HistoryExtra Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast 2026-10-23T09:16:17.000Z https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/feed/atom James Osborne <![CDATA[The Vikings had a terrifying myth about the end of the world. Was it inspired by a real deadly disaster?]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/viking/fimbulwinter-inspired-by-real-disaster/ 2026-10-23T09:16:17.000Z 2026-10-23T09:16:17.000Z The legend goes something like this: before the gods met their enemies in their final battle, an unprecedented winter would take hold. A thick blizzard would come down from every direction, blocking out the weakening sun. Three successive winters would pass, with no summer between them.
This is the story of Fimbulwinter, the “mighty winter” of Norse mythology: the prelude to the destruction of the world at Ragnarök. It’s a story preserved in the Prose Edda and Poetic Edda; one part of a broader suite of legendary tales from these two sources of Norse mythology.
But what if Fimbulwinter wasn’t just a story, but rather, a memory?
“We know beyond any doubt now there were a series of really drastic volcanic eruptions in the mid-500s, with enormous effects on Scandinavia, that really impacted the population” says Professor Neil Price, one of the foremost world experts on the Viking Age.
Scientific evidence confirms the eruptions, but establishing what they did to Scandinavian communities is harder, and tracing their effects into stories told centuries later is harder still. Price nevertheless suspects that accounts of the disaster survived through oral storytelling, eventually becoming preserved for evermore as part of the grand Norse vision of the world’s end.
A fragmented empire
The volcanic eruptions Professor Price describes struck more than two centuries before the conventional (though contentious) beginning of the Viking Age in the late eighth century. In this early medieval period, Scandinavians then lived in farming societies connected by trade, warfare and travel to the rest of Europe, where Roman imperial power had broken down. Some historians refer to this period of turbulence the Age of Migrations. But Professor Price argues that the vast movement of peoples was only part of the upheaval.
“What we're really looking at is the disintegration of a superpower,” he says, speaking on an upcoming episode of the HistoryExtra podcast. “What happens when something like the Roman Empire begins to come apart in different ways, at different speeds, in different places, all through its territory, and what comes out of that?”
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Imperial rule in western Europe fragmented during the fifth century. Scandinavia had never been a Roman province, but its inhabitants were connected to the empire’s economic and military networks. Disruption farther south affected the movement of goods, wealth and people. “There is a decline in the numbers of settlements, the numbers of cemeteries, basically a decline in human habitation in Scandinavia at this time,” Price explains.
Amid this destabilisation, Scandinavian mercenaries returning north, Price suggests, could use their military experience to strengthen their position at home, consolidating power around themselves as regional warlords. So, communities were already dealing with economic disruption, conflict and shifts in political authority when the eruptions began.
Changing climates
In AD 536, observers around the Mediterranean reported an unusually dim sun. The historian Procopius, writing about the wars of the eastern Roman emperor Justinian, described weak sunlight resembling an eclipse. Other accounts recorded disturbed seasons and problems with food supplies. These witnesses were far from Scandinavia, so their reports show how widely the effects were felt.
Researchers can compare those accounts with records preserved in ice and wood, thanks to archaeological science. Ice cores contain sulphate deposited after volcanic eruptions; unusually narrow tree rings can indicate poor growing conditions. Together, they help researchers connect eruptions with periods of abrupt cooling.
This evidence points to major eruptions in 536 and around 540, followed by another in 547. In a short window, the climate suffered repeated, violent disturbances. As a result, says Price, “you end up with something resembling a volcanic winter.”
For communities of early medieval Scandinavia, these eruptions would have been catastrophic. “The margins of subsistence [in this region], in terms of the regular climate, the scarcity of agricultural land and so on, they're so much narrower than they are in, say, the Mediterranean.”
Unlike in the warmer climates of the Mediterranean, Scandinavian farmers needed enough warmth to bring in their harvest before autumn. They also had to gather fodder to keep livestock alive through winter. A poor growing season threatened both sources of food. Repeated agricultural failures would make survival nearly impossible.
“Some scholars have estimated that the combined impact just of the volcanic eruptions is a 50 per cent mortality rate, not universally across Scandinavia, but in some places,” says Price. “In social terms, that's catastrophic.”
Even where communities survived, their inhabitants faced years of disruption. “An awful lot of lives were not only ended, but the lives of all the survivors were also disrupted.”
A legendary truth?
Price thinks those experiences of intense climate disruption may help explain the legend of Fimbulwinter. He sees similarities between the environmental crisis and the wider mythology of Ragnarök: darkness, cold, hunger and the breakdown of social order; a memory of a real environmental catastrophe, passed down across generations, possibly transformed over the course of centuries into this frosty myth of the precursor to the end of the world.
But Ragnarök, despite all the death and despair, isn’t a tale of total doom. The stories also describe a world renewed after the destruction, though scholars debate how Christian influence may have shaped the surviving accounts. For Price, the prospect of life continuing after catastrophe is another possible connection with the sixth-century experience.
- Read more | This Viking warlord had a magical banner that promised victory. But it had a secret curse
“Ragnarök is not in the past tense. It's still in the future. [And] of course, in the 6th century, the world didn't actually end,” says Price. “People did get past that.”
Research into connections between natural events and traditional stories is called geomythology. These connections can be suggestive and persuasive, but similarities alone don’t prove that a story descended from a particular event. Could a culture that has had no experience of a long, harsh winter create a myth that tells of a long, harsh winter, drawn from imagination rather than reality? Logically, yes. Retaining some scepticism is important.
That’s why Price says “it's an interesting idea, but it's also a bit risky and like a circular argument because you find what you're looking for in the end.”
“But personally, I think the idea that there is an echo of that disruption, that trauma, centuries later in the Norse myth of the end of the world, I think it's very strong.”
Neil Price was speaking to James Osborne on the HistoryExtra podcast.
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[The Nazis fell in love with the Bayeux Tapestry – and there's a dark reason why]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/why-the-nazis-fell-in-love-with-the-bayeux-tapestry/ 2026-10-21T14:54:37.000Z 2026-10-21T13:30:05.000Z On 1 August 1944, two SS officers drove a pair of trucks into the heart of Nazi-occupied Paris, and headed straight for the Louvre. These men were on a top-secret mission – one assigned to them by Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the SS and one of the most powerful men in the Third Reich.
