The subject of this book is the embroidered textile, 68.38 meters or a little over 224 feet in length, that has long been known as “The Bayeux Tapestry.” It is room-encompassing in size, implying a large number of viewers and underscoring the work’s essential public nature (Figs 1–36). The full extent of the hanging may also be appreciated through the statistics that have been compiled about it: the work comprises 627 human figures, 190 horses or mules, 35 dogs, 32 ships, 33 buildings, and 37 trees, all hand-stitched in colored woolen thread on a plain linen ground. The surface decoration of the Bayeux Embroidery is organized into slender upper and lower borders, with a larger central frieze. In height, the work ranges between 45.7 and 53.6 centimeters or 18–21 inches, a variation that reflects the process of hand embroidering which has lightly stretched its rectangular shape. This narrow field has the advantage of being about the maximum extent for embroiderers to work on comfortably. In addition, the ribbon-like proportions make it easier to hang a textile of this length.

An inescapable left-to-right momentum is established by the 378-word Latin inscription in the central frieze, as well as by the figures whose sometimes-extravagant poses and vivid gestures keep the story moving. Not infrequently a figure will look in one direction while pointing in the other, a posture that serves to link one episode to the next and impel the action forward (e.g. Plates II, VII, X and XII). These aspects of the embroidery’s design, as well as compositions that echo one another and make artful quotations of other works of art, suggest that the pictorial narrative was very carefully composed.

Most scholars concur that the Bayeux Embroidery was made sometime in the last third of the eleventh century, whether in the months immediately after the Battle of Hastings of 1066, or in the decades following it. As to when work on the textile began, we concur with those who date it to William I’s reign (1066–1087); but we reject the more recent hypothesis, that it was initiated and quickly completed immediately after 1066, and the conventional one, that its dating must be somehow correlated with the imprisonment of Bishop Odo of Bayeux between 1082 and 1087.