Why is it so significant?It “must be the only artistic masterpiece that is also a crucial source for a major historical event”, wrote the medieval historian Patrick Wormald. The Bayeux Tapestry’s survival, largely intact, is miraculous in itself. A strip cartoon-style rendering of the Norman Conquest, from 1064 to the Battle of Hastings, it is rich, evocative and astonishingly vivid. The tapestry is “not merely a record of conquest, but an incomparable mirror of medieval life”, says the French scholar Lucien Musset. Colourful, graphically violent and occasionally ribald, it is rich in background detail, allowing us to look back nearly a millennium and see the world of the Anglo-Saxons and their Norman foes: their arms and armour, their ships, their cooking, their horses and dogs, their hairstyles (the English have flowing locks and long moustaches, while the Normans are cropped and clean-shaven).
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