Himmler had tasked the two men with descending into the bowels of the world-famous art museum, seizing the Bayeux Tapestry and spiriting it away to a “safe place” far from the grasp of the Allies’ rapidly advancing armies.
After 15 years as the head of one of the most feared paramilitary organisations in history, Himmler was used to getting his own way. Yet in this case he was to be disappointed. A few days earlier, a group of local resistance fighters – tipped off by the codebreakers of Bletchley Park – had learned of the SS men’s mission and rushed to the Louvre to protect the iconic embroidery. Warned at the last minute that any attempt to ‘liberate’ the tapestry would be met with a hail of bullets, the SS officers gave up on their mission.
The Nazi proclivity for buying, extorting and confiscating Europe’s greatest artworks is well documented. But there was more to Himmler’s desire to seize the Bayeux Tapestry than an acquisitive lust for one of France’s foremost cultural treasures. In the celebrated images of Norman knights putting Anglo-Saxon foot soldiers to the sword he saw evidence of medieval Germanic supremacy.
The Nazi fascination with the Bayeux Tapestry can, perhaps, be traced back to 1 July 1935 when Himmler – along with fellow Nazi ideologues Richard Walther Darré and Herman Wirth – created Ahnenerbe, the Society for the Study of Germanic Heritage. Ahnenerbe was founded to promote archaeological investigations of sites that could be associated with early Germanic settlement, and to study, in situ, works related to the history of the Aryan race. It wasn’t long before its leading lights had turned their attention to the celebrated 11th-century embroidery depicting the Norman conquest of England in 1066.
The French had claimed the Bayeux Tapestry as a national historical monument since the early 1700s, but the Nazi regime had an alternative theory. In July 1939, a memo written by Franz Altheim, professor of classical philology at Frankfurt University, arrived on the desk of Wolfram Sievers, Ahnenerbe’s general manager. It proposed that a detailed examination of the Bayeux Tapestry would prove that the Normans who conquered England were, in reality, Vikings – and, by extension, Germanic. The idea that they were French, Altheim argued, was based on a 200-year-old lie. At the bottom of his note he wrote: “I emphasise the importance of this study.”
In July 1939, when Altheim penned his memo, the idea of a team of ardent Nazis poring over one of the most iconic artefacts in French history in an attempt to establish its Germanic origins would have been anathema to the people of France. But the fall of their nation to German forces in June 1940 rendered their opinions all but irrelevant.
And so, in the aftermath of the French surrender, Dr Herbert Jankuhn, professor of Viking archaeology at Rostock University – and a loyal Nazi – was appointed to head a team of experts tasked with studying the artefact in the northern French town of Bayeux. Jankuhn offered a clue as to what he hoped to achieve when declaring: “For general Germanic studies, the Tapestry’s visual representations, through the recording of Germanic legends and traditions, provides a very valuable source for this early period.”
Photographic evidence
Jankuhn’s first task as leader of Special Assignment Bayeux was to study the hanging, and gather information so that further studies could be carried out by research scholars after the embroidery had been moved to safe wartime storage. The ultimate aim was to produce a multi-volume publication of their findings, featuring a photographic replica of the tapestry. By examining representations of everything from boats and weapons to costumes, they would provide irrefutable scientific evidence that the tapestry was a testament to Germanic hegemony in early medieval Europe.
Jankuhn couldn’t complete such a weighty undertaking alone. He was accompanied by Dr Karl Schlabow, textile expert and head of the Germanic Costume Museum in Neumünster, whose job it was to scrutinise the fabric and take careful measurements. Rolf Alber, photographer and war reporter, was to shoot new images of the tapestry, in both black-and-white and colour. Herbert Jeschke, an artist from Berlin, was the only member of the Bayeux team who wasn’t a member of the Nazi party or the SS. His task was to create a series of accurate, full-size drawings and watercolours of details from the Bayeux Tapestry, under Jankuhn’s guidance.
First, though, they had to gain access to the embroidery – and that would prove surprisingly problematic. In September 1939, with war clouds gathering, the French authorities had rolled it up on a bobbin, placed it in a padded, zinc-lined wooden case and deposited it in a concrete bunker in the basement of Bayeux’s Hôtel du Doyen.
Since the fall of France, German officers had peppered Bayeux’s authorities with requests to see the tapestry – a process that meant repeatedly manhandling the fragile, 900-year-old artefact. The French were reluctant to allow this to continue and, in a classic delaying tactic, began insisting that all permissions to view the tapestry be signed by the proper authorities in Paris. As a result, following their arrival in Bayeux on 8 June 1941, Jankuhn and his team would have to wait days before beginning their work.
At first, they examined the embroidery in the Hôtel du Doyen’s Bishops’ Gallery – but this entailed unrolling and rolling the tapestry every day. So, on 23 June, it was moved in a truck – accompanied by Rene Falue (the tapestry’s official guardian), three French customs officials and a lone German policeman – to the Monastery of St Martin at Mondaye, five miles south of Bayeux, where a large section could be left unrolled.
Summoned to fight
Working seven days a week, Jankuhn’s team set about studying, drawing and photographing all 70 metres of the embroidery. They hit a stumbling block on 29 June, when Alber returned to military service. A replacement photographer, Ursula Uhland, was summoned but, because women weren’t allowed in the monastery’s cloister, the tapestry had to be transported to its public gallery.
Despite this setback, Jeschke had completed his sketches by the end of July, and the project’s last week was taken up with Uhland’s work and with shooting propaganda films for Wochenschau, a newsreel series released in the cinemas.
On 1 August, the tapestry was returned to its concrete bunker in Bayeux. A few days later it was moved again – to the Château de Sourches, some 100 miles south of Bayeux, where it joined treasures from the Louvre.
The first stage of Special Assignment Bayeux may have come to an end, but the Nazi obsession with the Bayeux Tapestry was showing no signs of abating. Dr Hermann Bunjes, head of the German Art Historical Institute in Paris, now became the project’s guiding spirit, assembling a group of academics to bring the multi-volume book on the artefact to fruition.
