00:00Yeah, I'm amazed that we've got the Bayer Tapestry here at the British Museum.
00:03It's going to be a fantastic experience for the public.
00:06I mean, never before has this object been seen in this country since it was made.
00:10Yeah, I mean, I was first involved in this in 2013.
00:13I joined the Bayer Tapestry Scientific Committee.
00:15That was really about the development of Bayer Museum,
00:17but it obviously opened the opportunity that the tapestry could come to this country.
00:22And of course, there's been people on both sides of the channel
00:24that have worked really hard to make this happen,
00:27both from the political perspective, but also the very practical perspective
00:30of moving the Bayer Tapestry here.
00:32I mean, the operation, just to put it in its case, took about 18 hours.
00:36So it's an amazing job.
00:38Yeah, so one thing that's really important here is that the tapestry is laying flat.
00:43And in fact, speaking to my colleagues,
00:44they've noticed how that's kind of leveled out the tapestry.
00:47It's more relaxed.
00:47So in France, in Bayer, it was kind of hanging up a bit like a curtain in a way,
00:52and that was putting pressure on certain parts of the tapestry.
00:54So in some ways, it being flat has been really helpful to the tapestry,
00:58especially whilst the museum is being redeveloped.
01:01But of course, it's a very secure case that we've got here.
01:04It's designed to minimise accidental damage,
01:08you know, for people knocking the case and such like,
01:11but also from liquids and things like that.
01:13So it's the securist case that we think we've got.
01:15And obviously, I can't go into details,
01:17but there's other security aspects to ensure that the tapestry is as safe as possible.
01:21The tapestry, the woven record of the Norman Conquest,
01:25has returned to the UK for the first time in almost 1,000 years,
01:30on loan until September 2027,
01:33as part of a special trilateral agreement between the UK, France and the museum.
01:39Special conservation and security measures are in place to ensure its safety while in the UK.
01:44The tapestry is considered to be one of the wonders of the medieval world
01:49and offers an insight into life in 11th century England,
01:53both before and after the conquests from castles, warfare and ships to clothing, food and furniture.
02:00Yeah, there's very few women actually depicted in the Bay of Tapestry.
02:04There's three in the main freeze and three in the borders.
02:07It's interesting what those women are doing.
02:09There's Edith, Queen Edith, who's crying at the bottom of her husband's bed.
02:13There's this woman called Alf Giva, who we don't really know who she is
02:16or how she fits in the story even.
02:18And there's this woman kind of fleeing a house.
02:20And then there's the border details,
02:22where strange pairings of men and women doing all sorts of things.
02:26The point is that these women are mostly in kind of points or moments of kind of distress to a
02:33degree.
02:34I mean, obviously we're interpreting it from a modern sort of perspective,
02:38but it does make you think about the female embroiderers making the Bay of Tapestry
02:41and what they would reflect on as they're depicting these scenes,
02:45not only of the battle scenes of the men who are dying that they may have known,
02:48but also the women and the kind of,
02:50are they reflecting their own sort of situation that they've gone through?
02:56.
02:56.
02:56.
02:56.
02:56You
