A tapestry’s rich life

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The Bayeux tapestry records pictorially in a series of 56 panels, stretching for 70 metres, the last successful invasion of England. It reveals that the invasion of 1066 was a combined operation involving the building of 800 ships to transport an army of some 12,000 men and 2,000 horses across the Channel. For its time it was as complex a piece of planning as the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944.

Since its creation, probably in the 1070s, the tapestry had rested for centuries in comparative obscurity in the care of Bayeux cathedral. In the 18th century, squabbling British antiquarians, for whom the artefacts of the past constituted a supplement, even a substitute for the written record, had established its historical importance. But with the confiscation of church property in the early years of the French Revolution, the tapestry became the property of the state, and states use history and its artefacts for propaganda purposes. The tapestry itself was intended as propaganda for William the Conqueror. It illustrated Harold’s breaking of his oath to William, giving the latter a just cause for war against a perjurer. This Norman/ French version of the conquest was indignantly rejected by English patriots. For the novelist Bulwer-Lytton and Tennyson, Harold was the tragic victim and William a brutal tyrant. Throughout its history the tapestry exposed the tensions that underlie our relationship with the French.

Napoleon consistently used a controlled press to brush up his image. In 1803 he had assembled an army in Boulogne which would conquer England. Ordering the tapestry to be exhibited in the Louvre, he assumed the mantle of William the Conqueror. To Carola Hicks, ‘it could not more directly predict the same outcome for the same enterprise’, i.e.