For British schoolchildren, 1066 is a talismanic year: the year of the Norman Conquest, when a dispute over the royal succession transformed the entire structure of England.
William, the duke of Normandy — that’s whom Harold has gone abroad to meet — will cross the Channel himself in 1066, and rout Harold’s forces at the Battle of Hastings on Oct. 14. By Christmas, the foreigner will be crowned at Westminster Abbey, as William I of England. To posterity, he will be known as William the Conqueror. The conquest is reliably illustrated in those students’ textbooks with images of the Bayeux Tapestry, a 230-foot textile record of William’s victory.
It was stitched in the 1070s, historians believe, probably by secular English women working in Canterbury or nearby. Thereafter — no one knows when; uncertainty is going to be a theme here — it went to Bayeux, in northern France. It has taken nearly 1,000 years to bring it back to Britain, where until next July the tapestry is at the British Museum in an exhibition of unparalleled diplomatic significance.
King Charles III, who still signs the British Parliament’s bills into law in the Norman French of his predecessor, was on hand last week to inaugurate the exhibition. So was President Emmanuel Macron of France, who masterminded the loan as part of a post-Brexit détente.
To judge from the advance sales and the media saturation, Macron hit the mark. The first tranche of tickets (costing nearly $45) sold out in less than a day. The challenge of getting in now currently approaches Birkin bag-level difficulty.
The loan of the Bayeux Tapestry has been hyped as a once-a-millennium homecoming. And there is no denying that this is a national blockbuster, a British Museum triumph for a British audience. For locals, the tapestry can be seen as the rarest survivor of the country’s origin. Even the mnemonic that English children once learned to memorize their monarchs (“Willie, Willie, Harry, Stee…”) treats 1066 as England Year 1, and everything before as basically Arthurian legend.
But to my foreign eye, the only justification to move the Bayeux Tapestry — extremely fragile, and not very far from Britain to begin with — was as an instrument of 21st-century political reconciliation. Foot by foot, fiber by fiber, this is the material proof of England’s entwinement with the continent 21 miles from its coast.
In Bayeux, whose museum is under renovation, visitors have always seen the tapestry hung vertically. At the British Museum, it lies flat in a single vitrine, running nearly 230 feet in a long, dark gallery. There is basically no interpretation and, except for a smattering of coins and a manuscript or two, no other objects in the show. No audio guides, either, thank goodness. A minimal animation on the gallery’s longest wall points out highlights, translates some inscriptions and, most importantly, keeps crowds moving.
As you stoop over the Bayeux Tapestry in London, you get a better sense of its strangeness. For a start, it’s not actually a tapestry (which is woven) but an embroidery, stitched onto a long strip of linen. The colors of the wool display little logic. Horses are red or blue, armor changes shades, and even the Latin inscriptions can be multicolored. The action proceeds left to right — except when it doesn’t, in a flashback or two.
The imagery is straightforward, a little goofy and very accessible for kids, flowing left to right like a comic strip. Things can get especially weird in the upper and lower borders, filled often with foxes and pheasants with no direct narrative significance, but eventually filling up with battlefield casualties.
Strange, too, is its political and military spin. William’s supporters insisted that Edward had promised him the English throne; they insisted, too, that Harold had ratified that promise. Yet if the Bayeux Tapestry is a justification of the Norman claim to rule, it remains strangely sympathetic to the king William deposed. That lack of overt partisanship, and the sensitivity it will finally bring to the Battle of Hastings, makes this document of “English” history a very ambiguous skein.
As the tapestry proceeds into the climactic battle, it also grows denser, more turbulent.
The creamy linen fills up with repeated men and horses. The borders thicken, too, until they’re packed with archers and foot soldiers. It’s a visual panic attack, a crescendo I’d never appreciated before in reproductions — and which the accomplished exhibition catalog, reproducing the textile across 80 pages, cannot truly convey.
Walking the tapestry’s full length in London, I saw for the first time how the showdown between the Norman-led and English armies takes on the aspect of a civil war. If the battle is the fulfillment of a divine plan, there’s nothing beautiful about William’s victory, and the winners and losers can be hard to divide. That may help explain why the Bayeux Tapestry has become so mythologized in Britain. It is a record of conquest that, through the needles of nameless Englishwomen, is already effecting some kind of reconciliation.
The conquest that closes the tapestry utterly Frenchified England. The local earls were replaced by a new Norman aristocracy. England got a new church, led by Norman bishops. New saints. A new legal system. A new language, too, essentially: The conquest set in motion an absorption of French vocabulary and the ditching of Germanic grammar. (To cite the not entirely exaggerated claim of the French prime minister Georges Clemenceau: “The English language does not exist; it is badly pronounced French.”)
What began in 1066, as the Oxford historian Chris Wickham has written, was “the most complete destruction of a ruling class there has ever been in Europe, up until 1917.” That is the story of the Bayeux Tapestry: a story of total historical interruption that is also a decisive rebirth. Stitched in Kent, preserved in Normandy, the embroidery makes plain that heritage is never congruent with the ground beneath your feet. It ratifies, in wool, that English history is European history and every native is also a foreigner.
A million people may see it in London, though if you can’t get a ticket, it’ll be back in France next year, and probably for 1,000 years after that. It took a newer kind of interlacing before the British Museum show could happen. Only with the completion of the Channel Tunnel in the 1990s could the tapestry be transported safely and a loan like this become possible. The meaning lies all in threading things together, the translations and transformations of people on the move.
The Bayeux Tapestry Through July 11 at the British Museum, London; britishmuseum.org.
Produced by Alicia DeSantis, Ethan Hauser, Rebecca Lieberman and Maridelis Morales Rosado.
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