Almost everyone has seen, even if they are unaware of it, a scene from the Bayeux Tapestry: a warrior standing with his hand to his face, an arrow embedded in his eye, beneath the embroidered word HAROLD. Perhaps that arrow was not embroidered by anyone in the eleventh century, but rather by a hand in the nineteenth century.
The Bayeux Tapestry has not arrived intact since it was embroidered nearly a thousand years ago. Like any object of such antiquity, it has lost threads, suffered stains and tears, and has been repaired on several occasions. There is a documented restoration in 1842, and prior to that, records of its appearance are preserved: the engravings commissioned by Montfaucon in 1730 and, above all, the meticulous drawings made by Charles Stothard between 1816 and 1819. These records are the only window we possess into the prior state of the piece.
The historian Martin Foys has maintained that the arrow in Harold's eye was not there, or at least not in that form, prior to modern interventions. According to his reading of ancient records, what was present in that figure was a different element, possibly a spear or a shaft above the head, rather than an arrow entering the face. The restoration may have converted that ambiguous element into the unequivocal arrow we recognise today. It is a hypothesis: there is no unanimous consensus among specialists, and the very history of how Harold died is uncertain, as the chronicles of the period do not even agree on whether it was an arrow that killed him. Yet the hypothesis is serious, and its implications are dizzying.
If Foys is correct, even in part, then the most remembered image of the tapestry—the one that illustrates textbooks and documentaries, the one that 'everyone knows' represents the death of the king—would not be a testimony from the eleventh century. It would be a nineteenth-century interpretation embroidered over a gap, a restorer's conjecture turned into thread, and subsequently repeated for a century and a half as if it were the original. It was not merely any gap that was filled: the most famous moment of the entire work may have been fabricated.
When a reintegration is noticeable, when it is evident that a part is newer or of a different colour, the viewer knows that a later hand has been at work and judges accordingly. However, when the reintegration is successful, when it blends with the remainder and coincides with what we expected to see, it ceases to be perceived as an addition; it becomes canonical. The arrow in the eye fitted so well with the story already told about Harold that no one had cause to doubt it. The addition did not survive despite being invisible: it survived because it was invisible, and because it confirmed the narrative.
I recently wrote in this notebook about restoration using artificial intelligence, concerning the danger of a machine completing what is missing and our labelling that as restoration. Harold’s arrow demonstrates that the problem is not one invented by AI: it is as old as restoration itself. A nineteenth-century restorer, with needle and thread and with all the good faith in the world, could do exactly what we fear from the machine, fabricating what did not exist and presenting it with the same texture as the authentic. The difference is that, at that time, there was no digital record to leave evidence, so the conjecture dissolved into the work and became indistinguishable from it. It took nearly two centuries and a stubborn historian to separate them again, and even then, not entirely.
All of this does not cause me to distrust the tapestry, which remains a marvel, nor does it serve to accuse restorers who worked according to the logic of their time. It reveals something about how what we take for inherited truth is formed. Many of the images we believe we receive intact from the past have passed through intermediate hands that retouched them, completed them, and adjusted them to what was expected of them. Traces do not always remain. Harold's arrow has been looking at us for a thousand years, or so we believed; it may be that it has actually been looking at us for two hundred, and that what fixes that gaze is not the memory of a battle, but the conjecture of someone who wished to conclude it.
On the open conversation
This text begins with a verifiable academic hypothesis, that of Martin Foys regarding the arrow in Harold’s eye in the Bayeux Tapestry, to consider how a subsequent reintegration can become indistinguishable from the original and be canonised as if it had always been there. I mark the thesis as what it is, a solid hypothesis without unanimous consensus, and I do not arbitrate the historical question of how Harold died, which the sources of the period themselves leave open. It links to what I wrote about restoration with AI: the problem is older than the machine. If anyone wishes to intervene from the fields of medieval history, textile conservation, or museology, this notebook remains open.
Sources
Martin K. Foys, "Pulling the Arrow Out: The Legend of Harold’s Death and the Bayeux Tapestry", in The Bayeux Tapestry: New Interpretations (Boydell Press, 2009).
Records prior to the 1842 restoration: engravings by Bernard de Montfaucon / Antoine Benoît (1730) and drawings by Charles Stothard for the Society of Antiquaries (1816-1819), both with their own interpretative reconstructions.
Musée de la Tapisserie de Bayeux: 2020 conservation study and restoration project planned following the 2027 reopening.
Regarding the historical uncertainty of Harold’s death at Hastings (1066): discrepancy in the chronicles close to the event.