The Medieval Artefact Wanted As A Weapon by Recent War Mongers
On August 18, 1944, British codebreakers working at Bletchley Park intercepted an a message from Heinrich Himmler, a German Nazi politician and military leader who was also one of the main architects of the Holocaust. The message was not directly about military matters, but was reminding someone to bring the Bayeux Tapestry. Despite the dangers of travel in a country at war, the Tapestry was driven on open roads five times between 1941 and 1945, and was packed and unpacked by too many people.
Himmler (and Hitler) had been keen to get hold of the Tapestry and display it as part of their “war effort”. Despite the efforts of locals trying to frustrate the German plans, the Tapestry had already been moved from safe-keeping in Bayeux and was now in the Louvre. Himmler wanted it out of the country before Paris was blown to bits. The Germans had been trying to use it as a powerful propaganda weapon.
The Tapestry provided a visual representation of a noble lord crossing the Channel to conquer Britain. There had been teams of German “scholars” searching for evidence of Viking ancestry. The aims had been to make the Normans more Viking (and hence with stronger links to Germany) in their historic victory over the English.
In attempting to utilise the Tapestry in this manner, the Germans were merely repeating what Napoleon Bonaparte had attempted approximately 250 years earlier. Just as the Tapestry supported William’s elevation from duke to king, Napoleon Bonaparte (the Corsican Tyrant) sought to use the propaganda message of the Tapestry celebrating William the Bastard’s domination over France’s ancient enemy and neighbour.
Before Napoleon’s planned invasion by sea was eventually abandoned, the Tapestry was displayed in Paris. Napoleon gave financial incentives to theatres to support its message and in 1804 a one-act musical play was produced. After a season in Paris the play was sent on tour to towns where the awaiting invading troops were assembled.
Over 100 things you need to know about the Bayeux Tapestry
The Bayeux Tapestry: What it Is, and What it Is Not
The Bayeux Tapestry is not a tapestry at all. It is an embroidery, stitched in coloured wool yarns onto a linen ground. The term tapisserie only became common in the eighteenth century. In more accurate French usage it is the Broderie de Bayeux. The distinction matters. Embroidery allows for line, gesture, and narrative clarity in a way weaving does not, and places the work closer to manuscript illumination than to later wall hangings.
The materials are resolutely workaday: linen and wool. This apparent modesty is one reason for its survival. Precious-metal threads and jewelled textiles were routinely cut up, looted, or repurposed. The Bayeux embroidery was never worth dismantling for its raw materials.
The Bayeux Tapestry: Scale, Construction, and Technique
The embroidery measures about 68.38 metres in length and roughly 50 centimetres in height. It is made from nine separate strips of linen, sewn together edge to edge. Crucially, the embroidery runs across the seams, showing that the panels were joined before stitching began, not afterwards.
Only two stitch types are used throughout: stem stitch for outlines and laid-and-couched work for infilling. This limited repertoire is handled with great confidence. Figures read clearly at a distance, while close inspection reveals subtle variation in stitch density and tension.
At least ten colours were used, all produced from plant-based dyes such as madder, weld, and woad. Despite their age, many colours remain remarkably vivid, a testament to dye quality and controlled light exposure in later centuries.
The Bayeux Tapestry: Date, Place, and Patronage
The tapestry was made in the late eleventh century, most probably between 1067 and 1082. The strongest candidate for patron is Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, William the Conqueror’s half-brother. Odo appears three times in the narrative and is named in the inscriptions, an exceptional prominence for a cleric.
A plaque (1983) outside the Bayeux building says La Tapisserie de La Reine Mathilde as it was previously thought that William’s wife was the instigator of the work. However, inside the museum, in line with the majority of modern scholars, Odo is acknowledged as the Patron.
Stylistic, linguistic, and technical evidence strongly suggests that the embroidery was made in England, almost certainly at Canterbury, where major embroidery workshops existed and where Odo had influence. The Latin inscriptions show English spelling conventions, and the visual style closely resembles late Anglo-Saxon manuscript art.
