The Bayeux Tapestry’s Long Journey Home
In July, in northern France, an enormous folding screen was stored in a crate, which was suspended in a cage, which was delicately loaded into a special truck, which was accompanied by a police convoy as it made for the English Channel. At the center of this operation was the Bayeux Tapestry, an ancient wall hanging that narrates, over the course of two hundred and twenty feet, the Norman conquest of England, in 1066. Likely for the first time in French history, the tapestry was travelling to England. Or, as the English said, it was coming home.
We English think this is spiffing. Norman rule helped shape both our churches and our laws, not to mention the language that this sentence is written in. The year 1066 is considered the start of our national story, and, though the tapestry has been held in Bayeux, France, for centuries, it was likely made in England, by and for people who lived through the conquest. This month, the embroidery—“tapestry” is a misnomer, since the work was stitched onto cloth, not woven on a loom—will be put on display in the British Museum, where it will be laid flat, in a custom-made case, in a huge room. The curators are expecting at least seven hundred thousand visitors over ten months. When tickets went on sale, the digital queue was nine hours long.
Among the French, the mood is anxious. The tapestry’s early life is shrouded in mystery, but it seems to have led a fameless existence in Bayeux for hundreds of years. After coming to the attention of antiquarians, in the early eighteenth century, the tapestry’s renown grew, and its compound identity allowed both the French and English to claim it as their own. When Napoleon was prospecting an invasion of England, he hung it in the Louvre, supposedly to inspire the nation. After Allied forces invaded Normandy, the cover of this magazine was mocked up in Bayeux-style stitching.
Until recently, British efforts to secure a loan had met with little success. When Emmanuel Macron revived the idea, in 2018, a curator at the Bayeux Museum insisted that moving the frankly archeological textile was, conservationally speaking, inconceivable. Just eighteen months ago, the prefecture of Calvados, where the tapestry resides, uploaded a video that reportedly emphasized this point. (The video has since been taken down.) Yet the tapestry belongs to the French state, which made it Macron’s to lend. Last summer, an arts journalist named Didier Rykner started a petition against the loan, and quickly garnered more than seventy thousand signatures. When I called Rykner from London, he told me that the tapestry was more culturally important for the English than for the French. “That’s no excuse,” he added quickly. “The more important it is for you, the less O.K. you should be with it being moved.” Immaculate logic, yet somehow it isn’t so.
Certainly, this is not a textile that can be easily replaced. In the last three centuries, scholars have unearthed a few morsels—a description in an old poem of a similar tapestry; some rare Scandinavian textiles—that provide at least fragmentary context for the artifact’s existence. In reality, though, this object is one of one. Precious little of anything survives from a millennium ago, let alone textile, let alone narrative textile, hundreds of feet of it, unfolding in scene after scene with the colors still crisp. The British government’s indemnity scheme has insured the tapestry for an estimated billion dollars.
For sheer curatorial jeopardy, the closest comparison is the 1963 loan of the “Mona Lisa” to the United States. Where that gesture followed the Normandy landings and the Marshall Plan, this one arrives after ten years of Franco-British froideur. In 2016, Britain voted to leave the E.U.; shortly afterward, increasing numbers of migrants began crossing from France to England in small boats, creating a political pressure point at the maritime border. At a time of great friction, Macron hoped the gift would help the British and the French “make a new tapestry together.” Given the circumstances, his commitment was defiantly magnanimous. “In his clever, instinctive way, Macron understood that this tapestry would have far greater impact in the U.K. than it has had in France,” Lord Peter Ricketts, the U.K. government’s special envoy for the Bayeux Tapestry, told me. “It’s a foundational part of our story. Everybody knows 1066, even if they don’t know the detail. Why not lend it to the British?”
I can think of a few reasons. The Bayeux Tapestry is centuries old, torn in thousands of places, and liable to fray at the lightest touch. It is about as long as a giant-sequoia tree is tall. For decades, it hung on a U-shaped rail in a secure chamber of the Bayeux Museum, attached to a modern linen backing that weighed hundreds of pounds. In the twenty-tens, modern investigations made clear that the work was in danger of becoming distorted by this display, which would need to be redesigned. Whether or not a loan occurred, the tapestry would be taken down, and that, in turn, would require some thought.
Even for a famous masterpiece, the Bayeux Tapestry exerts an unusually powerful hold over the professionals who work with it. “These people fall asleep thinking about the tapestry, they wake up thinking about the tapestry, they spend their day thinking about the tapestry,” Aurélien Meyer, whose design firm worked on the new display table, said. “Everything is about the tapestry.” Owing to the item’s fragile condition, it had to be stored lying flat. It also couldn’t be manipulated by hand, for the same reason. You see the problem. How do you rotate a hundred-pound piece of cloth without touching it?
