The only Norman city to survive 1944 intact — where an 11th-century embroidered comic strip 70 metres long tells the story of the conquest of England, William the Conqueror is buried 30km away in Caen, and the D-Day beaches of Omaha and Gold begin at the city gate
Bayeux (14,000) in Calvados is the first French city liberated after D-Day (7 June 1944) and the only town in Normandy to escape the war without serious damage. The Bayeux Tapestry (c. 1077, UNESCO Memory of the World) is an embroidered panorama 70.34 metres long and 50cm tall — effectively the world's oldest graphic novel — depicting the events from the Norman conquest of England (1066) through the Battle of Hastings in extraordinary visual detail, with 58 scenes, 623 people, 202 horses, 49 trees, and 72 ships. The Cathedral Notre-Dame de Bayeux (begun 11th century) is where the tapestry was…
Bayeux was the seat of the Bessin people (a Gaulish tribe) and was Romanised as Augustodurum — a significant Roman city with a forum, theatre, and temples whose ruins underlie the medieval centre. After the Viking settlement of Normandy (911 CE), Bayeux became a Ducal capital of the Norse-descended Norman rulers; William the Conqueror likely spent his early years here. Bishop Odo of Bayeux (William's half-brother) commissioned the tapestry around 1077 for the dedication of Bayeux Cathedral — the embroidery was made, almost certainly, by Anglo-Saxon needleworkers in Canterbury, using a visual…