Return of the Threaded Epic: The Bayeux Tapestry Comes Home

After 900 years, the Bayeux Tapestry is coming home to a Britain as divided and politicised as the one it first depicted.

It has been nearly a millennium since the Bayeux Tapestry, one of Europe’s most extraordinary artefacts, was stitched in England. A masterwork of medieval propaganda, it chronicles the Norman conquest of 1066 CE in thread and pigment with cinematic clarity. Now, it is finally returning to the land of its making.

Though not technically a tapestry but an embroidery stitched in linen and wool, the Bayeux Tapestry - at 69 metres long and half a metre high - unspools like a medieval film reel, frame by frame, telling the story of Harold Godwinson and William of Normandy: one an oath-breaker, the other a conqueror; both men fated to change the fate of a country.

In an act of diplomatic grace, this embroidered epic will anchor an exhibition at the British Museum from September 2026 to July 2027. Never before has it been seen on British soil.

It is an event centuries in the making. Britain had petitioned for its return in 1931, again in 1953 for the coronation of Elizabeth II and most recently in 2018, when a much-trumpeted loan fell through owing to the pandemic.

For nine centuries it has remained in France, largely in Bayeux, in the heart of Normandy, save for two brief interludes - once in 1803 when Napoleon, flush with visions of empire, brought it to Paris to stoke enthusiasm for his own invasion of England; and again, in 1944, when the Nazis hid it in the bowels of the Louvre, fascinated by its supposed Germanic ancestry.

For generations of scholars and schoolchildren, the Tapestry’s iconic scenes are etched into collective memory: Duke William’s preparations for invasion, Harold Godwinson’s fateful oath in Normandy, the windswept landing at Pevensey and the chaotic clash at Hastings, culminating in Harold’s supposed death by arrow. Yet, as with all foundational myths, what the Tapestry chooses to include is as revealing as what it leaves out.

The Bayeux Tapestry is embroidered history in 58 vivid scenes wherein horses gallop, ships are launched, oaths are sworn and broken, and Harold Godwinson is pierced through the eye. Its margins are filled with animals from Aesop and Phaedrus, folkloric and moral counterpoints to the main drama.

Said to have been commissioned by Bishop Odo of Bayeux, half-brother to William the Conqueror (a lot of mystery therein), the tapestry was almost certainly stitched by Anglo-Saxon artisans, likely in Canterbury, in the final decades of the 11th century. Though its first recorded mention is in 1476 in the cathedral’s inventory, most scholars agree it was made shortly after the events it depicts, thus being a near-contemporary propaganda artefact.

Its story is deceptively simple. Harold, loyal and brave, fights beside William in Normandy. Later, he breaks a sacred oath and claims England’s throne. William, justified and wronged, launches his invasion. The final scene shows the bloody Battle of Hastings of 1066 CE. But this is only the surface.

The best modern accounts unravel these threads with scholarly precision and literary grace. Historian Marc Morris’s ‘The Norman Conquest’ (2012) offers a panoramic view of 1066 and the century that followed, anchoring the Tapestry in the broader context of a seismic transformation. Morris shows how William’s invasion did not just change England’s rulers but altered its language, its law, its architecture and its very sense of self, with Tapestry becoming not merely a memorial, but a manifesto.

For a more intimate portrait of the embroidery itself, Carola Hicks’s splendidly readable ‘The Bayeux Tapestry: The Life Story of a Masterpiece’ (2006) is a most accessible narrative account. Hicks treats the Tapestry not as a relic but as a living artefact, shaped by - and shaping - the turbulent centuries it has survived. Her central contention is that it may have been commissioned not by William’s half-brother Odo (as tradition holds), but by Edith Godwinson, Harold’s sister and Queen to Edward the Confessor, as a gesture of reconciliation between Anglo-Saxon and Norman factions.

Indeed, nuance is something the Tapestry eschews. It makes no mention of Harald Hardrada’s prior invasion from the north nor of Edgar Aetheling, the boy with a stronger claim to the English throne than either William or Harold.

Their exclusion, as the historian David Howarth notes in his acclaimed ‘1066: The Year of the Conquest’ (1977), was deliberate. As Howarth observes, the story depicted in the Tapestry is so vivid and so perfectly constructed that it demands belief.

Michael Lewis’s ‘Reading the Bayeux Tapestry’ (2022) takes that idea further, treating the embroidery not just as a narrative but as an argument. The Tapestry, he suggests, is less a commemoration than a political dossier designed to legitimise William’s rule and discredit resistance. And yet, its tone is not wholly triumphalist. Harold is portrayed with surprising dignity. He fights heroically. He commands loyalty. Even in betrayal, he is rendered as a man of consequence. Such nuance, Lewis argues, points to a brief moment - perhaps in the years immediately following the conquest - when reconciliation between the Normans and the Saxons seemed possible.

However, that possibility soon vanished. By 1069, William was unleashing fire and famine in northern England in a campaign of terror known as the Harrying of the North. The fleeting attempt to bind Normans and Anglo-Saxons together gave way to brute force. But the Bayeux Tapestry endured.

It first appears in the historical record in 1476, in an inventory of Bayeux Cathedral. There it slumbered until the Enlightenment, when antiquarians, inspired by rising nationalism and a taste for the medieval, revived it. From then on, the Tapestry became not just art, but a mirror for political ambition.

Napoleon displayed it in Paris in 1803, ahead of his (aborted) invasion of Britain. Hitler’s cultural officers pored over it during World War II, hoping to prove that the Normans (and by extension, the English) were descended from Vikings, and thus Germanic.

In ‘The Invention of the Bayeux Tapestry’ (2021), Alexandra Lester-Makin traces this thread of mythmaking with forensic clarity, showing how successive regimes – be they revolutionary, imperial or fascist – have sought to conscript the Tapestry into their own master narratives.

The tapestry’s return is not without quid pro quo. France’s agreement to loan the piece came only after British consent to send over treasures from the Sutton Hoo hoard and the Lewis Chessmen - two icons of Anglo-Saxon art. That swap is layered with irony. Sutton Hoo, with its ship burial and Byzantine-style silverware, speaks to a cosmopolitan Anglo-Saxon elite. The Lewis Chessmen - carved from walrus ivory - have long symbolised the mingling of Norse and Celtic traditions.

There is more. In the wake of William’s conquest, not all English nobles submitted. In the mid-1070s, a flotilla of 350 ships left England, ferrying nobles and warriors to Constantinople. There, many joined the Varangian Guard - the elite corps of the Byzantine emperor’s household troops. Thus, the very events narrated in the Tapestry set off their own refugee crisis: a reverse Channel crossing in search of sanctuary.

In an age when Britain fiercely debates the legitimacy of Channel migrants, the Tapestry history has an eerie resonance. A millennium after it was embroidered, it is still telling its story and Britain, divided as ever, is still listening.