The news is official: the Bayeux Tapestry, that 70-metre-long embroidery of Norman conquest, is to cross the Channel and settle in London. The French have finally relented, and British officials are giddy. ‘Nothing left to chance,’ they crow.
A cultural triumph, they say. A diplomatic coup. I say: beware the hubris of the victor.
We are not the Normans. We are the Saxons, and this tapestry is a monument to our subjugation. But more than that, the very act of its transfer reveals a decay in our intellectual life.
We are no longer a nation that creates; we are a nation that curates. Like the late Romans who shipped Greek statues to their villas, we mistake the accumulation of artefacts for the flourishing of civilisation. The tapestry will be a spectacle.
Thousands will queue. They will gaze at the embroidered Normans and think: ‘How splendid.’ But they will miss the point.
The point is that we are no longer capable of producing anything so grand. We cannot stitch a national epic. We cannot even agree on what our national epic would be.
So we import one. We treat the Bayeux Tapestry as a trophy, a symbol of our supposed cultural supremacy. But it is a poisoned chalice.
It reminds us that our ancestors were conquered. It reminds us that the last time a foreign army successfully invaded these shores, it was led by a Frenchman. And it reminds us that we now cheer the arrival of that army’s publicity material.
This is not triumph. This is necrophilia. We are caressing the bones of the dead because we have no life in us.
Every great empire falls when it begins to worship its own past. The British Museum is already a mausoleum. Now we stuff it with the shroud of our own defeat.
Mark my words: the tapestry will be a sensation. It will be lauded as a masterpiece of British-French cooperation. And it will be a symptom of our intellectual decadence.
The Victorians would have laughed at us. They built empires. We borrow tapestries.