They set about comparing Jeschke’s drawings with Germanic and Viking artefacts in museums, and considered the photographs taken by Uhland and Alber. They envisaged a book that would present essays on the past scholarship of the embroidery, its physical details, its historical authority, its significance for the history of culture. The book would also contain a study of the fabric and embroidery, and an analysis of its material and colour.
One study ‘proved’ the early Germanic origin of the wooden houses depicted; another emphasised the similarity of English and Norman boats to Viking ships.
All of this was undertaken with one overriding ambition: to prove that the Normans were still true, untainted Vikings – representatives of the pure Nordic Aryan race.
Herbert Jankuhn had little doubt that Special Assignment Bayeux had achieved just that. “The Bayeux Tapestry is not only a king’s saga of purely Germanic imprint, but also constitutes the documentary justification of William’s claim to England,” he declared in December 1942. “His actions appear to us… as the execution of his given right and the punishment of unforgiveable perjury and unfaithfulness according to the Germanic viewpoint. The tapestry not only exudes genuine Germanic joy in the tradition of heroic deeds, but also the statesmanlike desire to justify the campaign in England as a legal operation and political necessity.” Propaganda magazines agreed wholeheartedly, running articles that eulogised the tapestry’s celebration of “the joy of the Germanic tradition of great acts of war”.
In short, Special Assignment Bayeux was to reclaim the tapestry as a perfect fit with Nazi pan-Germanic ideology, since it bore witness to the early unification of the Germanic cultures of Scandinavia, Normandy and England. It would also serve as a precedent for the Nazis’ desire to recreate Germania, a homeland for all Germanic peoples.
Glorious warfare
This sentiment would certainly have struck a chord with Heinrich Himmler, who was fascinated by the Bayeux Tapestry’s imagery of medieval knights and glorious warfare. Over Christmas 1942, the head of the SS was presented with a bound volume of photos and drawings of the embroidery – a gift that delighted him so much that he sent a thank-you note to Wolfram Sievers in which he noted “the significance that this Bayeux Tapestry has for our glorious and culturally rich German history”.
The Allied invasion of western Europe on 6 June 1944 merely sharpened Himmler’s desire to secure the tapestry for the Third Reich. His fear that it would fall into enemy hands became apparent on 27 June, when the Gestapo moved the embroidery – without notice and despite local French protest – from Sourches to the basement of the Louvre. This would be followed, little more than a month later, by the two SS officers’ attempt to spirit the embroidery away to a “safe place”, only to be thwarted by fast-acting resistance fighters.
What had been Himmler’s intentions when he ordered the tapestry moved from Paris? What would he have considered a “safe place” in June 1944? One possibility is Wewelsburg Castle in central Germany, which had been chosen by Himmler as the location for his training centre, the home of the cult of the SS – a place where officers were taught how to recreate the lost world of the ‘Nordic race’.
Obsessed with the idea that the SS was a revival of the medieval Teutonic knights, Himmler imagined the castle as the home of modern Nazi Knights of the Round Table. The crypt, designed to hold the ashes of SS leaders, was named Valhalla. Himmler installed his own collection of ancient and medieval weapons in the castle, and indicated he wanted tapestries hung on the walls. This would have been an apt location for the Bayeux Tapestry, which he considered a great testament to an earlier Germanic-Nordic-Aryan triumph.
If Wewelsburg Castle was a safe place in June 1944, it certainly didn’t remain so. On 31 March 1945, with US forces closing in, Himmler ordered the castle dynamited, along with its contents.
Fortunately, the Allies had already found the Bayeux Tapestry safe in its temporary home in the basement of the Louvre. On 2 March 1945, after going on display in an exhibition in the art museum, it was returned to Bayeux.
Were the Nazis wrong to attempt to divine a Viking presence in the Bayeux Tapestry? No. It has long been accepted that the Scandinavian influence on both English and Norman societies was significant – seen, for example, in ships, ship-building tools and some decorative elements. This influence can be traced back to the Viking occupation of vast swathes of England (the so-called Danelaw), and the ceding of what became Normandy to the Vikings in 911.
All three groups – English, Normans and Scandinavians – may be considered, to some extent, Germanic. But surely Ahnenerbe would have had finally to admit that, even if the Normans were still Vikings in 1066, they were French-speaking ones.
Shirley Ann Brown is professor emerita of art history at York University, Toronto, a member of the Bayeux Tapestry Advisory Committee, and author of The Bayeux Tapestry: A Sourcebook
This article was first published in the July 2018 edition of BBC History Magazine
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[Bollocks, bastards and broad arses: the filthy medieval names that expose the real story of 1066]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/1066-bayeux-tapestry-names-of-norman-conquest/ 2026-10-21T12:17:16.000Z 2026-10-21T12:17:16.000Z The Bayeux Tapestry (at the time of writing wowing visitors to the British Museum) is thronged with characters – warriors, of course, but also monarchs, dukes and bishops, plus countless unnamed figures. This famous embroidery helps us think about the people caught up in the events depicted – and examining their names opens a window onto a world in which English, Scandinavian and Norman cultures met, melded and clashed, how conquest and colonisation influenced lives, and how colourful nicknames can preserve glimpses of the way medieval people saw one another at all levels of society.
Ælfgif... who?
The Bayeux Tapestry features only 15 names – and, typically for this period of history, those of women are largely excluded. Curiously, the only woman actually named in the embroidery can’t be identified – a mysterious figure labelled ÆLFGYVA, or Ælfgifu. She is pictured in an interaction with “a certain cleric”, an encounter that may have been innocent – though the depiction of a naked man in the border below her suggests that it may not have been, and could be a reference to a scandalous liaison of some kind.
The fact that we don’t know who this Ælfgifu was can be explained partly by the fact that hers was such a common name in 11th-century England. There had already been three queens named Ælfgifu by the turn of that century, the consorts of Edmund I (ruled 939–46), Eadwig ‘All-Fair’ (r955–59) and Æthelred the Unready (r978–1013 & 1014–16). When Æthelred married the illustrious Emma of Normandy, the great-aunt of William the Conqueror, she was given a new English name. You’ve guessed it: Ælfgifu.
