the coffin. Artists or others who wish to know the ceremonial for
that occasion, will find it set forth in the descriptions of many of
our mediæval funerals. At the obsequies of Henry VII. in Westminster
Abbey:--“Twoe herauds came to the Duke of Buck. and to the Earles and
conveyed them into the Revestrie where they did receive certen Palles
which everie of them did bringe solemply betwene theire hands and
comminge in order one before another as they were in degree unto the
said herse, thay kissed theire said palles and delivered them unto the
said heraudes which laide them uppon the kyngs corps, in this manner:
the palle which was first offered by the Duke of Buck. was laid on
length on the said corps, and the residewe were laid acrosse, as thick
as they might lie.”[198] In the same church at the burial of Anne of
Cleves, A.D. 1557, a like ceremonial of carrying cloth-of-gold palls to
the hearse was followed.[199]

 [195] Matt. Paris, p. 249.

 [196] Wills, &c. of the Northern Counties of England, Surtees Society,
    p. 6.

 [197] Tom. ii. p. 501.

 [198] Lelandi Collectanea, t. iv. p. 308.

 [199] Excerpta Historica, p. 312.

Among the many rich textiles belonging to St. Paul’s, London, A.D.
1295, are mentioned: “Baudekynus purpureus cum columpnis et arcubus
et hominibus equitantibus infra, de funere comitissæ Britanniæ. Item
baudekynus purpureus cum columpnis et arcubus et Sampson fortis
infra arcus, de dono Domini Henrici Regis. Duo baudekyni rubei cum
sagittarijs infra rotas, de dono E. regis et reginæ venientium de
Wallia, Unus Baudekynus rubei campi cum griffonibus, pro anima Alianoræ
reginæ junioris,”[200] &c. At times these rich stuffs were cut up into
chasubles: “Casula de baudekyno de opere Saracenico,”[201] as was the
cloth-of-gold dress worn by one of our princesses at her betrothal:
“Unam vestimentum rubeum de panno adaurato diversis avibus poudratum,
in quo domina principessa fuit desponsata.”[202] The word “baudekin”
itself became at last narrowed in its meaning. So warm, so mellow, so
fast were all the tones of crimson which the dyers of Bagdad knew how
to give their silks, that without a thread of gold in them, the mere
glowing tints of those plain crimson silken webs from Bagdad won for
themselves the name of baudekins. Furthermore, when they quite ceased
to be partly woven in gold, and from their consequent lower price and
cheapness got into use for cloths of estate over royal thrones, on
common occasions, the shortened form of such a regal emblem, the canopy
hung over the high altar of a church, acquired, and yet keeps its
appellation, at least in Italy, of “baldachino.”

 [200] Dugdale’s St. Paul’s, pp. 328-9.

 [201] Ibid. p. 331.

 [202] Inventory of the Chapel, Windsor Castle, Mon. Ang. viii. 1363.

How very full in size, how costly in materials and embroidery, must
have sometimes been the cloth of estate spread overhead and behind the
throne of our kings, may be gathered from the “Privy Purse Expenses
of Henry the Seventh,” wherein this item comes: “To Antony Corsse
for a cloth of an estate conteyning 47½ yerds, £11 the yerd, £522
10_s._”[203]

About the feudal right, still kept up in Rome, to a cloth of estate,
among the continental nobility, we have spoken, p. 107 of this
catalogue, where a fragment of such a hanging is described.

The custom itself is thus noticed by Chaucer:--

    Yet nere and nere forth in I gan me dress
    Into an hall of noble apparaile,
    With arras spred, and cloth of gold I gesse,
    And other silke of easier availe:
    Under the cloth of their estate sauns faile
    The king and quene there sat as I beheld.[204]

 [203] Excerpta Historica, p. 121.

 [204] Poems, ed. Nicolas, t. vi. p. 134.

This same rich golden stuff asks for our notice under a third and even
better known name, to be found all through our early literature as

CLOTH OF PALL.

The cloak (in Latin pallium, in Anglo-Saxon paell) of state for regal
ceremonies and high occasions, worn alike by men as well as women, was
always made of the most gorgeous stuff that could be found. From a very
early period in the mediæval ages, golden webs shot in silk with one or
other of the various colours--occasionally blue, oftener crimson--were
sought out, as may be easily imagined, for the purpose, through so
many years, and everywhere, that at last each sort of cloth of gold
had given to it the name of “pall,” no matter the immediate purpose
to which it might have to be applied, and after so many fashions.
Vestments for church use and garments for knights and ladies were made
of it. Old St. Paul’s had chasubles and copes of cloth of pall: “Casula
de pal, capa chori de pal, &c.”[205]

In worldly use, if the king’s daughter was to have a

    Mantell of ryche degre
    Purple palle and armyne fre.[206]

So in the poem of Sir Isumbras--

    The rich queen in hall was set;
    Knights her served, at hand and feet
        In rich robes of pall.[207]

 [205] Hist. ed. Dugdale, p. 336.

