The 70-metre (230 feet) long Bayeux Tapestry, held at a museum in the northern French town of the same name, is a fragile object suffering from wear-and-tear, including thousands of holes. It will now be restored for the first since 1870, two years after an agreement between Paris and London for the tapestry to be loaned to Britain.
The Bayeux Tapestry depicts the events leading up to the Norman Conquest, a pivotal event in English history that transformed the country’s language, culture and administration. Believed to have been made a few years after the conquest, it culminates with the defeat by William the Conquerer of Anglo-Saxon monarch Harold at the 1066 Battle of Hastings after the Norman ruler crossed the Channel with an invasion force.
“The tapestry is an old lady who is nearly 1,000 years old, a very, very fine linen canvas embroidered with wool which now shows multiple signs of damage,” Antoine Verney, the chief curator of the museum said.
In January 2020, eight textiles experts inspected the tapestry, listed as a “memory of the world” artefact by UNESCO, recording nearly 24,200 stains and 10,000 holes. Repairs carried out over the centuries and “the exceptional dimensions of this work give the illusion of a good general state of conservation” but “the structural state of the canvas and support of the embroidery is very fragile and worrying”, they said in a report.
The loan of the tapestry for display in Britain was announced at a meeting in 2018 between then prime minister Theresa May and French President Emmanuel Macron in what was seen as a sign that close Franco-British ties would endure after Brexit. Bayeux is the custodian of the work which belongs to the French state.
Before the pandemic, the tapestry attracted 400,000 visitors per year, 70 percent of whom were from abroad. Even moving the tapestry into a workshop to review its condition required the mobilization of a 50-person team.
In tandem with the restoration, the museum housing it will be rebuilt. The two million euro restoration should be launched in the autumn of 2024 and last at least 18 months, said Verney.