For centuries, the Bayeux Tapestry has stood as a delicate yet powerful emblem of the Norman Conquest, its 224 feet of embroidered narrative depicting the momentous Battle of Hastings in 1066. Now, nearly a millennium later, this iconic artifact is at the center of a heated debate between Britain and France—one that reveals not only the fragility of ancient cloth, but also the persistent threads of class, identity, and cultural memory woven through the fabric of both nations.
According to the BBC, the Bayeux Tapestry is scheduled to be displayed at the British Museum for nine months starting in September 2026. However, this plan has sparked a fervent campaign and petition in France, where conservation experts and ordinary citizens alike argue that the tapestry is simply too fragile to risk transport. French President Emmanuel Macron has expressed his support for the loan, but the opposition remains staunch, prioritizing heritage and preservation over diplomatic gesture.
On the British side, the debate over the tapestry’s journey is more than just a logistical or political squabble. It’s a symbolically loaded episode that echoes the ambivalent legacy of the Norman Conquest itself—a legacy that, as historian Thomas Babington Macaulay famously argued in the 19th century, took generations to become truly “English.” Macaulay wrote that the Normans, for “until the fourth generation,” were “not Englishmen,” and only began to embrace an English identity after King John lost the Norman territories in France. This historical shift, Macaulay believed, marked the birth of the English nation proper, as the conquerors and conquered slowly fused into a single people.
But the tapestry’s story—and the story of the Conquest—doesn’t end with national reconciliation. As UnHerd notes, about a third of the knights who fought alongside William the Conqueror were not even Norman, but Breton, and they justified their invasion by claiming kinship with the Brythonic peoples displaced by the Anglo-Saxons. This early rewriting of national mythology helped the new aristocracy assert their legitimacy, promoting “British values” as a governing-class project that stretched back beyond the Anglo-Saxons themselves.
The echoes of this elite rebranding still resonate today. In the 21st century, British people with Norman surnames like Glanville are statistically more likely to be wealthy than those with Saxon surnames such as Smith or Cooper. The billionaire Duke of Westminster, Hugh Grosvenor, can trace his lineage directly back to the 1066 Conquest. As UnHerd points out, the meaning of the Norman Conquest—and its lingering class hierarchy—depends greatly on where one stands in Britain’s social order. At times of economic strain and popular dissatisfaction, old resentments flare up, with political rhetoric framing contemporary conflicts in terms of Norman overlords and Saxon underlings.
This dynamic has become especially visible in recent years. GB News commentator and Conservative figure Jacob Rees-Mogg, referencing Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Norman and Saxon,” argued in August 2025 that “the Saxons will run out of patience with their overlords.” Such pronouncements tap into a thousand-year-old seam of national resentment, one that has periodically erupted into revolutionary fervor—from the Diggers of the 17th century, who decried Norman oppression, to Thomas Paine, who dismissed England’s aristocracy as “A French bastard arriving with armed banditti and establishing himself the King of England against the consent of the natives.”
Yet, as Macaulay and later writers observed, over time these divisions softened, becoming more metaphorical than literal. By the high noon of the British Empire, the Norman-Saxon divide had been largely subsumed into narratives of national unity and progress, with the conquerors recast as the ancestors of a mighty, if sometimes ruthless, imperial power. The story of the tapestry, and of the Conquest, became a tale of eventual fusion and mutual respect—at least at the level of official mythmaking.
In the present day, however, these narratives are being re-examined and contested, not least through the lens of popular culture. The BBC’s recent historical drama King & Conqueror, starring James Norton as Harold, Earl of Wessex, and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as William, Duke of Normandy, has ignited its own storm of controversy. Released on BBC iPlayer in early September 2025, the series attempts a fictionalized retelling of the Norman Conquest, but has been roundly criticized for its use of modern language and phrases that viewers say are jarringly anachronistic.
“I’m sorry to say that King & Conqueror is not only complete, utter nonsense but it’s simply bad TV too,” wrote one viewer on social media, echoing a widespread sentiment that the show’s historical inaccuracies and poor scriptwriting undermined its ambitions. Another lamented, “A waste of talent and a missed opportunity to share the real history.”
James Norton, who also served as an executive producer, defended the creative choices during an appearance on This Morning, explaining, “You have to make things up for great drama,” and noting that writers had to “interpret between the lines” due to “conflicting accounts of what actually happened.” Some viewers did praise the show’s set design for authentically evoking the world of 1066, but critical reception was largely negative. The Independent’s Nick Hilton awarded the series just two stars, calling it “almost unwatchably dark” and describing the lead performances as “rather bland vessels, bobbing along on the tide of internal politics.” The Telegraph dismissed it as “more Monty Python than Game of Thrones,” while The Guardian observed that it “hangs a little too heavy” to succeed as a “ripping yarn.”
Beyond the question of historical accuracy, King & Conqueror has also become a flashpoint in debates about how contemporary Britain understands and represents its own past. The show’s casting decisions—specifically, its use of color-blind casting for Anglo-Saxon roles while keeping the Normans white—have sparked discussion about the intersection of race, class, and historical narrative. As UnHerd suggests, this approach can be seen as an attempt to map the class and ethnic hierarchies of the Norman Conquest onto modern frameworks of postcolonial and critical race theory, themselves products of an Anglo-American intellectual tradition that sprang from the very legacy the show seeks to dramatize.
It’s a bitter irony, then, that the same ruling class whose ancestors pioneered the model of conquest, elite replacement, and peasant suppression in England now finds itself both critiqued and celebrated in the cultural sphere. The BBC’s casting policy and the British Museum’s diplomatic overtures both reflect a contemporary version of “British Values” that is at once the descendant and the distant echo of the Norman project. As UnHerd wryly notes, “It is a bitter irony indeed that ideas which began life critiquing the kind of ethnocentric smash ‘n’ grab pioneered by the Normans and perfected by their English descendants has, in the hands of today’s governing class, become yet another stick with which to beat the sullen Saxons.”
The fate of the Bayeux Tapestry—whether it crosses the Channel or remains in France—serves as a metaphor for the delicate balance between heritage and politics, between the stories nations tell about themselves and the realities that persist beneath the surface. As Britain and France negotiate the tapestry’s future, they are also, in a sense, renegotiating the meaning of the past and the terms of their own uneasy kinship. For all their differences, both nations remain bound by the threads of history—fragile, contested, and endlessly fascinating.
In the end, the tapestry’s age and vulnerability remind us that symbols of power and identity, no matter how grand, are always subject to the wear and tear of time—and to the shifting patterns of those who inherit them.
