The Bayeux Tapestry: a political football for 900 years

Back then, in 2018, HistoryExtra asked a panel of Tapestry experts for their views on the likelihood of the loan actually coming off. Professor Shirley Ann Brown made this observation at the time:

“It is a daunting and incredibly expensive proposition. All previous loan requests were stymied, and I am sceptical this one will succeed. Bayeux’s mayor and the museum’s director have stipulated that any loan is conditional upon conservation studies indicating the embroidery is stable enough for the move. An institutional partnership must also be formed and a financing agreement negotiated.

“The loan date has to be short, between Bayeux Museum’s proposed closure in 2022 and its reopening in spring 2024, and a climate-controlled exhibition case at least 225 feet long has to be built. It boils down to politics vs conservation concerns.”

Conservation fears

So, part of the hold-up was that the loan of the Tapestry was always contingent on the temporary closure of its home museum in Bayeux, while it was being remodelled into a 21st-century exhibition space. The plans for that renovation have taken longer than expected to come to pass. But in September this year, the Tapestry is being taken off display and put into storage while building works commence. It is planned that the museum will reopen in 2027, to form part of Normandy’s millennial celebrations for the birth of its famous conquering duke, William. The window of loan opportunity, therefore, is opening – but it will be closing fast.

There have also been concerns raised over the fragility of the Tapestry and whether it can safely travel across the Channel. Similar worries were voiced in 1953 and 1966, when previous loan deals were proposed and then ultimately dashed. In 1953, the loan was mooted to celebrate Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation, and in 1966, the 900th anniversary of the battle of Hastings (not in anticipation of the England mens' team's World Cup football triumph).

It has yet to be explained how this undoubtedly delicate artefact will be moved in 2026, but there is a conservation and stabilisation project planned. This work is already underway. According to the Bayeux Tapestry website, this commenced in January “with the meticulous dusting of the linen canvas and the removal of its technical backing, a fleece affixed in 1983, which, although protecting the work on its back, stiffened and weighed it down. These upstream interventions will facilitate the extraction of the work from its display case when the museum’s renovation work begins in the fall of 2025”.

As well as conservation fears, previous loan requests were also partly stymied by the vast costs associated with moving and insuring the artwork. As of 9 July, financial details of the 2025 agreement have not been released.

By far the biggest hurdle to loan deals, however, has been political will – or lack of it. The Tapestry is owned by the French state, so it was always going to be a government-to-government negotiation, rather than a local decision by the authorities in Bayeux. If both national administrations had wanted it to happen, it could have happened. Right now, there is a climate of rapprochement between the UK and the EU, and so finally the political stars have aligned.

Changing allegiances

Interestingly, the Tapestry has long been something of a diplomatic football. At the start of the 19th century, Napoleon had the artwork moved from Bayeux to Paris to be displayed in advance of his planned invasion of Britain. During the Second World War, the Nazis took a particular interest in the Tapestry because they wanted evidence to show that the Normans who invaded England were Vikings, and by extension, Germanic. This aligned with their search for proof of medieval Germanic supremacy across Europe.

The Tapestry’s association with international politics goes back much further than that, though. We do not know the circumstances by which it was created, or indeed anything much about it at all until the 15th century. The first strong documentary evidence for the Tapestry comes in 1476, when it appears to be mentioned in an inventory of Bayeux Cathedral. However, most scholars now agree that it was likely made in England, and probably more specifically in Canterbury, shortly after the events it depicts – the run-up to the Norman invasion, and the battle of Hastings itself.

Its narrative line is a very clear one that focuses on the relationship between Harold Godwinson and William the Conqueror, with the set-up being that Harold is a worthy adversary to William. The two men even go on a military campaign together, in which the Englishman is notably heroic.

But then Harold chooses to assume the throne of England after the death of his predecessor Edward the Confessor. This is despite the fact that he has made an oath in Normandy, seemingly to support William’s claim to the throne. Thus Harold is laid low by his own perjurious character faults.

