IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 229

Visitors to the Normandy town of Bayeux can see, in a darkened room of a museum built for the purpose, a band of embroidered cloth almost 70 metres long and about half a metre wide. Its subject is the Norman conquest of England, and in English it is known as the Bayeux Tapestry. The name is misleading. A tapestry is woven on a loom, whereas this work consists of stitching applied to a plain ground, so its pictures are embroidered rather than woven into the fabric.

The story the embroidery tells is long and remarkably detailed. It opens with King Edward the Confessor, seated in a palace, instructing Harold Godwinson, the most powerful of the English earls, to cross the sea. Harold is shown praying at Bosham, sailing, and being received by Duke William of Normandy, to whom he then swears an oath on holy relics. The narrative continues with Edward's deathbed, Harold's coronation, the appearance of a comet that observers took as an evil omen, and the felling of trees to build a fleet. It ends with the landing of the Norman army, the battle near Hastings and the death of Harold, after which the strip breaks off.

Narrow borders run above and below the pictures, filled with animals, hunting scenes and fables, some of which seem to echo the events they frame. Well over 600 human figures appear, together with around 200 horses and more than 30 ships, and almost every one is shown with clothing, weapons and equipment that military historians have studied closely. The creatures in the margins, among them dogs, birds, lions and others that look as though they come from a bestiary rather than from observation, occupy as much space as many of the human actors.

The work was almost certainly made in England, though the evidence is indirect. Eight or nine separate lengths of plain linen, woven by hand, were joined end to end to produce the long strip. The design was then marked out on the cloth, most probably by a designer working from a written account, and the figures were stitched over the lines. The thread was spun and dyed wool rather than silk; the range of colours is much reduced today, but analysis has shown that blues, greens, reds and yellows were once far more varied. Outlines were worked in a simple stem stitch, while larger areas of colour were filled with a flatter technique known as laid work, in which long threads are laid side by side and secured at intervals. Above the figures, short inscriptions in Latin were added to name the leading characters.

Who was responsible has been debated for two centuries. The strongest candidate is Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, a half-brother of William who appears in the embroidery more often, and more prominently, than might be expected of a churchman; his presence suggests that the work was intended for a building he controlled. Where it was made is less certain. Canterbury and Winchester have both been proposed, since both had workshops capable of fine embroidery, and no surviving document settles the question. Most historians would place its completion within twenty or thirty years of the battle.

A persistent tradition claims that the embroidery was made by William's queen, Matilda, and her ladies, and it is still sometimes promoted under that name. The story cannot be traced further back than the eighteenth century and has no contemporary support. The earliest firm record of the work is an inventory of the treasures of Bayeux Cathedral drawn up in 1476, which lists a hanging of this kind; it was presumably displayed in the nave on feast days, where it could be stretched across the building.

It has survived several dangers. In 1792, with the cathedral closed and its property being seized during the French Revolution, local officials intervened to prevent the cloth from being cut up or used as a covering, and it passed into the hands of the town. In 1803 Napoleon, then preparing to invade England, ordered it to be brought to Paris and exhibited there; it was returned to Bayeux later.

During the nineteenth century the linen backing was renewed and many of the woollen threads were replaced by restorers whose work is now hard to distinguish from the original. During the Second World War the embroidery was packed and taken away for safe keeping, spending the last months of the occupation in Paris, and it came back to Bayeux in 1945. Since 1983 it has been shown in a museum designed for it, where the light is kept low and visitors see it behind glass; in 2007 it was added to UNESCO's Memory of the World register.

Scholars still argue about the work's purpose and tone. Some read it as straightforward Norman propaganda, exalting William and belittling Harold; others find a subtler attitude, noting that Harold is shown as brave and that the Normans are not always flattered. The most famous question concerns Harold's death. The inscription names him, but a second figure standing beside the one struck by an arrow may also be intended as the king, and no agreement has been reached.

What nobody disputes is the value of the embroidery as a source. It offers a pictorial account of eleventh-century ships, armour, castles and costume of a kind that no other surviving object provides, and it does so with an energy that still draws visitors to a small Norman town.

