As the Bayeux Tapestry comes to London, the year 1066 and the Norman Conquest are in the spotlight. The tapestry – an embroidered cloth nearly 70 metres long, created soon after the events it depicts – tells the story of the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and William of Normandy’s triumphant defeat of Harold Godwinson, King of England.

The tapestry depicts William of Normandy as the victor, and Harold as a slippery oath-breaker who promises the English throne to William then goes back on his word. But it shows little of the wider impact of the battle on English people – except for one glimpse, just after William’s ships land at Pevensey on England’s south-east coast, when we see a woman and child fleeing a burning building, torched by Norman soldiers.

So what did 1066 feel like from an English perspective? What was it like to live through the Norman Conquest? Remarkable English documents, written in the thick of events, give us an astonishing insight into the side of the story not depicted on the famous tapestry.

The battle on October 14 1066 had far-reaching consequences for England (and later, more of Britain), as the land passed into Norman control. By 1086, only 8% of the total landed wealth of England was still held by English people, with the other 92% in Norman possession. Language, culture and tradition were trodden under the feet of the new occupying force.

Even more than a century later, the Conquest remained a raw and open wound. Around 1196, the English monk William of Newburgh writes that, whenever it rains, the battlefield at Hastings “sweats real and seemingly fresh blood”.

But some English sources have the power to take us right back into 1066 itself.

Contemporary accounts

The Life of King Edward (Vita Ædwardi Regis), was written between 1065 and 1067 and so takes us through the Norman Conquest in real time. The Life was commissioned for the wife and widow of King Edward the Confessor, Edith, who was also the sister of his successor King Harold II. It was written in Latin, probably by a Flemish monk. It’s a clever piece of political spin, setting out to bolster Edward’s reputation – including his posthumous standing as an emerging new saint.

But, unexpectedly, The Life of King Edward finds itself in the teeth of the Norman Conquest, where it struggles to find words for the devastation that has struck England and its ruling dynasties.

Book I of The Life was completed before the Battle of Hastings and deals with the exploits of the powerful Godwin family, including Edith’s father, Earl Godwin of Wessex, and her brother, Harold – who caught an arrow in the eye (probably) at Hastings.

Book II of the Life opens in crisis and despair. In the silence between the books, the Battle of Hastings has happened. Now, Edith’s husband Edward and her brothers (Harold, Leofwine and Gyrth, as well as Tostig who died at Stamford Bridge) are dead, together with other English nobles and perhaps four thousand English fighters. England’s power lies in tatters.

The writer appeals to Clio, muse of history, for help, as he desperately searches for words. “Alas!” the text exclaims, “What will you say?”

What’s fascinating here is that we don’t actually get a direct account of 1066. Instead, the author of this text is dumbfounded. What we see is a writer reeling from this catastrophic blow to the English ruling elite, talking us through the impossibility of his attempt to chronicle it. Shocked silence speaks louder than words, letting us in on the trauma of the English defeat.

How can anyone articulate the horror that has just unfolded? “What madman,” the author asks, “could write of this?” And how can he present this book to his noble patron, Edith, when – instead of a celebration – it’s now a catalogue of personal loss and the kingdom’s ruin?

Today, the Bayeux Tapestry is incomplete, its final scenes lost long ago. Scholars presume it ended with a depiction of William’s triumphant coronation as King of England. The Life of Edward, instead, shows us an alternative ending: loss, grief and desolation for the English.

Moving to later, a generation after 1066, we find a more considered, deliberate response to the Norman Conquest from defiant English voices.

Monks at Peterborough Abbey continued making year-by-year additions to their monumental Chronicle of English history (often called the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle), written in monasteries across England since the time of King Alfred the Great.

On the death of William the Conqueror in 1087, the monks wrote an epitaph – a poem summing up the life of this mighty king and his legacy. The first line takes us straight inside the reality of life under Norman occupation.

Castelas he let wyrcean ond earme men swiðe swencean (He had castles built and wretched men sorely oppressed)

We glimpse the militarised landscape engineered by the Normans, with castles – their new technology of war and control – built across the country.

The Chronicle poem laments William’s “harshness”, his greed and cruelty to his people. Spitting with irony, it reflects on how he loved his royal forests, lavishing care on boars, hares and stags, while his destitute subjects would be blinded for killing a deer.

“Woe, alas,” the poem proclaims, “that any man should be so proud, / raise himself up and reckon himself over all men”. Just as William has tallied up his new possessions in England – the record of his lands and property in the great Domesday Book – the Chronicle poem takes its own cool and careful accounting to William’s life, and finds it wanting. This is guerrilla poetry, written in English, quietly holding out against the consequences of 1066.

