The tapestry was likely embroidered in Canterbury, England, at some point in the 11th century, and historians aren’t sure how, when or why it made it to Bayeux, a city in northern France. It does not feature in historical records until 1476, when it appears in an inventory from Bayeux cathedral as “a very long and narrow hanging of linen, embroidered with figures and inscriptions representing the conquest of England.”

Although it was often stored in a cedar chest to guard against moths, the tapestry wasn’t always treated as a fragile masterpiece, even as, over the next few hundred years, its reputation grew.

In 1803, Napoleon ordered it moved along bumpy roads from Bayeux to the Louvre museum in Paris to help drum up support for his planned invasion of Britain. It later returned to Bayeux, from where some 19th-century English visitors wrote that the tapestry was “already ragged” and predicted that it would “be wholly ruined in the course of half a century.”

When France was under German occupation during World War II, the Nazis brought the tapestry back to the Louvre on the orders of Heinrich Himmler, who ultimately wanted it in Germany. But the Allies liberated Paris before the tapestry disappeared into a Nazi treasure trove. It went back to Bayeux, and in the decades afterward, the tapestry’s guardians all seemed to agree on one thing: It shouldn’t leave town again.

Down on One Knee

The centuries of rough handling had an impact: A study from 2020 found that the tapestry had 24,204 stains, 16,445 wrinkles, 9,646 holes and 30 tears. By that time, ideas about art conservation had changed drastically.

Ella Hendriks, a professor of conservation at the University of Amsterdam, said that conservation had emerged as a profession in the 19th century, when there were two schools of thought. Some artists and philosophers, exemplified by the English critic John Ruskin, thought that artifacts should be maintained as they were or left to naturally decay, arguing that the “golden stain of time” added aesthetic value. Yet the majority of incipient conservators and restorers felt a duty to keep artworks looking brand-new.