Reading Museum’s Bayeux Tapestry: The Victorian Copy and the 35 Women Who Made It

There are two Bayeux Tapestries worth seeing in England in 2026.

One is the eleventh-century embroidery now attracting enormous attention at the British Museum. The other is in Reading, less famous but far more interesting than the word replica makes it sound.

Reading Museum’s full-size copy was made in 1885–86 by 35 women associated with the Leek Embroidery Society. It was intended to reproduce the medieval original as faithfully as Victorian materials and the evidence available to them allowed. In the process, it became something else as well: a record of how late-Victorian Britain encountered, copied and sometimes accidentally altered one of the most important visual sources for 1066.

That makes it worth looking at in its own right.

Why Reading has a Bayeux Tapestry

The project began with Elizabeth Wardle. She was an experienced embroiderer and a leading figure in the Leek Embroidery Society in Staffordshire, founded in 1879. Her husband, Thomas Wardle, was a silk dyer and industrialist with a serious interest in historic textiles and natural dyes.

Elizabeth visited Bayeux in 1885 and came away convinced that Britain should have a full-size copy of the embroidery telling the story of the Norman Conquest. That was an ambitious idea. The original is roughly 70 metres long. Copying it meant reproducing hundreds of figures, horses, ships, weapons, buildings, inscriptions, border animals and tiny details over a strip longer than many houses.

The Leek Embroidery Society took it on.

According to Reading Museum’s history of the replica, 35 women worked on the project. They came not only from Leek but from Derbyshire, Birmingham, Macclesfield and London. Each woman stitched her name beneath the panel she had completed. The work was finished around Whitsuntide 1886, only a little over a year after the project began.

That detail matters. We tend to talk about historical artefacts as if they simply appeared. Here the makers are literally named underneath their work.

Thirty-five women and one enormous job

The scale is easy to underestimate until you see it. The copy is not a shortened teaching version. It is a full-size recreation of the surviving embroidery.

Elizabeth Wardle organised the work, but it was collective. Reading Museum’s records name all 35 embroiderers. Other people helped prepare the material: drawings had to be made, sections organised, wool supplied and the separate pieces joined into a continuous whole.

Thomas Wardle produced woollen yarns intended to match the colours of the original. The group tried to reproduce the stitching, forms and palette closely rather than creating a loose Victorian interpretation.

There is something very practical about the whole exercise. Thirty-five people had to copy a huge object in sections while keeping scale, colour and alignment consistent. Anyone who has tried to get several people to produce one supposedly identical piece of work will recognise the problem.

The result was first exhibited at the Nicholson Institute in Leek in June 1886. It then travelled widely around Britain and went abroad to Germany and the United States. In 1895 it was shown in Reading Town Hall. Former mayor Arthur Hill bought it and presented it to the town, giving the copy its permanent home.

They did not work from the original

This is where the story becomes much more interesting.

The Leek embroiderers did not spend a year sitting in front of the medieval embroidery in Bayeux. Their principal visual source was a set of hand-coloured photographs held by the South Kensington Museum, today the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Those photographs had their own history. In 1872 the British photographer Edward Dossetter was sent to Bayeux to photograph the entire embroidery for the South Kensington Museum. The V&A’s account of the project describes how Dossetter recorded the work in full. The images were later coloured and annotated.

So the Reading copy sits at the end of a chain:

medieval embroidery → nineteenth-century photograph → hand-coloured and annotated image → Victorian embroidery.

Every stage creates the possibility of losing, simplifying or altering information. That does not make the Reading copy worthless. Quite the opposite. It makes it a fascinating historical object in its own right, because it preserves what Victorian scholars believed they were seeing in the original during the 1870s and 1880s.

The famous Victorian underpants

One detail has become part of Bayeux Tapestry folklore.

The borders of the medieval embroidery contain several nude male figures. On Reading’s version, one of them wears a pair of modest little trousers.

It is often told as a story about prudish Victorian women being unable to reproduce medieval nudity. That is not what happened.

