It is not actually a tapestry — it is an embroidery, 70 meters long and half a meter tall, stitched in wool on linen by hands we will never know. And it is one of the most extraordinary documents in the history of art: the entire story of the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, told in images, with captions in Latin, in a continuous strip that unrolls like a film.

The panel where Harold falls — struck by an arrow, or struck by a sword, the image has been argued over since the eighteenth century — is one of the most resonant images of defeat in Western art. He reaches up toward the shaft in his eye (or near his eye). Around him, his men fall. Above him, naked figures lie stripped of their armor. Below him, scavengers strip the dead. The Latin above says simply: HAROLD REX INTERFECTUS EST. King Harold is killed.

It is history told from the winner's side. But something in the image of Harold dying exceeds its propaganda purpose. He looks like a man, not a symbol. He looks like it hurts.

Linen ground, embroidered in eight colors of woolen thread using laid-work and couching techniques — the laid threads create the solid color fills, the couching creates outlines and detail. The eight colors are: terracotta, buff, two greens, blue-green, sage green, and two blues — all from natural dyes. The figures are outlined in a darker tone, giving the whole work a graphic, almost woodcut-like quality. At 70 meters, it is the longest secular narrative artwork of the medieval period.

The Bayeux Tapestry works through juxtaposition rather than symbol — it places scenes in sequence so that each one comments on the next. The appearance of Halley's Comet was read as an omen of catastrophe; placing it just before the Norman fleet sets sail makes it Harold's omen, not William's. The border running above and below the main narrative is populated with fables, animals, and scenes of everyday life that function as a kind of Greek chorus on the main events.

Made within two decades of the Conquest, probably in Canterbury, almost certainly for the new Norman establishment in England. It was meant to justify the invasion — to argue that Harold had broken an oath sworn on holy relics, making William the rightful king. Whether it was believed depends on who was looking: the Normans who commissioned it read a vindication; the Anglo-Saxons who may have stitched it perhaps read something else.

The Bayeux Tapestry's use of sequential visual narrative — images in continuous strip, with captions, telling a historical story — anticipates the comic strip, the graphic novel, and the film storyboard with unsettling accuracy. It almost certainly influenced English illuminated manuscript traditions and may have influenced the development of narrative fresco cycles in Italy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.