BORIS JOHNSON: Never mind the Bayeux Tapestry, it’s just French propaganda… Here’s proof it was ENGLAND wot won the Battle of Hastings

I don’t want to seem the least bit ungrateful to my old friend Emmanuel Macron for lending us the Bayeux Tapestry, which arrived in London yesterday.

In fact, if you can get tickets, I highly recommend you go to the British Museum and see it for yourself, because you will discover that it is a magnificent work of art unlike anything else in the world.

Go and check out those colorful horses and strange medieval people with twisted necks and fingers waving like sea anemones.

Take out the Latin parts of the picture titles, as I did more than 30 years ago when, on a glorious cider-filled afternoon, I found myself almost alone in the Bayeux Museum in Normandy.

As you walk from left to right, you’ll realize that the French president’s generous gesture was actually a cruel joke – or should that be a crew joke – played on us. It is a bare-faced cheek piece. Il nous tire la jambe, mes amis!

He could lend many wonders to the British Museum as a sign of the friendship between our countries.

He could borrow the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo, or the Obelisk from the Place de La Concorde, which would look magnificent in the UN forecourt.

Instead he gave us 230ft of blatant political propaganda about how the British were beaten by the French and how they deserved to be beaten! The images make the point clear enough and the message is hammered into place by the text.

What do you mean you don’t know Latin? Yes like that.

It says: HIC FRANCI PUGNANT meaning ‘Here the French are fighting’; and a little later he says – in a withering tone – ET FUGA VERTERUNT ANGLI. Which, I’m afraid, means: ‘And the English turned and fled.’

The Battle of Hastings was not just a battle that caught Harold’s attention; It was a national disaster.

Ask yourself this simple question: Who won in 1066, them or us? Aren’t they the answer?

The French won. We British suffered a great beating; Their heads and limbs were cut off by the invaders, a humiliation depicted in the Tapestry on the naked bodies of Harold’s housecarls**.

So there’s a very good reason why, almost 1,000 years later, we still feel a little conflicted about this.

In the words of historian John Gillingham, the Norman Conquest of England was ‘a disaster for the English’. ‘No other conquest has followed such a wholesale elimination of the old regime.’

All Anglo-Saxon elite – perhaps 4,000 or 5,000 thegn [an Anglo-Saxon aristocrat] – killed or dispossessed. They fled to Scotland, Denmark, and some to Ukraine.

Their buildings were destroyed, their culture destroyed, their laws and courts replaced with those of Norman France. For the purposes of criminal law, the British were turned into second-class citizens.

If a body was found in the village, under ‘English’ law the poor villagers had to prove that the victim was English and not Norman, otherwise they would all face cruel punishment.

Why were the Normans so cruel? Simple. They were a small minority.

Even when they all crossed in 1075, they constituted only one percent of the population; perhaps 15,000 out of a population of 1.5 million.

The British had been violently subjugated and robbed. But they were still there as a huge underclass, and this had very important psychological and linguistic consequences.

The language of the ruling elite naturally became French or Latin, and as Walter Scott famously pointed out, you can see the old class stratification in the culinary lexicon.

English peasants raised pigs that became pork for the Norman table. Ewes for mutton, calves for veal, etc. happened.

As English ceased to be the language of the ruling classes, English literature that had flourished before the Conquest was eclipsed for nearly 300 years.

English as a literary language only comes back to life with Chaucer in the 14th century – and during this period the great poet of the Canterbury Tales uses an incredible hybrid, a mixture of Anglo-Saxon and words of Norman or Latin origin.

It is as if two giant streams of words have merged to create a super river: this is one of the reasons why English is by far the largest modern language, with around 600,000 words (German has about 300,000, French has 200,000, Chinese has 100,000, etc.).

This is because English is essentially two languages ​​in one, with many shades of meaning and many puns.

But the important political point is that the structure and essence of the language is English. English is not borrowed French; quite the opposite. This is due to the extremely unstable demographic reality of the Norman Conquest.

To date, there is a golden rule of political speeches or interviews. If you want to distract, confuse, or generally be despised by your audience, use as many French-derived or Latin-derived words as possible.

But if you want to be on the Today show and make sure people are actually listening to what you have to say, use the shortest, simplest, most Anglo-Saxon words you can find. What emerges are old, short words.

They are English words that speak to people’s hearts.

Churchill understood this. On June 4, 1940, he had to rally a disheartened country after the defeat at Dunkirk, where many were suspicious of him and his conduct in the war.

When it came to his speech he said: ‘We will fight them on the beaches. We will fight them on the landing sites. We will fight them in the fields and streets. ‘We will never surrender.’

Among these 30 words, there is only one word that is obviously derived from French, and that is submission.

The final irony of Macron’s ‘loan’ is that the Bayeux Tapestry is actually ours, so it is almost certainly made in this country.

It is a masterpiece of a special type of English embroidery called Opus Anglicanum. [‘English work’] and was probably created by women from Canterbury.

They had no choice but to obey their Norman patrons and exaggerate William’s tenuous claim to the throne, as Tapestry had done. It was not their idea to make such a big deal about the mysterious oath in which Harold was seen swearing at William while he was held captive in Normandy.

They did not find ET FUGA VERTERUNT ANGLI. They knew that Harold had been elected by the Witenagemot, or parliament, and had the better claim. They bowed their necks under the Norman yoke, although sometimes they barely understood what they were asked to do.

They still spoke their native language among themselves, and so did their children; That’s why the English were never defeated and eventually came back to conquer the world.

So what should we give to our dear Emmanuel Macron to thank him for his kind gesture?

Let us lend him Napoleon’s pistols, which are in the library at Checkers, or, as I am told, we confiscated from the Corsican tyrant at the Battle of Waterloo.