After Æthelred’s death, Emma (or Ælfgifu) effortlessly switched sides, marrying England’s new Danish king Cnut in 1017. In doing so, she replaced Cnut’s previous wife, another Ælfgifu. To add to the general sense of confusion, the Anglo-Saxon Earl Harold Godwinson had a sister called Ælfgifu. Any of these women could be the ÆLFGYVA named in the Bayeux Tapestry – the chances are that we’ll never know for certain – but the use of her name suggests that the story surrounding her was common knowledge at the time, even if it’s no longer familiar to us today.
The mystery of Edith Swanneck
Another question mark lingers over Harold’s ‘unofficial’ wife, Edith Swanneshals (‘Swanneck’) who, we are told, identified the dead English king’s body on the battlefield at Hastings. However, her identity is still disputed. She is often assumed to be the woman recorded in Domesday Book as Edeva Pulchra (‘The Fair’), partly based on the assumption that this epithet, like ‘swan-neck’, referred to beauty, as well as the fact that the woman in William’s survey was listed as being incredibly rich. But this identification is by no means certain.
Again, the confusion is partly down to the prevalence and ambiguity of monikers. By the 11th century, a number of distinct names had come to sound similar: Eadgyth (Edith), Eadgifu (Edeva), Ealdgyth (Aldith) and Ealdgifu (Aldeva). Even then, some of these might well have caused confusion, particularly amongst Norman scribes recording unfamiliar English names. And later writers have tended to merge all of these into one modern name, ‘Edith’.
This similarity still causes problems today. In the 2025 BBC drama King and Conqueror, three Ediths were renamed to avoid confusing viewers. Edith Swanneck kept her forename but Harold’s sister, Edith of Wessex, was renamed Gunhild, and his official wife, Edith of Mercia, became Margaret. The irony is that not all three of these shared that name in the first place: Edith Swanneck was probably Eadgifu (Edeva), while Edith of Mercia was called Ealdgyth (Aldith). Edith of Wessex was definitely known as Eadgyth (Edith), but even she may have been known by a different name – Gytha – before she married Edward the Confessor.
A tale of two Harolds
Hastings was the last of three major battles that decided the fate of England in 1066. While William was readying his troops to cross the Channel, England was already under attack from the Norwegian king, Harald Hardrada (‘Hard Ruler’). The fact that two rival kings bore essentially the same name tells us a lot.
The Viking raids that began in the eighth century may have been dramatic, but it was the long-term influence of interaction and intermarriage of English natives and Scandinavian settlers that had the greatest impact on the land, its language and its names. Scandinavian names became widely used across England ¬– not only by Viking newcomers but also by English people.
This only increased after Cnut conquered England in 1016. His right-hand man here was Earl Godwine, father of the man who became King Harold II (who was quite literally ‘Godwin’s son’), whose family is a great example of Anglo-Scandinavian integration. Godwine and his Danish wife, Gytha, gave their children a mix of Scandinavian names – including Harold, Sweyn, Gunhild and Tostig – and English, including Wulfnoth, Ælfgar and Eadgifu.
In practice, many of these names may not have been considered ‘Scandinavian’ by the people who used them – they were deemed just as English as any other. But one thing we do know is that 1066 marked an abrupt shift in the political and cultural world that England inhabited, as its influences shifted from the North Sea to the English Channel.
Tostig no more
This is epitomised by the fate of the name of another of Godwine’s sons, Tostig. Harold’s brother infamously betrayed Harold by supporting Harald Hardrada in 1066, so played a key role in the end of Anglo-Scandinavian England. His name seems to have been one of those Scandinavian names that had become popular in the 11th century – perhaps partly because of his own fame.
After the conquest, once-popular Anglo-Scandinavian names were quickly discarded in favour of those brought to England by its new Norman overlords. We have a first-hand account of this process in action through the story of a boy named Tostig in the early 12th century. We are told that his childhood friends teased him so remorselessly that he took it upon himself to change his unfashionable name, insisting on being called William instead.
Most people didn’t change their own names, but the speed of the shift more widely was dramatic, with parents swapping English names for Norman ones. William became rapidly popular, thanks to the influence of the hundreds of Williams who came to England after the Conquest. There were almost as many Richards and Roberts, as well as a large number of Walters and Ralphs (and a surprising scattering of Wazos and Bosos).
William the Bastard
The most famous of the new Williams was, of course, the one we know as ‘the Conqueror’, duke of Normandy and king of England. But William wasn’t known by this byname during his lifetime, as far as we can tell. Rather, he was dubbed by contemporaries as William ‘the Bastard’ (through the Latin terms bastardus and nothus).
This wasn’t a judgement on his character but reflected his illegitimacy. Although many noblemen had unofficial partners before taking an official bride, the fact that William was illegitimate clearly mattered, judging by the wide use of this nickname and the fact that his mother, Herleva, was never named as such until after his death.
By the time of the Conquest, the practice of using additional bynames to add detail to the lives and identities of individuals was becoming more common on both sides of the Channel. As William’s nickname shows, these were usually not chosen by the bearers themselves but instead offer us a glimpse into the judgment of other people.
Black beards, barrel cats and broad arses
Bynames were often merely bland descriptors referring to visual characteristics – Burewold Crul (‘Curly’) and Brunstan Blachebiert (‘Blackbeard’), for example. Or they might refer to the occupation of the bearer, such as those of Bernard Faber (‘the Smith’) and William Bruwere (‘the Brewer’). But there were a lot of names that were much more evocative, some of which were mildly insulting – perhaps partly humorous descriptions of someone’s physical appearance, social status or personality traits.
- Read more | The Anglo-Saxons’ last stand
The meanings of some of these names were obvious, but for others we have to read between the lines. Alestan Braders (‘Broad Arse’), Willelm Pinguis (‘the Fat’) and the man just known as Porcel (‘Little Pig’), are likely to have been overweight. Alric Penipurs (‘Pennypurse’) was almost certainly tight with his money. Lewin Gulee (‘Big Mouthful’) probably had a foul mouth. And we can assume that Lefstan Bittecat (‘Barrel Cat’) liked a drink. But how Edwin Wridel came to be known as ‘the Wriggler’ remains a mystery.