It’s a straightforward, easy-to-understand, man-to-man clash – basically, a story of a brotherly falling-out. It’s not surprising then that there is no mention of the other invasion of 1066, when the Norwegian king Harald Hardrada brought a fleet to northern England, nor indeed of the fact that there was a young man with a stronger blood claim to the throne, Edgar Aetheling, than either Harold or William. Both those figures would have clouded the simple story and don’t get a look-in.

With that easy-to-follow agenda, you could see the Tapestry as a simple reflection on William’s greatness, and a triumphal account of the Norman victory. That may be true, but looking more deeply, it’s also an overtly political document, making the case for why William’s invasion was justified because of Harold’s back-sliding over the oath.

Going further, there is an argument that it in fact speaks of a very particular moment in the short period after 1066 when the new King William was seeking an accommodation with the defeated English and trying to bring the Normans and Anglo-Saxons together. You can read the Tapestry as being surprisingly positive towards Harold and the English, while simultaneously glorifying the martial achievements of the Normans. So perhaps it was created to be displayed to the military men on both sides, to throw them both a bone, and give them something to bond over as the heat of the battle subsided.

Those friendly conditions rapidly ceased to exist as William struggled to cope with English rebellions against his rule. This famously resulted in his Harrying of the North in 1069, when Normans laid waste to much of northern England.

If you follow that theory, then there is only a very brief moment in time when the Tapestry’s political narrative matched the reality on the ground. Maybe it quickly became an irrelevance and was put into storage and forgotten about, which might explain why it actually survived at all. Then, as now, the Tapestry was very much a tool for political storytelling and deal-making.

Small boat crossings

In the context of current deal-making, we have the very charged question over the small boats and the flow of immigrants into Britain. It’s interesting to reflect on the fact that the battle of Hastings led to flood of emigrants from England.

By the mid-1070s it was clear that the future for the former Anglo-Saxon nobility was looking shaky under King William’s hardline rule. Thus, according to 13th- and 14th-century accounts, a great host of 350 ships, under three earls and eight barons, left England for a new home. They went to Byzantium and ended up in the service of the emperor there, in his personal bodyguard, the Varangian Guard. They went on to establish a settlement, a Nova Anglia, on the shores of the Black Sea – maybe on the Crimean peninsula in modern-day Ukraine.

The immediate aftermath of the story told in the Tapestry that is being loaned to the UK, as part of a broader negotiation to try to stem the flow of migrants across the Channel, is one of desperate migrants leaving this land in ships going the other way across the very same Channel.

There is a fascinating coda to the tale as well. In return for us getting the Bayeux Tapestry, we are lending out the Sutton Hoo Treasures from the British Museum to France.

Sutton Hoo, of course, is the Anglo-Saxon ship burial that was found in 1939. The story of excavation, and the fabulous riches it revealed, was told in the 2021 film The Dig. According to the Financial Times, France’s desire to have the Sutton Hoo treasures as part of the swap deal was what swung it for the British Museum to get the Tapestry, rather than the V&A. Curiously, one recent theory has it that the artefacts buried in Sutton Hoo were brought back to England by Anglo-Saxon mercenaries who had been serving in the Byzantine army, fighting in what’s now Syria, in the sixth century AD.

A great exhibition

So there’s a tangled story of ships big and small, emigrants and immigrants, and refugees and warriors, going on here. It also takes in places like Ukraine and Syria, which both have contemporary resonance.

Perhaps these will be the key narrative elements of the story told in what will surely be the biggest exhibition to ever grace the British Museum. There is a lot of work to be done before the 70-metre-long medieval masterpiece can be displayed around the museum’s walls, and hopefully some scientific research, too. The opportunity for experts to analyse the Tapestry – and particularly to investigate the rear of the embroidery – is hugely exciting.

We have to go all the way back to early 1980s, when the Tapestry was previously re-displayed, for the last time that researchers were able to get up close and personal with it. Assuming that academics are actually allowed to get their hands on the Tapestry, the huge leaps forward in scientific techniques and computer analysis should allow for some fascinating new findings on why, when and how it was actually created.

The Tapestry is coming home and it’s very, very exciting. I’ll be first in what I expect will be a very long queue to see what it looks like on display on British soil for the first time in nine centuries.