ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
This week, French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer met to discuss Ukraine and migration. But the two allies also discussed another conflict, one that goes way back to the year 1066. From London, NPR's Lauren Frayer explains.
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UNIDENTIFIED NARRATOR: On this hillside, on Saturday, 14 October, 1066, a single battle between a few thousand men permanently changed the course of history in England and beyond.
LAUREN FRAYER, BYLINE: It was the Battle of Hastings, the start of the Norman Conquest, as this BBC documentary explains, when William, Duke of Normandy, better known as William the Conqueror, led an army from France that invaded England, killed its King Harold with an arrow to the eye and installed William on his throne. But there are no hard feelings.
SARAH BAXTER: Britons are great, by the way, of making a great triumph out of a defeat. And I studied history at Oxford. My courses started at 1066.
FRAYER: Sarah Baxter is an antiquities expert who, like generations of school kids here, learned their country's history began in 1066. There's a popular satirical history book called "1066 And All That." The date is even immortalized in a ubiquitous car insurance ad on TV.
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UNIDENTIFIED VOICEOVER: Insurance.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) 0800 00 1066.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) Or visit our website.
FRAYER: And so when French President Macron visited this week, British Prime Minister Starmer stood next to him and waxed poetic about that 1066 battle that his country lost because it was the beginning, he said...
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PRIME MINISTER KEIR STARMER: Of a thousand years of shared culture that is now defined by mutual admiration and kinship.
FRAYER: And Macron, noting that in 2027, William the Conqueror has his 1,000th birthday, said this...
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PRESIDENT EMMANUEL MACRON: France will loan the United Kingdom the Bayeux Tapestry.
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FRAYER: The Bayeux Tapestry is the earliest known depiction of that 1066 battle and the world's first war propaganda, woven in wool on linen. It looks like a 230-foot comic strip, complete with that scene of King Harold with an arrow in his eye. Sown in England, it was plundered away to Bayeux, France. But next year, for the first time in 900 or so years, it is coming home on loan to London's British Museum, which is home to more than a few things plundered from elsewhere.
BAXTER: They are very sticky diplomatic things.
FRAYER: Sarah Baxter, who studied history at Oxford, as you heard earlier, says the return of the Bayeux Tapestry is part of a bigger trend of museums giving things back. She serves on the advisory board of the Parthenon Project, lobbying the British Museum to return the so-called Elgin Marbles to Greece, where they were plundered from the Parthenon. She's hopeful that museums may be catching up with modern sensibilities. The British Museum has already given back some of the Benin Bronzes to modern-day Nigeria.
BAXTER: There's a lot of talk about slippery slopes and museums emptying. But I think what the Bayeux Tapestry coming to Britain does show, though, is the power of the partnership is the diplomatic solution.
FRAYER: The power of a partnership to overcome who conquered who back in 1066 and share what's left of that history.
Lauren Frayer, NPR News, London.
(SOUNDBITE OF ADRIAN YOUNGE SONG, "STEP BEYOND (FEAT. BILAL & LAETITIA SADIER)") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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