Chine McDonald reflects on national identity following a visit to the Bayeux Tapestry. What story about Britain we are telling? 15/10/2026

Last month, my family and I went to see the Bayeux Tapestry at the British Museum – back in the UK for the first time in nearly 1,000 years. As we side–stepped along the 70–metre historic textile, we pointed out the iconic scenes to the kids: Harold’s mysterious oath to William, Duke of Normandy, the death of King Edward, the invasion by the Normans, Halley’s comet, and the bit where Harold (supposedly) gets shot in the eye (my boys’ favourite, of course).

The fact that tickets for the exhibition sold out so quickly when they went on sale in July (generating £2.5m of sales for the British Museum on that day) tells us something about the very human desire to witness history, and perhaps pay homage to the ingenuity of human creativity. The Bayeux Tapestry is a story of honour and power and wealth and poverty and destruction and faith. Created in the aftermath of the Battle of Hastings and during what historian Janina Ramirez describes as “an ongoing mission to destroy English identity”, viewing it felt particularly poignant in this moment in which we are exploring the fabric of national identity. What does it mean to be British? What does it mean to be English, or Scottish, or Welsh or Northern Irish? What does it mean to be us?

There has been much debate over the past few weeks, following former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Sunday Times article, in which he questioned those who questioned his Englishness. In 2025, podcaster Konstantin Kisin had claimed that Sunak could not be described as English on account of him being “a brown–skinned Hindu”. But Sunak wrote in his column:

“We cannot have a situation where people who live here, who feel British, who embrace our culture and embody our values, who strive to be the best members of society they can be, are marked down because you won’t find their name in the Domesday Book.”

Fellow Conservative Jacob Rees–Mogg also pushed back on defining Englishness purely in ethnic terms, while Reform’s Suella Braverman said that Englishness is an ethnic identity not just a nationality, and counted herself out. (I realise I’m oscillating between English and Britishness here, but this itself is part of what makes the debate a tricky one). As a brown immigrant myself, I would say… it’s complicated. I understand the need to have a sense of place and a people to whom we belong; and in conversations around national identity, we do risk reducing Englishness simply to “liking tea”, as my colleague Dr Nick Spencer put it at our event on faith and democracy at Westminster Abbey last month. But if the Bayeux Tapestry tells us anything, it tells us about the complicated history of these islands. A history of conquest, migration, assimilation, conflict and relationship. It doesn’t mean Britishness means nothing, nor that a nation doesn’t need a common story into which its people can place themselves. This makes the question of who gets to tell that story, and who gets written into and out of it, all the more important.

The tapestry is widely believed to have been commissioned by Bishop Odo, half–brother of William the Conqueror. He would have had the means to pay for it, and would have shaped how the story of the Norman Conquest was told in it.  It can be read as a very effective piece of propaganda, into which Odo placed himself as a central figure, weaving himself into the story of England. Most notably presenting himself as a Christ–like figure at the head of a dinner table resembling the Last Supper. If we read Bishop Odo’s prominence as symbolic of Christianity’s presence in the story of England, then what exactly does this presence represent: genuine faith, political power, or both? What is the relationship between Christianity and Englishness, or more widely – Christianity and Britishness? What role has Christianity played in the shaping of our nation?

This is the complicated question we have explored in our new  study on Christianity and nationhood Beyond “Christian Nationalism”: Measuring attitudes to Christianity and Britishness today. Led by our Senior Fellow Dr Nick Spencer, it provides a useful framework into which we can discuss ideas of Christianity and nationhood, and where they overlap.  

For me, the question isn’t simply about who gets to count as British, but rather, what story about Britain we are telling. Who is at its centre? Who remains at its edges? Who gets to belong to its past, and who gets to – in the words of Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor – “survive the future”. As Lin Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton puts it:

Who lives

Who dies

Who tells your story?

What struck me looking at the pictures sewn into fabric by anonymous skilled embroiders (some theories suggest these may have been English nuns) was the stories they might have been telling us in the margins. The stories of the women, the stories of ordinary people experiencing violence and lives and homes and livelihoods lost in the ravages of war. But also the stories of what it is to be human in a changing and turbulent world.

A thousand years after the Bayeux Tapestry sought to tell a very particular story of the nation, we’re once again deciding how that story should be told, and who gets to see themselves stitched into its fabric.

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