Succeeding where football so frequently fails, the Bayeux Tapestry is coming home. In a landmark deal between the UK and French governments, the monumental artwork depicting the 1066 Norman invasion and Battle of Hastings is heading for the British Museum in September 2026.
In return, our erstwhile conquerors will be treated to the Lewis chessmen (a group of 12th-century chess pieces discovered on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland) and treasures from Sutton Hoo (the site of two Anglo-Saxon cemeteries in Suffolk dating from the 6th to 7th centuries). It’s nice to see that relations have improved a smidge since that petit contretemps in 1066.
To mark the occasion, we've compiled 11 of our favourite – and some of the strangest – facts about the Bayeux Tapestry.
11 things you (probably) didn't know about the Bayeux Tapestry
It’s not a tapestry
Tapestries are created by weaving threads on a loom. By contrast, the Bayeux artwork is embroidered, using around 45kg of wool. Thus it should really be called the Bayeux Embroidery, but perhaps that doesn’t trip off the tongue quite so readily.
And it’s not from Bayeux
The epic embroidery seems very likely to have been commissioned by William the Conqueror’s half-brother, Bishop Odo of Bayeux, not all that long after the events it portrays. However, all the evidence points to it having been produced in Canterbury, Kent, by nuns from Barking Abbey.
A vital bit of it may have gone missing
The Bayeux Tapestry consists of nine panels sewn together to create a graphic novel-like history that stretches for nearly 70m. The narrative begins in 1064 with Edward the Confessor and Harold Godwinson, the future Harold II. The final panel shows Harold’s defeat at Hastings in October 1066. But for some reason it omits the coronation of William the Conqueror on Christmas Day. Did the nuns never finish their work or, as seems more likely, was there once a tenth panel that has since gone missing?
It helped cement one of history’s most enduring myths
Harold II was famously killed by an arrow in the eye – as shown in the Bayeux Tapestry’s depiction of the Battle of Hastings. Or perhaps not. It’s been discovered that the knight we all think of as the English king originally held a lance. This was altered to an arrow in the 19th century (the wool used has been dated to that time).
The actual Harold is far more likely to be the prostrate figure on the far right of the panel being attacked by a horseman. His fate more closely tallies with an early Norman account that tells of four knights who pierced the king’s chest, sliced off his head, ‘liquefied his entrails with [a] spear’ and ‘cut off his thigh and carried it some distance away’. It’s safe to say Harold had had better days.
- This Roman massacre never happened, say scientists. New radiocarbon dating reveals the real story
- 10 epic battles fought on British soil that changed Britain's history forever
A mystery surrounds one of the few female characters
The artwork contains 623 men, 190 horses, 50 trees and 35 dogs. However, there are only three women. One of them, named as Aelfgyva, was evidently well known at the time of the creation of the tapestry but does not appear in any other historical record.
There’s something unexpected hiding in the borders
Take a close look at the borders above and below the main action of the embroidery and you’ll see four of the many tales attributed to the Ancient Greek slave Aesop. They are: The Fox and the Crow, The Wolf and the Lamb, The Wolf and the Crane, and The Wolf and the Kid. But just what they’re doing in this story of Saxons and Normans can only be guessed at.
- Bloody, brutal battles and border castles: The secrets of the savage frontier between England and Wales
- Six mythical locations in ancient Britain that you can visit today
Halley’s Comet flies through it
Shortly after Harold II was crowned, Halley’s comet was seen crossing the sky. It proved to be an ill omen for the new English king and the tapestry duly shows a crowd pointing up at this harbinger of doom.
It didn’t impress Charles Dickens
’It certainly is the work of amateurs,’ huffed the Victorian author, newspaperman and unlikely sewing correspondent. ‘Very feeble amateurs at the beginning and very heedless some of them too.’ So now we know where Charles Dickens found the inspiration for Scrooge.
It reputedly had a lucky escape during the French Revolution
Tradition has it that in 1792 the tapestry was going to be cut up and used as covers for soldiers’ carts. A local lawyer named Léonard Lambert-Leforestier is said to have foiled the plan by hiding it from the would be desecrators until the revolution had run its course.
The Nazis tried to steal it
As the German army were withdrawing from Paris in August 1944, SS chief Heinrich Himmler sent an order that the tapestry be taken from the Louvre. Thankfully, his message was intercepted and decoded, and French troops recaptured the museum before the instruction could be carried out.
Britain already has its own Bayeux Tapestry
Or at least an almost precise replica of it. In the late 19th century, women from the Leek Society painstakingly recreated it, stitch by stitch. You can see the astonishing result of their marathon sew-in at Reading Museum’s Bayeux Gallery – a room custom-built to display it. It’s not quite an exact copy though – the ladies had been supplied with images that had censored the many (mainly equine) phalluses contained in the original.
Top image: Bayeux Tapestry. Credit: Getty
More about UK history
