68 Metres of Silence!

For those who want to arrive well prepared at the British Museum and discover every detail of the Bayeux Tapestry worth seeing in real life, and for those who will not be able to visit the Museum, ikonoTV produced this 47-minute Slow Art video. No voice, no music, just a camera moving inside it. The Bayeux Tapestry is not a tapestry. It is a nearly 1,000-year-old embroidery: wool stitched by hand onto nine lengths of linen, joined into one strip sixty-eight metres long and about fifty centimetres high. It was made in the 1070s, most scholars think in Canterbury, by embroiderers whose names were never recorded. Every figure was outlined in stitch and then filled with colour, and the linen around them was left bare on purpose. Fifty-eight scenes run along it: six hundred men and one woman with a name, around two hundred horses, and a fleet cut from the forest and sailed across the sea. Short Latin captions name kings, a bishop, a man holding two horses, and that one woman. A comet crosses the sky and men point up at it. Above and below, in two bands about seven centimetres high, runs a second story: lions, griffins, birds, hounds and fables from Aesop. When the battle comes the animals stop, and the lower band fills with the dead. That any of it survives is a miracle. The cloth was wound on a winch that chewed both ends, the final scenes are gone, and the damage was patched in the nineteenth century, arrow in Harold’s eye included. Pick one ship, or one creature in the border, and stay with it.