Rhidian Brook - 01/09/2026

The British Museum has announced record ticket sales for the upcoming Bayeux Tapestry exhibition and London is expecting an imminent invasion of thousands of people from different nations. In a piece of cultural rapprochement, the French are loaning the British Museum the 70-metre embroidery for 9 months. President Macron has joked that the delicate negotiations took longer than Brexit.

The Bayeux Tapestry is such a part of the collective memory, I still think of it as having been in this country for the last 1000 years, rather than in France! In my schoolboy-head, history began at the Battle of Hastings. This owes something to 1066 And All That which says, ‘The Norman Conquest was a good thing, as from this time onwards England stopped being conquered and was thus able to become Top Nation.’

Growing up amongst the castles of Pembrokeshire, we would joke that they were built by the Norman oppressors. Secretly, I thought they were magnificent and part of my own heritage. Mongrel Welshman that I am.

Last year, I saw the tapestry in Bayeux the week before it was dismantled to be sent to England. I had just visited the memorial sights of another great invasion on the beaches of Normandy. From D-Day to Domesday.

In the flesh, the tapestry is a piece of embroidered cinema – the IMAX of its day - that grips from the first metre to the 90th . Commissioned by the conquerors, but stitched by the conquered, it clearly depicts an invasion of subjugation rather than liberation, showing the trauma of rape, torture, as well the intensity of battle. Victory and defeat are closely woven. And it is hard to tell the Saxons and Normans apart.

What the Tapestry shows, like the arrows in maps indicating Angles and Saxons and Normans invading these shores, is that history is not as neat as we would have it. And we’re as not as pure or ‘Top Nation’ as we like to think.

This is nothing new. As the psalmist says ‘Oh God, the nations have invaded our inheritance,‘ . And the invaders kept coming, Babylonians, Assyrians, Romans, and on and on. The prophets saw these invasions as God’s way of disciplining a disobedient people who thought they were ‘Top Nation’. They called on God to intervene.

Some believe this cry was answered when God, in the person of Christ, invaded history. This was done without the use of chain-mail or weapons. The gospels depict it as a sort of hidden invasion - a rapprochement - where the conqueror comes to do battle with the forces that kill. Defeat and victory are so closely woven in this history that it’s hard to be sure who wins and who loses. If, however, we look closely enough, in the detail of seeming defeat, we can still find the threads of a divine love.