Matthew d’Ancona’s culture: The Bayeux Tapestry and the continuing allure of all that Norman wisdom

Beholding the great embroidery – nine-and-half centuries after its creation and eight years since Emmanuel Macron first suggested it be loaned to this country – I understood finally what Walter Benjamin meant when he wrote about the “aura” of original art; the “strange weave of space and time” that no reproduction can capture.

The 68-metre-long tapestry’s sheer proximity, under glass, displayed flat for the first time, is startlingly intimate. From the first scene of King Edward the Confessor, crowned, sceptred and enthroned, instructing Earl Harold Godwinson, to the last surviving vignette of the defeated English fleeing Hastings, you appreciate the exquisite stitching; the vivid shades of blue, red and mustard yellow, fashioned from the natural pigments of weld, madder and woad; the parallel skeins of coloured wool lashed to the linen by the tiny perpendicular threads.

No less striking is the kineticism of this medieval storyboard, a quality that is simply not conveyed in page-by-page facsimiles, however detailed. The unsparing violence of the battle scenes escalates until the borders themselves, previously a cavalcade of fabulous beasts, bawdiness and mischief, become a charnel ground of decapitated, dismembered and shattered bodies.

Great credit is due to the curators – Sue Brunning, Lloyd de Beer, Millie Horton-Insch, Michael Lewis and Naomi Speakman – for the restrained simplicity of the tapestry’s presentation. This allows the treasure to speak for itself, free of distraction and clutter. 

In the process, images that are burned into the nation’s iconography – Harold apparently swearing an oath to William upon two reliquaries, the appearance of Halley’s comet after his coronation, the Norman fleet crossing the Channel, Harold slain by an arrow that may or may not have been added by a restorer (“HIC HAROLD REX INTERFECTUS EST”) – recover their original imaginative force and power to astonish.

But why endure queues both online and in person to see a masterpiece of medieval art that will soon return to the refurbished Musée de la Tapisserie de Bayeux, where it can be viewed with far less fuss? This argument is not only drearily contrarian but wilfully neglects the numinous significance of the tapestry’s return.

Let us expand Benjamin’s concept and identify an “aura of provenance”. Though we cannot be certain of the tapestry’s origins, the Anglo-Saxons were renowned both for manuscript illumination and for an embroidery tradition that would later flower into the opus anglicanum. More tellingly, its imagery contains striking echoes of manuscripts produced or preserved in Canterbury: the sixth-century St Augustine Gospels, probably brought to England from Italy; the Old English Hexateuch; and the Harley Psalter. Such correspondences strongly suggest that the designer had access to the libraries of Canterbury’s religious communities.

In all likelihood, then, the tapestry has returned to the land of its birth. How could this not be a moment to savour, an enchantment to relish? Its presence on these shores is both singular and fleeting: the French have made clear that “such a loan will only happen once and never again.” So this really is it. The next tranche of tickets goes on sale on October 21. Do not miss it.

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The Bayeux Tapestry’s medieval message for our times

Matthew d’Ancona

RESEARCH

Norman wisdom

Since the timeslots at the museum are only 40 minutes long, it makes sense to do a little light preparation before you go. So here are a few suggestions.

The indispensable introduction is The Story of the Bayeux Tapestry: Unravelling the Norman Conquest (revised, 2026) by David Musgrove and Michael Lewis (one of the curators). The best facsimile is David M. Wilson’s The Bayeux Tapestry (1985), though it will probably be superseded by the magnificent exhibition catalogue, full of cutting-edge analysis and thematic essays.

For the full narrative, Marc Morris’s The Anglo-Saxons: A History of The Beginnings of England (2021) and The Norman Conquest: The Battle of Hastings and the Fall of Anglo-Saxon England (2012) are both gripping and scholarly. Majorie Chibnall’s Anglo-Norman England 1066-1166 (1986) is good on the conquering force’s shrewd adaptation of existing institutions and social structures, alongside its undoubtedly repressive methods.

I also greatly enjoyed Tom Licence’s new biography, Harold: Warrior King (Yale University Press), which sheds fresh light on the last crowned Anglo-Saxon monarch as a daring political operator, an accomplished factional strategist and certainly much more than the alleged usurper vanquished at Hastings. 

For a vivid account of the all-important period between Harold’s crushing of King Harald Hardrada of Norway and of his own treacherous brother Tostig Godwinson at Stamford Bridge and his subsequent defeat by William, try the recently published Nineteen Days in Autumn (Viking) by UCL associate professor Erin Goeres.

And if you’d like to know more about the medieval mind and cosmology, take a look at The Making of the Middle Ages by R.W. Southern (1953); Jacques Le Goff’s The Medieval Imagination (1985); Umberto Eco’s Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages (1986); and the peerless Categories of Medieval Culture (tr. 1985) by the Russian historian A.J. Gurevich. But be warned: once you cross the moat of time and enter the medieval keep, you may never truly return.

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What happens when the world stops reading books?

Matthew d’Ancona

FILM

Pressure (general release)

And speaking of invasions… There have been many fine movies about D-Day: The Longest Day (1962), directed by Ken Annakin, Andrew Marton and Bernhard Wicki; Stuart Cooper’s Overlord (1975); and an unforgettable 25-minute sequence in Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998). But Anthony Maras’s terrific screen version of David Haig’s 2014 play, which he adapted with the playwright, dares to frame the make-or-break Allied operation as a claustrophobic chamber piece.

