Home
Membership
Shakespeare didn't do the Norman Conquest, but the Bayeux Tapestry did, so where does that leave the BBC's King and Conqueror?

Shakespeare didn't do the Norman Conquest, but the Bayeux Tapestry did, so where does that leave the BBC's King and Conqueror?

Shakespeare didn't do the Norman Conquest, but the Bayeux Tapestry did. So where does that leave King and Conqueror?

Dr David Musgrove, FSA

Published: August 24, 2025 at 8:00 AM

Save

If you’re going to make a TV series about the Norman Conquest, you’ll need to be ready for the British public, and historians particularly, to come at you and ask what liberties you’ve taken with the story. The makers of King and Conqueror, the new BBC eight-part drama with big name actors and a decent publicity budget, seem to know that. James Norton, who plays a very handsome Harold Godwinson, and is also executive producer for the series, had this to say on the matter in a BBC interview article:

“There were obviously artistic licenses that we had to take, particularly in terms of the timeline, because you often have to condense chapters with historical dramas like this. It was also about finding specificity and nuance. We know about the broad brush strokes of Stamford Bridge and the battle of Hastings, but you don't really get much about an individual from the Bayeux Tapestry and the wider historical facts.”

The Tapestry is of course the contemporary embroidery that recounts the events of 1066 with stitched vivacity, and which I’ve co-written a book about. It tells the story of the clash between King Harold of England and Duke William of Normandy, and most historians would have it that William’s half-brother Bishop Odo of Bayeux was the man who had the embroidery made. Very excitingly, it’s going to be loaned from Bayeux in Normandy to the UK this time next year, for a blockbuster show at the British Museum that will, I’m sure, break all records for historical exhibition visitors (unless a petition to France to keep it in cold storage in Normandy wins out). I think it’s unlikely that President Macron will be swayed by this dissent, and as you’ll see later in this article, James Norton has his ear anyway.3

I’d beg to differ with Norton’s take on the Tapestry; I’d argue that you can learn quite a lot about an individual from it. Or perhaps, more accurately, we can learn a lot about what people at the time wanted us to think about individuals in the Tapestry: the portrayal, for example, of Harold as a fallen hero comes through pretty clearly. There is undoubtedly a lot of specificity and nuance in the Bayeux Tapestry – we’re just 950 years too late to properly understand it because the captions are so spartan in telling us what we’re looking at. The Tapestry is professionally vague about what it is saying to the viewer.

No spoilers, but there are some pretty hot takes on the history

Anyway, I’ve watched the whole series and broadly I enjoyed it, but I am a sucker for historical dramas. Sit me down in front of The Last Kingdom for a Sunday afternoon and I won’t get off the sofa until bedtime, happily wallowing in the sweaty, sweary suffocation of a Saxon shieldwall and soaked in the blood of a thousand Viking extras (until my dog starts headbutting me to remind me it’s time for a walk – she cares not a jot for swords nor thrones).

The pleasure in watching this stuff is seeing what’s at odds plot-wise with the story that the historical sources would have us believe. I don’t really care about anachronisms of costume, but I do like to try to spot where the narrative arc is way out of kilter. And the narrative arc in King and Conqueror is pretty wild at times. No spoilers, but the way that the mother-son bond between King Edward the Confessor and Emma of Normandy is broken is, to say the least, surprising. Aside from that, the flow of events in the run-up to 1066 is pretty jumbled up, and people tend to die in times and ways that I think could be described as imaginative (the process by which King Harold ends up with an arrow in his eye in the battle of Hastings isn’t something I’ve read about in any chronicles). If you want to compare and contrast the King and Conqueror narrative with the historical story, check out my podcast series with Norman Conquest supremo Marc Morris on the HistoryExtra YouTube channel – episode two of the four-parter is out this very week.

Emma of Normandy, mother of King Edward the Confessor, is pictured in this illuminated 13th-century manuscript with two of her children. (Image: Alamy)

But what I do like is the way that both King Harold and his nemesis Duke William are portrayed as good guys, at least in their own minds. According to Michael Robert Johnson, the lead writer of the TV series:

“It's a bit of a knotty story because it looks very simple and it’s not, it’s very complicated. As one of our producers pointed out, even Shakespeare didn’t have a go at it! Even though the themes are massively universal, nobody cracked the way to tell it. Ed Clarke, one of the executive producers, said the way to tell it was that there’s not a good guy or bad guy.

“They’re both good guys in their own stories who end up coming to face each other. That was the fascinating thing to me – I think good guys question whether they’re bad guys, because that’s how a moral compass works. But bad guys just think they’re the good guys. It’s about people trying to solve their own little selfish problems and ending up rewriting history. It’s always interesting for me to delve into that.”