The ingenious answer was proposed by an art-engineering firm called SMACH. The company’s experts realized that, if the tapestry could not be rotated and stored, perhaps it could be stored and then rotated. They designed an object that resembles a huge, many-hinged ruler: a zigzag support that folds up, like a Japanese screen, into a neat cuboid. (They called this object le paravent, the French word for folding screen.) The museum could clip the tapestry to a rail, then feed it into the paravent inch by inch; when the whole thing was transferred, the huge zigzag could be folded up—with the tapestry secured between layers of padding—then turned on its side. When the extraction took place, last September, ninety people wearing blue latex gloves lined up behind the tapestry. A museum employee called out instructions—un, deux, tac tac, stop—and, on the third beat, everyone moved the tapestry another inch along the rail. The entire process took seven hours.
During the design phase for the paravent, SMACH believed that their object was going to travel only around three hundred metres, to a storage space in Bayeux. They were shocked to learn, halfway through, that it would be travelling three hundred miles, to London. “The mood was not great, I have to say,” SMACH’s co-founder Cécilia Gauvin told me. “We were all very scared about the outcome. But, you know, it came from above, so we had to do it.”
Gauvin asked a Dutch art-shipping firm, Hizkia, to think about ways to transport the tapestry. When the firm’s founder, Hizkia van Kralingen, drove down to Bayeux, he often found a huge group of people waiting for him. “The French, the English, the politics, the translators, the representatives from Macron—those meetings had thirty people in them,” he said. Hizkia’s plan was to build a huge crate around the folded paravent, then enclose that crate in a large aluminum frame. The big uncertainty of the operation involved vibrations. The loan specified a precise condition: the tapestry could be subjected to tremors no larger than two millimetres per second.
Van Kralingen asked a longtime collaborator, a German vibration-technology scientist named Kerstin Kracht, to join the project. “Vibration scientists, we’re the firemen,” Kracht told me, laughing. “It’s always the same. When a painting vibrates too much, when a car vibrates too much: ‘Kerstin, can you come?’ ” Since all of the objects in a system influence vibrational behavior, Kracht likes to study them first in isolation and then in combination. “It is a puzzle of subsystems,” she told me. “We have the subsystem of the truck, the subsystem of the inner crate, the subsystem of the wire-rope isolators, the subsystem of the outer crate, the subsystem of the paravent and of the object itself.” In this case, the paravent proved especially meddlesome. When a dry run took place in February, it became undeniable that the device was actually amplifying the tapestry’s vibration, which far exceeded the limit.
Most of the project team members were devastated. But Kracht was simply irritated. “This value drives me crazy,” she said. It wasn’t wrong, just incomplete. “Millimetres per second is a speed, and it’s an amplitude,” Kracht explained. That is, the metric tells you both how far an object moves and the time it takes to travel that distance. “The frequency—how often per second you change direction—says much more than amplitude,” Kracht said. While the tapestry’s amplitude surpassed the metric limit, the metric itself was misleading, and the work could travel safely with no further changes.
That left the bureaucratic challenge of communicating this fact to the relevant stakeholders. In a series of video calls with different groups, Kracht explained it in terms of a baby rocking in a cradle. Would it be better if it moved in short jerks, or in long, steady swings? “I don’t think all the people understood this, or, let’s say, wanted to understand it,” Kracht said. But, ultimately, the group was persuaded. When the tapestry finally travelled from Bayeux to London, it experienced fewer vibrations than many objects do from the ordinary footfall of a busy museum.
When those first viewers sidle up to the tapestry, will it measure up to their expectations? I can only speak for myself. I saw the tapestry ten years ago, in my early twenties, while road-tripping through northern France. I hadn’t planned to go, but I’m English, and I was near Bayeux. It felt obligatory.
The room was dark, or at least in my memory it’s dark. The tapestry was a strip of linen stretching around the corner and out of sight. Just a handful of bright colors are used to represent everything in the story, without concern for naturalism, and the first thing I registered was the rhythm of those colors, flowering along the wall.
Up close, the tapestry was hard to parse. In the opening scene, an old and bearded monarch sits wagging a huge finger at a young man. This is Edward, the aging King of England, talking to the ambitious noble Harold Godwinson. A group of mounted men set off from the palace, and as I followed them, thin, undulating lines of wool rose up from the ground beneath them. Harold’s men waded into water with their tunics bunched around their bare thighs. Four swan-necked longships appeared in sequence, and headed for France.
It was all told in a visual language that I’d seen a hundred times before, in reproductions and caricatures: the outline faces, fish-hook noses, and woolly chain mail, the plunging horses and shield walls. If the opening sequence seemed pale and crude, there was quickly almost too much detail. There were deliberate, intriguing variations in dress and weaponry. There were transient dramas of emotion among sailors. There was that billowing and entirely formal satisfaction of sails filled with wind.
