Is There a Royal Sex Scandal Hidden in the Bayeux Tapestry? With David Musgrove

Mia Sorenti (0:04)

Hello, I'm Mia Sorenti and welcome to Intelligence Squared, the podcast about ideas that matter. In each episode, we speak to some of the world's most interesting thinkers, not simply about what they've written or created, but about the ideas that drive their work and why they matter now. The Bayeux Tapestry is one of history's great acts of compression. Nearly 70 metres of wool embroidery on linen turn a disputed royal succession, an invasion and the Battle of Hastings into a story that millions of us think we already know.

Harold breaks an oath, William crosses the channel and 1066 changes England forever.

This month, the original went on display at the British Museum, where it will remain until July 11th, 2027 This is the first time it's been displayed in England since it was made almost a thousand years ago. In this episode, I'm speaking to Dr David Musgrove, a historian with a doctorate in Medieval Landscape Archaeology, a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and content director at HistoryExtra. With Michael Lewis, he wrote The Story of the Bayeux Tapestry, Unravelling the Norman Conquest. We are going to explore some of the most surprising mysteries of the tapestry, from a possible hidden royal sex scandal to the crucial characters left out and ultimately interrogate the question. Whose story is stitched into it, and why has that story proved so hard to dislodge? David, welcome to Intelligence Squared. So before we discuss what the tapestry means, can you explain to us what the object actually is physically, and is tapestry a bit of a misnomer?

David Musgrove (1:39)

Yes, it is. As you said in your intro, it is a very long piece of artwork, a monumental piece of artwork, 68.3 meters in length, half a meter high.

And it is composed of nine linen panels upon which is stitched an embroidered story in woolen thread dyed in natural colors, and those panels were stitched separately and then joined together, we assume, almost immediately after the event. Though we don't know that, to be sure. We call it the Bayeux Tapestry because it's been in Bayeux for many centuries. And tapestry is an interesting word. When it was first sort of came to academic attention in the 18th century, it was described by a French academic as a tapisserie. And that French word has been kind of slightly lost in translation when it's come over to the UK to English because tapisserie in French just kind of means any sort of wall hanging. And I think when it was first discovered, people in England and Britain hadn't actually seen it. So they thought tapisserie just meant tapestry, whereas actually it's an embroidery. A tapestry in the purest sense is where the design is woven on a loom, whereas an embroidery is where it's stitched on a backing cloth. So this is technically an embroidery.

Mia Sorenti (2:53)

And you've spent years returning to this object. What drew you to it in the first place? Why does it have this kind of enduring appeal? What kind of made it more than just this kind of story in a school book for you?

David Musgrove (3:04)

So I don't think you can study medieval history without sort of butting up against the Bayeux Tapestry pretty quickly.

So I studied archaeology and then I did a PhD in medieval archaeology, medieval landscape archaeology. And so obviously I was kind of coming across the tapestry in many ways and many sources. And archaeologists find it a useful source, though a difficult source, when you're looking at things like castle archaeology, because there are castles shown in the tapestry and you might wonder how far they are, a direct reflection of what was happening in 1066 with the introduction of castles into the English landscape. But it was later when I was working on HistoryExtra magazine when I kind of really started to delve into it. In 2008 I wrote an article about the essential Englishness of the tapestry where I interviewed a bunch of tapestry experts about it, about this idea that it was probably made in England. We can come back to that. And that just drew me into it because it showed me that there are many levels on this tapestry. And then I was sort of sucked in to one scene which really just I found fascinating, which is the really important scene in the tapestry, the sacred oath scene where Harold makes a promise to William. And in my view, that's how the tapestry sort of hinges. That's what it's all about. So I started looking at it and I thought, this is just absolutely fascinating.

And I couldn't get out my head. And so when news broke that it was going to be loaned to the UK, I leapt into action, contacted a friend and colleague, Michael Lewis, who is now the curator of the exhibition at the British Museum. And we put our heads together and wrote a book.