In that approach, I sense echoes of the Bayeux Tapestry, where Harold is a good man, a good lord, and a brave warrior, but whose fall is predicated on one very bad call (perjuring himself by going back on the crucial oath he makes to William, sacred in the eyes of the Lord and sacred to the secular authorities too). William, in his turn, is also a decent lord. He provides for his men, is charismatic in battle, and clear in his leadership. So the whole Tapestry set-up is to pitch two broadly exemplary figures against each other in a head-to-head conflict. The Harold-William bromance that we see in King and Conqueror (they even have a bath together – that definitely does not happen in the Tapestry) doesn’t feel too far away from the brothers-in-arms story that the Bayeux Tapestry gives us in the Brittany campaign, where Harold accompanies William on a siege-filled foray against the Bretons. Like the TV series, the Tapestry is a story of two good guys: they are well-matched heroes, but only one can win.

Stitch-up over Shakespearean soul-searching

But unlike the TV series, the Tapestry doesn’t have any truck with this Shakespearean-style soul-searching. The stitching is mute on character motivation, which is probably what James Norton was talking about in that quote I started with. Personally I’m not sure how far Harold would have dwelt on the moral case for taking the crown after Edward the Confessor died in early 1066. He acted pretty fast and maybe he didn’t think he had much choice if he wanted to retain his family’s grip on power with both William of Normandy and Norway’s King Harald Hardrada waiting menacingly in the wings.

So the whole ‘heavy wears the crown’ vibe runs a bit rich for my tastes, coming at the story as a Bayeux Tapestry enthusiast. But what I do like is the way that women are given starring roles in King and Conqueror. That’s something that the Tapestry definitely falls short on: famously the number of females in the Tapestry is far outweighed by the quantity of penises. Though the Tapestry is fairly silent on how far women were actors in the 1066 drama, other documentary sources are more forthcoming, and historians have been able to write women back into the narrative recently. Check out this round-up I wrote about this for HistoryExtra a while back.

Clémence Poésy plays Matilda of Flanders in King and Conqueror, which gives women starring roles, helping to write them back into history. (Image by CBS Studios)

Emily Beecham as Edward the Confessor’s queen Edith, Clémence Poésy as Matilda of Flanders (wife of William of Normandy), and Juliet Stevenson as Emma of Normandy, queen of two kings and mother of two more, are all on great form throughout the series. They take no prisoners (well actually, they do take prisoners, but you know what I mean), and they show themselves as wily operators. Edith and Matilda are portrayed playing a political game that the men in the piece aren’t necessarily across, because they are too busy bathing and wrestling together. You’ve heard of the mother-in-law from hell - well Emma of Normandy is the mother from hell to a very put-upon Eddie Marsan as Edward the Confessor.

I don’t know whether this TV series will be judged a success. I suspect a lot of historians will find a lot to criticise about it. And I can absolutely guarantee that the colour-blind casting is going to be a big talking point for some people. But one thing that’s certain is that if it’s going to be a commercial win, it needs to be popular beyond Britain. I’m sure the hope is that having Game of Thrones’s Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau**)** as Duke William will bring the global crowds flocking, whether they’ve heard of Hastings or not.

I do wonder, though, how far the story travels. I gave a talk to a group of very engaged and sharp international students in Oxford the other day, about the Bayeux Tapestry, and I got the definite sense that the Norman Conquest wasn’t something they’d spent much time worrying about (until they’d heard my riveting review of the way the embroidery tells the story of course). One young American scholar said that it was something she had been taught in history in junior school but that she hadn’t returned to it since.

The hard sell on the Norman Conquest

I guess it’s the telling rather than the actual events that matters for a TV drama, but the fact that Shakespeare didn’t do the Norman Conquest has probably limited its immediate global appeal, certainly compared to other medieval stories that the playwright did tackle (I reckon Netflix had a much easier sell with Timothée Chalamet as Henry V in The King because it had the Shakespeare backstory). That perhaps explains why Harold and William are given Shakespearean-style soundbites in King and Conqueror. “Power is like a fire: unchecked it will destroy everything”, announces Earl Godwin; “Power isn’t given, power is taken”, intones Emma of Normandy; “All of Europe knows my intentions”, growls Duke William, which all sound like utterances the Bard would have penned.

The other day, I was chatting to Professor Charles West from the University of Edinburgh for a forthcoming HistoryExtra podcast episode about 11th-century Europe (look out for it, and his new book Europe in the 11th century (Oxford University Press), in September). I asked him whether all of Europe did indeed know, and care, about William’s adventure in England.

“They write about it. They’re generally quite impressed by William’s achievements: he becomes a great figure. They also talk about the slaughter and the loss of lives. Obviously 1066 isn’t just about England. It’s got a Scandinavian dimension too. So you can see how it draws in different European threads, but the world keeps turning. There’s a German chronicler called Lambert of Hersfeld and he writes a set of annals. He mentions Hastings, but he just gives it one line. Most of his chronicle is talking about the various squabbles between the German bishops and the emperor. So it’s just a question of keeping our sense of perspective.”

