Visitors waiting in line, The Bayeux Tapestry exhibition, British Museum, Sept. 17, 2026. Photo: Stephen Eisenman.

“An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one.”

– George Mikes, How to be an Alien: A Handbook for Beginners and More Advanced Pupils, (1946).

Bayeux mania

The exhibition of the Bayeux Tapestry at the British Museum in London has generated a whirlwind of publicity and been a bonanza for the institution. Despite the high cost of transporting, installing and protecting the fragile embroidery (tapestries are woven), “Bayeux mania” is expected to generate about $14 million in profit (revenue above costs) for the venerable museum. That’s the vulgar side of things. The lofty side – the art, history and cultural legacy of the object – seems to be of less matter to exhibition curators and promoters.

Though the story of the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 told on the 70-meter-long embroidery unfurls like the panels of a comic strip, the meaning of key episodes has long been debated by experts. Even the famous scene of King Harold’s death is ambiguous. For the public, it’s worse: The figures mostly look alike, with long bodies and little, pointed heads; the relationship between the subjects in the middle of each panel and the vignettes in the borders above and below is opaque; and the identifying names and places are written in Latin.

The dramatic battle scenes are confusing and perhaps comical to many viewers. If you are used to Game of Thrones carnage, the bloodless separation of head or leg from torso on the tapestry, effectuated by two-edged Viking swords, will be deeply unsatisfying. The didactics don’t help much either. Wall texts and graphics at the BM are minimal and seem directed at children or teens, though the long queues to enter the exhibition space would tax the patience of any child.

But not the adult English public, for whom queues – standing in line – is a matter of heritage and pride. While the Bayeux Tapestry is an example of artistic virtuosity and an expression of French (or early Norman) chauvinism, the Bayeux Tapestry exhibition – by virtue of the long queues to enter — is an example of institutional power and an expression of English conformism. At the British Museum, to paraphrase Shakespeare, the queue’s the thing.

My first visit to the Bayeux Tapestry

Before it landed at the British Museum, the Bayeux Tapestry resided at the Bayeux Tapestry Museum, a specially converted seminary in Bayeux, Normandy. Before that (1948-1983), it was housed in the Hôtel du Doyen, an 18th C. private mansion in the same, small city. That’s where I saw it first, without the queues or crowds – in fact, all by myself.

In summer 1974, I cashed in the U.S. Savings Bonds I’d received as gifts for my bar-mitzvah five years before and blew the money (about $500) on a trip to Europe with my friend, Andrew Zerman. We flew with our backpacks to Reykjavik, and then on to London via Icelandic Airlines – the hippie express. I looked the part – long hair, Nehru shirt and bell-bottom trousers. But I preferred Beethoven to the Grateful Dead and herbal tea to marijuana. (That would soon change.) Andy wore chinos and swore by Stephen Sondheim. We camped for free in the basement apartment in Kensington of John Goldstone, a Zerman family friend we never met – he was busy producing Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) and The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975).

Apart from visiting Carnaby Street and finding it dead, and being impressed by the Crown Jewels in the Tower of London, I have little recollection of what we did or saw. After a couple of weeks, Andy and I spilt up for a while, with a plan to meet up later in Paris and return together to the U.S. Before that, however, I wanted to go to Bayeux to see the tapestry. I’d learned about it from an old issue of National Geographic Magazine (1966).

The Channel crossing from Dover was my first cruise, though I was a veteran of the Staten Island Ferry. From Calais-Maritime station, I took the train to Rouen. After that, I stuck out my thumb to hitch the rest of the way to Bayeux. There, I stayed at an ancient-looking, half-timbered youth hostel and ate granola at breakfast with a bunch of other kids of different nationalities, all of them older, cooler, and sexier than me. That morning, I walked the short distance to the Hôtel du Doyen, paid the one- or two-franc admission and entered the still empty gallery.

Bayeux Tapestry at the Hôtel du Doyen, Bayeux, where it remained from 1948-1983. Photo: Postcard, c. 1965.

I remember taking my time and following the dramatic narrative, section by section, frequently circling back to remind myself what happened before. Today, I can’t remember much of my reaction to what I saw except the following: that the people and events depicted were completely foreign to my experience and understanding. Eleventh-century Hastings might as well have been the planet Mars. I didn’t then know the L.P. Hartley quote: “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”  But I understood the sentiment.

The tapestry itself

In my undergraduate classes in medieval art at SUNY Albany in the mid 1970s, and later in graduate school, we spent little time on the Bayeux Tapestry. That’s probably because it’s a unicorn – there’s almost nothing like it, which means it’s hard to put it in art historical context. Unlike Romanesque churches and cathedrals – of which there are thousands (hundreds in Britain alone) – there are very few textiles of........

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