If there is one scene in the Bayeux Embroidery always mentioned in support of the twin hypotheses of the embroidery’s manufacture at St Augustine’s in Canterbury and Bishop Odo’s patronage of it, it is the scene of Odo officiating at a banquet held after the Normans had landed in England and before the battle (W48; Plate XV; Fig. 24). In 1927 – decades before Francis Wormald drew attention to the wide-ranging similarities between motifs in the embroidery and illuminated manuscripts from Canterbury – Laura Hibbard Loomis located what is widely believed to be the pictorial “source” of the scene of Odo at the banquet, the scene of the Last Supper from the sixth-century Gospels of Saint Augustine now in Cambridge (Plate XXVIII). Nicholas Brooks and H. E. Walker referred to this scene as one “where distinctive errors seem to point very clearly to St Augustine’s models.” Among the errors to which they refer is the “bungled” table, the “irregular semi-circle that defies gravity and perspective” based on the sigma-shaped form in the Byzantine iconographic tradition that is found in textile and manuscript alike.

If distinctive motifs such as this one have contributed to the consensus that the embroidery’s creation at St Augustine’s is now “established fact,” less clear is Bishop Odo’s role in the endeavor. This chapter begins by investigating the iconography of the scene and the hypothesis of Odo’s involvement in it, and continues by suggesting ways of opening up the patron-directed process traditionally employed. At the end of this discussion, I consider how the model of internal monastic patronage proposed in Chapter 3 can assist in understanding how the image came about.

This scene has already received a certain amount of scholarly attention. Its pictorial sources, its representation of food and utensils, and the social significance of this kind of communal meal have all been discussed. But its status as the first appearance in the embroidery in which Odo is identified by inscription has overshadowed all other attention. Not only have scholars detected evidence of his efforts at self-aggrandizement in this and other episodes of the embroidery, but they have also assumed that his perspective on the Norman Conquest somehow influenced the pictorial narrative as a whole.