A lot of you know that my son and I have a Valentine’s Day tradition of going to an aquarium. We’ve been to one in Brighton, Portsmouth, Chessington, and two in London. This year we missed Valentine’s Day by a week, but we still had our trip. Since we’ve gone to every aquarium nearby, we had to take three hours of trains to get to one in Hastings.
Hastings was already on our list of places that we wanted to go because of the Battle of Hastings, when William the Conqueror came up from Normandy and took over England. It’s taught a lot in school here, and we made a stop motion film about the battle with my son’s drawings for an assignment he once had.
I even had to learn about the Battle of Hastings for my Life in the UK test. It took place in 1066 and is detailed by the Bayeux Tapestry. The tapestry is only 20 inches tall, but it’s over 200 feet long. We got to see it at the British Museum while it’s on loan from the Bayeux Museum. There is a whole debate around whether King Harold died by an arrow through the eye, which is a pretty bizarre detail!
William the Conqueror also started the Domesday Book—it kept track of every citizen, their land, and their taxes. The government wanted all the money it was owed. But while it was started for financial reasons, it was the beginning of the idea of a census, which has become crucial for many countries, and I think as a math nerd, I loved learning about this as well.
Okay, enough history! Back to the trip.
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