Save this story Save Story Save this story La Fabrique de Patrimoines en Normandie/Antoine Cazin 1. The first thing you should know is that it is really, surprisingly, weirdly difficult to get tickets for the Bayeux Tapestry , on display now at the British Museum until July 2027. Tickets are released in tranches and members are given early access, and even then they sell out with an urgency I would describe as Glastonburyian .
2. To be given special, journalist-exclusive, VIP access—it’s the same ticket, just with the letters VIP on it—I have to harangue three separate British Museum employees, over many e-mails and many days, and in the end my source, who I can only reveal as A, was handed to me by another journalist under strict instruction not to share their details with anyone else. “You can go at 10.40 AM tomorrow and not a moment either side,” A said.
3. Over 58 panels, the Bayeux Tapestry tells the story of how the Norman Duke William II conquered England and became King William I, a fusion of two cultures that shaped the country into what it is today. It is a beautiful, near-holy artifact from history, a genuine treasure that occupies no small part of our national psyche, mainly because it was taught in our schools relentlessly. But can anyone tell you about it, other than Halley’s Comet or someone getting shot through the eye? Not really, no.
4. The British Museum is an unbelievable bit of gear. 43 Ionic columns outside, all of them surviving the War! That supreme criss-crossed roof, the light falling blanched and grey-green onto the marble below! To get inside you have to go through a cheerfully thorough bag check, where a man wearing nitrate gloves shines a torch on my laptop, my water bottle, and a soft overshirt I have ready in case the air chills. I wonder why this is necessary, but then I look over at the handbag of the woman next to me, who is trying to enter with an entire roll of jewelry-making tools.
5. Inside, I am immediately baffled and lost. The Museum is giddily huge, and all its objects hum with a drawing power of their own. If this were a video game, each artifact would buff your stats if you managed to steal and equip them: boss-slaying swords and axes; jewels that could augment a gauntlet for better defense against poison creatures; the Rosetta Stone, so overpowered that forum threads argue it should be nerfed from the loot pool.
6. This is the first time the Bayeux Tapestry has been on U.K. soil since it was first stitched together almost 1,000 years ago, and that does feel significant. This is our history. As a placard explains, we have hedge fund billionaire Igor Tulchinsky to thank for sponsoring the transport and display of the tapestry, as well as “the generosity of the French people” and the “deep friendship and trust that has long existed between our countries.”
7. When I was a kid, the beef between France and England felt much more intense than it is now, probably a bit of a hangover from the events detailed in the Tapestry. What changed, I wonder? Eurostar Snap is a big part of it, I think. The availability of Brets Crisps, too. And, of course, French footballers: Thierry Henry, Claude Makélélé.
La Fabrique de Patrimoines en Normandie/Antoine Cazin 8. But, as the Tapestry tells me, things used to be different. A thousand years ago, King Edward’s reign was coming to an end and he had no heir apparent. In 1064, he sent Harold Godwinson to Normandy and, while crossing the Channel, he was blown off course and eventually captured by Guy I of Ponthieu. When William II, the Duke of Normandy, heard of this capture, he sent as many horses and men that the embroiderers could be bothered to stitch (four) to release Harold and bring him to the safe embrace of Billy Deux. They ate, drank, and made merry before conquering Conan II in nearby Brittany, who surrendered his castle by dangling the keys on the end of a lance. William gave Harold a load of armor and swords as thanks, and Harold endorsed William’s right to the English throne. Everyone is friends. France and England are not at war.
9. Two years later, after Edward the Confessor died in his bed, Harold accepted the crown. As the man next to me says to his wife: “Well, you would, wouldn’t you?”
10. In the Museum’s Sainsbury Wing, you show a QR code ticket and are ushered into a queue, my second of the day.
11. If you were to venture generalizations about the state of Modern England, you might begin with our queueing system. We are so proud of our ability to queue here. But we are actually quite bad at it: we bristle at the edges of queues, tut at the indignity of them. Queues have an intrinsic order that the English people understand, but we also loathe them. We hate it when someone skips the queue, or asks a stupid question about it (“Is this the queue?”). To queue anywhere in England is to enter a state of fight-or-flight.
12. Queue #2 becomes a holding pen for about ten of us. The half-room we’re in is shady and dark, because the Bayeux Tapestry can only be exposed to a few hours of light each day, but that only adds to the theatre. The Tapestry is sensitive to vibration, I’m told, so don’t tap on the glass. I wonder why anyone would be compelled to tap on the kind of glass that can withstand a sniper bullet, but later, when I am exposed to the Tapestry, I do see a number of barely-perceptible fingerprints.
13. For a while, though, I look at a cool axe.
14. Once inside, our group forms a third queue while a music video projected on the wall tells us that we’ll soon see the Tapestry but are forbidden from taking photos of it. As intended, all this suspense does give way to a kind of reverent excitement.
