The Bayeux Tapestry isn't a tapestry, and Harold's arrow may be a repair.
The famous 70-metre record of 1066 is embroidered, not woven, so technically it isn't a tapestry at all. It was probably stitched in England, not France. And the arrow in the eye of 'Harold' may have been added by restorers centuries later.
The Bayeux Tapestry is a strip of linen nearly 70 metres long and about half a metre high, embroidered in wool in ten natural dye colours. Because the images are stitched onto the cloth rather than woven into it, it is strictly an embroidery. Its 58 scenes, captioned in Latin, run from the last years of Edward the Confessor to the Battle of Hastings in 1066, and include 623 people, 994 animals and 41 ships.
French legend credited Queen Matilda, William the Conqueror's wife, and her ladies. Twentieth-century scholars concluded it was more likely commissioned by William's half-brother Bishop Odo of Bayeux, who appears in it four times, and made by Anglo-Saxon embroiderers, probably around Canterbury. It tells the story firmly from William's side, and some historians read it as propaganda for the new regime.
The most famous detail is contested. Above one figure hit in the head by an arrow is the name Harold, but the next figure, cut down by a sword, sits under the words for 'was killed'. Engravings made around 1730 show a spear or lance where the arrow now is, without feathers, and needle holes suggest the shaft was altered during later repairs. The ending is also missing, and the final caption, 'and the English fled', is thought to be a spurious early-19th-century addition.
It has survived more than nine centuries against the odds. In 1792 revolutionaries seized it to cover military wagons until a local lawyer rescued it. Napoleon displayed it in Paris while planning to invade Britain. In the Second World War Heinrich Himmler coveted it, and in August 1944 ordered it moved from the Louvre, but Paris was liberated first. Its upper border also carries the earliest known picture of Halley's Comet.
Source: Wikipedia — Bayeux Tapestry · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