The design presents William’s claim to the English throne as legitimate, yet it does not caricature Harold as a villain. That balance makes sense if an English workshop was executing a Norman political narrative.
The Bayeux Tapestry: Planning and Labour
The entire narrative was planned in advance. The design was almost certainly drawn onto the linen before stitching began, though the drawing itself has not survived.
Several embroiderers worked on the tapestry. Variations in stitch length, figure style, and letter forms point to multiple hands. The overall unity of the design, however, suggests a single master designer directing the work.
The workforce was probably largely female, reflecting known patterns of elite embroidery in eleventh-century England. This was professional, highly skilled labour, not amateur needlework.
The Narrative Frame
The story begins not in 1066 but in 1064, when Edward the Confessor sends Harold Godwinson to Normandy. It ends abruptly with the English fleeing after the Battle of Hastings. The final section is missing. If it ever existed, it may have shown William’s coronation on Christmas Day 1066.
The embroidery compresses time ruthlessly when it suits the argument. Edward’s burial and Harold’s coronation follow one another immediately, sharpening the political message rather than preserving strict chronology.
Harold’s Journey and Oath
Harold’s capture by Guy of Ponthieu and his release by Duke William are shown in striking detail. The oath scene is central and deliberately ambiguous. Harold is shown swearing, but the precise nature of the oath is not spelled out. This visual uncertainty mirrors the uncertainty of the written sources and allows the embroidery to assert legitimacy without overstatement.
Halley’s Comet
The appearance of Halley’s Comet in 1066 is shown with figures pointing in alarm. This is the earliest known visual representation of the comet. To contemporary viewers it would have been an unmistakable sign of cosmic disorder and impending change.
Ships, Horses, Birds, and Logistics
The tapestry shows the building, loading, and sailing of William’s fleet with unusual care. Forty-one ships are depicted. Over 200 horses are shown – some of them being transported by sea, a logistical detail rarely mentioned in written sources but essential to the Norman campaign.
The trappings of falconry are shown in great detail.
This is one of the tapestry’s great historical strengths. It shows how conquest actually happened, not just who won.
The Battle of Hastings
Nearly a third of the entire embroidery is devoted to the battle. The fighting is dense, repetitive, and exhausting, by design. Horses charge, fall, and trample bodies. Infantry formations clash and collapse.
Violence is shown without sentimentality. Severed limbs, pierced torsos, and stripped corpses appear throughout. Looting is implicit. There is no heroic sanitising of death.
The Death of Harold
Scene 57 bears the inscription HIC HAROLD REX INTERFECTUS EST (“Here King Harold is slain”). Beneath it, one figure grasps an arrow near his head while another nearby (possibly Harold) is cut down.
The famous “arrow in the eye” interpretation is traditional but not certain. Contemporary written accounts do not specify such a wound. The embroidery itself seems intentionally ambiguous (is the man being slain in front of the horse Harold), perhaps combining different stories or avoiding a single definitive version.
Borders as Commentary
The upper and lower borders are not decorative filler. They contain animals, hybrids, agricultural scenes, sexual imagery, and episodes drawn from Aesop’s fables.
Early in the narrative, the borders are busy and playful. As the battle begins, they fill with corpses and broken bodies. Animals and fables disappear. The visual world tightens as chaos takes over.
This is sophisticated narrative control, not naïve ornament.
Bodies, Sex, and Discomfort
Human and animal genitalia are shown openly. By modern counts, there are 93 or possibly 94 penises. Sexual imagery appears most frequently near scenes of violence, suggesting deliberate commentary rather than crude humour.
These details disturbed eighteenth- and nineteenth-century viewers. Some Victorian copies softened or omitted them. Their presence in the original tells us much about medieval comfort with the exposed body.
Visual Codes of Identity
The embroidery distinguishes English from Normans through consistent visual shorthand:
- Long hair and moustaches indicate English figures.
- Shaved necks and clean upper lips mark Normans.
In the chaos of battle, these cues allow viewers to follow the narrative quickly and accurately.
Also the English ride to battle but dismount to fight. The French use their horses as a weapon and carry out cavalry charges.