15. Upstairs, we’re shown another video. Odo of Bayeux, the Bishop of Bayeux and William the Conquerer’s half-brother, will be a featured character, in part because he was integral to the success of the Battle but mainly on account of the popular belief that he commissioned the Tapestry, so he gets to be in it. Once you know to look for him, he is everywhere: whispering in William’s ear, charging into war.
16. Who really won the war: the guy who shot the arrow? Or the guy who made a Tapestry about it?
17. Our group has a baby in it, strapped to an adult chest, so tiny and new that its eyes are still an indecisive jewel-blue. I distantly wonder what the point of bringing a baby to the Tapestry is, but then I remember all the places I allegedly went as a baby and that my parents always delighted in telling me about: in utero, for example, I kicked very groovily at a Bob Marley gig.
18. The baby gazes at me, bluely. “First tapestry?” I ask.
19. Three more videos about Odo before we are ushered onto a balcony, from which we get our first glimpse down at the Tap. I can see at least two more queues down there.
20. We walk down the stairs and assemble into a fourth queue, where we are asked to stand in pairs, perhaps to make the queue seem shorter. This does not have the intended effect.
21. If you get a Linguistics degree, you’ll learn that your professional prospects are quite limited and also that the Battle of Hastings in 1066 was instrumental to the formation of Modern English and therefore crucial to our national identity. Put simply, we would not speak this kind of English without the French. When an unnamed archer put an arrow through Harold’s eye and William the Conqueror ascended to the throne, he brought with him a mass of barons and lords and dukes who all nestled into castles and spoke French in them. This was the language of the courts and of the King, and all the upper classes had to assimilate. Within a generation, Old English was augmented with French to form a new language that filtered down into the taverns and the fields.
22. One of the great examples of this is the difference in words for animals and meat: in Old English, you would kill a cow and then eat cow . It was only when William came to the throne did we think to call it beef .
23. We keep shuffling forward, as instructed in both English and French by the queue management system. Nobody, of course, is really moving.
24. As we all understand the queue, we understand the tacit agreement therein, which is that if someone in front of you is taking too long, and a gap appears, you can overtake them. An attempt at this is made: a husband and wife, dawdling over Halley’s Comet, are asked to briefly step aside to let the queue move around them. The man, startled from his study, turns around on the spot and shouts, “AH!”
25. This, of course, causes devastation to the queue.
26. Behind me, the chatty stranger has found something to talk about with the Irish-accented person nearby. “ Derry Girls ,” she says, as solemnly as a prayer. This must be the first time in history those words have been uttered in the presence of the Bayeux Tapestry.
27. When we first enter the Tapestry room, it carries the whispering ambience of a library. But the longer we wait, the braver people get. I overhear the groaning of a man who took the day off to see the exhibition, which another visitor calls a “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunity. We are told that audio design in conjunction with the Tapestry will make it feel more immersive, soundtracking the display with men jeering and swords clinking.
28. For now, though, I can only hear someone describing the Tapestry as it was previously displayed in France. “It’s shaped more like a U,” she says. “It’s much worse.”
29. At the cusp of queues four and five, I ask a staff member what his favorite bit of the Tapestry is. “Panel 57,” he says, “the main bit. Where Harold…”
30. I realize that I still do not confidently know how to say “Bayeux” or why it is called the “Bayeux Tapestry.”
31. Wikipedia tells me it’s called the Bayeux Tapestry because it was housed in Bayeux Cathedral. The prevailing theory is that the Tapestry was commissioned by Odo in 1070 for the dedication of the Cathedral in 1077, though there is no known record of the Tapestry until 1476. Did you know it’s not actually a tapestry? It’s just a really long embroidered cloth. But “the Bayeux Long Embroidered Cloth” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.
32. History is embroidered by the winners, and William kicked Harold’s head in at the Battle of Hastings. We don’t even know for sure that Harold got an arrow through the eye—the Tapestry is so old that the arrow-through-the-eye bit has been re-stitched several times, leading historians to speculate that in the course of textile restoration Harold’s death was made to seem more spectacular and William’s conquest more heroic. I suppose it’s easier to stitch one magic arrow than a battalion of Norman serfs kicking a king to death in the mud.
33. The Tapestry tells the story of a sinless Norman king, spurned on a promise, taking what is rightfully his in a way that rings through the centuries. But it’s probably a bit more nuanced than that, right?
34. Finally, I've reached the Tapestry. I am immediately struck by the way it just starts . There’s a raw hem of linen, and then the stitching begins. The borders are filled with animals (cows, peacocks) and as the Tapestry goes on and the lines start to wobble, more fantastical things emerge: dragons, a farmer, a cow, other random shapes and blobs. It reminds me of drifting off in a science class while doodling nonsense in your notebook.