A load of Ballocs
The creation and use of derogatory nicknames might have been done in good humour, or could have served a community-building function. However, some of the names from 11th-century England sound downright offensive to modern ears.
In Winchester around 1050, we know of at least three men whose names referred to testicles. There was an Alfred Taddeballoc (‘Toad-bollock’), a Lefwin Balloe (‘Bollock’), and one man known simply by the name Balloc (‘Bollock’). Even if the sexually explicit nature of these names was not as taboo in medieval England as it is today, the use of these names must have still been unpleasant for the people who had to live with them.
This must certainly have been true in the case of Godwinus Clawcunte (‘Scratch-c*nt’), whose name conjures up an image of a man with some sort of unfortunate groin-related ailment.
An artificial divide
The names of English people in the 11th century can tell us a huge amount about their world and how it was changing. Some of this was, undoubtedly, a result of the Norman conquest, but other aspects of its transformation likely reflected longer-term shifts within English society. In fact, names might be linked to the apparent divide evident between the world that came before 1066 and the one that came after.
Names that were popular in England a century after the Conquest could equally be plucked from any census over the past 900 years: William and Richard, Alice and Matilda. They are recognisably English, recognisably modern. In contrast, the Æthelwulfs and Ælfgifus of pre-Conquest England seem alien and unfamiliar. They create an air of fantastical detachment – more like characters from Game of Thrones than the direct ancestors of modern Englishmen and women. And they can create a false sense that the people of England in 1066 were far more different from those that followed them than they really were.
For more detail on the Bayeux Tapestry, you access our HistoryExtra Academy series on the subject: a six-part video lecture series, in which the majesty and mystery of the Tapestry is explored in full.
]]> Dr David Musgrove, FSA <![CDATA[The Bayeux Tapestry has returned to the UK – and this is how you can see it]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/bayeux-tapestry-british-museum-exhibition-tickets/ 2026-10-21T12:14:32.000Z 2026-10-21T10:00:33.000Z The Bayeux Tapestry is being displayed in the UK as part of a landmark exhibition at the British Museum in London.
The embroidery is normally housed at the Bayeux Tapestry Museum in Normandy, but a historic agreement was reached with the French government for the artefact to be loaned to the UK while its home museum undergoes renovation.
Running for 10 months, the exhibition offers a once-in-a-generation opportunity for audiences to see the Tapestry in the British capital.
When is the Bayeux Tapestry exhibition open?
The Bayeux Tapestry exhibition opened at the Sainsbury Exhibitions Gallery at the British Museum on 10 September 2026 and will run until 11 July 2027.
For the first time, the Tapestry is being displayed flat and in one continuous length inside a specially constructed showcase, allowing visitors to appreciate its full scale and intricate detail as never before.
How to get tickets to see the Bayeux Tapestry exhibition
Following the 21 October ticket release, the next batch of tickets to see the Bayeux Tapestry can be booked via the British Museum website in early 2027, for viewings between April-July 2027. The precise date of for this ticket release hasn't yet been confirmed.
This will be the final batch of tickets released before the exhibition ends and the embroidery returns to France.
How much do tickets for the Bayeux Tapestry exhibition cost?
Tickets range in price from £25 to £33, through a tiered pricing structure based on the day and time of visit. Children under 16 go free if accompanied by paying adults.
What do visitors see inside the exhibition? What else from the Norman Conquest period is shown alongside the Tapestry?
The exhibition not only presents the Bayeux Tapestry in its entirety, but also sets it within the wider context of 11th-century England and Normandy.
Objects from the British Museum’s own collection and other significant loans from across the UK and Europe are displayed, offering fresh perspectives on the people and events depicted in the embroidery. Key highlights include the Junius 11 manuscript, which influenced the Tapestry’s design.
- Read more | Michael Wood on women’s contributions to the Bayeux Tapestry
The story of the Bayeux Tapestry
Member exclusive | Join Dr David Musgrove for this video series for the HistoryExtra Academy, as he traces the threads of the 11th-century embroidery
Watch episodes now
What to know before visiting the British Museum for the exhibition
The Bayeux Tapestry exhibition is already proving to be one of the most popular in the museum’s history.
Alongside the Tapestry itself, visitors can explore a range of digital elements designed to enhance understanding and engagement. Curators are hosting talks and special events throughout the exhibition run, while a programme of activities for schools and families ensures the Tapestry’s story reaches the widest possible audience.
How to read the Bayeux Tapestry: key scenes to look for
As you walk the length of the Tapestry, look out for its most famous episodes: King Edward the Confessor’s deathbed scene; Harold Godwinson’s fateful oath to William; the appearance of Halley’s Comet as an omen; the mustering of Norman ships; and the climactic battle of Hastings, where Harold is slain.
The Tapestry’s borders are filled with animals, fables and mischievous details that invite close inspection. Its ambiguous storytelling and sparse Latin captions leave much open to interpretation, making every visit a chance to discover new perspectives on this epic tale of conquest and change.
For more detail, you access our HistoryExtra Academy series on the subject: a six-part video lecture series, in which the majesty and mystery of the Tapestry is explored in full.
]]> James Osborne <![CDATA[This Viking warlord had a magical banner that promised victory. But it had a secret curse]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/viking/viking-warlord-sigurd-the-stout-raven-banner/ 2026-10-20T14:59:20.000Z 2026-10-20T14:59:20.000Z Facing a Scottish army he believed outnumbered his own seven to one, the Viking warlord Sigurd the Stout went to his mother for help. According to Orkneyinga Saga, she had little sympathy – if any – for his concerns.
“She basically says, ‘Well, if I thought you would be worried about dying, I would have brought you up in my wool basket,’” Viking Age scholar Judith Jesch explains on the HistoryExtra podcast.
