About

Medieval Tapestry Edits, or Medieval Macros, refers to a series of image macros based on historic tapestries and images of the medieval era, as well as parodies of such images created via online generators.

Origin

In 2002, German students Björn Karnebogen and Gerd Jungbluth from Academy of Media Arts Cologne created the Historic Tale Construction Kit using Flash.^[1] The application allowed users to create custom medieval tapestry designs by adding stylized text and images scanned from the 11th century Bayeux Tapestry. On May 15, 2003, the kit was made available to the public.

The website was soon discovered on 4chan, where it was used to create image macros and reaction images.

From an archived version of Wikiworld's 4chan entry:

Olde English image macros of existing memes created using the Historical Tale Construction Kit. New medieval macros show up from time to time as new memes and in-jokes appear, though nothing has yet matched the original flood when /b/ first discovered them. Stolen by YTMND.

Spread

YTMND

In addition to the popularity of still-frame image macros on 4chan, the Bayeux Tapestry inspired the creation of a multitude of YTMNDs.

• Medieval WRYYYY
• All Thine Castles are Within ovr Possesion
• Medieval PTKFGS

From YTMND's wiki entry:

The resulting combination of pictures and text resembles the most basic form of a YTMND, perhaps explaining the fad's appeal to YTMND users.
The text in Medieval YTMNDs is usually a fad catchphrase rewritten to resemble Early Modern English, often to the point of absurdity. ("I hath it with thine mother trysting serpents on thine mother trysting flying barge!")
To complete the medieval setting, virtually every site in the fad uses the same song: folk singer Heather Dale's recording of the 15th century Christmas carol "This Endris Night." The popularity of the fad earned "This Endris Night" a spot on YTMND – The Soundtrack Volume 1.

Mirrors

The Construction Kit went offline sometime around July 2011. A similar construction kit was hosted on a subpage of the Reading Museum in Britain detailing the history of the tapestry until Johannes Jander created a mirror of the original. The mirror can be found here.

On September 28th, 2015, GitHub users Leonard Allain-Launay, Mathieu Thoretton and Maira created an open source remake of Historic Tale Construction Kit.^[2]

2019 Morgan Bible Edits

On January 7th, 2019, Redditor ascending_pepe posted a series of object label meme based on images taken from the 13th century illustrated bible known as the Morgan Bible to /r/dankmemes subreddit. One of the posts made by the Redditor gained over 72,600 upvotes within 24 hours.^[3]

On the same day, ascending_pepe posted linked the source images for the illustrations in a Reddit comment.^[4]

Following the initial posts, more noteworthy memes exploiting medieval images were posted to /r/dankmemes subreddit.

On January 8th, 2018, ascending_pepe^[5] posted more edits of the Morgan Bible illustrations.

Search Interest

External References