Women in the tapestry
Only three women appear in the main register (over 600 men), with two more women in the borders. Their rarity is striking and reinforces the overwhelmingly martial, masculine focus of the narrative.
Ælfgyva and the Cleric
If you want a topic for a Ph.D. thesis you might consider the meaning of this pair, but be warned, thousands (if not millions) of words have already been written about them. The panel appears to show a cleric touching or possibly striking a woman’s face. No one knows the significance of this scene or the caption above it: ubi unus clericus et Ælfgyva (“where [or in which] a certain cleric and Ælfgyva”).
There are two naked male figures in the border below this figure; the one directly below the figure is in a pose mirroring that of the cleric, squatting and displaying his genitalia (a scene that was frequently censored in historical reproductions). Who they are and what they are doing depends entirely on which of the many, many theories you believe.
Display
The tapestry was almost certainly intended for temporary display, not permanent hanging. It was probably shown annually in Bayeux Cathedral, traditionally during the Feast of St John the Baptist.
In the fifteenth century it was hung in the nave, among the more modest hangings, not in the choir with the richest textiles. It was always important, but never treated as sacred in itself.
During the French Revolution it came closest to destruction. In 1792 it was requisitioned to cover military wagons. M. Lambert Léonard-Leforestier, a local police commissioner, retrieved it and stored it in his office. His portrait still hangs in Bayeux in gratitude.
In the summer of 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War the invading German Troops came close to Bayeux and the Tapestry was taken from its display case and soldered into a zinc cylinder.
In the C19th it was stored on a spindle in the town hall of Bayeux where visitors could unroll it (and cut pieces off).
Napoleon and Propaganda
In 1803 Napoleon ordered the tapestry to Paris as propaganda for his planned invasion of England. Critics mocked its “primitive” style and obscenity, yet Napoleon understood its power as a visual argument for conquest.
A one-act musical play, La Tapisserie de la Reine Mathilde, played in Paris and then toured French towns where invasion troops were stationed. The authors (Jean Baptist Radet, François Desfontaines, and Pierre-Yves Barré), each received 4,000 francs and bonuses. The embroidery had become state theatre.
Misunderstanding and Mockery
Not all later viewers admired it. Dickens thought it the work of “feeble amateurs”. John Constable compared it unfavourably to ancient Mexican painting. Such remarks tell us more about nineteenth-century taste than about eleventh-century skill.
Recording, Copying, and Damage
Bernard de Montfaucon’s engravings of the 1730s were the first full visual record.
Charles Stothard’s drawings of 1816 revealed holes and stains already present. Stothard used hot wax to provide ‘negative’ moulds onto which plaster of Paris was poured. Stothard also cut off and kept two fragments, probably with his wife Eliza’s involvement. Scholarship and vandalism were sometimes uncomfortably close.
Victorian Replication
Between 1885 and 1886 Elizabeth Wardle and around 37 women in Leek produced a full-size embroidered copy. William Morris advised on technique. Some explicit details were bowlderised to suit Victorian sensibilities.
Ironically, the Reading replica now preserves details that have since faded in the original, making it a document in its own right.
War and Modern Conservation
The tapestry was evacuated during both World Wars. During the Second World War it was driven on open roads five times, packed and unpacked repeatedly.
Himmler wanted it taken to Germany as evidence of supposed Viking, and therefore “Germanic”, Norman origins. An SS attempt to seize it in 1944 failed.
Since 1983 it has been displayed in Bayeux under strict environmental control. It was removed again in 2025 for museum redevelopment and is currently in controlled storage.
Meaning and Status Today
The Bayeux Tapestry is both historical narrative and political argument. It is not a neutral record, but a crafted interpretation designed to persuade.
It remains one of the most important visual sources for eleventh-century warfare, ships, clothing, and power. Its survival is not miraculous, but the result of repeated, often local, acts of restraint and rescue.
© James Rye 2026
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Sources
- Hicks, C. (2006), The Bayeux Tapestry: The Life of Story of a Masterpiece, Chatto & Windus
- Morris, M. (2012), The Norman Conquest: The Battle of Hastings and the Fall of Anglo-Saxon England, Penguin