The Behold the Field meme is an item of internet culture, but it’s also an item of English culture, dating back nearly a thousand years to the Norman Conquest. The unnamed women who stitched the nearly 230-foot-long Bayeux Tapestry were also combining images and words, dealing in stock characters (mustachioed Anglo-Saxons and clean-shaven Normans), reifying and mythologizing current events of the era (our impression that Harold Godwinson, last king of the Anglo-Saxons, was killed by an arrow to the eye in the Battle of Hastings is based on this tapestry).
