Bayeux tapestry arrives in London: 68 facts about medieval embroidery

The Bayeux Tapestry opened at the British Museum today, and almost nobody got a ticket. When sales began in July, the digital queue stretched nine hours long. The exhibition has already shattered the British Museum's single-day ticket sales record, a distinction that speaks less to the museum's marketing prowess than to the sheer gravitational pull of an object that hasn't left France in nearly a thousand years.

A few people did get in early. King Charles viewed it last Wednesday, as did Emmanuel Macron and Andy Burnham. Guests at One Aldwych, a hotel where rooms cost £1,000 a night, can purchase the "Bayeux experience"—a mead spritzer, a full English breakfast, and preferential ticket access. The rest of the country will queue for the privilege of seeing a piece of cloth that is, technically speaking, not a tapestry at all but an embroidery: 68.3 metres of linen stitched with woollen thread in ten colours, probably dyed with woad, madder, and indigo. It depicts the events leading to the Battle of Hastings in 1066, when William the Conqueror defeated King Harold. The embroidery contains 623 men, 190 horses, 35 dogs, 37 buildings, and 41 ships, all stitched by multiple women whose names history did not preserve.

The tapestry was almost certainly made in England, near Canterbury, though it was commissioned by Bishop Odo, William's half-brother, for his cathedral in Bayeux. Odo, the curator Michael Lewis notes, was prone to self-aggrandisement—he gave himself a starring role in the narrative. The nine panels were embroidered separately and then stitched together. Scholars estimate the work took between two and four years, though nobody knows for certain. Only three women appear in the finished piece, and none of them are having a good time: one weeps at her husband's deathbed, another flees a burning building, and a third is being assaulted by a priest. This third figure is named Ælfgyva, the only woman in the tapestry to receive a name. Scholars believe she may be Emma of Normandy, accused of an affair with the Bishop of Winchester.

The tapestry survived at least three fires in Bayeux Cathedral. It was nearly destroyed again in 1792, when French revolutionaries almost used it to cover a wagon—an official saved it by swapping it for canvas. In 1794, someone proposed cutting it into strips to decorate a festival float. A nineteenth-century British artist secretly snipped off two fragments that ended up in a London museum before being returned. In 1803, Napoleon moved it to Paris to hang in the Louvre as propaganda for his planned invasion of Britain. The Nazis later saw it as a tool to establish that Normans were descendants of Viking settlers. In 1944, Heinrich Himmler tasked two SS officers with seizing it from the Louvre basement. Local resistance fighters, tipped off by code breakers at Bletchley Park, intercepted the officers and protected the tapestry.

France refused to loan the tapestry to Britain twice before: once in 1953 for Queen Elizabeth II's coronation, and again in 1966 for the 900th anniversary of Hastings. In 2018, Emmanuel Macron announced at a summit with Theresa May that France had changed its mind. The decision sparked fierce opposition. Arts journalist Didier Rykner started a petition that gathered more than 70,000 signatures against the loan. David Hockney called it "madness." Two expert reports in 2021 and 2022 advised Macron against moving the tapestry at all. The object is extraordinarily fragile: a 2020 study found it had 24,204 stains, 16,445 wrinkles, 9,646 gaps in the cloth or embroidery, and 30 non-stabilised tears.

The transportation required extraordinary measures. The tapestry had to be stored lying flat and could not be subjected to vibrations greater than two millimetres per second. A team of conservators, including a German vibration technology scientist, designed a hinged folding screen on wheels called a paravent. It took ninety people in blue latex gloves seven hours to extract the tapestry from its case and transfer it to the paravent, which was then folded 28 times and placed in a specially manufactured crate with an outer aluminium shell designed to reduce movement impact. The art logistics firm Hizikia provided a customised reinforced truck to dampen vibrations. Two dry runs were conducted with a replica tapestry; data from these runs revealed that French roads are smoother than British roads. Two threads broke when the tapestry arrived in London.

The tapestry has been insured by the Treasury's indemnity scheme for £800 million—more than twice the value of the most expensive artwork ever sold at auction. At the British Museum, it will be housed in a custom-made case, believed to be the longest ever constructed, and exposed to a limited number of light hours per day at 50 lux, the international museum standard for sensitive materials. It will remain in London until July 2027, before returning to a newly built museum in Normandy. Philippe Bélavel, Macron's former culture adviser, has said such a loan will only happen once and never again. The next wave of public tickets, priced at £33, will go on sale on October 21 at 10am.