After the disastrous dress rehearsal of Exercise Tiger in April 1944, in which hundreds of US servicemen were killed, General Dwight D. Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser), supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, is finalising plans for Operation Overlord and the initial D-Day assault by 156,000 troops on five Normandy beaches.

To his HQ at Southwick House, five miles north of Portsmouth, he summons Group Captain James Stagg (Andrew Scott), a Met Office meteorologist hailed as a genius by Churchill. D-Day is scheduled for Monday June 5 and Eisenhower has only one question for this prickly Scot: “Go – or don’t go?”

To complicate matters, the general has his own in-house forecaster, Captain Irving P. Krick (Chris Messina), as flamboyant as Stagg is reserved, who boasts of his accurate weather prediction for David O. Selznick’s shooting of the fall of Atlanta in Gone with the Wind (1939) and his impressive record during Eisenhower’s north African operations. But as Stagg witheringly points out, the climate in northern Europe is much less predictable.

He is no less dismissive of Krick’s “analogue method” in which archives are combed for past weather maps that can guide new forecasts. Stagg, in sharp contrast, only cares about up-to-the-minute data from weather stations, ships and balloons: “The weather never replicates itself”. 

And guess what? The data is telling him that there will be storms on Monday. Which is emphatically not what Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery (Damian Lewis), commander of Allied ground forces, wants to hear. 

“If D-Day is cancelled,” he says, “we will lose this war. Do you want to be personally responsible for losing this war, Captain Stagg?” On top of it all, Stagg is fearful for his heavily pregnant wife Liz (Tamsin Topolski), with whom he is forbidden from communicating.

Not that he is the only one feeling the strain. In his portrayal of the chain-smoking anxiety that lurks beneath Eisenhower’s public bullishness, Fraser is characteristically impressive (“When I close my eyes, all I can see is failure”). Montgomery needles Ike about his lack of battle-field experience. He depends absolutely upon his driver-turned-chief aide, First Lieutenant Kay Summersby (Kerry Condon, excellent). 

“Did you know that weathermen are traditionally boring?” she says to Stagg. The remark is meant to be amiable but also spurs the pent-up meteorologist to speak with almost mystical candour about the ultimate unknowability of what “controls our daily life”.

Which is the movie’s deepest and most nuanced theme: that, in the end, we are all at the mercy of Fortune’s wheel, chaos theory, the caprice of the gods – and yet, to function and to take decisions, we must act otherwise. This existential dilemma is stunningly dramatised in one particular scene, as Eisenhower steps out of a church service into torrential rain, catching sight of Stagg, exhausted beneath a tree, to the strains of Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel.

After Morten Tyldum’s The Imitation Game (2014), in which Benedict Cumberbatch played Alan Turing and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023), Pressure is the brilliant completion of an unofficial trilogy on the absolute centrality of eggheads to victory in the war. 

It also makes Scott the man to beat for the Best Actor Oscar – though, to judge by early reviews of Simon Stone’s forthcoming Elsinore, in which he plays Ian Charles performing Hamlet while dying from AIDS (and which opens the London Film Festival on October 7), he may be his own strongest rival.

FILM

Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger (general release)

It turns out that the most effective form of family counselling is a 41-date stadium tour, across five continents, playing to more than two million delirious fans. Or at least it is if you’re Noel and Liam Gallagher.

Directed by Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern, and written by Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight (now hard at work on the new Bond movie), Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger does not dwell upon the well-worn story of the supposedly irreparable rupture between the brothers in 2009 but – more intriguingly – explores the way in which they achieved reconciliation; not by excavating the grievances of the past, but simply by getting back on stage.

Both are nervous: so much is at stake and, after 15 years of not speaking to one another, they have no idea quite what to expect. But when Liam swaggers into the rehearsal room, gripes about the baffles on the drum kit – “they’re giving me the hump” – and then breaks into Hello, you can feel all the bitterness, the bickering and the recriminations being washed away like tears in rain.

What neither of them had clocked was that, while they were pursuing solo careers, the phenomenon of Oasis had simply kept going, conquering new territories and audiences – with the startling consequence that, as Noel says, the songs somehow mean “more to a new generation than to our generation.” The first cohort of fans never gave up on the music but, instead, “gave it to their children”.

The documentary is great on the absolute Englishness of the band, grafted on to the brothers’ Irish roots: the convergence of punk sarcasm with deep communal mythology. Liam is amazed that the fans “kept the faith that long”, just as Noel is overwhelmed by the “fucking religious experience” that the reunion gigs undoubtedly became. 

Among the Oasis classics, the intermittent use of the Adagio from Schubert’s String Quintet in C Major is as moving as it is unexpected. In its pen portraits of fans young and old from all over the world, the documentary leaves you in no doubt of the consuming emotionalism, ultimately resistant to analysis, that their sound still summons and will, I have no doubt, continue to summon (to quote Max Boyce: I was there).

Along the way, the Cain and Abel of rock discover that they really like each other, to an extent they never grasped in the deranged years of early fame. Liam speaks with undisguised awe of Noel’s gift as a songwriter. Noel now says that he respects Liam as an “absolute fucking mad cunt” but also a “delightful” brother, whom he texts all the time (“I forgot how funny he was”). 

They embrace on stage and celebrate one another, reunited by the undoubted magic of what they can do together, and only together; and – more to the point – what it still means, after all these years, to countless people. See it in IMAX if you can.