The Bayeux Tapestry is one of the most famous works of art in the world: nearly 70 metres of kings, battles, betrayals and bloodshed. But how much of the story it tells can we actually believe?
Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams unravel the extraordinary 11th-century embroidery that turned the Norman Conquest into a medieval propaganda epic. Who commissioned it? Why was it probably made by English women? And did Harold really die with an arrow in his eye?
There are mysteries in the margins too, including the enigmatic Aelfgifu, Halley’s Comet and a surprisingly large number of naked men.
And then there’s the remarkable survival of the tapestry itself. From revolutionaries who nearly used it as a wagon cover to Napoleon and the Nazis, it has repeatedly come within a whisker of disappearing altogether.
Nearly a thousand years after the Battle of Hastings, what can the Bayeux Tapestry really tell us about 1066, and about the people who wanted history to remember their version of it?
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