The 70-Metre Embroidered Cloth That Tells the Story of the 1066 Norman Conquest of England in 58 Scenes Stitched in the Decade After the Battle

The Bayeux Tapestry is a 70-metre-long strip of linen embroidered with wool yarn in eight colours, approximately 50 cm tall, depicting the events of the 1066 Norman conquest of England in 58 narrative scenes with Latin captions. It is not technically a tapestry — a true tapestry is woven, while the Bayeux is embroidered on a pre-woven base — but the conventional name has been used since the 18th century and is now standard.

Modern scholarly consensus places its production in southern England (probably Canterbury) in the 1070s, within a decade of the events it depicts. Its commissioner was probably Odo, Bishop of Bayeux — William the Conqueror’s half-brother, a senior Norman administrator of conquered England, and the new Earl of Kent. The tapestry was almost certainly designed for display at the consecration of the new Bayeux Cathedral on 14 July 1077.

What it shows

The 58 scenes tell a coherent narrative from approximately 1064 to October 1066.

The opening scenes show Harold Godwinson, then earl of Wessex, being sent to Normandy by King Edward the Confessor — apparently to confirm William of Normandy’s claim to succeed Edward. Harold is shown being shipwrecked, rescued by the Count of Ponthieu, ransomed by William, joining William on a campaign in Brittany, and swearing an oath on saint’s relics at Bayeux to support William’s succession.

The middle scenes show Edward the Confessor’s death on 5 January 1066, Harold’s accelerated coronation the next day at Westminster Abbey, and the appearance of Halley’s Comet in late April 1066 — interpreted by the contemporary embroiderer as a divine omen of imminent disaster.

The closing scenes show William’s response: the building of an invasion fleet in northern Normandy, the September 1066 crossing of the Channel, the landing at Pevensey, the Battle of Hastings on 14 October 1066, and the death of Harold.

Harold’s death

The single most-discussed scene is the depiction of Harold’s death. The Latin caption reads Hic Harold rex interfectus est (“Here King Harold is killed”). Below the caption is a figure with an arrow in his eye, then a figure being cut down by a Norman cavalryman.

The scholarly question — debated since the 18th century — is which figure is Harold. The 19th-century consensus identified the arrow-in-eye figure as Harold; the subsequent consensus (mid-20th century onward) identified the cavalry-victim figure as Harold; the 21st-century consensus is that both figures may be Harold, depicting two sequential moments of his death (first wounded by the arrow, then dispatched by the cavalryman). The embroidered details that originally distinguished the figures have been partly lost to later restoration work.

The arrow-in-eye narrative entered popular English memory as the canonical version of Harold’s death. The other contemporary written sources — the Bayeux Tapestry being a primary source itself — do not specifically mention the arrow; the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle gives no details; William of Poitiers describes Harold being cut down by Norman knights without specifying the eye injury.

Provenance

The Tapestry’s history between approximately 1080 and 1476 is undocumented. It first appears in the historical record in a 1476 inventory of Bayeux Cathedral’s treasury, where it is described as a long linen cloth depicting the conquest of England. The cathedral hung it annually around the nave during the week of the Feast of Relics in early July, from approximately 1480 until the French Revolution.

During the French Revolution the Tapestry was nearly destroyed. In 1792 the local revolutionary committee at Bayeux requisitioned it as a canvas to cover military supply wagons. A local civil servant named Lambert Léonard-Leforestier intervened — physically wrapped the cloth in a smaller protective package and substituted ordinary canvas — and saved it.

Napoleon had it brought to Paris in 1803 for public exhibition as propaganda for his planned cross-Channel invasion of England. (The invasion was abandoned in 1805 after Trafalgar.) It was returned to Bayeux in 1804.

During the Second World War the Nazi German Ahnenerbe — Heinrich Himmler’s archaeological research office — took an extensive photographic survey of the Tapestry in 1941, intending to use it for racial-ideological purposes. The original was moved to the Louvre’s wartime storage in 1944. The Germans attempted to seize it during the August 1944 Battle of Paris but were unable to reach it before the Allied liberation.

It returned to Bayeux in 1945 and is now displayed at the purpose-built Bayeux Tapestry Museum, opened in 1983, in the former Grand Séminaire building near the cathedral.

In January 2018 the French president Emmanuel Macron announced a planned loan of the Tapestry to the British Museum for an exhibition — the first time the tapestry would leave France since approximately 1066. The loan has been repeatedly postponed for conservation reasons. The most recent announcement in 2025 set the loan dates for autumn 2026.

The 70-metre embroidery has survived 950 years of mixed handling, multiple near-disasters, two world wars, and ten generations of display use. The wool yarn colours have faded; the linen base has worn at several points; approximately 1.5 metres of the original eastern end (covering the immediate aftermath of Hastings) is missing and was replaced with a 19th-century reconstruction. The surviving 58 scenes are essentially the contemporary 1070s record of how the Norman conquest was visualised by its own beneficiaries within a decade of the events.