Bayeux Tapestry at the British Museum: An extraordinary masterpiece showing pity and brutality of war

Golly, it’s big. Before you get close up to the Bayeux Tapestry, you can look down on it from an upper balcony and see all seventy yards of it under glass. Close up what strikes you is something different…it’s that the pictures and the story are made up of stitches. It sounds obvious but what reproductions never really convey is the sheer physicality of the embroidery; you can see the way the stitches work: round circles to show chain mail, running stitch for outlines. And what extraordinary skill those women had. For, of course, this was women’s work; probably the nuns of Canterbury, possibly with skilled laywomen, or maybe Barking. Englishwomen were famed at their skill at embroidery and this is one of the finest early examples.