Until recently, the case for connecting the Bayeux Embroidery to the abbey of St Augustine’s in Canterbury has consisted of three main arguments. First, scholars turned to English traditions reflected in it, including the use of the much-admired craft of embroidery, and Anglo-Saxon elements in its inscription. Second, scholars observed strong affinities between the Bayeux Embroidery and the splendid illuminated manuscripts produced by the abbey. Finally, the ties between its putative patron Odo of Bayeux and St Augustine’s, rather than Christ Church, with which his relations throughout his lifetime were less than cordial, make it virtually certain that his representations on the textile (W48 and W67; Plate XV; Figs 24 and 34) must stem from his relationship to the abbey, and not the cathedral.

Yet while most scholars now concur that the Bayeux Embroidery was made at St Augustine’s, they have nevertheless failed to acknowledge the monastic community’s role in the textile’s conception. This is reflected in their repeated efforts to name an external patron, as if the monks themselves were incapable of formulating an approach to the Norman Conquest and carrying it out. Previous chapters having provided additional grounds for believing that the embroidery originated at St Augustine’s and for maintaining that it was intended to serve the monks’ own purposes at the abbey, where its most competent beholders would have been the monks themselves, this chapter now extends these two arguments by examining how the Bayeux Embroidery might have been displayed there.

The hanging of the Bayeux Embroidery within the abbey church of St Augustine’s allows for the imagining of its ideal context, display, and audience and in many ways is the logical extension of arguments already advanced in the literature. As previously noted, the textile was at one time widely believed to have been made for the 1077 consecration of Bayeux Cathedral, so neither the concept of a date in the 1070s nor the notion of an ecclesiastical setting is radically new. In addition, scholars have increasingly drawn attention to the textile’s scenes of religious import, the sophistication of its beholders, and to its role as an interactive performance piece, where its stories and the audience who would see and hear them would be meant to engage meaningfully.