The Bayeux Tapestry comes to the British Museum on loan from France, 10 September 2026 to 11 July 2027.
The Bayeux Tapestry is not a tapestry. It is an embroidery in wool on linen, nearly seventy metres long and fifty centimetres tall, and it tells the story of the Norman conquest in fifty-eight scenes running left to right like a strip cartoon, with Latin captions and a border of animals, fables and, at Hastings, corpses. It was probably commissioned by Bishop Odo of Bayeux, William’s half-brother, and probably made in England in the 1070s by English needlewomen, within living memory of the events it shows.
Its history since is a run of near-misses. The earliest written reference is a cathedral inventory of 1476; scholars rediscovered it in 1729, by which point it was being hung round Bayeux Cathedral once a year; it survived the Revolution, when it was nearly cut up for wagon covers, and the Second World War, when the SS took an interest in it.
The British Museum shows it from Thursday 10 September 2026 to Sunday 11 July 2027, on loan from Bayeux. It has never been displayed in Britain before, in nine hundred and fifty years, and the loan is conditional on works at the Bayeux museum that will not recur. It is there for ten months and then it goes home. It is also the earliest surviving depiction of Halley’s Comet, which passes overhead in scene thirty-two while Harold is told what it means.