It cannot do portraits. It cannot do depth. When its creators needed to depict a church, they were forced to label it in Latin — Ecclesia — as though the image alone could not be trusted to speak. By every technical standard that art history has ever devised, the Bayeux Tapestry should be a curiosity at best, a footnote in a survey of medieval craft.

And yet, standing before it in the British Museum's long, darkened gallery, with its russets and greens and yellows burning quietly under precisely calibrated light, you feel your heart begin to race. It is, without much serious competition, the most thrilling battle scene ever made. The story it tells is one of the most consequential afternoons in European history. On 14 October 1066, Harold, who had recently been crowned king of Anglo-Saxon England, led his army against the forces of William, Duke of Normandy, on a hillside near Hastings.

By nightfall, Harold was dead, his nobles were slaughtered in devastating numbers, and a conquest had begun that would never be reversed. William succeeded where Philip II of Spain, Napoleon, and Hitler would each, in their turn, fail entirely. What the Tapestry's unknown artists — or perhaps a single, extraordinary artist — understood was that speed is its own form of drama. The narrative hurtles rightward along the linen strip with a pacing that feels almost cinematic, accumulating dread and momentum in equal measure, so that the viewer is carried forward not by scholarly duty but by something far more visceral: a genuine, pounding sense of doom.