Why was the Norman Conquest important?

Narrator: 1066 is the best known is the best known date in English history. Harold, the last Anglo-Saxon King of the English, lost his eye to an arrow and his crown to William, Duke of Normandy, at the Battle of Hastings.

A great deal of what we know, or think we know about the event, is captured in the Bayeux Tapestry.

The first thing to say about the Bayeux Tapestry is that it’s not a tapestry at all. Technically, it’s an embroidery. A tapestry is woven on the loom.

An embroidery is stitched onto the fabric – in this case, linen.

The images in the Bayeux Tapestry are terribly familiar – all these men going like that, going overseas and meeting up with kings so when you actually come to the tapestry yourself and see it for real, it’s quite a surprise just what it looks like in terms of its proportions.

That’s only the half of it way down there. It’s displayed on a U-bend on the outside of it, here in its gallery.

It’s now accepted that the tapestry was made in England, which was top nation at tapestry making at the time. It was sewn by English craftspeople but probably designed by a Norman, and commissioned and paid for by William’s half-brother, Odo, Bishop of Bayeux.

In the main central band, there are depicted over 600 men, 200 horses, 50 dogs, and three women.

Anglo-Saxons are recognised by their moustaches. Normans by their hair, cropped aggressively short at the back.

The more you look at the tapestry, the more sophisticated it appears. To take a simple example, Harold is here shown eating a meal before sailing to France. He and his companions are on the first floor of a large house. But for economy of space in the tapestry, the upper floor is also the meal table.

Holding the roof on the right, there is a man who points the way down the stairs to Harold, who is now seen boarding his ship to Normandy.

Where necessary, scenes are separated by highly stylised trees. In the borders, drawings of fables and fantastic beasts comment on the action.

One or two scenes appear to be out of order, and have sometimes been dismissed as mistakes. But the ordering is no more an accident than is the use of flashback in a novel or a feature film.

Westminster Abbey, Edward the Confessor’s burial place, is shown before his funeral procession and two-layered deathbed scene. This is not because the designer forgot that you do not bury a king before he dies. Rather, it’s done in this way so that the man offering the crown to Harold in the next scene can point to Edward, bequeathing him the kingdom just before his death.

What everyone knows – or thinks they know – about the Battle of Hastings is that Harold was killed with an arrow in his eye. Is the tapestry the original source of that story?

Dr Majorie Chibnall: It’s the earliest known source of the story, but it’s a very plausible one. And although, sometimes, people have though that the arrow in the eye.

And although, sometimes, people have thought that the arrow in the eye was part of a restoration and wasn’t in the original, the stitch-holes at the back of the tapestry show clearly that it was in the original.

And as I said, it really is quite plausible, because so many arrows were flying around.

Narrator: Of course, further along, there’s another man falling down, obviously dead. That could be Harold.

Dr Majorie Chibnall: The most plausible explanation is that they’re both Harold, because these are two scenes shown as a cartoon, where you have to draw your figure several times, in order to show the change.