The wrong moustache in the Battle of Hastings

How and why did they get the facial hair so wrong in the new BBC 1066 drama King and Conqueror, and what did an actual Viking look like on the hair and beard front? Find out in my in-depth analysis of moustache-gate, framed, as is my wont, in the context of the Bayeux Tapestry.

The new 1066 drama King and Conqueror has been accused by numerous commentators of playing fast and loose with the historical narrative of the Norman Conquest. That’s a reasonable criticism, but on my assessment of the critiques of the series, the deepest opprobrium has been reserved for the facial hair fantasy.

Dad tache or bad tache?

The problem is that Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, as Duke William of Normandy, sports a bristling tache (memorably described by Lucy Mangan in the Guardian as a ‘1970s dad tache’ and in the Daily Mail as an Asterix look), while the upper lip of James Norton’s Harold Godwinson is unequivocally hairless.

That, as many experts have pointed out, is directly at odds with the Bayeux Tapestry. The famous 11^th-century embroidery, which provides the earliest visual representation of the 1066 story, quite clearly shows a moustachioed Harold and a clean-shaven William.

Harold’s facial hair in the Tapestry is in line with that of his Anglo-Saxon compatriots: they tend to (but don’t always) boast moustaches, some of which are thin and straggly, while others are impressive handlebar efforts. The Normans, on the other hand, lack upper lip action. The embroiderers were clearly following a style guide to try to offer a visual prompt to the viewer about which side the respective figures were on.

Menacing reverse mullet

It wasn’t just moustaches in the Tapestry that helped viewers to know who was on which team – the haircuts also offered a clue. The Normans often had curious shaved necks, which, in the words of the great Tapestry scholar Professor Gale Owen-Crocker were ‘sometimes accompanied by a menacing lock of hair at the forehead’, or a ‘reverse mullet’ as Dr Thomas Williams has fabulously described it. The English generally had a decidedly less scary bowl-cut bob sort of look going on. This was significant because one of the things with the Bayeux Tapestry is that it doesn’t give you very much information in the captions to describe what’s occurring and who is doing what, so you needed these visual hints to keep up with the story.

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Aside from the moustache debacle, King and Conqueror doesn’t, for my money, capture the spirit of the Bayeux Tapestry with the barnets either. Norton’s haircut isn’t quite dorky enough, and Coster-Waldau’s isn’t really as shavenly intimidating as it ought to be. Maybe Luther Ford’s Tostig Godwinson gets closest to a Tapestry look with his bowl-cut (though Tostig himself does not specifically appear in the embroidery, so I’m generalising about the Anglo-Saxon vibe).

I haven’t seen any explanation in the crew interviews for the TV series for this obvious diversion from the historical facial hair facts. However, I do note that Norton had originally hoped to play William. His plan, apparently, was scuppered by a contractual obligation with HBO that he could only appear in King and Conqueror if his character died. That legal stipulation ruled out the option of him appearing as the Norman Duke, who does not die at Hastings, and left him little choice but to take on the ill-fated Harold instead, who famously does. So maybe they just forgot who was supposed to grow the tache after that.

Manly strength, modernity and bravery

I do understand this level of moustache anxiety, particularly in these days of hipster facial hair. I’m reminded of a great HistoryExtra article from the eminent beard historian Dr Alun Withey on moustache matters. He said, “Like many other facial hair styles, the moustache has a long and complicated history. In some periods it has symbolised manly strength, modernity and bravery; in others it was decried as an affectation of fey young men. It’s easy to write facial hair off as something that is quirky or irrelevant, but it often tells us a very great deal about individual men across time, as well as shifting attitudes towards masculinity and the male body.”

Having established the importance of facial hair, I’m surprised that not many people have been exercised by the chin of Eddie Marsan’s Edward the Confessor in King and Conqueror. Marsan’s simpering mother-beaten monarch is very different from the Bayeux Tapestry version, because the embroidered king wears a long flowing beard. I know Marsan can grow facial hair because he was bearded in his depiction of noted canoe conman John Darwin in an ITV drama a few years ago, so again, the King and Conqueror team have apparently made a deliberate decision to ignore the evidential pogonotrophy of the Bayeux Tapestry. I can only assume that they figured Marsan with a beard wouldn’t look as weak-willed as they wanted his King Edward to be.

