Bayeux Tapestry
Tapisserie de Bayeux
Interesting facts
- In 1792 revolutionaries seized it to cover military wagons, and it was saved only because a local lawyer pulled it from a wagon and hid it at home.
- For centuries Bayeux Cathedral hung it in the nave once a year for the week of the Feast of St John the Baptist, then stored it in a chest.
- French tradition long credited Queen Matilda and her ladies with the needlework, and it is still sometimes called the Tapestry of Queen Matilda.
- It is made of nine linen panels sewn together, worked mainly in stem stitch for outlines and couched laid work to fill in the figures.
- Besides people and animals, it depicts 438 plants, 37 buildings and fortifications, and 41 ships and boats.
- The closing caption, saying the English fled, is thought to be a forgery added shortly before 1814 during a wave of anti-English feeling.
- Bishop Odo, the likely patron and William's half-brother, appears in the embroidery four times.
- In August 1944 Himmler ordered it moved to safety, probably to Berlin, but when the SS came for it the Louvre was already back in French hands.
- In 1941 a Nazi research team took small fragments from its underside; they were rediscovered in 2023 and returned to Bayeux in 2026.
- Victorian visitors were divided: John Ruskin was captivated by it, while Charles Dickens dismissed the needlework as amateurish.
Why it is worth it
Some seventy metres long and only about half a metre high, the Bayeux Tapestry tells the story of the Norman Conquest of England as a continuous strip of images, like a medieval graphic novel read from left to right. Strictly speaking it is not a tapestry at all but an embroidery: wool thread in ten natural dye colours stitched onto a coarse linen ground. Across 58 scenes it shows more than six hundred people, nearly a thousand animals, ships, castles and churches, with short Latin captions naming the action.
The narrative begins in 1064, with the English earl Harold Godwinson crossing to Normandy, and runs through his oath to Duke William on holy relics, his coronation as king of England, the building of the Norman invasion fleet and the Battle of Hastings in October 1066, where Harold is killed. Roughly half the scenes come before the invasion itself. Among the details are the earliest known depiction of Halley's comet, which appeared in the spring of 1066 and was read as an omen, and the earliest image of a harrow drawn across a field; a few scenes, such as one involving a woman named Ælfgyva, remain unexplained. The final section, which probably showed William's coronation, is lost.
Most historians believe the work was commissioned by Bishop Odo of Bayeux, William's half-brother, soon after the Conquest, and made in England, probably at Canterbury, in the 1070s. It is first recorded in an inventory of Bayeux Cathedral in 1476, and the cathedral, dedicated by Odo in 1077, was probably its original home. Its later history was eventful: it caused a sensation when exhibited at the Louvre in 1797 while Napoleon was contemplating his own invasion of England, it drew the covetous attention of Heinrich Himmler during the German occupation, and it was sheltered at the Louvre in 1944. Since 1983 Bayeux has shown it in a former seminary in the town centre. UNESCO added it to the Memory of the World Register in 2007.
Bayeux itself, a small cathedral town on the river Aure a few kilometres inland from the Channel coast of Normandy, was the first town liberated in the Battle of Normandy in June 1944 and came through the fighting almost untouched.
Getting there
The Bayeux Tapestry belongs to the town of Bayeux in Calvados, Normandy, France, about 30 km north-west of Caen. Bayeux railway station has connections to Caen, Cherbourg and Paris. The nearest airport is Caen–Carpiquet (CFR), about 21 km away.
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From the encyclopaedia
The Bayeux Tapestry is an embroidered cloth nearly 70 metres long and 50 centimetres tall that depicts the events leading up to the Norman conquest of England, led by William, Duke of Normandy, and the Battle of Hastings in 1066. It is normally thought to have been made in England in the decades after the events it shows, although the earliest known written reference to it was in 1476. Since 2007 it has been inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register. It is normally displayed in the Bayeux Tapestry Museum in Bayeux, Normandy, France, but this is closed for renovation until 2027, and the work is currently on display in London.
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