The Bayeux tapestry is back after a thousand years. Made in England at the end of the 11th century, the 70-metre masterpiece has returned for the first time in a blockbuster exhibition at the British Museum.

The origins of this embroidery are mysterious. Although there is general agreement now that it was most likely designed by the monks of St Augustine’s in Canterbury, and crafted by highly skilled embroideresses, so much of its medieval life is unknowable.

The tapestry may have been commissioned by Bishop Odo of Bayeux, possibly as a gift for William the Conqueror, his half brother. It could have been displayed in the refectory of a monastery, or draped magisterially at a palace or church of immense political power.

There is evidence of other vast, but now lost, early medieval tapestries. A 12th-century chronicle known as the Liber Eliensis tells of a tapestry donated to Ely Abbey by Æfflæd, formidable widow of Byrhtnoth, the ealdorman (regional governor) of Essex who died at the Battle of Maldon in 991.

But nothing survives that compares with the Bayeux tapestry. The inventory of Bayeux cathedral is where it emerges into the historical record, but this was written in 1476 – around 400 years after the last stitches were embroidered. No one knows how it made its way to Bayeux.

What we do know is that this remarkable early........

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