Someone who is clearly tooled up to look intimidating in King and Conqueror is the Norwegian King Harald Hardrada, played by Sveinn Ólafur Gunnarsson. He is resplendent with a big brash beard that Brian Blessed would be proud of. Hardrada’s invasion, accompanied by King Harold’s disaffected brother Tostig, is the preliminary story to the Norman Conquest (and if you want the full story, watch my chat with Marc Morris all about it on the HistoryExtra YouTube channel). Harold’s victory over his brother and the mighty Hardrada at the battle of Stamford Bridge would have been the stuff of legend if it wasn’t overshadowed by his own defeat and death a few days later at the hands of William and the Normans at Hastings. The Tapestry devotes zero attention to the Hardrada story so we cannot say whether the King and Conqueror depiction of a big beardy Viking is accurate.

Actual Viking facial hair evidence

However, and this is breaking news, an archaeologist at the National Museum of Denmark, Peter Pentz, has just published some research on a remarkable Viking period figurine, which gives us a very rare glimpse of what a Viking hair style actually looked like. Granted it’s from the 10th century rather than the 11th, and obviously sartorial trends can move fast, but nevertheless, it’s a good insight. The little figurine, currently on display in the Viking Sorceress exhibition at the museum in Copenhagen, has a middle parting with a side wave that leaves the ear visible, while the hair has been cropped at the back. Plus he’s got a large moustache, a long, braided goatee and sideburns. It’s some look, and according to Peter Pentz, it’s quite a find:

“Hitherto, we haven’t had any detailed knowledge about Viking hairstyles, but here, we get all the details – even the little curl above the ear is marked. This is the first time we see a figure of a male Viking with his hair visible from all angles. It’s unique”.

Hardrada, in King and Conqueror, isn’t quite aligned with this Viking look, given that he has a full beard rather than tache, goatee and sideburns, but this research has only just come to light, so we can let the producers of the series off on that one at least.

• Read more | How historically accurate is King and Conqueror? Here’s the real history that should have happened

What’s interesting, I think, is to dwell briefly on whether we are reading far too much into these Bayeux Tapestry haircuts and moustache designs. Might perhaps we better assume that the designer and embroiders were simply trying to remind the viewers about who was English and who was Norman, as I mentioned above, and not really be attempting to represent the hairy reality of the day?

As the noted scholar of Old English Dr Thijs Porck pointed out in this excellent blog post a few years ago, the early 11th-century Anglo-Saxon religious writer, Ælfric of Eynsham, had cause to write a letter of complaint, admonishing his fellow monks for adorning themselves ‘in Danish fashion, with bared neck and blinded eyes’. That shaved back of neck and hair flopping over the eyes sounds quite a lot like the Norman look in the Bayeux Tapestry, and not dissimilar to what we can see in the Viking figurine. So maybe both the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans were trying to look scarily Viking in the 11th century, and the Tapestry has slipped us a red herring by making out that the two groups adopted different hair styles. Maybe moustache-gate is simply an overly-literal reading of the embroidery.

As Marc Morris has noted, however, there is other documentary evidence besides the Tapestry to suggest that there were stylistic differences in hair and face between Normans and English. William of Poitiers recorded how the French and Normans 'looked with curiosity' at the long-haired English hostages that the Conqueror brought home with him in 1067, and other sources do point to the Normans being clean-shaven and the English wearing facial hair.

One final point on faces, moustaches and hair is this: quoting Professor Owen-Crocker once more, ‘No-one ever looks happy in the Bayeux Tapestry’. The range of facial expressions in the embroidery are limited, though Harold does look notably downtrodden when he’s making his famous oath in the presence of Duke William in Bayeux. So, if we’re being picky about facial hair and divergence from the Tapestry, we ought also to criticise King and Conqueror for allowing its characters to smile on occasion, because that really isn’t in the spirit of the embroidery.

If you want to know more about the Bayeux Tapestry, feel free to have a scan of The Story of the Bayeux Tapestry, by myself and Professor Michael Lewis.

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