35. They really gave all the horses dicks.
36. Some of the nuns were definitely better embroiderers than others. Horses are colored in with tight, neat rows of stitches, while some humans at the borders appear blob-like and unsure. But the Medieval style is so cool, and I wonder why no one renders faces like that anymore. We lost that when we figured out gunpowder, I suppose.
37. It’s remarkable how readable it is, how the story flows vividly as you shuffle along. The sea-crossing scenes—there are four of them, frame after frame of boats bobbing on water and men climbing up their masts—are swaying and alive and brilliant, shifting the narrative from England to France and back again.
La Fabrique de patrimoines en Normandie / A.Cazin & G.Debout / CC by-nc-sa 38. By now Harold is King and William has heard about the betrayal and Odo is in his head about it; seams of men chop trees and thump drums into the crisp sea air as they point themselves towards Pevensey. When they land, the army wanders aimlessly waiting for Harold and his boys to turn up, terrorizing villages in the interim.
39. Now we’re in the midst of battle. Harold beat back a Norwegian invasion at Stamford Bridge in September and now finds himself in the milk-white October sun of Sussex, bristling against the French. What a life: a tall man dies in his bed and now everyone in Europe wants a pop at you.
40. The horses and spears are pointed this way and that, and the Tapestry is alive with combat. Over the next few panels, Harold watches as horses tip forward through the mud, and he and his men try and fend them off, bodies falling into pieces at the Tapestry’s edges. It’s breathtak—
41. “Guys, you're doing so well moving for me today! You're doing such a brilliant job, guys! Keep moving please, thank you. You're all doing such a great job of moving along for me.”
42. Museum employees are shouting at us in a tone normally reserved for children first learning how to walk. They repeat it twice a minute, maybe more, seemingly in a deliberate effort to halt all possible attempts at genuine contemplation. I am so close to saying something, to exploding in such a profound and deranged way that they’d have to make a big embroidery about it.
La Fabrique de patrimoines en Normandie / A.Cazin & G.Debout / CC by-nc-sa 44. "You're doing so well for me, guys. Thank you!"
45. The point is we are not doing well and everyone in the queue knows it. So not only am I frozen in place and barely moving, I’m being shouted at constantly about how well I’m doing for moving.
46. King Harold is dead, his limp corpse stitched vivid into the linen. Panel 57, I think. “Where Harold…” The museum staffer was right.
47. A woman in the queue finally breaks under the pressure of what is technically psychological noise torture, leaving her hallowed spot at Panel 55 to tell off the Museum employee.
48. “Can you be quiet, please? You've been repeating the same sentence for an hour!" The queue has clattered to a complete stop.
49. “We just need everyone to keep movi—,” the Museum employee starts.
50. “I know .” Then: “We're not stupid .”
51. “Well, thank you for the feedback,” the employee says. “I hope you had an enjoyable experience with the Tapestry today.”
52. “Well, I would have if you'd just shut up .”
53. I’m really glad I didn’t snap at the Museum employee.
54. Things have settled into a quiet whisper and the queue is really moving now. At the end of the linen is a cache of silver coins, shiny like buttons, which were found near the battlefield and buried in a panic. They are glimmering and gorgeous and I feel a genuine connection to my past. Which of my ancestors might have been there, on that field that day, possessing the trails of DNA that weft and wended down to my mother, my father, and me? There were only a few million people in England back then, so it’s not inconceivable.
56. The gift shop is worth the queues alone. There are two different ties, a normal one, and a £130 silk number made in collaboration with Liberty. Two different t-shirts, one of which I pick up and then put down. Countless tea towels. Embroidering kits and plushy Norman soldiers for kids. There is a cap with a conquering soldier stitched onto the crown, which I think about buying for a long while and am later slightly annoyed that I didn’t. Christmas tree ornaments and key-rings and vases in the shapes of kings. A brooch that looks like Halley’s Comet.
57. Since this is a Museum gift shop in 2026, it goes without saying that there are also tote bags. I am tempted to spend the amount of money that would get me registered on a government database of Bayeux superfans. But in the end, I buy the t-shirt of the year: the Bayeux Tapestry classic t-shirt (£24.99), which I’ve already seen on two of London’s coolest Instagram accounts, and a single tea towel for a friend. But you better believe I thought long and hard about the £299 jacquard throw.
58 . I emerged from the gloomy light-controlled corridor in which the Tapestry is kept profoundly moved. I’ve looked at a genuine artifact of my history and been confronted with what defined us then (hubris, heroism) and what defines us now (hurriedness, passive-aggression). I want to hum “Jerusalem” and learn how to bowl fastball for the English cricket team. I want to get a tattoo of the St. George’s Cross across my back. I want, finally, to stitch the crotch back together on an old pair of jeans. “You’re doing so well.” Yeah. I guess I am.
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