The story of this place
The 70-metre Bayeux Tapestry, embroidered around 1077, tells in vivid woollen scenes the Norman conquest of England: Duke William's invasion fleet, the Battle of Hastings in 1066, and the death of King Harold, apparently struck in the eye by an arrow. Even Halley's Comet, blazing overhead in 1066, is stitched into the cloth as an omen. Nearly nine centuries later Bayeux earned a new place in history as the first significant town liberated after D-Day, on 7 June 1944, escaping the destruction that levelled Caen. Charles de Gaulle gave his first speech on liberated French soil here on 14 June 1944.