Bayeux Might Have a Tapestry But Not the Famous One

We spent our final night in Le Havre Monday which meant that regardless of the choice we made that Tuesday morning our group had seen its last of that French port. You see, with the turning of the calendar from April to May our trip organizers had provided another set of options for how we might spend our day.

Choice one: Leave the boat in the morning and take the hour and a half bus ride to Bayeux mainly to see the famous tapestry (that isn’t really a tapestry). Choice two: remain on the boat as it started the trip back upstream to dock in Caudebec en Caux where the Bayeux group would re-board for dinner and everyone would be treated to a special performance by the crew – including one by Captain Jerome. Having never seen the famous Bayeux Tapestry, I opted for the former.

The weather would vary between nearly cloudless skies and thick clouds that seemed to portend something ominous though happily they never made good on that threat. It was cool (maybe 12 – 15) and at times breezy but on the heels of the three previous days, the weather was wonderfully pleasant.

Before I start with the usual history of the city and recounting the day, let me dispense with the musical references and puns all of which I vocalized more than once on the day. To begin, we were in France and, as I noted above, April had turned to May. So, of course, my thoughts turned to Lerner and Loewe

because while the Arthurian legend is British, the love affair between Guinevere and Lancelot first appeared in Chrétien de Troyes’s 12th century poem Lancelot, le Chevalier de la Charrette (Lancelot, Knight of the Cart).  Tra-la!

Next, we were going to Bayeux which can be easily misconstrued and mispronounced as bayou. Naturally this means thinking of this song:

(I chose the Linda Ronstadt version because like many {dare I say most} cisgender males who were in our teens or twenties in the late sixties and early seventies, I had a serious Linda Ronstadt crush.) However, you can follow this link if you prefer Roy Orbison’s original (with its slightly different lyrics).

The third song of the day came to mind because Matthew, our marvelous tour manager from Earthbound Expeditions, is one of those folks who have difficulty with the French pronunciation of Bayeux. I thought giving him a musical reference with a rhyme might help. It didn’t. But it’s Friedrich who provides the clue in this song from The Sound of Music.

(A bit of trivia: Nicholas Hammond played Friedrich in the 1965 movie seen here. A dozen years later – at 27 – he would play Peter Parker in the television series The Amazing Spider-Man.)

There’s actually one more musical reference for the day and though I didn’t sing this one at the time, it is in today’s title. If it is still a mystery to some of you (and I suspect it might be to most of you), the answer is at the end of the new post series summarizing the day.

Standing Bayeux – a few historical notes.

Unlike Honfleur which seemed to pop up spontaneously sometime in the 13th-century, the first settlements at what is now Bayeux appear in the first century when the Romans called it Augustodurum. Established as more or less a midpoint between the Roman settlements of Alauna (Valognes) in the west and the market town of Noviomagus Lexoviorum (today’s Lisieux) Bayeux is the largest commune on the Aure River.

(Here’s an interesting – at least to me – bit of tangentially related trivia. The Aure is considered a main tributary of the Vire which flows across Normandy and into La Manche at Isingy-sur-Mer. Olivier Basselin was a 15th-century poet from the Vire valley who gained some renown for composing satirical songs that came to be called chansons du Vau de Vire or, in English songs of the Vier Valley. In time, the initial phrase was dropped and these works became known simply as Vau de Vire. It’s been suggested that this term – changing slightly as it worked its way into English – eventually became vaudeville. There is, in fact, at least one other suggested etymology for vaudeville but I like this one.)

Life was reasonably quiet as Augustodurum lost the name that honored Augustus Caesar and transformed into Civitas Baiocassium named for the local Celtic tribe the Baiocassi. Over time, Baiocassium became Baiocasses and eventually lost the ‘casses’ as well thus the name became Bayeux. The city grew in importance and had a surrounding wall by the end of the third century before becoming a bishopric in the fourth.

Skipping ahead a few hundred years, it’s time for us to once again come into contact with Hrólfr – also known as Rollo, also known as Gaange Rolf. The Vikings seemed to enjoy – and probably saw great profit in – invading France. It began with Reginherus who besieged Paris in 845 and received a big ransom from Charles (the Bald) to withdraw. The next several decades saw ever more frequent incursions by different configurations of Vikings under different leaders. (However, while the France’s Viking raiders were persistent, in my opinion, none were quite as colorfully named as the Great Heathen Army that started invading the four Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England in 865 and were led by Hvitserk, Ubba, Björn Ironside, Sigurd-Snake-in-the-Eye and Ivar the Boneless.)

Rollo came along in 875 or so and started gobbling up territory around the lower Seine. (Like some of the rivers I encountered on this trip that included Yellowstone, National Park, the Seine flows south to north where it empties into La Manche. Thus, despite the ‘north at the top” orientation of most of our maps, the part of the river at the top of the map is the lower Seine.) He captured Rouen in 876 and sacked Bayeux in 880 destroying much of it in the process. By 887, Rollo had installed himself as the leader of all the Vikings in the lower Seine region. Conceding his de facto rule and wanting to put an end to other Viking raids that were using the Seine as something of a riparian superhighway, Charles III conferred suzerainty much of what is today’s Normandy on Rollo in 911.

Note: In keeping with my 2022-2023 reformation of the blog into shorter entries, backdated to maintain their sequence, any comments on this post might pertain to its new configuration. See the full explanation in the post Conventions and Conversions.