Beyond the Bayeux Tapestry, these medieval documents remind us that every story has another side, and that history is not written only by the victors.

Catherine Clarke does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Egisto Ott is no James Bond. But the stories the 63-year-old Austrian told a Viennese jury recently would make good plotlines. Ott worked as an intelligence officer in Austria’s now-defunct Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Counterterrorism. He was also moonlighting for the Russians.

Prosecutors say Ott, who was sentenced to four years in prison on May 20, handed over information to fellow Austrian Jan Marsalek, the fugitive former executive of the collapsed payments firm Wirecard. Marsalek ran a cell of Bulgarians who were convicted in London in 2025 of spying for Russia. They called themselves the “minions”.

In 2023, the London Metropolitan police in cooperation with MI5 secured chat messages between Marsalek and the minions, which led to Ott. It turned out Ott had provided sensitive data on dissidents, investigative journalists and a Russian intelligence defector. The trial also revealed that Ott had obtained the infamous “canoe-trip-mobiles”.

In 2017, high-ranking Austrian civil servants went on a canoe trip in a tributary of the Danube River. They managed to fall into the water and had their phones sent in for repairs. Their mobile data was copied by Ott and subsequently ended up in Moscow, along with Marsalek’s favourite Viennese chocolate cake, a Sachertorte. According to the chat messages, the minions had a stressful time finding the correct one (there are rival Sachertorte recipes).

What sounds like a comic opera has a sinister backstory. Since the 1950s, Austria has hosted several international organisations that are regularly targeted by intelligence services. These include Opec (the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries), the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

However, Austria’s reputation as a spying hub dates back even longer. The Austrian capital, Vienna, was known for espionage before and after the second world war. Arnold Deutsch, the recruiter of the Cambridge Five spy ring that passed information to the Soviet Union, hailed from Vienna. Its leading light, Kim Philby, was also talent-spotted by Soviet intelligence in the city in 1933.

But Vienna was never just a playground for Soviet intelligence. After the war, when the city was divided into four sectors for allied occupation, the UK’s foreign intelligence service, MI6, started its most creative cold war operations. Peter Lunn, head of MI6’s Vienna station, built listening stations in the city to tap Soviet phone lines.

He hid his listening tunnels underneath ordinary shops in the British zone. The first tunnel was built beneath a police station. Later, MI6 built another tunnel under a jewellery shop and then installed intelligence officers posing as a young, rich couple in a Viennese villa. While they were partying upstairs, their colleagues listened in to Russian military traffic downstairs.

The only surviving witness of a listening station today is Sir Rodric Braithwaite, whom I first interviewed in 2024. As a 19-year-old conscript, Braithwaite worked with British Army Field Security in the Aspang listening station, next to the Aspang Bahnhof (a train station on the outskirts of Vienna).

It wasn’t an uplifting experience. He sat there for long shifts with earphones on, handling old equipment and pressing recording buttons. But his memories of the tunnel are valuable because to this day MI6 has not released any photos, let alone recordings, that were made during these operations.

The Third Man

They have also not revealed the details of another highly creative intelligence operation. In 1948, a British team arrived in Vienna to film The Third Man, a thriller set in the city. They were eager to shoot scenes in the Soviet sector.

Four key people involved in the making of the film were working for British intelligence: novelist Graham Greene, director Carol Reed, “Austria advisor” Elizabeth Montagu and, most importantly, producer Sir Alexander Korda. Korda’s film production company had been providing covers for British intelligence officers in Europe since the 1930s.

Whether the filming of The Third Man was connected to Lunn’s tapping operations, or whether MI6 had to smuggle something out of the Soviet sector, is a matter of conjecture. But “odd people” appeared on the set.

The film’s sound engineer, Jack Davies, remembered a British technician who turned up out of the blue. After filming, the technician vanished completely and Davies never came across him again – something rather unusual in the small world of British film technicians.

The script girl, Angela Allen, who I first interviewed for my book Das Haus am Gordon Place (Vienna ‘48) in 2024, also realised that something odd was going on. She noticed that Carol Reed was under enormous stress in Vienna and kept himself awake with Benzedrine. He stopped taking the drug once they were back in England, filming in London studios.

Allen, who is 97 now, wasn’t surprised to find out years later that Korda was working for the British intelligence services. She told me: “He had enormous charm. He could make his people do everything for him.”

Perhaps that is one reason why Ott and Marsalek failed. To succeed as a spy in Vienna, you need to be a great illusionist like Alexander Korda.

Karina Urbach’s book about spies in Vienna, Das Haus am Gordon Place (Vienna ’48), won the German crime award. Her interviews with Angela Allen and Sir Rodric Braithwaite can be watched here: https://vimeo.com/1086100608