Visit the Tapestry Museum

Visit the Tapestry Museum

	TIME TARGET (confirm these times): Visit Tapestry Museum by 4:30 pm
Tapestry Museum Open daily: 9 am – 6:30 pm (7 pm from May to August); last admission 45 minutes before closing (5:45 pm). Cost: 9€ for Tapestries Museum alone. 12€ for two museum combination ticket; 15€ for all three museums. Additional museums: Museum of Art & History (37 rue du Bienvenu) and/or the Memorial Museum of the Battle of Normandy (Boulevard Fabian Ware).
Note about other museums on the Combo Ticket Museum of Art & History: housed in the Bishop’s Palace beside the cathedral. Exhibits include fabulous Bayeux lace samples, pottery, china, and paintings. Memorial Museum of the Battle of Normandy: a unique museum that immerses you in the battle of Normandy from the allied point of view, as well as the German perspective, spanning from preparations for D-Day (June 6, 1944) to the aftermath. You will have time to fit in one or both of these additional museums, one each at the end of the days you travel to Caen.

French legend claims that the tapestry was created by William the Conqueror's wife, Queen Matilda, and her ladies-in-waiting. You will learn more about the dauntless Mathilde tomorrow, when you visit the royal couple’s castle and abbeys in Caen. Most scholars, however, believe that the tapestry was stitched by nuns at the behest of William’s half-brother, Bishop Odo of Bayeux, probably at the same time he was overseeing the construction of the cathedral. Whatever its genesis, the tapestry is a veritable marvel. And the fact that it has survived from the 11^th to the 21^st century is nothing short of miraculous.

If a visit to a museum of tapestries sounds low key to you, consider why the tapestry was created at the time. Imagine yourself alive during William’s conquest—this seemingly impossible, and insanely heroic, venture across the English Channel to wrest back the throne of England from the usurper, Harold. How would you have learned the story, in all of its glory? The graphic version of the tale displayed in the tapestry would have been your primary means to discover what had happened, given that, in that day and age, you most certainly would not have had access to radio, TV or the Internet. All of these means of communication were far in the future. Most probably, you would not even have been able to read. And if you were, you would have had very limited access to written accounts.

So, to learn the story, you would have gone to the Cathedral, along with all of your neighbors, to view the saga in the “living technicolor” of the day. William’s tale of bravery and sacrifice, loyalty and love, was passed on, and then preserved for the next 1000+ years, through this very tapestry you are about to see. This Norman work of art, a key resource for the history of earlier civilizations, was added to the UNESCO “Memory of the World” Register in 2007.