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A man in mail grips an arrow shaft at his face, and the letters stitched above him spell HAROLD. Whether this figure is the king is the oldest argument about the Bayeux embroidery.

William heard mass before dawn on 14 October 1066 and hung the relics around his neck, the same relics Harold had once sworn an oath on. His chaplain, who wrote the campaign up as a lawsuit God decided, records the gesture. The English army stood on foot 7 miles inland from Hastings, along a ridge, with their shields locked. The huscarls stood in front, the king’s paid household soldiers, swinging the long axe their fathers had learned from Cnut’s Danes. These men had beaten the last Viking king 19 days earlier, 250 miles to the north, and marched back at the same killing pace. The men riding at the wall were the same story at a different speed. Normandy was the land a Viking named Rollo had taken off a Frankish king in 911, and William was Rollo’s great-great-great-grandson. In five generations the family had traded the longship for the warhorse, and Norse for French. The fleet that crossed the Channel two weeks before the battle was still built the old northern way, with dragon heads at the bow. The embroidery shows the warhorses standing in the open hulls, heads out over the sides. In one autumn England was invaded by the Viking past and the Viking future, and beat only the past. The battle lasted about nine hours, which battles of that age almost never did. The Breton wing broke and ran in the morning, and the rumor spread that the duke was dead. William pushed back his helmet and rode the line bare-faced so his own men could see him. His chaplain counts three horses killed under him. What began as a real rout was then faked twice on purpose. The horsemen fled, the shield wall leaked men downhill after them, and the horsemen turned. By dusk the English were a knot around the standards, and somewhere in that dusk the king died. The one surviving picture will not settle how. Under the stitched caption HAROLD REX INTERFECTUS EST, King Harold is killed, two figures share the name. One is a man in mail gripping an arrow at his eye. The other is falling, taking a Norman sword across the thigh. The arrow enters the written record within a generation. The earliest poem about the battle gives Harold four killers with blades and no arrow at all. Some scholars read the two figures as one man shown twice, hit and then cut down. The needlework keeps both deaths and takes no position. The body was too badly cut up to identify. By the Waltham monks’ tradition, Edith Swan-neck was brought to walk the field and find him by marks only she knew. The picture itself is the strangest survivor of the year. Bayeux calls it a Tapisserie. It is embroidery, wool on linen, 68 metres long and half a metre tall. More than 600 people are stitched into it, and nearly 200 horses. It was made within a decade or so of the battle, almost certainly in England, probably at Canterbury. The likely patron is Odo, the duke’s half-brother and bishop of Bayeux, who appears in it swinging a club. Later ages explained the club as a churchman’s way around the rule against shedding blood. Which means the conquered made it: English needles, sewing the conquerors’ case, beautifully, for a Norman cathedral. William was crowned in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day. The shout of approval went up in two languages, the guards outside took the noise for a revolt, and they set fire to the nearest houses. The rite was finished in smoke. Domesday Book, 20 years on, found barely a twentieth of England still in English hands. The embroidery outlived all of it. It turns up in a Bayeux cathedral inventory in 1476. In 1792 it was seized to cover a wagon, and a local lawyer pulled it back off. Napoleon showed it in Paris in 1803, while he was planning a crossing in the other direction. Its final metres are missing. The strip ends mid-flight, with Englishmen running off the torn edge, and no one knows how much longer it once was.