Despite her misgivings about her son’s courage, his mother had, however, made something for him: a banner bearing a raven, so skilfully worked that the bird seemed to fly when the cloth whipped in the wind. She promised that it would bring him victory, with one condition.
“She says, ‘This banner will help you win the battle, but whoever carries the banner will die.’”
Three standard-bearers were killed in the fighting that followed. “You'd think they would have heard that it was a bad idea to carry this banner,” Jesch says. “But Sigurd does eventually win the battle.”
Fighting for power in Scotland
Sigurd ruled Orkney in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries. From the islands off Scotland’s northern coast, the Norse earls could reach allies and enemies across Scandinavia, Scotland and Ireland. They also sought territory closer to home, across the Pentland Firth in Caithness.
The saga names Sigurd’s Scottish opponent as Earl Finnleik and places their battle at a site generally identified as Skitten, near Wick. Control of this part of the mainland was a recurring concern for Orkney’s rulers.
This account of the battle was written long after the fighting. Orkneyinga Saga, a history of the islands’ earls, is generally thought to have first taken shape around 1200, some two centuries after Sigurd’s lifetime. Its writers drew on earlier traditions, and the text underwent further revision.
We cannot recover a conversation between Sigurd and his mother from this scene, or establish what happened at Skitten through its account of an enchanted banner. We can, though, see what interested the storytellers who wrote this legend.
A taunting mother
“Her response to him is goading,” Jesch explains. “And this is a motif we find a lot in Icelandic sagas.”
In saga feuds, a killing or an insult could affect the standing of an entire family. Relatives had a stake in whether a man sought compensation, took revenge or did nothing, even if they would never fight themselves.
“It's often thought of as a very masculine world,” says Jesch. “It's the men going out and killing each other, basically. But as the sagas make clear, women also play a part in this process because they're part of the family group.”
That involvement often means “urging, encouraging the menfolk to go out” and commit violence, she explains, whether to avenge a wrong or for another purpose.
Sigurd’s mother uses the same pressure against her son. Her wool-basket remark paints a picture of an earl anxious about the odds as a child who still needs protecting – it’s emasculating. If he wants to be taken seriously, she implies, he must accept the possibility of death.
Such scenes tell us about the expectations of saga writers and their audiences. The woman who shames a reluctant man into fighting is a recurring literary figure – beyond this saga, too; think of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
But in this story, the notion of women encouraging men to commit violence is only one of several motifs.
“It's the combination of women giving advice, women with magical powers, and women goading men to go out and kill. These are three motifs that are entwined in this episode.”
Weaving the fate of warriors
Women who foresee events or practise magic appear elsewhere in Norse literature, among them the seeresses known as ‘völur’. The banner belongs to another strand of Norse storytelling, in which textile work gives women control over the fate of warriors. A poem preserved in Njál’s Saga describes valkyries, the supernatural figures associated with choosing the battlefield dead, weaving a fabric of war from human entrails and severed heads.
The raven, too, was familiar in accounts of battle. It fed on the corpses left after fighting and was associated with Odin, whose ravens Huginn and Muninn brought him knowledge of the world. On Sigurd’s banner, the bird is an appropriate emblem for a victory that will leave its bearers dead.
There is evidence for Vikings entering battles with raven standards outside the sagas. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records the capture of a Viking war banner with the black bird in Devon in 878 – during the Viking attacks on Alfred the Great’s Wessex.
The death of Earl Sigurd
Sigurd died in 1014 at Clontarf, near Dublin, fighting in the coalition opposed to the Irish ruler Brian Boru. His allies included the rulers of Dublin and Leinster. With Irish and Norse interests entangled on the battlefield, the conflict neatly demonstrates how interlinked the Norse and broader Gaelic worlds had become.
- Read more | The history of Dublin: from Viking stronghold to international success story
His death is recorded beyond the Icelandic saga tradition. The Annals of Ulster name the earl of Orkney among the dead. And in Njál’s Saga, the raven banner returns to account for his end. Once again, its bearers are killed. This time, the surviving men refuse to take it. Sigurd takes the banner himself. As per his mother’s magic, he dies.
Judith Jesch was speaking to James Osborne on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
]]> Jonny Wilkes <![CDATA[This medieval king ruled a vast empire and inspired the pope. He also didn't exist]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/this-medieval-king-ruled-a-vast-empire-and-inspired-the-pope-he-also-didnt-exist/ 2026-10-18T10:31:03.000Z 2026-10-18T10:30:11.000Z In 1145, the German bishop Otto of Freising published his influential work of history and philosophy, the Chronica, in which he mentioned a Christian ruler of a domain far to the east. This priest-king had defeated the Muslims in battle and set out to capture Jerusalem, but had been unable to cross his army over the Tigris River.
This is the first-known written reference to Prester John, a significant figure in medieval Europe, despite the fact that he never existed.
The myth behind the man
Twenty years later, in 1165, a letter appeared at the court of the Byzantine emperor purporting to be from the mysterious man, the “supreme ruler of the three Indies”. In the lengthy missive, he introduced himself: “I, Prester John, am lord of lords and surpass, in all riches which are under the heaven, in virtue and in power, all the kings of the wide world.”
He was a devout Christian who served as both king and religious leader (the word ‘prester’ means priest) of a vast empire where 72 kingdoms lived in peace and all crime and vice had been eliminated. Riches abounded, with rivers literally flowing with precious gems, and mythical creatures such as the phoenix and cyclopes thrived.
Not only did the letter promise a Christian paradise on Earth that could be explored, but also the ally that Western Europe so badly needed to fight the Muslim forces in the crusades.
Why did people believe Prester John was real?
The letter was a fake written by a still-unknown author, yet it was widely circulated. Soon, the name and reputation of Prester John spread across Europe with many having no problem in considering him to be completely genuine. Pope Alexander III even sent an envoy to attempt to deliver a letter to this imperious king to the east.
Europeans had long believed that there had to be Christian kingdoms in the east, and not without reason. There were indeed huge Christian communities across Asia; it was thought that Prester John – who claimed to be a descendent of one of the Magi, the three wise men who visited Christ at his birth – may have belonged to a sect called Nestorianism.
