The Bayeux Tapestry, which opens at the British Museum on 10 September, must be the world’s most anticipated exhibition of the year. For the first time in nearly 1,000 years, the almost 70m-long embroidery telling the story of the Norman Conquest has returned to England.
The first tranche of public tickets for the exhibition sold out in a few hours and around one million visitors are expected by its closure on 11 July 2027. King Charles III, the British prime minister Andy Burnham and the French president Emmanuel Macron attended a special preview this week.
But what will it be like for visitors? They will be allowed just 40 minutes to see the tapestry and associated objects and texts. That would mean only around 30 seconds in front of each of the 58 scenes. Personal photography is expected to be allowed, and a museum spokesperson suggests that some visitors will snap scenes that catch their eye and then move on more quickly than if they were actually looking. The downside is that the snaking queue may become a line of held-up phone cameras (although high-definition images are freely available online).
In anticipation of the blockbuster exhibition, The Art Newspaper has delved into the Bayeux story to illuminate ten surprises about one of the world’s greatest treasures.
What’s the angle?
Curiously, the British and French believe it is safer to display the tapestry in different ways (although called the Bayeux Tapestry, it is actually an embroidery). In London, it is shown lying flat, whereas in the Bayeux Tapestry museum (a new wing to house the work is under construction), it will be presented at a 60-degree angle from the horizontal. Surely one way would be best for this fragile textile?
A spokesperson for the Bayeux Tapestry museum explained to The Art Newspaper that an angled display is best. But this will first require conservation work, “which will take place after its return from England and before the Bayeux museum reopens”. There was not time to do this before the loan, so the French government “stipulated that the tapestry must be displayed flat” in London, resulting in less stress on the textile.
A 70m-long display cabinet for London was made specially in Ghent © The Trustees of the British Museum
This may well be the first time in over 900 years that the tapestry has been shown flat. The British Museum’s Sainsbury Exhibition Galleries are 70m long and the tapestry is 68.3m, so by good fortune it just squeezes in. This helps to explain why the British Museum, rather than the Victoria and Albert Museum (its rival to put on the show), won the loan.
The 400-year mystery
Nothing is known of the tapestry’s early history. The first record of it is in a 1476 inventory of Bayeux Cathedral, stating that it was “hung round the nave of the church” once a year and otherwise stored in a chest. Before that, the tapestry’s home remains a mystery; it could have arrived at the cathedral soon after its creation or it may have belonged to the French kings.
Unrolled on cue
The tapestry was housed in Bayeux town hall from 1812 to 1842 Cécile Haupas
From 1812 until 1842, the tapestry was kept at Bayeux town hall, rolled up on a spool. When visitors asked to see it, it was simply unwound on a table. One early British traveller described the cylinder mechanism as resembling something that “lets down the buckets to a well”. Conservation standards were rather laxer in those days.
The abrupt ending
Exhibition visitors may assume they are seeing the whole tapestry, but there could be around 3m missing at the end—and possibly also some at the beginning. These losses would have occurred before 1729, when an engraving was published by the Benedictine scholar Bernard de Montfaucon. And what would the final images have depicted? They probably recorded events just before the coronation of William the Conqueror on Christmas Day 1066.
An eye for the finer points
The depiction of King Harold being hit in the eye by an arrow was likely added later © La Fabrique de Patrimoines en Normandie/Antoine Cazin
The tapestry’s most famous scene is not what it seems. It shows King Harold with an arrow in his eye, which is said to have led to his blinding and death in battle. This may well be a later addition, since the 1729 engraving suggests the “arrow” is a spear being held aloft by the king.
The pointed object was probably shifted slightly when the tapestry was restored in the 19th century. It is also uncertain whether the man with the arrow is actually Harold. Well-informed visitors will know this, but for them the surprise may be that specialists have failed to definitively establish the truth after nearly 200 years.
A stellar sighting
The tapestry features the first European depiction of Halley’s Comet © La Fabrique de Patrimoines en Normandie/Antoine Cazin
The earliest European depiction of perhaps the most famous comet is not on an illuminated manuscript but on a textile. When Halley’s Comet (as it was later named) appeared in April 1066, just after Harold’s coronation, it was regarded as a harbinger of his demise—and was duly included.
