A friend now living in Germany visited this week. Mostly my old friends and I catch up while I’m travelling for work, so I was delighted that C made the effort to come, partly because I’ve already found that there’s nothing like showing your new home to old friends to let you feel some sense of belonging. I gave her a wholly idiosyncratic tour of Dublin, taking in all the bookshops and art galleries and avoiding the crowds and global chain stores by slipping down lanes and backstreets I’ve only recently learned to navigate confidently.
I took her to the fine art textile exhibition in Dublin Castle, because we both like good cloth and sewing, and as we looked at some of the work there we remembered learning basic embroidery together in primary school. Aged seven, we learned about the Bayeux Tapestry, a series of embroidery panels made shortly after the Norman conquest of England in 1066. Our teacher wheeled in the school television on its trolley, and we watched a man in a brown suit explaining that the panels made a kind of strip cartoon telling the story of William the Conqueror overthrowing King Harold.
English primary education in history always began with this moment, the Battle of Hastings, when the Normans conquered the Anglo-Saxons and began to rule England. In the primary school account, the Norman overlords spoke French, the oppressed peasants Germanic Anglo-Saxon, which over the centuries merged into the illogical and wild mash-up that is the English language. The conquest was presented to us ruefully, with a touch of embarrassment, because the Normans came from Normandy and were thus plainly French, though that was not an identity that would have made sense at the time, and the Anglo-Saxons, although originally hailing from Saxony – both French and German by modern reckoning – had been in England since the Romans left and were therefore pretty much English. It was, we were told, the last time England had been successfully invaded, which didn’t make much sense because didn’t the invader become “England” by virtue of conquest, in which case were “the English” the conquered or the conqueror?
The Bayeux Tapestry set out the story in a way accessible to children, though interestingly without a clear indication of which side were the baddies. Our teacher marvelled with us that fabric and stitching had survived nine centuries, and encouraged us to look as closely as 1980s film and photography permitted at the detail and technique of the needlework. She pointed out the moments of high drama – Harold famously killed by an arrow in his eye – but also the smaller sadnesses around the edges. A clique of girls in my class were horse-obsessed, and Mrs Madras let them explore medieval horse-riding, armour and weaponry. My friend and I were, inevitably, more interested in the traces of emotion in the work: who was in pain, afraid, triumphant? It perhaps seemed to us even then that it was more important that men of violence had done harm that would carry down generations than who was waving which flag at the time. We would not for some years begin to see that with the damage of medieval warfare came new forms of art, culture and technology, which is not to say that “progress” was then or ever worth its toll.
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And, growing up with a mother and grandmother who were gifted needlewomen, I was curious not only about the sewing techniques, which had changed fascinatingly little across the centuries, but about the idea that embroidery was part of the historical record, and a natural response to war and revolution. I used to consider embroidery the most frivolous branch of sewing, which was already merely a feminine pastime, occupation for otherwise idle hands in moments of repose; my mother and grandmother both had full-time professional careers as well. So the juxtaposition of sewing, war and national stories of origin was surprising to me, but remembering that history lesson last week with my (Irish-English German-resident) friend in the coach house of Dublin Castle – a location with its own dark and complex past – it made more sense.
[ Sarah Moss: A reader tried to needle me by scoffing at knitting - I was intriguedOpens in new window ]
National histories are always something of a stitch-up. English identities in particular are patchwork, not made from whole cloth; the history of these islands is layered, interwoven, visibly and invisibly mended. The more we try to make simple stories of centuries of migration and conflict, the more we embroider the truth.
