Beat the stitch up! As tickets to see the Bayeux Tapestry go on sale for up to £33 a head, here’s how to see it for free (but without the rude bits!)

Dubbed the ‘blockbuster show of a generation’, it marks the return of the Bayeux Tapestry to the country for the first time in nearly 1,000 years.

However, the British Museum charges a £33 entry fee for just 40 minutes of viewing time when the exhibition opens in September.

If you think this is a seam, don’t despair: you can still watch the classic tale of William the Conqueror and the Battle of Hastings for half the price or nothing.

Thought to have been commissioned by William’s half-brother, Bishop Odo of Bayeux, the tapestry inspired many copies.

There is a Danish version, completed in 2015 by a group of Viking women in Jutland, which costs around £16 to visit. A new English version, erected by a fan of true crime documentaries, is also in production, and its progress is being followed by 13,000 enthusiastic followers on Facebook.

And then there’s a life-size replica from the 19th century in the Reading Museum; A magnificent replica with a fantastic history linking arts and crafts pioneer William Morris, Queen Victoria and former Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts. You can visit for free.

‘The original was a medieval masterpiece, but this tapestry is a masterpiece of the arts and crafts movement,’ says Brendan Carr, curator of community engagement at Reading Museum. ‘This makes it not merely secondary to Bayeux but a work in its own right.’

It should be acknowledged from the outset that the Reading version is missing a few salacious details from the original.

Part of the Bayeux Tapestry on display

The famous Bayeux Tapestry, which features 626 human figures, 190 horses, 33 buildings and 37 ships, also contains 93 penises, both horses and humans; none of these can be seen in the Victorian copy.

The driving force behind the 230ft Reading tapestry (more accurately described as embroidery, as in the original) was a formidable woman named Elizabeth Wardle.

She lived in the Staffordshire market town of Leek with her husband Thomas, a successful silk and textile manufacturer.

The Wardles’ colorful circle included Victorian celebrities such as William Morris and the artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, founder of the Pre-Raphaelites.

Most of Elizabeth’s married life was spent giving birth to and caring for 14 children before she suffered what was thought to be a breakdown. According to family legend, she regained her health after Thomas brought home embroidery for her to do.

Embracing this work with enthusiasm, Elizabeth founded the Leek Embroidery Society, which also helped develop her husband’s textile business.

Elizabeth counted Sir Philip Cunliffe-Owen, who ran the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A), among her many friends, and it was Cunliffe-Owen who first showed her photographs of the Bayeux Tapestry in 1885.

The idea of ​​processing a copy to England [could] The idea of ​​’having a copy of your own’ became an obsession. So she gathered more than 35 women together, divided them into different departments and put them to work.

‘These were not noble women like those who sewed the first tapestry,’ says Jan Messent, a well-known embroiderer and author of The Bayeux Tapestry Embroiderers’ Story.

Messent says that Leek needlewomen were ‘from the prosperous middle classes, the wives of merchants, businessmen and tradesmen’. And unlike the original, they all stitched their own names on it, so we know who embroidered what.’

The women’s deadlines were tight and stressful, with the completed work only to be exhibited a year later, in 1886. Elizabeth’s son later told the Reading Standard that ‘every minute of the day revolved around the making of the tapestry’. But the more serious problem turned out to be the source material.

Mia Hansson with a full-size replica of the Bayeux Tapestry in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire

Elizabeth Wardle (1834-1902) was an English embroiderer. In 1857 she married her distant cousin, silk dyer Thomas Wardle.

The women based their work on images provided by Joseph Cundall, who was commissioned by the government to capture the original tapestry in photographs. Only three copies of Cundall’s works survive; one of which belonged to the late Rolling Stone Charlie Watts. When he died, the Bayeux Museum bought him for £16,000.

Cundall’s photographic plates were hand-coloured by South Kensington Museum before being loaned to the Leek women to trace and copy. However, the coloring had blurred the different types of stitches used.

As Professor Gale Owen-Crocker, author of The Design of the Bayeux Tapestry, said: ‘The images in this copy are an accurate representation, but the stitches are not always.

‘To adapt Morecambe and Wise’s famous quote, they use the correct stitches but not necessarily in the correct order.’ There is also the question of the controversial nudity in the Reading tapestry. Or rather, its absence.

The Leek ladies cannot be blamed for the censorship: the responsibility for this lies with the South Kensington curators, who removed anything obvious when they hand-coloured the photographic plates.

Brendan Carr explains: ‘The stallions in the original were gelded and the men were covered. ‘There’s a particularly well-equipped gargoyle [in the original] A person who looks like he’s wearing a diaper because of his height.

‘So this is not the case of chaste Victorian ladies; They were male curators who thought they were protecting them.’

The Tapestry was finally unveiled on June 14, 1886, and quickly became a sensation. More than 1,200 people paid a shilling (about £8.50 today) to view it.

It toured nationally and exhibited in New York and Germany before returning to England for Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887.

Still, taking the tapestry on tour required a lot of work and expense. So when in 1895 alderman Arthur Hill (half-brother of National Trust founder Octavia Hill) offered £300 on behalf of the town of Reading, the Leek ladies eagerly accepted, except for Elizabeth, who was horrified by the deal.

The 19th-century life-size replica at Reading Museum has a fantastical history linking arts and crafts pioneer William Morris, Queen Victoria and the late Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts

“By this time, the tapestry’s fame had even reached Queen Victoria, who summoned Arthur Hill and the tapestry to Windsor Castle,” says Carr.

The monarch’s rather arrogant diary entry noted only that he had seen ‘a very interesting copy of the famous Bayeux Tapestry’. But when it comes to Bayeux, he appears to be alone in his pessimistic view.

‘Tapestry is the foundation of our heritage,’ says Owen-Crocker. ‘The Norman conquest changed ownership of the land, the Church and the language we speak. This is extremely important.’ Perhaps this is what fuels many reproductions.

The Danish version at Borglum Abbey in Jutland took nine women in the ‘Viking group’ (teachers, nurses, bank clerks and cleaners) 14 years to complete and remains faithful to the original (nudity and all).

Meanwhile, Jan Messent was commissioned by an embroidery company to create an ending to the original Bayeux work, as the last eight feet were lost.

‘Or there’s a possibility that the final scene was deliberately stolen as someone’s personal reward, perhaps during the French Revolution,’ he says.

His work, which was also exhibited at the reading exhibition, shows a victorious conqueror being crowned and ends with the words ‘omnes gaudent’ (“everyone rejoices”). ‘This is in the spirit of Bishop Odo’, but suggests that this may not include the Saxons.

If you’re a fan of the Normans and their Conquest, you can even buy your own Bayeux tapestry.

Embroiderer Mia Hansson from East Anglia has been working on a version since July 2016, documenting her progress for her 13,600 Facebook followers who enthusiastically comment on her posts. It will eventually go on sale.

Hansson, who also takes care of her disabled son, says she likes to watch true crime documentaries while sewing.

‘I have no interest in history, but I have loved embroidery since I was five years old, when my grandmother taught me,’ she says.

‘I have a quiet life, so I like to watch something gory while I’m sewing.’

The Bayeux Tapestry certainly has plenty of this. The only catch? With only 30ft to go, when the job is completed it will have involved 10,000 working hours and £1,200 in wool and fabric.

It will be auctioned with a reserve of £1 million; Which puts the British Museum’s £33 entrance fee into perspective.