I have been seized by illness. My fingers ache as though I have spent hours toiling over an embroidery or hitting refresh on the British Museum website. I suffer nightmares and wake in a cold sweat, strange images floating before my eyes of ships and arrows and dismembered limbs. At the edges shimmer foxes and crows, the stuff of Aesop’s Fables. People have become epithets: the postman, ‘The Deliverer’; Harry, after a battle with the printer, ‘The Conqueror’; I myself, ‘The Unsteady,’ following an encounter with some mead.

Bayeux Tapestry fever is upon me.

I have not yet secured a ticket to see this mighty comic strip but I am determined that I will and that before then I am going to do my homework. I want to know the theories about who designed it, who commissioned it, who made it and why. I want to know how to approach reading it and how it has been interpreted over the last few hundred years. I want to know how it survives, if it’s been changed and who Queen Edith and Edith Swanneck were. I want to know all the political and diplomatic ramifications then and now. I want to know how it happened that Chris Bryant, a gay, married MP, had to propose to the female, also married, French culture minister in order to secure its coming to the UK.

I have been reading Nineteen Days in Autumn by Erin Goeres and The Story of the Bayeux Tapestry: Unravelling the Norman Conquest by Michael Lewis and David Musgrove. Goeres’ book is about the time between Harold’s victory at Stamford Bridge and his less successful career move at Hastings. Of course, it is really about the years building up to that too, all the machinations of rulers in Norway, Denmark, Normandy and England. It is electrifying. There are invasions using birds set on fire and faked deaths. There is so much eye-gouging, though not the one you think you know about. There is someone named Ragnarr Hairy-Breeches. Ragnarr Hairy-Breeches.

Goeres writes brilliantly, making the complex comprehensible and dramatic. She also has a terrific flair for understatement. ‘It was a hoax,’ she writes when Earl Godwin greets Alfred, brother of Edward the Confessor, with kisses and dinner plans. Let’s hope the wine was good because I’m not sure ‘hoax’ covers then being stripped naked, strapped to a horse and set upon by clumsy torturers. Really, you want your torturers to be dextrous. On the blinding of Michael V Kalaphates so that he cannot challenge Haraldr’s quest for power, she comments, ‘It was an unpleasant task.’ Well, so is taking out the bins.

Whilst Goeres’ book helps with the history of the events depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry, Michael Lewis and David Musgrove’s book is rich with all its details and mysteries. It is one to read slowly. There is so much to take in.

A few headlines: it’s not a tapestry, it wasn’t made in Bayeux and it is fantastically bonkers that it has survived. There are three women in the main panels and three in the borders compared with 620 men and 190 horses. So, that’s about right. It may have been stitched by nuns near Kent. We don’t know. But let’s not allow academic debate to impede a good nun story, especially when you see how much detail they put into certain parts of the male anatomy. That famous arrow may have been added later and the eye it’s piercing may not be Harold’s – he had a way worse death: the word ‘hacked’ is used a lot.

The ‘Tapestry’ is torn and stained. Imagine being the person inspecting someone’s stitching and spilling some candle wax on it in the process. People have tried to steal it. It has survived fire. At one point rather than being on display it may have been used to wrap up other things. You know how you use a priceless and delicate historical artefact to protect the Christmas baubles. The British Museum had better be selling Bayeux Tapestry wrapping paper.

While I panic about whether I will get to see it, I can carry around the lovely Pocket Bayeux Tapestry by Emily A. Winkler, illustrated by Victor Sansonetti. Not quite the full effect of seeing it in its 70m long glory but a brilliant guide, produced with great care. And, for the coffee table, there are the British Museum’s new books, the colourful Fold-Out Edition and this big, gorgeous celebration of the landmark exhibition, unpicking, as it were, the story of the tapestry and the import of this moment.

I do have more preparation planned in the form of Tom Licence’s biography, Harold: Warrior King and William the Conqueror by David Bates – for which of them should I be rooting? I’m not sure I’d want to sit sewing for either – and The Norman Conquest by Marc Morris, about the events leading up to 1066 and the absolute chaos of the years afterwards.

But I must admit that I have been distracted by Nosy Crow’s board book, My Bayeux ABC. Without giving anything away, N is for Normans, not nuns, sadly. T is for Trees and, oh my, the trees in the Tapestry are fascinating. Confronted with the eternal conundrum of the ABC book, what to do for ‘X’, the publisher is equal to it. X is for aXe. They worked with what they were given.

I do think this is a very exciting moment for education and engagement with history for all ages. I hope loads of children get to see it. Helping their enjoyment will be The Bayeux Tapestry: The Graphic Novel by Martin Howard, a clever and funny version, faithful to the many wild moustaches in the original, which made me realise that of course the Tapestry itself is basically a graphic novel/comic and The History of the Bayeux Tapestry by Libby Walden, an illustrated and energetic guide in picture book style with so much to pore over on every page, which I would have loved to have when learning about it at school.  

Apropos of nothing, should you find yourself with a spare ticket to see the Bayeux Tapestry, I make a really good museum companion. I’m short so you can read all the signage over the top of my head, I don’t spend the whole time with my phone out taking photographs and I will buy you the best tat from the gift shop. We all need another pencil sharpener.

May your weekend be full of moustaches and nuns,
Elizabeth the Abstemious*

*I’m rebranding.**
** Just kidding. Pass the medieval mead.