Portraits of Monarchy - William I - from the Bayeux Tapestry - One of the great historical records of the Middle Ages in Britain lies in a specially-built tourist centre in Bayeux, France. The Centre Guillaume le Conquerant, translated as "The William the Conqueror Centre", houses the Bayeux Tapestry, one of best sources of information on early Norman dress, armour, castle-building, boat-building, hunting, and other facets of daily life. The Bayeux Tapestry, despite its name, is not actually a tapestry at all! It is embroidery, using coloured wool, on 8 long strips of bleached linen which have been stitched together to form a continuous panel about 20 inches high and 230 feet long. We don't know the exact length of the original tapestry, because the final strip is tattered, although its present length fits pretty closely around the nave of Bayeux Cathedral, suggesting that it was custom-built for that church. The Bayeux Tapestry tells the tale of William the Conqueror's invasion of England through pictorial panels. We do not know for certain who commissioned the tapestry, though the likeliest candidate is William's half-brother Odo, Bishop of Bayeux from 1050-1097, or one of Odo's followers. Although the story is told from a Norman point of view, the style of the needlework indicates that the tapestry was actually made in England. For many years a pleasant tale told of William's wife, Queen Matilda, and her ladies making the tapestry as a gift for her victorious husband, though this now seems little more than pleasant romantic fiction.