There are many things the Bayeux Tapestry is held to be that, in fact, it is not. Most obvious of all is that it is not a tapestry, woven on a loom, but an embroidery, stitched by hand. Its misnaming is perhaps the result of an 18th-century antiquarian account describing it as a tapisserie – a wall-hanging rather than explicitly a tapestry. It is also called the Bayeux Tapestry not because it was made there but because it was hung there – around the nave of the cathedral once a year, certainly since 1476 when the hanging was first recorded.
Nor is it specifically about the Battle of Hastings: almost three quarters of its 223ft length describes the political manoeuvrings and preparations that preceded the confrontation. And it is not a work of unequivocal propaganda either, extolling William, Duke of Normandy and execrating King Harold. In many ways it is Harold who is the tragic hero of the narrative, a flawed but not ignoble figure who appears 27 times to William’s 20. And the story the Tapestry tells is incomplete; thanks to the pulley system that was used to display it in the early 19th century – which, according to a visitor, resembled something that “lets down the buckets to a well” – the end sections were damaged and subsequently removed and lost. The original did not end with the death of Harold but continued for as many as seven more scenes, culminating in the coronation of William at Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day 1066.
And, of course, it does not offer clear evidence that Harold died when an arrow struck him in the eye. According to earlier drawings of the Tapestry, the arrow may originally have been a spear shaft with the flights added during a 19th-century restoration so that the image accorded with the story of his death that was then popular. The sources closest in time to the actual events make no mention of an arrow. For example, the Carmen de Hastingae Proelio (“Song of the Battle of Hastings”), composed in 1067, records Harold falling under the onslaught of four knights: “The first of the four, piercing the king’s shield and chest with his lance, drenched the ground with a gushing stream of blood. The second with his sword cut off his head below the protection of his helm. The third liquefied his entrails with his spear. And the fourth cut off his thigh and carried it some distance away.” This gory description better fits the prone figure in the same scene being attacked by a Norman horseman. In fact, both figures could depict the death of Harold in flick-book motion.
What then does the Bayeux Tapestry show? It starts with King Edward (he didn’t become “the Confessor” until his canonisation in 1161) in conversation with Harold Godwinson, Earl of Wessex, and scrolls through subsequent developments, all stemming from the fact that Edward and his queen, Edith, were childless. Consequently, around 1051, Edward seems to have named William of Normandy as his successor (the king had Norman blood through his mother, Emma). In the Tapestry, Harold travels to Normandy where he meets William, helps him defeat a local foe and swears an oath promising to support his claim to the English throne. It was the breaking of this oath, by seizing the Crown for himself, that provided William with his casus belli.
The Tapestry – essentially a bande dessinée – depicts the rapidly spiralling events that followed. The end is presaged in scene 32 (the numbering of the 58 scenes was extended by the fascinated Nazis, especially Heinrich Himmler, who were not only preparing their own seaborne invasion of England but believed the Normans were a Germanic people), when Halley’s Comet (the “haired star”) appears – according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, “a sign such as men never saw before”. It is an ill omen that occurs between the death of Edward and the coronation of Harold.
In Normandy, meanwhile, trees are felled and ships are built; arms, wine and provisions are gathered. William’s fleet – 3,000 vessels according to William of Jumièges, but more likely 600-700 – crosses the Channel carrying an estimated 2,000 horses and 7,000-14,000 men. The flotilla lands at Pevensey, William digs in, his soldiers terrorise the countryside thereabouts, and then settle down to await the English army (there is no hint of Harold’s march south after defeating a Viking army at Stamford Bridge in Yorkshire).
The battle itself, on 14 October, is shown in detail – feints and manoeuvres, cavalry charges, Harold’s shield wall, the death of his brothers, a hail of arrows – all culminating in the death of Harold himself and, with him, the end of Anglo-Saxon England too. The throne was now William’s, his status confirmed by surviving English leaders at Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire towards the end of the month.
In their wonderfully lucid and comprehensive book The Story of the Bayeux Tapestry: Unravelling the Norman Conquest, David Musgrove and Michael Lewis (a member of the scientific committee at the British Museum who has been instrumental in the Tapestry’s exhibition there) also draw attention to some of the other historical details contained within the main narrative. There are, for example, images of the Church of St Peter the Apostle (Westminster Abbey) and Mont Saint-Michel; detailed depictions of the armour and weapons of the combatants (none of which has been recovered from the site of the battle itself), as well as military strategy; and a cluster of leading figures in the story, such as Queen Edith (who appears just once), and Odo, William’s half-brother and the Bishop of Bayeux.
As an artefact, the Tapestry is a rare surviving piece of Romanesque needlework. Most fabrics of the period have long since disappeared but the Bayeux Tapestry was for many centuries probably kept folded in a chest, which accounts for its excellent condition and unfaded colours. And while other contemporary weavings contained gold thread, the Tapestry was too long for such expense – another reason it wasn’t simply unpicked and discarded.
It was made from a single piece of linen cut into nine panels, which were worked on independently and then stitched back together (restorers in 2020 recorded 24,204 stains, 9,646 holes and 30 tears). Contrary to the lore that has formed around the work, the embroiderers were not William’s queen, Matilda, and her ladies but English embroiderers from Canterbury (Englishwomen were famed for their needlework and several motifs seem to have been taken from manuscripts made at Canterbury), although the unknown designer was probably Norman. The embroiderers were clearly not of a prudish disposition since assiduous scholars have counted 93 penises depicted, 88 of which are equine. Their Victorian ancestors were more censorious: in the full-scale replica made by 35 women of the Leek Embroidery Society in Staffordshire between 1885 and 1886, and now in Reading, at least one offending member was covered up with a pair of underpants.
The best candidate for the man who commissioned the Tapestry is Bishop Odo, who was himself present at the battle. After the victory, William made him Earl of Kent and regent when he himself returned to Normandy. Odo not only wanted the Tapestry to celebrate his half-brother’s triumph and show his own loyalty but to decorate the cathedral at Bayeux which was being remade under his direction: it was consecrated in 1077, so the Tapestry was most likely complete by then.
History is embroidered by the victors, but what Odo and his needlewomen could not realise was that what they were recording was not just the official account of a military and political triumph but the origin story of the tangled Anglo-French relationship – with its innumerable enmities and ententes – that would play out for the next millennium.
The Bayeux Tapestry
The British Museum, London WC1
Until 11 July 2027
[Further reading: Meet Generation Screwed]
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This article appears in the 02 Sep 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Meet Generation Screwed
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