Ask most visitors to a ruined abbey what the monks did all day and they will probably answer that they prayed. Prayer was indeed the purpose of monastic life, and the daily round of services was long and demanding. Yet a large medieval monastery was also one of the most substantial economic organisations in Europe. Its estates were farms, workshops and markets as well as places of worship. By the thirteenth century a great house might own tens of thousands of acres, employ hundreds of people and handle sums of money that would have interested a royal treasurer.

Much of this wealth arrived as gifts. Kings, bishops and nobles gave land, churches and the right to collect tithes, often hoping to secure prayers for their own souls or those of their relatives, and a monastery's estates were consequently scattered across the countryside. The Cistercian order, which spread rapidly from the twelfth century, organised its property differently: instead of renting fields out to peasants, it farmed a large central estate directly, using outlying farms called granges that were worked by monks and lay brothers. Historians disagree about how efficiently these estates were run. Some see the Cistercians as among the most enterprising farmers of their age; others point to heavy debts and argue that their methods were no more productive than those of lay neighbours.

The most valuable product of many estates was wool. English fleeces were prized throughout Europe for their length and softness, and the cloth towns of Flanders depended on them. Great abbeys such as Fountains and Rievaulx in Yorkshire kept thousands of sheep on the hills and sold the wool to merchants from Flanders and Italy, sometimes years in advance, using the proceeds to pay for building work. Wool was not the only source of profit, but for several centuries it was the most dependable; when prices fell and flocks were struck by disease in the fourteenth century, monastic finances suffered badly.

Water power was a second source of income. Monasteries built mills to grind their own grain and, increasingly, to grind that of their tenants for a fee, and the mill was often the most valuable single building on an estate. From the twelfth century some houses also installed fulling mills, in which hammers driven by a waterwheel pounded cloth to thicken it, an innovation that helped to move the English cloth industry from towns into valleys where water was plentiful. Iron working was another activity: several Yorkshire abbeys ran forges on their land, smelting ore with charcoal, and heaps of slag left by these operations can still be found in the woods.

Monasteries were also consumers on a large scale, buying wine, fish, spices and building stone, and their needs supported whole trades. Some founded towns beside their gates and drew an income from markets and fairs, charging tolls on the goods sold and rent on the plots where traders set up their stalls. They lent money as well, to neighbours and occasionally to the crown, and a great abbey might hold deposits for local landowners. Hospitality and almsgiving were religious obligations, but they were expensive ones; a house that fed every traveller who knocked could spend a large share of its income on the poor.

Managing all this required a bureaucracy. In most large houses the abbot delegated responsibility to officials known as obedientiaries, each of whom ran a department: the cellarer bought food and drink, the sacrist looked after the church and its treasures, the chamberlain dealt with clothing and bedding. Every official kept a separate account roll, in which money received was set against money spent, and the rolls were read out and checked at an annual audit before the whole community. The arrangement was strikingly modern in its separation of duties, and the best surviving sets run for centuries without a break.

Written records of this kind have obvious limits. Accounts record cash, not production: a grange that grew grain for the monastery's own kitchens may leave no trace in them at all. Survival is uneven, so that the rolls of a single official may be complete for one decade and missing for the next. Historians have therefore turned to other evidence. Excavation of monastic rubbish dumps has yielded thousands of animal bones, which suggest that monks ate a good deal more meat than their rules intended, and the bones of sea fish show that preserved food was carried long distances inland. Standing buildings tell a similar story of change: a mill rebuilt three times, a barn extended, a refectory abandoned.

The end came abruptly in England. Between 1536 and 1540 Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, sold their lands and confiscated their treasures. The records were not destroyed, however: a government department created to handle the property gathered the account rolls together, and from there many of them passed into the national archives, where they remain one of the richest sources for medieval economic history. Argument continues about the condition of the religious houses on the eve of their destruction. Some historians have claimed that they were already in decline, with fewer monks and shrinking income; others reply that most were solvent and that the evidence of decay rests on a handful of exceptional cases.

