Visitors will enter via a mezzanine which means they will be able to see the entire length of the work in one go from afar. <\/p>\n
They’ll then walk – presumably at some pace – closer to the action; the 58 scenes of the events leading up to 1066 and the Battle of Hastings, complete with 626 figures, 202 horses and six women.<\/p>\n
We got a glimpse of one of those women as the conservators working on the tapestry lifted up a section of the cover that is on it now to protect it from the light.<\/p>\n
It shows a woman fleeing with her child from her house as Norman soldiers begin to torch it during the Conqueror’s devastating journey to fight Harold for the throne. A human interaction that reveals the horror of war.<\/p>\n
Horton-Insch called it “one of the most poignant moments on the tapestry”.<\/p>\n
“Her experience is the experience of the everywoman if you will, the experience that a lot of English women, including the English women who probably made the tapestry, would have lived through and would have experienced”.<\/p>\n
Lewis told me there are still so many mysteries about the tapestry. One I wanted cleared up was about a section – sadly under cover for our visit – which shows a figure, believed to be Harold, with an arrow in his eye at the Battle of Hastings.<\/p>\n
Some historians believe the arrow was added later, during restoration in the nineteenth century. Lewis agrees it’s a later addition. <\/p>\n
“The earliest drawings of the tapestry don’t show the arrow in the eye… my feeling is the arrow is a later invention based on a tradition that comes along in the 12th Century that Harold died with an arrow in his eye. But I’m happy to be proven wrong”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Visitors will enter via a mezzanine which means they will be able to see the entire length of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":697618,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-697617","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/697617","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=697617"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/697617\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/697618"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=697617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=697617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=697617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}