analysis alex Woolf, st andrews University school of history

President Macron’s offer to allow the Bayeux Tapestry to be loaned to a museum in Britain for temporary display is probably motivated more by political needs than by any real consideration for its history.

Although the tapestry, depicting the Norman Conquest and the events that led up to it (c.1063-66), has been in the cathedral at Bayeux in Normandy since at least 1476, it was actually made in England, as the needlework indicates, by English women.

Every indication is that it was produced soon after the events it depicts.

It has provided historians with the best surviving pictorial evidence for clothes and equipment of the late 11th Century north of the Alps.

The preservation of the tapestry in Bayeux Cathedral and the prominence of Bishop Odo of Bayeux (d.1097), William the Conqueror’s half-brother, in its narrative has long been taken to suggest he was the patron who commissioned its production.

He had been made Earl of Kent after the conquest and would have had no difficulty finding English women to work for him.

The tapestry is almost unique from this period in presenting female perspectives on the events.

Although the topic may have been set by Odo, much of the detail, particularly in the upper and lower margins, indicate the particular perspective of the seamstresses who produced the work.

Thus, the tapestry presents us with two distinct points of view, that of a Conquering Norman lord and that of the conquered English women whom he commanded.

The return of the tapestry to Britain should be welcomed as it will give it a new and much wider audience and will doubtless stimulate fresh discussion of its importance and meaning, both among academics and the wider population.