How Should the Bayeux Tapestry End? A New Competition Invites Children to Reimagine Its Missing Final Panel

After centuries in France, the Bayeux Tapestry, which tells the story of the Battle of Hastings and the Norman conquest of England, is going on display in London. To celebrate its upcoming debut at the British Museum, children across the country will be learning about the artifact by reinventing its ending. The “Beyond the Battle” competition, a partnership between the charity English Heritage and the foundation Art Explora, is calling on children ages 7 to 11 to imagine a final scene for the artwork that looks “beyond conquest” and toward a hopeful vision of the future.

The Bayeux Tapestry isn’t actually a tapestry Tapestries are traditionally woven on a loom, with the design created by weaving colored threads through plain threads. The Bayeux Tapestry is an embroidered linen cloth, with images and text stitched onto the surface of the fabric using colored wool. The project takes inspiration from one of the tapestry’s enduring mysteries: What, exactly, was supposed to appear at the end?

The nearly 230-foot-long embroidered artwork ends with the death of Harold Godwinson, the English king defeated by William the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings. But some historians think that the tapestry’s original end was a roughly ten-foot-long depiction of William’s Christmas Day coronation in 1066. Nobody knows the fate of this segment, if it ever existed in the first place.

But the “Beyond the Battle” competition isn’t the first creative attempt to “complete” the tapestry. In 2012, a group of embroiderers from Alderney, one of the Channel Islands, spent a year stitching together a depiction of this celebratory coronation, using the same techniques and design principles as the original. In 2014, the completed ten-foot-long artwork went on display at the Bayeux Tapestry Museum in Normandy, next to the nearly 1,000-year-old original.

In 2016, English Heritage launched “The Kids’ Tapestry” to commemorate the 950th anniversary of the decisive Battle of Hastings. After children selected their favorite moments from history, artist Liz Pichon illustrated them on panels stretching more than 25 feet. The tapestry’s final panel, designed by 10-year-old Kate Arnold, depicted the invention of the internet.

The upcoming competition, which will launch in late September, takes a different approach. Rather than recreating moments from history, students are being asked to imagine their own endings. Historians aren’t certain where it was created, but they think it was likely made in or near Canterbury, England.