A triumph or act of cultural recklessness? The Bayeux Tapestry comes to London

“A lovely idea, but it’s never going to happen.”

For years, that was how colleagues at Normandy’s Bayeux Tapestry Museum responded whenever English medievalist Michael Lewis suggested that the 11th-century embroidery should return to Britain for the first time in a millennium. Yet, thanks in large part to his persistence, those doubters are about to be proved wrong.

This autumn, the Bayeux Tapestry – which depicts the death of the last Anglo-Saxon king, Harold II, at the Battle of Hastings – will appear in a landmark British Museum exhibition, curated by Lewis. Across a 10-month run, the museum expects a million visitors, which would make it one of its most popular exhibitions ever, joining the ranks of The First Emperor: China’s Terracotta Army, which had 800,000 visitors in 2007-8; and The Treasures of Tutankhamun blockbuster of 1972, which attracted almost 1,700,000.

If, like me, you’ve only encountered images of the tapestry online or in books – where its continuous frieze is broken up into piecemeal scenes – the show should, in addition to providing a history lesson about the Norman Conquest, reveal the monumentality of an artefact that, at 224ft, is as long as a football pitch is wide. For Nicholas Cullinan, the British Museum’s director, it’s more than an exhibition: “It’s a national cultural moment, a piece of international diplomacy,” he tells me, “and a hugely historic moment.”

But the show is also proving controversial, and not only because when advance tickets went on sale for museum members earlier this month they complained of hour-long queues at the online checkout. Although the tapestry has already been removed from display in Normandy – concertinaed into a special crate and placed in storage while the Bayeux Tapestry Museum undergoes extensive redevelopment before reopening next year – there are concerns that it could suffer damage while travelling farther afield to London via Kent, where it was probably designed and embroidered in the years immediately following the Conquest of 1066.

According to the French art historian and commentator Didier Rykner, who last summer organised a petition, signed by tens of thousands of people, to stop the loan (and whom I met in Paris earlier this year), “everybody who knows” about historical textiles believes that moving the tapestry is “a menace”. “It could tear, the material could fall,” he told me. “It’s madness.” The late artist David Hockney, who loved the Bayeux Tapestry, agreed: “Some things are too precious to take a risk with,” he wrote in January, with the tapestry in mind, before accusing the British Museum of “vanity”.

There has been criticism, too, of the price of tickets, which go on sale to the general public on July 1 for £33. Given that each ticket secures only a 40-minute slot, that equates to almost £1 per minute of the show – although Cullinan points out that cheaper tickets will be available for “off-peak” time slots, priced between £25 and £27.

There are even “dark suspicions in France that the Brits might want to hang on to [the tapestry]”, says the diplomat Peter Ricketts, who has served as special envoy to facilitate the loan, as well as the British Museum’s reciprocal loans to museums in Caen and Rouen of various objects, including Anglo-Saxon artefacts from the Sutton Hoo burial site in Suffolk. “Of course we will give it back,” he laughs. “This isn’t about restitution. It’s been in France for a thousand years.”

For all its fame – and, evidently, enduring power to generate strong emotions – much about this unique artefact remains unknown or misunderstood. Even the notion that it is a “tapestry” is incorrect: in fact, it’s an embroidery of coloured woollen threads stitched on to an off-white linen backing of nine conjoined panels of varying lengths. (Although, following convention, I’ll continue to refer to it as “the tapestry”.)

During the Middle Ages, textile works were prestigious, not least because it required so much labour to produce them. But they are also fragile. So the survival of such a fine and large example – first recorded in a 1476 inventory of Bayeux Cathedral’s treasury – is “completely extraordinary”, according to Tom Nickson, an expert in medieval art at London’s Courtauld Institute of Art. “Nothing like it has survived from the Middle Ages,” he says. Twenty-four thousand stains (some caused by candle wax), almost 10,000 holes and 30 tears have been documented in the Bayeux Tapestry. Still, given its age, it’s in surprisingly good nick.

Framed by upper and lower borders teeming with characters, animals and incidents (possibly representing Aesop’s Fables), the main action of the tapestry’s central frieze moves from the final phase of the reign of Edward the Confessor – depicted as an old bearded man clutching a walking stick – when the succession was in question, to William’s victory at Hastings. Although the final scene (or scenes) is probably missing, the last surviving section of the tapestry depicts apprehensive English foot soldiers fleeing the battlefield, pursued by Norman knights on horseback.

Translating such a tangled sequence of events into two dimensions presented a complex challenge to the tapestry’s designer or designers. Had they been depicting a Biblical story, they could have adapted earlier artworks. But there was no precedent for representing this factual story from the very recent past. One of the tapestry’s most impressive features is that it tells the narrative of the Conquest in an engaging way, with humour as well as a smattering of nudity. “They loved d--k jokes in the Middle Ages,” Nickson tells me. In 2018, a historian counted 93 penises, mostly belonging to horses, in the tapestry – although last year another medievalist made news when he identified one more.

There are also politics at play. In one well-known scene, the Anglo-Saxon nobleman Harold Godwinson – whose sister Edith was Edward’s queen – seems to swear an oath of allegiance to William, the bastard Duke of Normandy, possibly justifying William’s decision, following Harold’s accession, to invade England and seize his crown. Yet the tapestry isn’t just pro-Norman propaganda. In representing the battlefield near Hastings strewn with slaughtered soldiers, some decapitated or stripped of their armour by looters, it also serves as a critique of the brutality of William and his men. Elsewhere, says Nickson, the tapestry even depicts straightforwardly “honourable actions by the English nobility and churchmen”, creating an “embedded ambiguity” about its true message.

