Why has the Bayeux Tapestry captured everyone’s attention?

It’s the first time it has left France in 1,000 years

Made in the 11th century, the Tapestry has never been displayed in England. It has been loaned to the British Museum under an agreement with the Bayeux Museum in Normandy in exchange for nationally symbolic Anglo-Saxon treasures loaned to museums in Normandy including the Sutton Hoo treasures and the Lewis chess pieces.

This extraordinary work of art depicts the events leading up to the Battle of Hastings and the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. Comprising fifty-eight scenes and featuring 626 characters, 202 horses and forty-one ships, it offers a vivid portrait of life in 11th-century England, both before and after the conquest.

Installation view of the Bayeux Tapestry at the British Museum, London

It is not actually a tapestry

Contrary to its name, the Bayeux Tapestry is actually an embroidery, made from dyed wool stitched onto a bleached linen background fabric. Four coloured dyes were used to create a rich variety of shades throughout the narrative. The Bayeux Museum in Normandy, the Tapestry’s usual home, states its length as 68.3 metres, set across nine panels. For the first time, it is being displayed flat in one continuous 70-metre run, rather than in the curved form in which it has traditionally been exhibited in Bayeux.

We don’t know for sure where the Bayeux Tapestry was made

Suggestions have been made over the years about where the Bayeux Tapestry was made. Historians have proposed many possible locations on both sides of the English Channel. However, most scholars today believe that it was made in England, probably in or around Canterbury, because its design shows the influence of illuminated manuscripts made in, or owned by, Canterbury’s monastic libraries.

These manuscripts contain many illustrations alongside their text, and some of the Tapestry’s imagery was almost certainly based on particular Canterbury manuscript drawings. For example, the Tapestry’s ships closely resemble those in two Old English manuscripts, the Hexateuch and Junius 11. Similarly, its depiction of a man carrying a boulder is strikingly similar to an illustration in an illuminated copy of the Latin poem Psychomachia by Prudentius.

The margins reveal elements the main narrative doesn’t explain

While visitors will naturally be drawn to the central panel, where the invasion unfolds, there is much to discover in the borders. These are populated by scenes from Aesop’s fables, farm and wild animals familiar from daily life, and fantastical mythical beasts. As the exhibition’s accompanying book, The Bayeux Tapestry (ed. Sue Brunning, Lloyd de Beer, Michael Lewis and Naomi Speakman), observes: ‘The precise function of the borders is debated, but it seems clear that they combine pure decoration with interactive commentary on, and amplification of, events in the central frieze.’

The Tapestry ends mid-story

The Bayeux Tapestry is damaged at the end and is almost certainly incomplete. We don't know what, if anything, is missing from the end of it. However, some scholars believe it would have finished with a depiction of William's coronation at Westminster Abbey, which took place on Christmas Day in 1066. Nobody knows exactly if or how that final section was lost. Theories range from wear and damage over the centuries to sections deliberately cut away.

The Bayeux Tapestry is on show at the British Museum in London until July 2027.

Héléne Duchêne, Nicholas Cullinan, George Osborne at Picadilly Circus

And we should add that one of our esteemed colleagues, the late Robert Chenciner also suggested, somewhat controversially, that the Tapestry alos has the earliest depcition of the meat kebab in a paper at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery entitled "The Bayeux Tapestry Shish Kebab Mystery".