With the Bayeux Tapestry commanding renewed attention at the British Museum, one of the defining episodes in English history is once again being examined under the microscope. Hand-stitched in Canterbury in the eleventh century, the nearly seventy-metre embroidery tells the story of the struggle for the English throne that culminated in William the Conqueror’s victory at the Battle of Hastings; however, as visitors to the exhibition may well already have noticed, its extraordinary richness lies partly in everything that surrounds that story. Animals, plants, tools, and scenes of everyday life fill the work alongside its kings, soldiers, and courtiers, sometimes illuminating the central narrative and sometimes raising questions of their own. One such detail is of particular interest to the Sustainable Eel Group and to the wider history of human relationships with the European eel. In the lower border of Scene 17, several eel-like shapes appear beneath Harold Godwinson as he crosses the River Couesnon near Mont-Saint-Michel, accompanied by a disproportionate figure attempting to catch one of them by its tail.

The scene occurs relatively early in the narrative, before Harold became king and whilst he is accompanying William of Normandy on a military campaign in Brittany. As the party passes the tidal limits of the Couesnon, men and horses struggle through dangerous sands, and Harold emerges as the hero of the episode, carrying one man on his back and pulling another to safety. The tituli, the Latin inscriptions embroidered into the Tapestry, reinforce what the image shows: ‘ET HIC TRANSIERUNT FLUMEN COSNONIS’, approximately meaning ‘And here they crossed the River Couesnon’; followed by ‘HIC HAROLD DUX TRAHEBAT EOS DE ARENA’, or ‘Here Duke Harold dragged them from the sand’. Harold is named and credited with the rescue, appearing here as a figure of considerable strength and authority. The image acquires additional significance from what follows, since the man accompanying William in Brittany will become King of England before facing him as an adversary at Hastings.

Beneath this display of strength, the creatures in the border have generated scholarly attention across disciplinary boundaries. The zoologist William Brunsdon Yapp, who studied the animals of the Bayeux Tapestry in detail, identified the six elongated forms as European eels and places them within a broader ‘aquatic theme’ running beneath the crossing of the Couesnon. In doing so, he rejected an earlier interpretation of them as snakes representing a constellation, pointing instead to their appearance, number, and position beneath the river scene, and described the neighbouring figure idiomatically as ‘catching one of the eels by the tail’. Yapp was cautious about explaining what this might mean, suggesting that the episode could refer to a story that has since been lost and warning more broadly against the temptation to turn every creature in the Tapestry’s borders into a coded symbol. The eels can belong quite naturally to the watery world being depicted, by his account, even if their arrangement leaves open the possibility that a medieval viewer might have recognised something more compelling.

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Their placement directly beneath the English king makes that possibility particularly intriguing: in the main register, Harold has a secure hold on two men; immediately below, another figure has taken an eel by its tail, with all the slipperiness and uncertainty that such an action implies. Jill Frederick has explored this juxtaposition in relation to the Tapestry’s presentation of Harold, whose apparent command at the Couesnon precedes his brief possession of the English throne and eventual defeat, arguing that a mirror effect invites reflection here. A further association lies in the resemblance between ‘anguilla’, the Latin word for eel, and ‘Anglia’, meaning England. Several centuries later, the scholar Thomas Bradwardine would make that connection explicit when describing a mnemonic technique, advising his reader to imagine the King of England and “let him hold in his right hand an eel [anguilla] wriggling about greatly, which will give you ‘England’ [Anglia].” And whilst Bradwardine cannot tell us exactly what the Tapestry’s makers intended, the parallel is an evocative one: beneath the future King of Anglia, a man struggles to keep hold of ‘anguilla’, the wriggling personification of the English people.

Such imagery would have resonated with the society of early medieval England, where eels made up some fifty per cent of freshwater fish biomass and were a familiar and economically important part of everyday life. Only twenty years after Hastings, William the Conqueror commissioned the great survey that became the Domesday Book, whose records reveal eel fisheries across England and payments in kind measured in hundreds or thousands of fish. Eels were caught for food, traded, used to generate income, and rendered as rent, making them part of an economy closely connected to the productivity of rivers, marshes, and wetlands. That familiarity provides an important context for the imagery of the Tapestry, since an eel did not have to be a real animal or a metaphor: its recognisable characteristics could make it useful for humour, storytelling, wordplay, or political allusion precisely because people knew the animal so well. The creatures beneath Harold could belong naturally to the Couesnon whilst also carrying associations drawn from a much wider experience of living alongside eels than might be expect in today’s climate.

The European eel, A. anguilla, is now a species of serious conservation concern, and its recovery depends on decisions about fisheries, trade, migration routes, habitat, and the management of the waterways on which eels and people continue to depend. At the same time, its social, cultural, and economic significance remains part of that conservation story, and understanding these connections is important to the Sustainable Eel Group’s approach to balancing environmental recovery with responsible use and the interests of communities associated with the species. The Bayeux Tapestry brings many of these strands together within a remarkably small detail, placing the eel within a river, an economy, a language, and perhaps even a political story. As the Tapestry draws new audiences at the British Museum, Scene 17 offers a vivid reminder that the European eel has occupied a place not only in Europe’s waters, but in the lives and imaginations of its people for close to a thousand years.