For Lewis, who wrote his doctoral thesis on the tapestry, its most likely patron was William’s half-brother Odo, Bishop of Bayeux (and Earl of Kent), who appears prominently in it. Over the years, other candidates have been suggested, including, traditionally, William’s wife Matilda, as well as Queen Edith. Lewis argues that the embroidery was probably completed during the 1070s by skilled secular Englishwomen, possibly working from drawings executed by monks in the manuscript houses of Canterbury.

Although Lewis wasn’t the first person to dream of bringing the tapestry to London – “Throughout the 20th century, there had been many attempts to have it loaned,” Cullinan tells me, “but the stars never quite aligned” – his longstanding ambition began to crystallise in 2013, after he was invited by the Bayeux Tapestry Museum to join a scientific committee of international experts advising on various issues relating to the artefact, including its future display. “It was obvious to me that if they were going to close down the museum and put the tapestry into storage,” he recalls now, “it could do something in that time.”

From this point onwards, until Emmanuel Macron publicly announced the loan at an Anglo-French summit with Theresa May at Sandhurst in 2018, Lewis was, as he puts it, “nobbling whoever I thought would listen to this idea”. He approached contacts at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, “and I kept saying to them, ‘Look, I think there’s something in this’ – and they started speaking to their French colleagues”.

The latter recognised that a loan could benefit Anglo-French relations more broadly. As Cullinan suggests, “The fact that Macron offered the tapestry to May post-Brexit was probably intended to try to bring our two countries closer together.” However, the coronavirus pandemic made any exchange impossible and then, Ricketts points out, “relations with France were pretty rocky under Boris Johnson and Liz Truss”.

The loan was finally confirmed by Macron and Sir Keir Starmer at the British Museum last summer. Big shows like this typically take up to five years from concept to delivery; The Bayeux Tapestry will be delivered, Cullinan says, “with just a year to prepare”. To pull it off, a spokesman reveals, “nearly the entire museum is mobilising in some way to make this exhibition a reality”, with several hundred full- or part-time members of staff contributing to the project.

To assess the impact on the tapestry of travelling by road and rail via the Channel Tunnel, there have already been two test runs of its journey to Britain, including one with a full facsimile – neither of which, Cullinan assures me, has “raised any concerns”. As well as climate-control mechanisms, the container in which it will be transported has been designed with shock absorbers to minimise vibration.

Lewis – who points out that, because of the refurbishment of the museum in Bayeux, the tapestry was always going to be driven off site anyway – is also confident that the necessary precautions have been taken. “Institutions like the British Museum are moving very important and very fragile objects all the time, without much debate,” he tells me, although he concedes that, given the “attention”, this case is different.

Assuming all goes according to plan, the tapestry will be on display in the British Museum’s Sainsbury Exhibitions Gallery from September 10.

After entering the exhibition, visitors will cross a bridge offering an overview of the tapestry. “I think it will hit people when they see how big it is,” Lewis says. The entire tapestry will, for the first time, be laid out flat – a requirement of the French state, Lewis reveals – and in a single length, which is very different from how it has been displayed since 1983 in Bayeux, at eye level in a U-shaped case. (Details of how the tapestry will be presented when the museum in Bayeux reopens have yet to be announced.) The bespoke glass-and-metal showcase that will house the tapestry in London will likely be the longest museum cabinet ever constructed, at a cost of £500,000.

Thanks to strict provisions regarding “lux levels” (that is, the intensity of light), there will be no opportunity to keep the show open for 24-hour periods to satisfy demand, as happened with the Tutankhamun exhibition. Hence the decision to restrict visits to 40 minutes – although, Lewis insists, the experience shouldn’t feel like being on a conveyor belt inside a gigantic hangar. There won’t be an audio guide, but projections will elucidate characters, scenes and details, and subtly encourage visitor flow.

Although the most expensive tickets aren’t cheap, the museum has committed to free access for children under 16 (accompanied by an adult). This, like the expense of transportation, must be recouped. “The exhibition is going to be the most expensive we’ve ever staged,” says Cullinan. According to a spokesman, the final bill is still to be worked out, but the museum anticipates a budget “in the millions” of pounds, likely two and a half times that of The First Emperor, for which a dozen terracotta warriors were transported from Xi’an in China. “The idea that the British Museum is going to make loads of money from this is not what it’s about,” Lewis says.

My view is that the risk of damaging the tapestry is far outweighed by the benefit of this once-in-a-lifetime endeavour: allowing British audiences to encounter on home soil a work of art that is an essential part of our collective national psyche. “I cannot emphasise enough the amount of care and thought that’s going into it,” says Cullinan, for whom the tapestry’s finest aspect is the “real human emotion” it manages to express, from “the looks of grief of those surrounding Edward the Confessor’s deathbed to the trepidation of Harold’s troops eating before the battle. Emotion is a difficult thing to conjure through embroidery, but the full spectrum is there.”

Besides, it’s worth remembering that the tapestry was made to be shown in public. As Nickson points out, “the first reference to it talks about the fact that it was displayed every year on the Feast of Relics”, a festival at Bayeux Cathedral for which it may have been created. “And you can guarantee that it’s going to be displayed with much more care in this exhibition than it was for hundreds of years in Bayeux.”

General admission tickets for The Bayeux Tapestry, which will open at the British Museum on Sept 10, are now on sale. Information: britishmuseum.org

[Source: Daily Telegraph]