In 2026, 80,000 people crashed websites in a virtual queue for a 900-year-old strip of linen. This episode decodes the Bayeux Tapestry, which is not a tapestry at all but a nearly 70-meter embroidery in wool on linen, stitched with just two techniques and a handful of plant dyes, almost certainly commissioned by Bishop Odo of Bayeux and made by Anglo-Saxon needleworkers in Canterbury who were recording the defeat of their own people.

We walk through its 58 scenes as an early graphic novel: Harold’s oath on holy relics, the coronation, Halley’s Comet and the ghostly ships in the border, the shield wall at Hastings, and the dismembered bodies in the margins. Then we examine the subversive Aelfgyva panel, the disputed arrow-in-the-eye death of Harold, the missing final panel, and the artifact’s survival through the French Revolution, Napoleon’s invasion propaganda, Himmler’s SS, an intercepted 1944 order decoded at Bletchley Park, and the 2026 loan to the British Museum with its concertina-fold transport and enormous insurance liability.

• How laid work kept expensive dyed wool on the visible surface of the linen
• Why Queen Matilda’s authorship is legend and the Domesday Book points to Odo
• Needle-hole evidence suggesting restorers added the famous arrow, and where the real Harold may be
• Fragments cut by the Ahnenerbe and returned to France in 2026, and the Louvre basement standoff of August 1944
• The paravent folding screen, dry runs with a replica, a 40,000-signature petition, and the ethics of moving fragile history