Limited knowledge of geography beyond the Islamic world meant that Europeans simply did not know who lived there and what they were like, so why could there not be a Christian ruler of a vast empire? There were enough kernels of truth on which to grow Prester John’s image too: there were indeed non-Muslim peoples making their presence known in Europe, namely the Mongols.
Perhaps the most important factor in why Prester John’s existence was not questioned too strongly was that Europeans wanted to believe in him. They wanted to hold onto the possibility of an ally that would change the course of the crusades, to be evoked whenever the need was greatest.
Following the disaster of the Fifth Crusade, Jacques de Vitry, bishop of Ptolemais, wrote to the pope with words of optimism, explaining how the Muslims had been attacked by David, King of India and a descendent of Prester John. Historians have speculated that this account might have been inspired by Genghis Khan.
The move to Ethiopia
The story of Prester John inspired many travellers and missionaries over the years to head into the unknown and locate his near-magical kingdom, thought for some time to be in India. By the time Marco Polo went on his travels in the late 13th century nothing had been found, but he still referenced Prester John as a real figure in the region.
As it became increasingly clear, however, that there was no Christian empire of the size and power related in Prester John’s letter, the story shifted to place the king in Africa instead, specifically in Ethiopia, where a Christian community had existed since the fourth century.
From the 14th century, embassies from Ethiopia travelled to Italy and established a presence in Rome, and Europeans quickly jumped to the conclusion that their leader must be Prester John. Tales emerged of how his land contained the source of the Nile and he had the power to divert its course and wreak havoc in Egypt.
The Portuguese committed huge resources to their exploration of Africa – which led to Vaso da Gama’s world-changing voyage to India around the Cape of Good Hope from 1497-99 – fuelled in no small part by the aim of finding Prester John once and for all. They did find a Christian ruler in Ethiopia, but it was clear that this was not the all-powerful, fabulously wealthy king of the legend.
While belief in Prester John diminished, this mythical king had a very real legacy: it was the desire to find his empire that helped light the fires of European exploration in Asia and Africa.
]]> Emily Briffett <![CDATA[Being disabled in the medieval era]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/being-disabled-in-the-medieval-era-podcast/ 2026-10-09T09:14:05.000Z 2026-10-09T09:14:05.000Z Prosthetic legs, wheelbarrow wheelchairs and guide… children? Those were just some of the assistive technologies and body augmentations available to our medieval and early modern ancestors.
In this episode, Rae Gillibrand highlights how bodily difference was understood in this pre-modern era, and explores the medical marketplace and community support that was available. Speaking to Emily Briffett, Rae reveals a world of ingenuity, adaptation and care.
Beyond the podcast
To find out more about Tudor attitudes to disability – and why they may have been more compassionate than you might think – don’t miss this HistoryExtra article written by Phillipa Vincent-Connolly
]]> Michael Wood <![CDATA[How cruel was William the Conqueror to the Anglo-Saxons? This document reveals the "miserable" truth]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/how-cruel-was-william-the-conqueror-to-the-anglo-saxons-this-document-reveals-the-miserable-truth/ 2026-09-30T15:01:06.000Z 2026-09-30T15:00:43.000Z I first saw the Tapestry in the old Bibliothèque municipale in Bayeux, almost a lifetime ago now. Its magical power is all the more poignant because it was made by English needlewomen as a record of the brutal conquest of their own land – a defeat so harrowing that it took a century for the English to accept. Some would say they never did.
The Bayeux Tapestry, it’s now agreed, was made in England, probably at Canterbury. Its English sympathies are among its many extraordinary aspects. It tells the tale of the noble hero who fatefully broke his oath – an oath that by tradition was sworn at Bayeux.
There are 626 people depicted on the Tapestry, with just three women – one of them nameless and clutching her child’s hand as her house is burned down and she flees in terror. Of the men who are named, most are kings, dukes and bishops, the key characters in the story. But there are three exceptions that have always intrigued historians. Turold, Wadard and Vitalis are three of the Norman rank and file. Why are they on the Tapestry? That question leads us directly to the matter of who commissioned it, and why.
We can identify the three men in the pages of Domesday Book, William the Conqueror’s survey of England made 20 years after the battle of Hastings. By then, Turold was dead, but his son Ralph is named as holding his father’s land in Kent. Wadard and Vitalis were still living, and had done very well out of the Conquest. What unites the three is that they were all men of Odo – the Conqueror’s half-brother, bishop of Bayeux – who played a famous role at Hastings.
First, Wadard. On the Tapestry we see him on horseback in chain mail directing men gathering supplies after the Norman landing. It’s a small event not mentioned by the historians, but he was evidently a knight in the entourage of Odo. Turning through the folios of Domesday, in 1086 Wadard had land in nine places in Kent. Among them was Nurstead, with its church of St Mildred; at Buckwell he owned a mill and “an alder wood”; and in Dover six houses gifted by Odo, his “protector, deliverer and donor”.
Then there’s Vitalis of Canterbury. He appears on the Tapestry at a crucial moment before the battle, when Duke William interrogates him about the approach of the English army, depicted with almost cinematic skill. In 1086, Vitalis, too, had several holdings: the main one on the coast at Whitstable, with 69 smallholders and five slaves, five salt houses, a church and a small pasture for pigs. I imagine Vitalis enjoying the sea breezes, gazing out to Normandy, a short hop if he wanted to visit home.
Finally, Turold, who appears on the Tapestry earlier in the story. After Harold was wrecked on the French coast in 1065, Turold is one of two messengers of the Norman duke sent to bring the Englishman to William’s court. After 1066, Turold was also rewarded by Odo with estates in Kent and houses in Rochester and Canterbury.
So the three men appear on the Tapestry because their lord wanted to commemorate his own followers who had played their part in the great enterprise that propelled the Normans onto the European stage. That in turn supports what scholars have long suspected – that the sponsor of the Tapestry was none other than Odo of Bayeux himself.
It was, of course, a bitter and violent time. The Conqueror himself was a cruel and grasping man: too relentless to care, even though the world might hate him. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, “grædinæsse he lufode mid ealle” (“he loved greediness above all”).
