Wednesday, 9 July 2025

The Bayeux (Canterbury) Tapestry (Embroidery)

Strange to see a visiting President given a State visit and nobody protesting or holding up banners decrying his orange coloured skin or him being a sex offender but this is the French President and not the weird one with little hands and we seem to like the French guy.
In exchange for a visit to Buckingham Palace and a slap up dinner, he is offering to lend us the Bayeux Tapestry to gawk at but to be honest, i have seen it and to be polite, it's not as impressive as you may think.  
The bit everyone looks for first in the 230ft long tapestry is the section where Harold has the arrow in his eye but accounts at the time had Harold skewered through the heart by a Norman Knight, his head chopped off while his guts were strewn across the ground and his left leg cut off at the thigh. Oh, and then his corpse was castrated just for good measure but that's a lot of needlework so instead they just knitted an arrow in his eye instead.
It is therefore reasonable to assume that the rest of the Bayeux Tapestry isn’t 100% reliable, for a start it’s not a tapestry it's an embroidery and it's from Canterbury and not Bayeux and you can only assume when William the Conqueror was told he was to be presented with an epic work which had taken years of painstaking labour by dozens of devoted artists to commemorate his victory other the English, he wasn't expecting some fancy needlework.  
Could explain why he didn't display it in the Royal Palace and had it shipped to Bayeux in France and why you never hear the line that history is embroidered by the winners.

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