For the first time in nearly a thousand years, the Bayeux Tapestry has crossed the Channel to be seen on the soil whose fate it depicts. The British Museum opened the embroidery to the public on Thursday, offering visitors in London a rare encounter with one of history's most consequential visual records — a seventy-meter thread connecting the present to the moment England was irrevocably remade in 1066. That such an object can still draw crowds, still provoke questions of worth and meaning, speaks to the enduring human need to stand before the past and feel its weight.