Visitors will learn about the origins of the tapestry-aspects of which continue to be debated-and its design, material, and construction. The museum’s second floor offers informative exhibits with explanations in English. The Bayeux Tapestry is so iconic that the cover of the 15 July 1944 issue of The New Yorker, which reported the invasion of Normandy, imitated its stylized soldiers and ships. The scene is reminiscent of GIs dashing ashore from their landing craft on Omaha and Utah beaches. Armored knights, lances and shields in hand, immediately charge inshore on their mounts, heading for battle at Hastings.

When the fleet reaches the beaches of Pevensey, England, the ships are pulled up on the shore, the horses unloaded, and the masts and rigging struck. William’s own ship bears a cross atop her mast. Some ships carry only horses for William’s cavalry. Sailors tend the billowing, multicolored sails, while helmsmen steer with starboard side rudders. Brilliant colors show the great fleet of single-masted ships crossing the Channel. Anyone remotely interested in logistics will appreciate the scenes of working parties carrying coats of mail (each took two men), spears and swords, casks of wine, and roasted pigs onto the ships.

With the ships completed, the provisioning begins. The planks become ships, and shipwrights bend over them using broadaxes, adzes, profile scrapers, a riveting hammer, and a shell augur, all clearly illustrated by the intricate embroidery. Next, a shipwright uses a shaping axe, its curved blade rendered so accurately that it is recognizable 900 years later, forming planks amid hulls in a shipyard. The tapestry shows shipwrights, felling axes in hand, selecting timber in the forests of Normandy. When William, duke of Normandy, learns that Harold Godwinson, earl of Wessex, did not honor his claim to the throne but has instead crowned himself king, we see William ordering his naval architect to build a fleet. Three depictions of ships crossing the Channel precede the tapestry’s major nautical scenes: the building, provisioning, and embarkation of William’s great fleet. Sailors handle lines, furl sails, and throw out anchors. Waves roll, sails billow, and flags flap. The tapestry transmits the energy and motion of these events. The tapestry gives us a rare contemporary look at the ships of the period, including their planking, masts, rigging, dragon-head bows, high sterns, steering boards (hence, starboard), oars, anchors, and shields on gunwales. Ships were essential to cross-Channel diplomacy, espionage, and invasion, and the careful and colorful stitching shows 11th-century sailing vessels performing all of these roles. One fact, however, stands out: In a preliterate society, the tapestry made clear William’s right to wear the crown of England. Though much remains in doubt about its origins, many historians believe it was commissioned by William’s half-brother, Bishop Odo of Bayeux, embroidered in about 1070, and subsequently displayed in the great cathedral at Bayeux. The tapestry is essentially a time-sequenced cartoon packed with more than 1,500 warriors, ships, horses, castles, and buildings. Its now-unknown embroiderers, stitching with eight colors of wool on linen fabric, depicted in detail the pivotal Battle of Hastings and the two years of diplomacy, political intrigue, and oath-breaking that preceded it. Visitors to the Bayeux Tapestry Museum in the eponymous city will see the fragile 230-foot embroidery (it is, in fact, not a tapestry) displayed in a graceful darkened chamber.

While thousands of photographs and newsreels document the 1944 invasion, only the 11th-century Bayeux Tapestry remains to record this historic event and the “dragon ships” that carried William’s army. He launched his fleet, estimated to have consisted of 400 to 1,000 ships, from this same coast and achieved what Napoleon and Hitler later could only dream about: the conquest of England. But the city of Bayeux, set amid these beaches, was the location of another great amphibious expedition, that of William the Conqueror in 1066. The beaches of Normandy, France, are synonymous with the greatest amphibious invasion in history when Allied armies surged across the English Channel and began landing on D-Day, 6 June 1944.

William the conqueror artoon