The Battle of Hastings depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry. (Image courtesy of Wikimedia/Creative Commons)
The Battle of Hastings depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry. (Image courtesy of Wikimedia/Creative Commons)
Mark Silk | Religious News Service | September 28, 2026
(RNS) — The Bayeux Tapestry, which depicts the story of the Norman conquest of England in 1066, returned from France to England this month, to be displayed in the British Museum nearly 1,000 years after it was created. An embroidered cloth rather than a woven tapestry, it is 230 feet long and 20 inches high and as challenging to interpret as it is chock full of detail.
The prevailing hypothesis, established in the 19th century, has been that it was commissioned to be made at St. Augustine’s Abbey in Canterbury by the warrior prelate Odo of Bayeux as a way to justify the conquest and glorify his own role in it. Odo was William the Conquerer’s half brother and chief adviser until he was found guilty of defrauding the government and returned to his bishopric in Normandy, presumptively taking the tapestry with him.
This hypothesis became problematic in the 1970s and ’80s when some scholars noticed that, far from justifying the conquest, the narrative at times seems critical of the Norman cause while showing support for the English side. They speculated that perhaps it offered a covertly pro-English version of the story or maybe that it was commissioned by a different patron who was sympathetic to its mixed messages or that it might have been designed to reconcile the Normans and English by offering support to both sides.
Then, a dozen years ago, my old teacher, Stephen White, a specialist in medieval legal history, and art historian Elizabeth Pastan published a jointly authored book with the novel thesis that it was the monks of St. Augustine’s themselves who designed the work “for their own purposes and at their own initiative.” Noting that the first reference to its being in Bayeux Cathedral doesn’t occur until 1476, Pastan argues that it was originally hung on the walls of the abbey choir, with the monks themselves as its primary audience. What lies behind the Bayeux Tapestry, in both authors’ view, is a distinctly religious perspective — conditioned by practical realities.
After William became king, the ancient monastery (established in 598) found itself in a tricky position. Alongside its English donors there were now Normans as well — all of them people of substance who gave the institution property and other valuables in exchange for the monks’ intercessory prayers. These lay patrons thereby became “brothers” and “sisters” of the abbey who, enjoying access to its buildings, would have been shown the new artwork. Under the circumstances, the monks had every reason to adorn it with messages that could be pointed out as favoring one side or the other.
Beyond that, however, the monks had their own perspective to convey on the fortunes of England and the state of humanity. The portrayal of the doomed English King Harold, with long hair, fine clothes and love of food, can be seen as emblematic of the corruption of English society that, according to a longstanding monastic view, resulted in God’s punishment — now via William. But it wasn’t as if the latter came off so well either.
Critical to Pastan and White’s interpretation are the many references to Aesopian fables that adorn the margins of the tapestry. Well-known to the monks via the version by the Latin author Phaedrus, a number of these fables portray rulers as predatory lions who let nothing, including legalities, get in the way of their appetites. In an early scene where the elegant Harold is handed over to William at his castle in Normandy, the entrance to the castle alludes to the mouth of the lion’s cave in a fable where a stag (seen underneath being hunted by Harold) takes refuge, only to be eaten by the lion.
Scene from Bayeux Tapestry in which Harold of England is handed over to Duke William of Normandy. (Image courtesy of Wikimedia/Creative Commons)
Scene from the Bayeux Tapestry in which Harold of England is handed over to Duke William of Normandy. (Image courtesy of Wikimedia/Creative Commons)
The monks’ bothsidesism was not employed, as today, to rationalize bad behavior on one’s own side, but as bona fide criticism of both. Nor did the monks confine their criticism to those at the top. As White points out in his chapter on the subject, while virtually all the fables depicted in the tapestry deal with predatory behavior of one sort or another, they are not meant to convey the “satisfyingly simple truths” of bad men taking advantage of innocent victims. The latter are themselves very often revealed to be “foolish, weak, pathetically naïve, or downright stupid.”
As we contemplate our world today, it is hard to avoid the sense that predatory behavior on the part of the rich and powerful is on the rise, and the foolishness and naïveté of their victims equally so. As we try to get a purchase on all this, the Bayeux Tapestry invites us to contemplate not only the chaotic politics and bloody violence of its main storyline but also, as White puts it, “the highly cultivated sense of their separation from the secular world, superiority to it, and power to judge it that was essential to the role that monks played as mediators between humans and God.”
You might call it “allsidesism.”
Mark Silk
Professor Silk is the author of “Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II” and “Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America.” He is co-editor of “Religion by Region,” an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of “The American Establishment,” “Making Capitalism Work,” and “One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics.” He inaugurated “Spiritual Politics” in 2007. In 2014 he became RNS Contributing Editor.