1066 and all that, then a Norman needling

As governments on each side of the Channel quarrel about the political issues of the day, a more academic battle looks set to flare up - over whether the Bayeux Tapestry was made in England or France.

The prevailing theory is that the famous tapestry, which depicts the Battle of Hastings in 1066, was the work of Anglo-Saxon seamstresses in Canterbury.

But George Beech, emeritus professor of medieval history at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, claims that the Bayeux Tapestry is the work of a French embroidery school.

In a book due to be published next month, Professor Beech suggests that William the Conqueror commissioned the tapestry from another William, the Abbot of Saumur, around 1070 as a celebration of military victory. "The Saumur workshop must have been known to the Normans, while there is no evidence at all of a workshop in Canterbury at this time," he said.

The Abbot was formerly Lord of Dol - a town key to William's campaign in Brittany in 1064. If the tapestry were a product of Abbot William's workshop, then it would explain the mysterious prominence of the Breton campaign in the tapestry.

Professor Beech's theory is likely to draw fire from academics true to the conventional view of the Bayeux Tapestry's origin.

Elisabeth Van-Houts, medieval historian at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, said she thought the theory was implausible. "I think it far fetched. Why would William the Conqueror commission work so far from where he was based?"

With no firm evidence, the theory that William's brother, Odo, commissioned the work from Canterbury's embroidery school was the most plausible, she said.