As for how the ordinary English felt about these events, we have little evidence, but Wulfwin and Leofwin (brothers, as I take it, who farmed at Siffleton in 1066 before Vitalis took their land) were, I guess, no different from Ælfric at Marsh Gibbon in Buckinghamshire – who, Domesday says, “held it freely in 1066 but now farms at a rent from William, a Norman, graviter et miserabiliter [miserably and with a heavy heart]”.
That’s the other side of the coin to Wadard and Vitalis relaxing on their loungers in the garden of England. And when they made their journeys back to Normandy, joining the crowds at the Bayeux summer relic festival as the Tapestry was displayed round the cathedral nave, they could point proudly and say: “That’s me! I fought at Hastings – on that day when we won England”.
This article was first published in the October 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]> James Osborne <![CDATA[This strange medieval ritual was designed to protect a mother from grief. How did it work?]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/middle-ages-childbirth-motherhood-charm/ 2026-09-23T14:08:50.000Z 2026-09-23T14:08:50.000Z There is one early medieval English childbirth charm that contains a rather unusual instruction. According to the text of the charm, a woman whose child has died should take soil from the grave, wrap it in black wool and sell it to a merchant, speaking a short formula as she does so.
The passage forms part of a group of rituals commonly known as For a Delayed Birth. They concern the difficulties of bearing and rearing children, combining prescribed movements, spoken words and objects associated with pregnancy and loss.
For historian Elinor Cleghorn, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, these instructions offer evidence of how medieval society acknowledged maternal bereavement. They also challenge the assumption that parents became emotionally detached from their children, because so many children died so young.
“It was a common assumption for a while that parents in history, especially in the Middle Ages, didn't really love their children in the way that we do today because lives were so precarious and short,” she says. Clearly, she says, that wasn't true.
A medieval collection of remedies
Cleghorn places For a Delayed Birth among the “metrical charms”: writings that use the rhythms and patterns of poetry as part of a prescribed ritual. They were, she says, “medical prayers”, which “could be recited to aid all sorts of things”.
Their subjects included concerns familiar to medieval households.
“There was a metrical charm for protection on journeys,” she says. Other charms addressed bees, the protection of cattle and the recovery of stolen livestock. These texts belong to a world in which religious practice, certain words, and ritual actions offered ways of seeking protection alongside other responses to illness or misfortune.
“For a Delayed Birth [is] a beautiful set of birthing rituals, not just around birth, but also around the hope for a child,” Cleghorn explains.
The text survives in British Library Harley MS 585, a manuscript containing medical remedies, prayers and charms. The collection in which it appears is known as the Lacnunga, an Old English word meaning “remedies”. The childbirth passages were copied in approximately between the years 1000 and 1050, before the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. They combine prose instructions with short passages of Old English verse intended for recitation.
Pregnancy after an earlier loss
The title of the charm doesn’t fully describe the text’s concerns. A modern reader might understand “delayed birth” as prolonged labour, but the instructions extend to carrying a pregnancy successfully and keeping a child alive.
Cleghorn interprets them as intended for “a woman who has experienced trauma and tragedy in childbirth, so perhaps has lost a child, or by a woman who hopes to again become pregnant and give birth safely after experiencing such a loss”.
This connects the experience of bereavement with expectations surrounding another pregnancy. The rituals address both an earlier death and the possibility that it might be repeated.
One sequence instructs that a woman hoping for a smooth pregnancy should step over her husband as he lies in bed. It recommends an “elaborate stepping sequence, and the woman has to make sure that her husband doesn't wake up while reciting her intentions to become pregnant again and have a healthy child,” Cleghorn says.
The soil and the black wool
Another passage concerns what a woman should do if she has previously lost a child.
“One of the sequences involves a woman going to the grave of her dead child and taking some of the soil and wrapping the soil in some black wool,” Cleghorn explains.
The instruction specifies material from her own child’s grave, linking the ritual to a particular bereavement. The soil is then transferred to someone outside the household.
“The ritual was completed if she gave this black wool containing the soil from her child's grave to a travelling merchant, who would then take it away from the area where she lived to symbolise her grief and the threat of another loss being taken far away from her.”
- Read more | Medieval family planning: meet the strong-willed women who redefined motherhood in the Middle Ages
“So there was also a little collaborative element as well in this,” she says, “that the merchant would then leave town, taking with him the grief and the danger.”
This reading suggests a practice that joined remembrance of a deceased child to concern for future pregnancies. It also provided a defined action through which a woman might respond to circumstances she had been unable to control: a way of reasserting some agency in a decidedly uncertain context.
Instructions rather than a personal account
The evidence has clear limitations. The charm survives as a written prescription, rather than a description of an observed ceremony or a mother’s account of her own experience.
“We know they exist and were written down, but we don't know how these rituals were performed, or by whom,” Cleghorn cautions.
Nor can the text establish how common these practices were or whether women found them reassuring. However, its survival demonstrates that certainly someone considered these responses to reproductive difficulty worth recording.
For Cleghorn, that’s significant in itself. It indicates “a real sense of a necessity to create practices around mothering and childbirth that could bring some safety, bring some degree of protection”.
So, the assumption that frequent childhood deaths produced parental indifference confuses two different questions: how often families experienced bereavement, and how they responded to it. These birth charms, however, show that the loss of a child was understood as an experience requiring emotional action and attention.
Grief may certainly have been more common, though no less profound.
Elinor Cleghorn was speaking to Lauren Good on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
]]> Elinor Evans <![CDATA[The slave ship that changed history]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-slave-ship-that-changed-history/ 2026-09-23T08:48:04.000Z 2026-09-23T08:47:48.000Z In 1781, more than 130 enslaved Africans were deliberately thrown from a ship called the Zorg into the Atlantic. The horrifying story of this slave ship – long mistakenly known as the Zong – was to have consequences far beyond its murderous voyage.
In this episode, historian and author Siddharth Kara speaks to Elinor Evans about the brutal economics of the Atlantic slave trade, the extraordinary court case that followed the massacre, and how the Zorg helped galvanise the abolitionist cause.
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