The news that the Bayeux Tapestry is to be moved from its Norman home to London for a brief exhibition has predictably sent the heritage industry into paroxysms of delight. “Nothing left to chance,” we are told, as if the thing were a Fabergé egg rather than a nine-century-old piece of embroidered propaganda. But let us not mistake logistics for wisdom.
This is not a cultural exchange; it is a vanity project, a symptom of a civilisation that venerates artefacts over ideas. The tapestry will travel in a climate-controlled crate, yes, but the real question is why a nation so obsessed with its own decline feels the need to import the Norman Conquest as a metaphor. We have become like the late Romans, hoarding the spoils of history while our own institutions crumble.
The tapestry’s journey is no triumph; it is a pilgrimage to a museum of the past, where we go to worship what we no longer have the courage to create.
