in acknowledging the needlework and other skills very clearly but they were capable of doing far finer work so again and lettering of course which is scattered throughout the original and tells us in detail what is happening into some of the scenes so a useful adjunct to the cartoon like pictures and the action that's going on and so really in all the leak women and Elizabeth Wardle had actually great experience of doing this sort of work elements that are in the tapestry have been practiced before in the leak forest and community so there is also a link with Elizabeth Wardle's brother George White Wardle with William Morris he was born in the leak as she was and he became the manager of Morris's company for 20 years at a time when he was going through a major expansion these stitches these embroideries are very fine angels are taken from his drawings so this is typical of the work before they embarked on the copy of the a Bayer tapestry at the end you have an acknowledgement Thomas Wardle who died the wool and all the women who stitched it when it was completed after the year which in itself is phenomenal he then once on a major tour around Britain and I can't help but feel that Elizabeth Wardle had this in mind before she embarked on the project in the first place it was never meant to be hung in her home so where was it going to go what was she going to do with it when it was finished and basically the tour must have been something that has planned in the very early stages otherwise what was it going to be where was it going to be and included in that was a major tour to America in 1886 so six months after it was completed it was going off to the States where it was received with a great deal of publicity in all the major newspapers there and it was displayed in New York in a major gallery of great interest to embroiderers and followers of the Alts and Crafts movement and it was clear from looking at the American journalists and their columns exactly who Thomas Wardle was who Elizabeth Wardle was and the nature of the work and it was actually written about as he was crossing the Atlantic so there's a great builder before it arrives in the States and at certain venues these are all on the Eastern Seaboard you have people giving lectures about it there are poems written about it and there's a great description of how it's hung in one gallery otherwise I have wondered often how on earth this 70 meter long work went from venue to venue in different towns across the country in venues that were totally different sometimes for two days sometimes for months on end who was in charge of this who dealt with the logistics of it who hung it this fragile textile all the textiles of fragile look it down who transported it we don't know but somebody did but in one of the American newspapers there's a great description of how it is hung on supports which wind across the room in and out creating little chambers for people to walk around so we can only presume this is what happened in other venues when it was shown and this life continued directly until the 1890s when it was shown at the town hall with a few to purchase Reading Museum now houses the leak of Faxima Lake of the Bear tapestry because whilst it was shown in leak shortly after it was stitched it was never kept in the town and so everybody's regret now as you might imagine and particularly Elizabeth Wardle's regret that the town never held on to it so it was bought by Oldman Hill who presented it to the town of Reading where it is now and in the 1920s the Margaret Lady Gaunt one of the little girls she saw in the early photograph saw it, hung in Reading and was horrified it was black and it had been cut into it was nailed to the wall it was too high and the lighting was poor and she offered to buy it back but Reading wouldn't sell it back to the family but they have cleaned it it's now on display in Reading Museum and it is extremely popular Thank you very much for listening and I hope you'll go and see it