Friday 25 April, 2025

HistoryExtra Podcast invites listeners to join in debate on the number of penises in the famous Norman Conquest embroidery.

Bayeux Tapestry scholar and expert on Anglo-Saxon nudity, Dr Christopher Monk, has told HistoryExtra Podcast that there is a missing penis from the current total.

It comes after Professor George Garnett, of St Hugh’s College at the University of Oxford, first published his findings on the 93 penises he found in the tapestry on HistoryExtra.com in 2018. But now, Monk argues he has discovered a 94th.

In Professor Garnett’s original count, the human genitals are all attached to naked figures, but there is one contested depiction of a running man with something hanging low beneath his tunic. Garnett is firm in his view that this is a scabbard of a sword or dagger, but Monk on the other hand, is sure it is indeed his manhood.

“I am in no doubt that the appendage is a depiction of male genitalia – the missed penis, shall we say? The detail is surprisingly anatomically fulsome”, says Monk.

Following Professor Garnett’s original finding, this week he featured on the HistoryExtra Podcast, discussing the historical world’s reaction to his original count and why there are so many penises in the Tapestry.

“I think my academic colleagues were mostly very entertained,” Garnett revealed. “One of them said to me, ‘You’re not a historian of masculinity; you’re a historian of masculinities, 93 of them.”

Despite the jokes and the media attention, Garnett insists that his work is not about sensationalism – it is about understanding medieval minds.

“The whole point of studying history is to understand how people thought in the past,” he says. “And medieval people were not crude, unsophisticated, dim-witted individuals. Quite the opposite.”

Garnett, following a rich academic tradition of counting items in the Tapestry, tallied up the number of penises and even identified the largest genitalia as that of Duke William of Normandy’s horse.

To join in the debate on whether the Tapestry does have 93 or 94 penises, you can listen to Professor Garnett’s HistoryExtra Podcast here. Subscribers to HistoryExtra can also listen to an exclusive bonus interview with Dr Christopher Monk, where he talks about attitudes to Anglo-Saxon sex, and outlines his theory on the missing penis. HistoryExtra is inviting the public to offer thoughts on the ‘missing penis’ on its social media channels.