Unravelling the Bayeux Tapestry – the secrets, scandals and stories stitched into history
By Caroline Phillips
When I went to see the Bayeux Tapestry, six portacabins emblazoned “Armed Police” were parked behind the British Museum. I thought they were there to deter thieves. On leaving, I discovered they were for a film shoot – dressing rooms, as it turned out. But they seemed an appropriate prelude to nearly 230 feet of medieval blood, sexual misdemeanours, political upheaval and skulduggery.
Like almost everyone in England, I learnt about the tapestry at school and, frankly, I had never found it particularly interesting. But seeing the actual thing is a zillion times more powerful. Its scale is awe-inspiring, its presence overwhelming. It is also strangely moving – not just the experience of finally standing in front of something known since childhood but also in the poignant scenes it depicts.
It is not really a tapestry at all but an extraordinarily fine piece of embroidery: wool stitched into linen, depicting the events leading up to William the Conqueror’s invasion of England and the Battle of Hastings. It hurtles from scene to scene like the best of comics, with astonishing economy and visual invention. The shapes and colours are magnificent, and it’s jaw-dropping that they’ve survived nearly 1,000 years. There are russets, greens, yellows – oh, and an awful lot of blue. In referring to the “blue,” I don’t mean literal colour: the tapestry is surprisingly ribald. The schoolbook version of 1066, by comparison, is like watching bloodshed, brutality and bawdiness while wearing a blindfold.
A random spectator beside me announces: “There are 97 willies in the tapestry.” I’m not sure whether that includes the horses’ phalluses. “That’s a lot of willies for a national work of art,” author William Dalrymple (another Willy) quips when I tell him. Quite.
The violence is visceral, too – one-up on the beastliest of video games. There are men sinking in quicksand, dismembered bodies, looting, burning and horses being slaughtered.
Then there are the tapestry’s borders, full of fables, sex, farming, animals and assorted medieval weirdness. They are not merely decorative: they work almost like footnotes to the central story, sometimes echoing it, sometimes commenting on it, sometimes seeming to have wandered in from another, considerably naughtier, narrative.
The women aren’t confined to the borders, but only three of the 627 figures in the main narrative are female, and none would have passed the Gloria Steinem test, or even the loosest feminist test of agency: there’s Queen Edith weeping (as Edward the Confessor nears death); another fleeing a burning building with a child; and Ælfgyva beside a cleric who holds her face, likely about to sexually molest her if the phallic building beside him and the naked figure with a prominent member in the border are any clue – but nobody’s sure. The tapestry may have been embroidered largely by women, English ones, but its narrative is overwhelmingly about men fighting over the English crown: the women doing all the work while the men take the glory.
Then there is Harold and the famous arrow in the eye. Or is it? The image certainly appears to show an arrow striking him, though there’s scholarly debate about what the original embroidery depicted and how much later restoration has affected what’s now visible.
The final mystery comes with the missing end of the fabric. The story finishes with the English fleeing Hastings. Perhaps the lost section showed William celebrating his victory; maybe it showed something else entirely. Its absence is tantamount to Daphne du Maurier having ripped out the revelation about Rebecca’s death. Nine hundred and fifty-odd years on, we don’t know how the Bayeux story was meant to end. The greatest work of medieval propaganda in existence, and we’re left hanging.
Yet it is a masterpiece: full of visual invention, humour and brutality, extraordinarily sophisticated in the way it tells a story – and, after nearly a thousand years, still capable of astonishing its audience. I spent 90 minutes looking at the tapestry and could have continued all day.
The Bayeux Tapestry is on display at the British Museum’s Sainsbury Exhibitions Gallery until 11th July 2027. Standard adult tickets range from £25 to £33 depending on the time slot, with concessions available and under-16s admitted free with a paying adult. Demand has been extraordinary: the first release of tickets, covering September to December 2026, sold out within days of going on sale. The next release, for January to March 2027, opens on 21st October 2026.
For tickets and current availability, go to www.britishmuseum.org/exhibitions/bayeux-tapestry.
Caroline Phillips is an award-winning freelance journalist who contributes to publications from Sunday and daily newspapers to glossy magazines and various luxury websites. To see more of her work, go to www.carolinephillips.net.