Who actually cares about the Norman Conquest?

From the perspective of the King and Conqueror producers today, whether people outside Britain cared about 1066 in the 11th century is less important than whether people outside Europe care about it now. For me, what’s undeniable is that the people who care most about the Battle of Hastings are here in the UK. When we at HistoryExtra asked a panel of historians to nominate key years in British history, obviously 1066 was one of the choices.

This has always struck me as a touch odd, given that the English were the losers at Hastings. But I suppose it’s because the Conquest had such far-reaching impacts across Britain that makes it important to us, rather than the actual battle itself. In an act of extraordinary narcissism, I’ll quote myself in a piece I’ve written for the Radio Times this week, referencing back to that podcast series I’ve made with Marc Morris.

When I asked Marc why the Conquest matters, “he pointed out that it led to the more or less wholescale replacement of the English ruling class, and the consequent introduction of the French language as well. These new rulers also radically altered the landscape by building castles all over the place. Plus the Normans ushered in a different, less Game of Thronesstyle, way of doing politics – capturing, imprisoning and ransoming your opponents became the done thing rather than blinding, mutilating or murdering them. So those are just some of the reasons why the Norman Conquest is still on our radar.”

What I should have added, and which Charles West reminded me about when I spoke to him, is that the Conquest also brought something else to England: chess. It was widely played in Europe before 1066 and it was probably the Normans who gifted it across the Channel after Hastings.

That’s interesting in the light of the much-anticipated loan of the Bayeux Tapestry from Normandy to England (where the embroidery was probably made in the 11th century) next year, because going the other way from the British Museum are the treasures of Sutton Hoo, and the fabulous 12th-century Lewis Chessmen.

Presidential chit-chat, but no chess

I don’t know whether James Norton and the French President Emmanuel Macron viewed the Lewis Chessmen when they were both at the British Museum at the event to launch the big Tapestry loan a month ago. What I do know is that while they were there, for some reason, Norton felt compelled to tell Macron that he’d done right by William the Conqueror in the TV series:

“I met President Emmanuel Macron recently at the event at the British Museum where the Bayeux Tapestry is being moved to, and I was very quick to reassure him that we had told the French story, the Norman story, with as little bias as possible.”

I’m not sure that you can extract the Norman story from implicit bias, and I’m not sure that the series does tell that version anyway, given that Harold is shown in quite a decent light for much of it. If you follow the Norman chronicler William of Poitiers’ view of Harold, he was insane, pernicious and a perjurer, so that doesn’t quite stack up. No, Harold is a conflicted hero in the spirit of the Bayeux Tapestry, so I would say that if anything, King and Conqueror follows to some extent the narrative line of the Tapestry. And the Tapestry is not, whatever you might expect from an embroidery celebrating a Norman victory, a Norman story – for my money, it’s a pretty balanced Anglo-Norman story, where both Harold and William’s virtues come through.

Aside from its attention to female roles in the story, where King and Conqueror diverges from the Tapestry is in its narrative timekeeeping generally, and specifically in its treatment of the northern and eastern dimensions of the events running up to the Battle of Hastings. The Tapestry devotes no time whatsoever to the role of Flanders in the pre-conquest politicking, and it also pointedly ignores the battles of Fulford Gate and Stamford Bridge. In contrast, King and Conqueror lavishes character time on Baldwin of Flanders and Harald Hardrada of Norway. But where the Tapestry and the TV series come back together again is their mutual avoidance of the Anglo-Saxon elephant in the room – the man with a better claim than anyone to the throne of Edward the Confessor. Edgar Aetheling, the long-exiled grandson of Edmund Ironside (half-brother to the Confessor), was brought back to England in the 1050s by King Edward and acknowledged as throneworthy by the old monarch. He was even acclaimed king by some of the citizens of London in the immediate aftermath of the battle of Hastings, but they revised their assessment when William’s forces advanced towards the capital with clear intent.

The Bayeux Tapestry utterly ignores the existence of this claimant to the throne, with good reason. Edgar’s presence is very inconvenient when you’re trying to tell a story that pitches two men head to head as martial equals. The fact that neither Harold nor William had particularly compelling claims to the crown meant that it really didn’t fit in the Tapestry narrative to have someone who did – Edgar – popping his head over the embroidery parapet. So he was written out then, and because the Tapestry has shaped our understanding of 1066 ever since, with its brilliant and long-lasting imagery, he’s been written out now. I wrote in detail, with Michael Lewis, about Edgar’s excision from history in this HistoryExtra piece here.

So we can’t really blame King and Conqueror for taking artistic licence with the 1066 story. The Bayeux Tapestry provides ultimate cover for anyone playing fast and loose with the facts in a dramatisation of 1066: if it was good enough for Odo of Bayeux, it’s good enough for James Norton.

Authors

Dr David Musgrove, FSAContent director

David Musgrove is the content director at HistoryExtra

Visit us on Twitter