Reading Museum makes the point very clearly: the Leek embroiderers copied what was in front of them. The South Kensington Museum photographs they used had already been cleaned up. The alteration had been made by male museum staff before the women began their work.

In other words, the famous pants tell us less about the sensibilities of the 35 embroiderers than they do about the way a Victorian museum mediated the past before passing the image on.

It is a small detail, but it is a useful warning. A copy can faithfully reproduce an earlier mistake.

A copy that may preserve colour the original has lost

There is another twist.

In August 2026 Reading Museum published a direct comparison between the Reading copy and modern images of the original. It found that some colours recorded in the nineteenth-century source photographs have since faded on the medieval embroidery.

That means there are places where the Victorian copy may preserve evidence of how the original looked before another century and a half of fading.

Reading Museum gives the example of a tree reproduced in blue on the Victorian copy which appears green today on the original, with a restored white area. Other colour differences raise harder questions: did the Victorian embroiderers misread annotations, did they have different thread available, or has the original changed?

We cannot assume that every difference means the replica is right. But neither can we assume that the medieval object as it appears in 2026 looks exactly as it did in 1885, let alone around 1070.

That is why the two objects are useful together.

What the Reading copy can — and cannot — tell us about 1066

The Reading embroidery is not an independent eleventh-century witness. It cannot settle arguments about Harold’s death, Norman cavalry tactics or the exact shape of the English shield wall.

For those questions, the starting point remains the original embroidery alongside written evidence, archaeology, landscape and later scholarship. Our own Bayeux Tapestry investigation looks specifically at what the medieval images can safely tell us about the battle and where interpretation starts to outrun the evidence.

But the Reading copy does have real evidential value.

It records the state of the original as it was photographed in the 1870s. It preserves Victorian readings of colour and detail. It shows which features were clear enough to be copied and which were obscured by photography, display cases or interpretation. And because the makers signed their work, it gives us an unusually human record of the people who recreated the object.

It is therefore evidence about two periods at once: the Norman Conquest and the Victorian rediscovery of it.

Why it matters in 2026

The timing could hardly be better.

The original Bayeux embroidery has come to the British Museum in 2026, the first time it has returned to England since it was made nearly a thousand years ago. Reading’s copy, meanwhile, celebrates its 140th anniversary this year and remains on permanent display in the museum’s Bayeux Gallery.

Reading Museum is also part of the wider Year of the Normans 2026–27 programme. For visitors interested in 1066, it creates an unusual opportunity: see the medieval original in London, then see the Victorian copy in Reading and compare what survived, what faded and what nineteenth-century eyes thought they saw.

Reading Museum itself points out that the two are less than an hour apart on the Elizabeth Line. That makes this one of the rare occasions when a copy is not merely the substitute you see because the original is somewhere else. It becomes part of the experience.

Then put the embroidery back into the campaign

The Bayeux Tapestry is famous enough to distort the story around it. It begins before Hastings and ends with the defeated English fleeing the battlefield, but 1066 was a campaign, not one dramatic Saturday in October.

Harold Godwinson had already faced Harald Hardrada and Tostig in the north. The English army fought at Stamford Bridge, then turned south while William established his foothold on the Sussex coast. The battle at Hastings only makes full sense inside that sequence.

Our 1066 campaign guide follows the succession crisis, Fulford, Stamford Bridge, Pevensey and Hastings as one connected story. The Hastings battlefield guide then narrows the focus to the fighting itself.

That is the best way to use both Bayeux embroideries: not as decorative illustrations, but as sources that sit inside a much larger body of evidence.

Sources and further reading

Reading Museum — The History of Britain’s Bayeux Tapestry
Reading Museum — Comparing the Bayeux and Reading Tapestries
Reading Museum — The Year of the Normans 2026–2027
V&A — Photographing the Bayeux Tapestry
British Museum — Bayeux Tapestry exhibition

Related design: If you came here for the history first, the Bayeux 1066 T-shirt takes its cue from the embroidery and the Norman Conquest rather than a generic medieval motif.