Almost every town and village in Britain has a war memorial: a stone cross at a crossroads, a plaque in a church porch, a list of names cut into granite. Most of these monuments were put up in the decade after 1918, paid for by public subscription and designed by local architects. The names on them were chosen by committees of local people, working from service records and from what families were willing to report. That process produced memorials that were never complete, and a growing number of campaigns now argue that the omissions should be put right.

The argument for revision begins with a simple observation: a memorial is not a neutral list but a selection. The men who sat on the committees of the 1920s had their own assumptions about who counted as a soldier and whose death was worth recording. Men executed by the British army for military offences were usually left off; so were many civilians killed by bombing; and in the colonies the dead were often recorded according to rules that treated some lives as more deserving of commemoration than others. To leave such gaps untouched, campaigners say, is to let an old injustice stand as though it were a fact of nature.

These are not merely theoretical complaints. In 2021 the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which maintains the graves and memorials of service personnel from across the former British Empire, published the findings of an investigation it had commissioned into inequalities in commemoration. The commission acknowledged that some of the dead had not been commemorated as fully as others, and that the attitudes of the time had played a part. The admission mattered because it came from an institution whose whole purpose is remembrance, and because it showed that the record was shaped by decisions that can be identified and criticised.

Much recent change, however, has come not from altering old monuments but from building new ones. The Shot at Dawn memorial, erected at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire in 2001, commemorates soldiers executed by the British army during the First World War, and the pardon granted to more than 300 of them in 2006 encouraged some towns to add their names to local memorials. The memorial to the women of the Second World War, unveiled in Whitehall in 2005, and the Armed Forces Memorial, which records the names of those killed in service since 1948, both honour groups that earlier monuments had largely ignored.

Against all this stands a conservative argument that deserves to be taken seriously. A memorial is an object made at a particular moment, and its inscriptions are evidence of what people at that moment believed and of how they organised their grief. Recut a name into the stone and you have not simply added information; you have altered a historical object and made it harder to read the intentions of those who paid for it. Conservators do not repaint a faded picture to make it look more agreeable to modern eyes, and the same restraint, this argument runs, should apply to monuments.

There is also the question of authority and of limits. If a memorial may be revised once, it may be revised again; each generation has its own sense of who has been forgotten, and a monument edited by every generation will end up as a surface on which nothing original survives. Who, in any case, is entitled to decide? The local committee that raised the money is long gone, and the descendants of the dead are numerous and not of one mind. Campaigns that begin with a clear case can end in arguments about whose addition matters most.

My own view is that these difficulties can be handled if we distinguish between two quite different operations. The first is the correction of an omission that we now regard as an injustice: a name excluded because the man who bore it was shot for cowardice, or because he served in a labour corps whose contribution was not thought worth recording. Adding such names is like correcting an error in a register; it does not change the purpose of the monument but fulfils it more honestly. The second operation is the expansion of what the monument is for, turning a list of the war dead into a general statement about who deserves to be honoured. That is a different kind of claim, and it deserves a monument of its own rather than a rewriting of somebody else's.

Reinterpretation, after all, need not involve cutting stone. When the Neue Wache in Berlin was rededicated in 1993 as the central memorial of the Federal Republic to the victims of war and tyranny, the building was neither demolished nor stripped of its earlier associations; its meaning was changed by the words attached to it and by the sculpture placed inside. Something similar can be done locally: a plaque explaining what the original memorial left out, a book of names kept in the church, a digital record that can be corrected and enlarged. These are modest measures, but they preserve the object while telling the fuller story.

Memorials, in short, are not closed documents but continuing acts of remembrance, and a tradition that refuses to change is not being faithful to the dead; it is being faithful to the committee that drew up the list. I would rather see a name added, with an explanation, than a monument left as a monument to its own period. But the addition should be honest about what it is doing: repairing an injustice where the record was wrong, and building anew where the claim is a new one.