At a certain point, I started to notice the borders. Above and below the main narrative of the Bayeux Tapestry are two strips filled with ancient beasts, including tail-chasing dogs and tightly knotted swans. When a cleric is shown grabbing at a veiled woman in the main story, a tiny naked man appears below him, imitating the cleric’s pose, his big white penis dangling down like a sword. Shortly afterward, a group of mounted men sink in the mud off the French coast, and the border begins to wriggle with fish and eels. What seems at first like decorative trim develops into something else: a parallel medium that’s free to comment on the main narrative at one point, and merge with it a few seconds later.
People often compare the tapestry’s style to a cartoon, but I remember an eerie, proto-cinematic sense of movement, as I watched the death of the elderly Edward, the accession of the ambitious Godwinson, and the surprise victory of William, Duke of Normandy, at the Battle of Hastings. In fact, the tapestry’s most singular attribute is its luxurious use of horizontal space. Scenes are divided infrequently, using trees or buildings. You’re drawn onward by the desire to know what’s happening—because you can’t know what’s happening until you know what happens next. I don’t know for sure whether this was a way to express what it’s like to live through times of radical change. But that’s what it felt like.
I spoke to Michael Lewis, a curator for the exhibition at the British Museum, about the tapestry’s hypnotic abundance of detail. He pointed out that, though the tapestry may have had a single designer, it was produced by many different hands working simultaneously. He brought up the nude figure, in the lower border, who seems to mock the cleric in the main narrative. “Someone has made the decision to kind of mimic that,” he said. “Was that border detail part of the original design? Or were the embroiderers getting the opportunity to add their own stuff?”
There is no eloquent aesthetic term for “the urge to join in with an art work,” but in the case of the Bayeux Tapestry the idea may be worth considering. In the eighteen-eighties, a group of thirty-five Victorian women spent more than a year stitching a replica. The Bayeux Museum recently acquired an early photographic copy of the tapestry from the estate of the Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts. These reproductions are surprisingly effective, partly because the tapestry was made by many hands to begin with, and free embroidery is not an art of finesse. Almost anyone can do it.
“It’s simple, it’s just sometimes mind-numbing,” Mia Hansson, a Swedish artist in her early fifties, told me recently. We were standing in an empty church hall, in the town of Wisbech, where Hansson was exhibiting all hundred and ninety feet of her unfinished scale replica of the Bayeux Tapestry. The actual stitches, she said, aren’t too difficult. “Once you’ve done a few, you can do it in your sleep. Though if you do it in your sleep, you will stitch yourself to the fabric, which I’ve done many times.”
Hansson started her project just over ten years ago, and has stitched every inch of it herself. It arrived at the church hall that day in two hard-shell suitcases, and was laid out on a set of faux-velvet backing cloths. Wearing a hand-sewn pink dress, Hansson walked alongside the replica, pointing out where life events had coincided with the narrative. This was the first line she ever stitched. This was the first time she took the tapestry out in public. This was where a beloved dog had died. “All this is crime TV,” she said, gesturing across a swath of Norman history.
Hansson was taught needlework by her grandmother, and took on the tapestry because she wanted a “big project” that she couldn’t finish quickly. It takes her roughly eighteen months to sew nine metres of the reproduction, which looks like a rejuvenated version of the original, the linen bed-fresh and the colors Mondrian-bright. “It’s addictive,” Hansson said. “You have these really lush images just growing in your hands. It’s kind of like you’re giving birth to these horses and buildings and trees.” In the course of her work, she has found what she believes are embroiderers’ jokes and private marks in the original. There was a dog’s leg that had been sewn on near a man’s crotch in a way that seemed like an obscene visual pun. There were two small red stripes on a sail, clearly deliberate but out of place. Hansson felt they were the work of an embroiderer who wanted to leave her own signature on the textile.
I asked if the designers ever repeated the building forms from place to place.
“No,” she said. “Nothing is repeated, ever.”
I said I didn’t follow.
Hansson looked at me. She was sitting on an early part of the story, something she would have started embroidering about nine years ago. “There are a lot of horses,” she explained. “But there are no two horses alike. Everything is hand-drawn, every single time.”
Hansson no longer lets many people see her reproduction. When she did, people were often drawn to it in an unusual way. They wanted to touch it, she said. Often, when Hansson told them to stop, they would say they hadn’t realized what they were doing—and this, she explained, was one reason she stopped taking it out. She was hoping to sell it one day, perhaps to a regional museum, as moving it around was becoming a risk. When she leaves the work at home, Hansson tends to lock it in a burglar-alarmed room. She might do so this fall, when she goes to London to see the Bayeux Tapestry. ♦