KING HAROLD was inspired by the embroidered lettering on the famous Bayeux Tapestry.

The Tapestry was made c.1073-83 and records King Harold’s adventures and loss at the Battle of Hastings to William the Conqueror, with a special appearance by Halley’s Comet. It measures 230 feet long (69 meters) and is one of the great examples of Romanesque art.

Although armed with photographs, including some very good close-ups, I still wanted more detail to get the right feel. So I embroidered all the letters and numbers I needed, in imitation of the style of the original, and made the font from scans of my embroidery. I’ve included all the characters that appear on the Tapestry, plus those needed to fill out a modern font. (J, K, U, and Z do not appear in the original.)

At the left is the whole of the alphabet portion of my embroidery, which takes the form of a word-search puzzle containing at least 20 words related to the Tapestry. No prizes for finding them all!

King Harold font contains 214 defined characters and 201 unique glyphs.

The font contains characters from the following unicode character ranges: Basic Latin (93), Latin-1 Supplement (84), Latin Extended-A (10), Latin Extended-B (1), Spacing Modifier Letters (5), General Punctuation (14), Superscripts and Subscripts (1), Currency Symbols (1), Letterlike Symbols (1), Mathematical Operators (1), Private Use Area (2).

• Font Name:King Harold
• Subfamily:Regular
• Version:Macromedia Fontographer 4.1.3 2/21/09

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