In last month’s CA, Sherds wrote that Reading Museum’s copy of the Bayeux Tapestry was censored by the women of the Leek Embroidery Society when they stitched the facsimile in 1886. Sherds has since learned that the ladies of Leek have been maligned.
The Leek embroidery was produced under the supervision of Elizabeth Wardle who, together with her husband Thomas Wardle, played a key role in the development of William Morris’ textile work, supporting his mission to revive ancient needlework skills using natural dyes and materials. When Elizabeth set about producing a full-size replica of the Tapestry, she paid particular attention to the expressive colour palette of the original, which uses subtle shades of red, blue, green, yellow, and brown – all derived from plants.
To guide the 35 members of the Society who created the replica, Elizabeth (later Lady Wardle: her husband was knighted for services to the silk industry in 1897) commissioned technicians at the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria & Albert Museum) to produce hand-coloured prints from the 180 glass-plate negatives that the museum held as a record of the Tapestry. It was at this stage that the imagery’s 90-odd male appendages were omitted or obscured. It seems that paternalism, rather than prudishness, deprived the ladies of Leek of the opportunity (no doubt enjoyed by their 11th-century predecessors) of having a good laugh at male pretensions as they worked at their embroidery.
Minerva: cultivating wisdom