There are, admittedly, more obvious places in which to go looking for William the Conqueror. Bayeux would be one. The British Museum, currently showing the original embroidery on its historic loan from France, would be another, assuming one is prepared to participate in what one visitor recently described as “Glastonbury for the over-60s”. Or, there is Reading. Three or four minutes on foot from The Roseate Reading, inside the gloriously municipal Reading Museum, is Britain’s Victorian Bayeux Tapestry: roughly 70 metres of the surviving story, recreated at full scale. No scrum around Harold’s eye; no stranger’s shoulder advancing inexorably into your field of vision just as William lands at Pevensey. Admission, magnificently, is free.
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