BAYEUX, France — For centuries, the storytelling masterpiece has been a source of wonder and fascination. In vivid and gruesome detail, the 70-meter (230-foot) embroidered cloth recounts how a fierce duke from France conquered England in 1066, reshaping British and European history. <\/p>\n
The Bayeux Tapestry, with its scenes of sword-wielding knights in ferocious combat and King Harold of England’s famous death, pierced by an arrow to an eye, has since the 11th century served as a sobering parable of military might, vengeance, betrayal and the complexity of Anglo-French relations, long seeped with blood and rivalry but also affection and cooperation.<\/p>\n
Now, the medieval forerunner of today’s comic strips, commissioned as propaganda for the Normandy duke William known as \u201cthe Conqueror\u201d after he took the English throne from Harold, is being readied for a new narrative mission.<\/p>\n
Next year, the fragile artistic and historic treasure will be gingerly transported from its museum in Bayeux, Normandy, to star in a blockbuster exhibition<\/a> in London’s British Museum, from September 2026 to July 2027. <\/p>\n Its first U.K. outing in almost 1,000 years will testify to the warming latest chapter in ties across the English Channel that chilled with the U.K.’s acrimonous departure<\/a> from the European Union in 2020. The loan was announced in July when French President Emmanuel Macron<\/a> became the first EU head of state to pay a state visit<\/a> to the U.K. since Brexit.<\/p>\n Bayeux Museum curator Antoine Verney says the cross-Channel trip will be a home-coming of sorts for the tapestry, because historians widely believe that it was embroidered in England, using woolen threads on linen canvas, and because William’s victory at the Battle of Hastings was such a major juncture in English history, seared into the U.K.’s collective consciousness.<\/p>\n \u201cFor the British, the date \u2014 the only date \u2014 that all of them know is 1066,\u201d Verney said in an interview with The Associated Press. <\/p>\n Moving an artwork so unwieldy \u2014 made from nine pieces of linen fabric stitched together and showing 626 characters, 37 buildings, 41 ships and 202 horses and mules in a total of 58 scenes \u2014 is further complicated by its great age and the wear-and-tear of time. <\/p>\n \u201cThere is always a risk. The goal is for those risks to be as carefully calculated as possible,\u201d said Verney, the curator. <\/p>\n Believed to have been commissioned by Bishop Odo, William the Conqueror\u2019s half-brother, to decorate a new cathedral in Bayeux in 1077, the treasure is thought to have remained there, mostly stored in a wooden chest and almost unknown, for seven centuries, surviving the French Revolution, fires and other perils. <\/p>\n