There is an earlier, non-European depiction in the Chronicle of Zuqnin, a Syriac manuscript compiled in a monastery in present-day Turkey soon after the comet’s heavenly passage in 760. After the tapestry, the next image came more than two centuries later, in Giotto’s 1305 fresco in Padua’s Arena Chapel.
Nazi admirers
Nazi commander Heinrich Himmler planned to take the tapestry to Germany Bundesarchiv, Bild
On the outbreak of the Second World War, the tapestry was first sent to an underground shelter in Bayeux and, after the German occupation in 1940, to a nearby abbey. The following year it was secreted away in the Château de Sourches, in north-west France. German forces later moved it to the Louvre in Paris.
Nazi specialists were fascinated by the tapestry, regarding it as having been made by “Aryans”; the Normans who conquered England were of Viking, and by extension Germanic, descent. In 1944, the Nazi commander Heinrich Himmler wrote of “the importance which the Bayeux Tapestry holds for our glorious and cultured Germanic history”, ordering its removal to Germany. Fortunately, Himmler’s order came too late. The tapestry remained in Paris and was returned to Bayeux in March 1945.
Tapestry’s first trip abroad
A ‘thank-you’ message to France beamed on the White Cliffs of Dover © The Trustees of the British Museum
Until recently, few believed that the tapestry would ever come to the UK, after five attempts to borrow it between 1931 and 1980 failed. The latest request began with informal conversations in 2008, but only became substantive in 2018, when serious plans were made to redevelop the Bayeux Tapestry museum (which closed for work in September 2025).
After considerable research, the risks of moving it to London were deemed to be minimal. In return, the British Museum has promised to lend Sutton Hoo treasures and Lewis chess pieces to two museums in Normandy, the Château de Caen and the Musées de Rouen, starting next spring.
Frenzy for tickets
Advance ticket sales were always expected to be high, but it was not anticipated that the initial tranche for the show’s first three-and-a-half months would sell out in a single day, generating £2.5m in ticket revenue. (The standard adult weekend price is £33.)
The Bayeux Tapestry will be the most expensive exhibition ever mounted at the British Museum. Although estimated costs remain confidential, they are expected to be in the range of £5m to £10m. This will still generate a good profit for the museum, which is facing a financial squeeze. The Belarus-born, US-based billionaire entrepreneur Igor Tulchinsky has also pledged £5m as the lead sponsor.
Millions by the metre
How can one value such a unique object? A sum of around £800m was agreed to indemnify the tapestry for the loan. This may sound enormous, but it is only 11 times the price fetched by a Jeff Koons sculpture at a 2019 auction ($91m for his Rabbit, 1986), so the Koons could be said to be worth the equivalent of five of the tapestry’s 58 scenes. Each scene, averaging just over a metre wide, works out at an indemnity value of £14m, a modest sum compared with what major Modern paintings regularly fetch at auction.
• The Bayeux Tapestry, 10 September-11 July 2027, British Museum, London
A Bayeux Tapestry crash course
The Bayeux Tapestry is a series of 58 scenes with images and words. It tells the story leading up to the Battle of Hastings in 1066, when the Norman king William the Conqueror invaded from France and defeated the Anglo-Saxon king Harold to rule England. Dyed wool was stitched into bleached linen to create a continuous narrative stretching across 68.3m. The original embroidery is 50cm high, although later backing fabric makes it higher.
Although the tapestry’s origins remain obscure, it was almost certainly made in England, probably in Canterbury. The commissioner may well have been William’s half-brother, Bishop Odo of Bayeux, since Odo is depicted so prominently. It was probably created just a few years after 1066, likely in the early 1070s, and then taken to Normandy.
The tapestry is due to be returned to Bayeux in late July 2027. It will then be conserved in the renovated Bayeux Tapestry museum, for its reopening in October 2027—in time to celebrate the 1,000th anniversary of William the Conqueror’s birth in 2028.