For the first time in almost 1,000 years, the Bayeux Tapestry returns to English shores. Its loan to the British Museum has already sparked a 'Glastonbury-style' scramble for tickets, and it's easy to see why: few objects tell a story with such drama, colour and immediacy. The galloping horses, the crowded battlefield, the doomed English king.
Yet for something so familiar, drummed into generations of schoolchildren, the Tapestry is wrapped in almost as many myths as the events it depicts. It isn't quite a tapestry, it may not have been made where its name suggests, and its most famous scene might not show what we were all taught. Drawing on David Musgrove and Michael Lewis's The Story of the Bayeux Tapestry, here are the myths worth unpicking…
1. It isn't a tapestry, and it wasn't made in Bayeux
2. Queen Matilda didn't stitch it
3. The mystery woman nobody can name
Amid the kings, dukes and warriors, only three women appear in the main story of the Tapestry, and one of them has baffled scholars for the better part of a millennium. In an early scene, a woman stands framed in a doorway while a tonsured cleric reaches out to touch her face. The caption names her only as ÆLFGYVA, notes that 'a certain cleric' is involved, and then, maddeningly, stops.
Who was she? Theories abound: a princess whose marriage was being negotiated, the subject of a scandal so notorious it needed no explanation, or a figure whose story has simply been lost. The scene is made stranger still by a naked man crouching in the border directly below, apparently mirroring the cleric's gesture.
Nearly a thousand years on, Ælfgyva remains the embroidery's great unsolved riddle, and proof that even a 'complete' historical document can keep its secrets.
Section 15: Ælfgyva, an unknown woman
4. There's a second story hidden in the borders
It's easy to lock onto the main frieze and overlook the narrow borders running above and below it, but they're among the most intriguing parts of the whole work. Alongside birds, beasts and scenes of hunting and farming, the borders carry a run of fables drawn from Aesop, among them the Fox and the Crow and the Wolf and the Crane.
Why are they there? One long-standing theory holds that they're no mere decoration, but a sly commentary on the drama unfolding above. Aesop's tales tend to turn on flattery, deception and broken promises, precisely the accusations swirling around Harold's disputed oath to William.
If the embroiderers were English, working under Norman patronage, some scholars suspect they stitched a quiet layer of subversion into the margins: a conquered people's verdict on their conquerors, hidden in plain sight. It's impossible to prove, but it's a beguiling thought the next time you're tempted to skip past the edges.
5. A comet foretold the king's downfall
Shortly after Harold was crowned in January 1066, a blazing star appeared over England. We know it now as Halley's Comet; but to medieval eyes it was an omen, and rarely a good one. The Tapestry captures the moment vividly: a crowd cranes upward, fingers outstretched, beneath the caption ISTI MIRANT STELLA, 'these men marvel at the star'.
The onlookers couldn't know what was coming. The designer, stitching decades later, certainly did. The comet blazes high in the upper border, and in the lower border just beyond, a ghostly fleet of ships slides into view: the invasion still months away but already foreshadowed.
It's a masterclass in visual storytelling, and a useful reminder that the Tapestry isn't a neutral record but a carefully shaped narrative, one that knew exactly how the story ended and stitched a sense of doom into the telling.
Scene 32: Men observing Halley's Comet
6. Harold may not have taken an arrow to the eye
This is the big one. Ask almost anyone what happens in the Bayeux Tapestry, and they'll tell you King Harold is killed by an arrow through the eye. It's one of the most famous images in English history. It's also far from certain.
The trouble starts with which figure is even Harold. The fatal caption, HAROLD REX INTERFECTUS EST, stretches across a group: one man clutching at an arrow near his helmet, and, right beside him, another being cut down by a mounted Norman knight. Scholars have argued for generations over whether Harold is the first figure, the second, or both, wounded and then dispatched.
Then there's the arrow itself. Comparisons with drawings and engravings made before the embroidery's heavy 19th-century restoration suggest this figure may originally have held a spear, and that the famous shaft owes as much to a Victorian restorer's guesswork as to any 11th-century needle. The authors liken it, memorably, to a spot of modern photo-editing. Add the way cropped photographs tend to centre this one figure, fixing him in our minds as the dying king, and the most famous arrow in English history starts to look decidedly shaky.
Scene 57: the death of King Harold at the Battle of Hastings
7. What survives isn't the whole picture
We tend to picture the Tapestry as a pristine survival from the 1070s, but what hangs before us today has been through the wars, literally and otherwise.
Extensive restoration in the 19th century, chiefly between the 1860s and 1870s, replaced lost stitching, sometimes faithfully and sometimes not. In places, restorers reworked figures and lettering according to what they assumed the scene should show, quietly altering the original meaning. A conservation survey published in 2020 catalogued the wear in almost forensic detail: 24,204 stains, 9,646 holes and 30 tears.
More striking still is what's missing altogether. The Tapestry as it survives ends abruptly, with the beaten English fleeing the field at Hastings. The final section, which very likely carried the story on to William's coronation, mirroring Harold's near the beginning, has been lost. So the object we treat as the complete account of 1066 is in fact both retouched and unfinished: a masterpiece with its last chapter torn away.
8. A treasure claimed for propaganda
For an embroidery pushing a thousand years old, the Tapestry has led a surprisingly political modern life. In 1803, Napoleon had it brought to Paris and put on triumphant public display, at the very moment he was massing troops and ships in northern France for a planned invasion of England. A medieval account of a successful cross-Channel conquest suited his purposes rather nicely.
A century and a half later, it caught a darker eye. During the Second World War, the Nazis seized on the notion that, as a 'Germanic' Norman work, the Tapestry belonged to an Aryan heritage. A team of German researchers studied it under occupation, and in 1944, as the Allies advanced, Heinrich Himmler ordered it moved to the Louvre. English in origin, French in ownership, and claimed by turns as a badge of French and Germanic glory, the Bayeux Tapestry has always been far more contested than its familiar images suggest.
