Bayeux Tapestry

Right, you go to the British Museum, you're super excited, you take along your phone or your camera, you get it out, and what are you not allowed to take a

photo of anymore, Alice? Oh, the Bayeux Tapestry.

I mean, it's almost 70 metres long in this beautiful exhibition that's underway at the moment at the British Museum.

Of course, this tapestry loaned by France.

The Bayeux Tapestry visits England for the first time in a thousand years.

Hi there, everyone.

It's Jeff, and this is Plain English, where we help you upgrade your English with stories about current events and trending topics.

Every week I pick a new story to talk about and this week I picked a story a thousand years in the making.

The Bayeux Tapestry lives permanently in a museum in Bayeux, France.

It depicts the Norman conquest of England in the year 1066.

It was probably made in England and then transported to France around the year 1077.

Now, let's jump into today's story.

It would seem, however, that if she did it at all, she must have done it as Solomon built the temple, with a great deal of help.

For this famous piece of embroidery, which has been celebrated among all the historians and scholars of the world for several hundred years by the name of the Bayeux Tapestry, is over four hundred feet long and nearly two feet wide.

The web is of linen, while the embroidery is of woollen.

It was all obviously executed with the needle, and was worked with infinite labor and care.

This piece of tapestry, therefore, if Matilda really worked it, is about 800 years old.

And when we consider how delicate, slender, and frail is the fiber of a linen thread, and that the various elements of decay, always busy in the work of corrupting and destroying the works of man, have proved themselves powerful enough to waste away and crumble into ruin the proudest structures which he has ever attempted to rear, we are amazed that these slender filaments have been able to resist their action so long.

The Bayeux tapestry has lasted nearly a thousand years.

It will probably last for a thousand years to come.

Why is it that I felt the need to carry, to keep my keys in my hand last night when I'm walking home? Why is that responsibility mine to bear?

Those stories and also why visitors to the Bayeux Tapestry are being told to get a shift on.

I'll explain why later in the hour.

Nine o'clock news on LBC is next.

Even the crowd seemed a little nonplussed by that, didn't they? We'll be speaking, we think, with Sir Ed later in the hour.

And then towards the end of this hour...

Why have visitors been banned from taking pictures of the Bayeux Tapestry, and what do they make of it? I'm LBC's Shivani Sharma, in the queue with everything you need to know.

And

Ryanair claimed 25,000 of its passengers were affected and a demand in the air traffic boss resigns.

Well, to the British Museum now, which has noted record numbers visiting to see the Bayeux Tapestry.

The famous medieval embroidery has led to long queues forming as staff try to keep visitors moving along the 70-metre work.

However, curators have now banned visitors from taking photographs of the tapestry over concerns that they were taking too long to view the historic work.

Guys, it's on loan until July, and tickets are sold out until the new year.

Well, good on you, Gavin.

I saw the Bayeux Tapestry at Bayeux.

There is no waiting, and you can take

There's the settlement of Iceland and Greenland.

And then if you look on the continent, the most enduring feature of Scandinavian overseas settlement is Normandy, very current in Britain at the moment with the loan of the Bayeux Tapestry.

Normandy literally means Nordmandia, the country of the Northmen, and it even has the same boundaries as were agreed when the Viking armies settled there in the early 10th century.

Now, talk to me about Dublin.

It's the only reason we do this podcast.

I believe the Bayeux Tapestry is currently on tour in the UK, isn't it?

It is.

I've seen a lot of memes.