BORIS JOHNSON: Never mind the Bayeux Tapestry, it's just French propaganda... Here's proof it was ENGLAND wot won the Battle of Hastings

Published: 00:59, 11 July 2026 | Updated: 01:46, 11 July 2026 I don’t want to seem remotely ungrateful to my old chum Emmanuel Macron for lending us the Bayeux Tapestry which arrived in London yesterday. Indeed, I thoroughly recommend that you go and see it for yourself at the British Museum – if you can get tickets – because you will discover that it is a magnificent work of art, unlike anything else on earth. Go and pore over those multi-coloured horses and strange medieval people with their bendy necks and fingers waving like sea anemones. Piece out the Latin of the picture captions, as I did more than 30 years ago, when I found myself almost alone in the Bayeux Museum in Normandy one glorious cider-fuelled afternoon. Walk yourself through it, left to right, and it will suddenly hit you that the French president’s munificent gesture is in fact a cruel joke – or should that be a crewel* joke – at our expense. It is a piece of bare-faced cheek. Il nous tire la jambe, mes amis! He could have lent so many wonders to the British museum, as a sign of the friendship between our countries. He could have loaned the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo, or the Obelisk from the Place de La Concorde, which would look magnifique in the BM forecourt. Instead, he has given us a 230 ft piece of blatant political propaganda – about how the English get thrashed by the French, and how they deserve to be thrashed! The illustrations make it plain enough, and the message is rammed home by the text. What do you mean, you don’t do Latin? Yes, you do. It says: HIC FRANCI PUGNANT, which means ‘Here the French are fighting’; and a bit later on, it says – in withering tones – ET FUGA VERTERUNT ANGLI. Which means, I’m afraid: ‘And the English turned tail and fled.’ The Battle of Hastings wasn’t just one in the eye for Harold; it was a national disaster. Ask yourself this simple question: who won in 1066, them or us? The answer is them, isn’t it? The French won. We English got the most tremendous drubbing – a humiliation depicted by the Tapestry in the naked bodies of Harold’s housecarls**, their heads and limbs lopped off by the invaders. There is, then, a very good reason, almost 1,000 years later, why we still feel a bit conflicted about it all. In the words of the historian John Gillingham, the Norman Conquest of England was ‘a catastrophe for the English. No other conquest has been followed by so total an elimination of the ancient regime.’ The entire Anglo-Saxon elite – perhaps 4,000 or 5,000 thegns [an Anglo- Saxon aristocrat] – were murdered or dispossessed. They fled to Scotland, to Denmark, some to Ukraine. Their buildings were pulled down, their culture eradicated, their laws and courts replaced with those of Norman France. For the purposes of the criminal law, the English were turned into second-class citizens. If a dead body turned up in the village, then under the law of ‘Englishry’ the poor peasants had to prove that the victim was English – not Norman – or else the whole lot of them would be subject to brutal retribution. The tapestry has multi-coloured horses and strange medieval people with their bendy necks and fingers waving like sea anemones * Crewel: Slackly twisted worsted yarn which is used for embroidery ** Housecarl: A member of the bodyguard of a Danish or early English king or noble  Why were the Normans so cruel? Simple. They were a tiny minority. Even by 1075, when all of them had crossed over, they made up only one per cent of the population – maybe 15,000 of a population of 1.5 million. The English had been violently subjugated and robbed. But they were still there, in a gigantic underclass – and that had very important psychological and linguistic consequences. The language of the ruling elite naturally became French, or Latin, and as Walter Scott famously pointed out, you can see the old class stratification in the vocabulary of cookery. The English peasants reared pigs that became pork for the Norman table. Their sheep became mutton, their calves became veal, and so on. Because English ceased to be the language of the ruling classes, English literature – which had flourished before the Conquest – went into an eclipse, for about 300 years. As a literary language, English only really comes back to life with Chaucer, in the 14th century – and by this time the great poet of the Canterbury Tales is deploying an amazing hybrid, a mixture of the Anglo-Saxon and the Norman or Latinate words. It is as though two giant verbal streams have joined to create a super-river: which is one of the reasons that English is by far the most capacious modern language, with about 600,000 words (German has about 300,000, French 200,000, Chinese 100,000 and so on).  It is because English is effectively two languages in one that it has so many shades of meaning, and so many puns. But the important political point is that the structure of the language, the essence of it, is English. It is not French with English borrowings; it’s the other way round. And that is because of the vastly lop-sided demographic reality of the Norman Conquest. To this day there is a golden rule of political speeches or interviews. If you want to waffle or obfuscate, or be held in general contempt by your listeners, then use as many French-derived or Latinate words as possible. But if you want to go on the Today programme and ensure that people actually listen to what you have to say, then use the shortest, simplest, most Anglo-Saxon words you can find. It’s the old, short words that cut through. It’s the English words that speak to people’s hearts. Churchill understood that. On June 4, 1940, after the defeat at Dunkirk, he had to rally a disheartened country, where many people were suspicious of him and his conduct of the war. As he came to his peroration, he said: ‘We shall fight them on the beaches. We shall fight them on the landing grounds. We shall fight them in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender.’ In those 30 words there is only one obviously French-derived word and that is surrender. It is the final irony of Macron’s ‘loan’ that the Bayeux Tapestry is really ours anyway – in the sense that it was almost certainly made in this country. It is a masterpiece of a specifically English type of embroidery called Opus Anglicanum [‘English work’] and was likely created by the women of Canterbury. They had no choice but to obey their Norman bosses, and to exaggerate – as the Tapestry does – William’s slender claim to the throne. It wasn’t their idea to make so much of the mysterious oath that Harold is seen swearing to William, while he was held captive in Normandy. They didn’t come up with ET FUGA VERTERUNT ANGLI. They knew that Harold had been elected by the Witenagemot, or parliament, and had the better claim. They just bowed their necks beneath the Norman yoke, though sometimes they barely understood what they were being asked to do. Among themselves they still spoke their mother tongue, and so did their children, which is why English itself was never beaten, and bounced back – eventually – to conquer the world. So, what should we give dear Emmanuel Macron, to thank him for his kind gesture? Let’s lend him those pistols of Napoleon – the ones that are in the library at Chequers – which, or so I was told, we confiscated from the Corsican tyrant… at the Battle of Waterloo. ANDREW NEIL: Our new PM needs to stop drivelling on about Manchester and get across the political earthquakes convulsing Rome, Paris and Berlin