Bayeux Tapestry at the British Museum: An extraordinary masterpiece showing pity and brutality of war

Golly, it’s big. Before you get close up to the Bayeux Tapestry, you can look down on it from an upper balcony and see all seventy yards of it under glass. Close up what strikes you is something different…it’s that the pictures and the story are made up of stitches. It sounds obvious but what reproductions never really convey is the sheer physicality of the embroidery; you can see the way the stitches work: round circles to show chain mail, running stitch for outlines. And what extraordinary skill those women had. For, of course, this was women’s work; probably the nuns of Canterbury, possibly with skilled laywomen, or maybe Barking. Englishwomen were famed at their skill at embroidery and this is one of the finest early examples.

It would of course have been extraordinarily vivid a thousand years ago before the colours faded but it has been marvellously preserved, even given problematic Victorian restoration (including the arrow in Harold’s eye – which is difficult to make out). It’s exciting, the way a cartoon is exciting, with all the happenings spelt out in the captions, and you follow the narrative all the way along. But it’s not just a left to right motion; at times the story moves in the other direction – think a stage set, rather than a cartoon.

The scene depicting King Harold's death on the Bayeux Tapestry

AFP/Getty

The tapestry is, I think, brilliantly displayed, with captions and little pictures on the dark wall behind telling visitors unobtrusively what’s happening in each section. But the tapestry itself tells a story that draws the viewer in. The sequence of events from Edward the Confessor holding court right through to the flight of the English from Hastings is outlined with marvellous economy in the main narrative panel.

But above and below there are the decorative panels, except that they’re not all decorative. Sometimes they subvert the narrative (people going about their farming, indifferent to the battle above) or amusing (the naked man with a big penis and the naked woman may be mildly subversive) or are part of the action. For at the end, at the Battle of Hastings, we see the great battle happening in the main panel. Underneath, other men are busy pulling chain mail over the heads of dead or dying men or gathering up weapons - loot.

It is, in fact, a terrifically exciting narrative. It shows the pity as well as the brutality of war … and all in sophisticated needlework. Genius.