The 70-meter Medieval tapestry captivating London
Nearly 1,000 years after it was stitched, the Bayeux Tapestry is drawing new audiences with its story of conquest, mystery and medieval life. Northeastern scholars explain why
In a month’s time, people from all over the world will be queuing up in Central London to get a look at a 70-meter-long band of parchment-colored cloth. Along its length, this textile is hand-stitched with images rendered in woolen threads in terracotta, gold and blue.
The images on the fabric can at first appear clunky and cartoonish – like a Medieval comic book – but look closer and you will discover intricate depictions of political drama in kings’ courts, the clash of military hardware and innocent civilians fleeing as their homes burn.
This is the Bayeux Tapestry, which tells the story of the Norman Conquest: how William, the Duke of Normandy, defeated Harold Godwinson, who had been crowned King of England earlier that year. When it goes on display at London’s British Museum on Sept. 10, it will be the first time it has been seen in the U.K. in its nearly 1,000 year existence.
Already, the British public is swarming to get a look. Some waited in an 80,000-person online queue for nine hours to secure the first tickets on sale in July, according to the British Museum. Before the first visitor has arrived, the exhibition has sold out until 2027.
But what explains its extraordinary – and impressively long-lasting – appeal?
Northeastern Global News spoke with Northeastern University scholars, who unpacked some of the reasons why crowds are still drawn to this narrative depiction of betrayal and conquest – an artifact that reveals dramatic political change, the birth of a new culture and a curiously modern story.
An invasion that changed England
“The Norman Conquest is a unique event in medieval history,” said Lars Kjaer, associate professor of history at Northeastern University London. In images and words, the tapestry displays William’s claim to the English crown – depicting Godwinson, years earlier, pledging the throne to William – and the decisive Battle of Hastings in 1066, where Harold is killed.
“England before 1066 was oriented towards the North Sea and Scandinavia” and it had been a part of Danish and Norwegian empires a generation earlier, he noted. With Harold’s death, the Normans violently overthrew an entire political system, replacing the ruling class with French landholders, explained Kjaer.
That meant that England began to come into line with the nobility and cultural heritage of France and continental Europe, according to Kjaer, leading to rapid changes in architecture, laws, and culture, with French-influenced legends of King Arthur emerging as national myths, in place of the Norse-rooted myths of Beowulf.
In other words, “This is the single most important event in English history,” Kjaer emphasized.
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Enduring quality
Kathleen Coyne Kelly, professor of English at Northeastern University, argues that the tapestry’s appeal is threaded through its linen fabric. Despite its name, this textile is not a woven tapestry but an embroidery, stitched with dyed wool.
We do not know for sure where this textile was created but many scholars now believe that it was made by a group of women in Canterbury, southeast of London, in the decades after the conquest, then shipped to the Bayeux Cathedral in Normandy, France.
Over centuries it has been restored, altered, censored and appropriated by different groups seeking to claim and reinterpret its meaning, explained Kelly. For instance, a figure often believed to be Harold is depicted with an arrow through his eye, matching a description of his death by 12th-century historians. “That arrow through the eye was not in the original – it was embroidered in the 19th century,” during a restoration process, she explained.
The tapestry’s imagery has become so deeply embedded in popular culture that many people recognize it without realizing they do, said Kelly. It has appeared in films, cartoons and magazine covers, including a well-known cover illustration for the New Yorker published in July 1944 commemorating the Allied armies D-Day invasion of Normandy.
The tapestry’s sequences of images – which “unspool like a film” – can be likened to modern visual storytelling in comic books, graphic novels, cartoons and movies. Kelly is interested in how something that has “weighty cultural meaning” shows up in “The Simpsons,” which began a 2008 episode “E Pluribus Wiggum” with a joke that depicted the family’s conflict with their neighbors, the Flanders family, in images mimicking the Bayeux.
No simple story
At the same time, Stephen Spencer, assistant professor in medieval history at Northeastern University London, said that the tapestry is far from the simple, propagandistic story that some have claimed. From the 1950s, scholars believed that it was commissioned by Odo, the bishop of Bayeux and half-brother to William, to celebrate the invasion of England. But the embroidery portrays Harold in a curiously “sympathetic light and lacks the hallmarks one would expect of pro-Norman propaganda.”
For example, the tapestry does not tell us emphatically that William was the legitimate heir, leaving open the possibility that Harold made his promise under duress.
“Harold himself is not a cartoon villain. He comes across as quite a glorious figure in many ways,” added Kjaer. The two are depicted as having once had a beautiful alliance, including in a “buddy movie sequence” where they are united in battle – before ending in tragedy.
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An up-close picture of a medieval world
The tapestry offers a rare, visual snapshot of medieval life, said Kjaer. Most surviving illustrations from this period come from monks who depict a spiritual world “of God, of saints, of devils,” he noted. But the Bayeux Tapestry shows an everyday world: “It lovingly renders these beautiful horses, these boats, the chain mail, the dress, the haircuts,” he said, with mustachioed Anglo-Saxons battling Normans who sport half-shaved heads.
Textiles like this were very common in the Middle Ages, when they would have covered the stone walls of castles, but have largely disappeared – “eaten by mice, burned, abandoned when they fell out of fashion,” he said. The Bayeux Tapestry presents a rare record of a lost world, by people who “knew what it looks like when armies charge one another [and] what battlefields look like after the victory,” he said. It’s also impressively large, so visitors “feel like you’re right in the middle of it. That makes it a completely unique source from medieval history,” Kjaer said. “We have nothing like this, nothing at all.”
Tantalizingly, it ends without a conclusion to the tale. The end of the tapestry is damaged but some historians believe it may have shown William’s coronation at Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day 1066.