 [206] The Squire of Low Degree.

 [207] Ellis’s Metrical Romances, t. iii. p. 167.

For state receptions, our kings used to send out an order that the
houses should be “curtained” all along the streets which the procession
would have to take through London, “incortinaretur.”[208] How this was
done we learn from Chaucer in the “Knight’s Tale,”[209]

    By ordinance, thurghout the cite large
    Hanged with cloth of gold, and not with sarge;

as well as from the “Life of Alexander:”--

    Al theo city was by-hong
    Of riche baudekyns and pellis (palls) among.[210]

Hence, when Elizabeth, our Henry VII.’s queen, “proceeded from the
Towre throwge the Citie of London (for her coronation) to Westminster,
al the strets ther wich she shulde passe by, were clenly dressed
and besene with clothes of Tappestreye and Arras. And some strets,
as Cheepe, hangged with riche clothes of gold, velvetts, and silks,
&c.[211] “As late as A.D. 1555, at Bow chyrche in London was hangyd
with cloth of gold and with ryche hares (arras).”[212]

Those same feelings which quickened our doughty knights and high-born
ladies to go and overspread the bier of each dead noble friend, with
costly baudekins or cloths of gold, so the church whispered and she
whispers us still to do, in due degree, the same to the coffin in which
the poor man is being carried to the grave beneath a mantle of silk and
velvet. The brother or the sister belonging to any of our old London
gilds had over them, however lowly they might have been in life, one
or other of those splendid hearse-cloths which we saw in this museum,
among the loans, in the ever memorable year 1862.

This silken textile interwove with gold, first known as “ciclatoun,”
on account of its glitter, then as “baudekin,” from the city where it
was best made, came at last to be called by the name of “pall.” Whether
employed on jubilant occasions, for a joyful betrothal, or a stately
coronation, or for a sorrowing funeral, it mattered not, it got the
common term of “cloth of pall,” which we yet keep up in that velvet
covering for a coffin, a burial pall.

 [208] Matt. Paris, p. 661.

 [209] V. 2569-70.

 [210] Warton’s Hist. of English Poetry, t. ii. p. 8.

 [211] Leland’s Collectanea, t. iv. p. 220.

 [212] Machyn’s Diary, p. 102.

LETTERED SILKS

are of no uncommon occurrence, and some examples may be seen in this
collection.

A celebrated Mohammedan writer, Ebn-Khaldoun, who died about the middle
of the fifteenth century, while speaking of that spot in an Arab
palace, the “Tiraz,” so designated from the name itself of the rich
silken stuffs therein woven, tells us that of the attributes of all
Saracenic kings and sultans, and which became a particular usage for
ruling dynasties, one was to have woven the name of the actual prince,
or that special ensign chosen by his house, into the stuffs intended
for their personal wear, whether wrought of silk, brocade, or even
coarser kind of silk. While gearing his loom, the workman contrived
that the letters of the title should come out either in threads of
gold, or in silk of another colour from that of the ground. The royal
apparel thus bore about it its own especial marks emblematic of the
sultan’s wardrobe, and so became the distinguishing ensigne of the
prince himself, as well as for those personages around him, who were
allowed, by their official rank in his court, to wear them, and those
again upon whom he had condescended to bestow such garments as especial
tokens of the imperial favour, like the modern pelisse of honour.
Before the period of their having embraced Islamism the Kings of Persia
used to have woven upon the stuffs wrought for their personal use, or
as gifts to others, their own especial effigies or likeness, or at
times the peculiar ensign of their royalty. On becoming Mussulmans,
the rulers of that kingdom changed the custom, and instead of
portraiture substituted their names, to which they added words sounding
to their ears as foreboding good, or certain formulas of praise and
benediction.[213] Wherever the Moslem ruled, there did he set up the
same practice; and thus, whether in Asia, in Egypt, or other parts of
Africa, or in Moorish Spain, the silken garments for royalty and its
favoured ones, showed woven in them the prince’s name, or at least his
chosen badge. The silken garments wrought in Egypt for the far-famed
Saladin, and worn by him as its Kalif, bore very conspicuously upon
them the name of that conqueror.

In our old lists of church ornaments, frequent mention is found of
vestments inscribed, like pieces here, with words in real or pretended
Arabic; and when St. Paul’s inventory more than once speaks of silken
stuffs, “de opere Saraceno,” we lean to the belief that, though not
all, some at least of those textiles were so called from having Arabic
characters woven on them. Such, too, were the letters on the red
pall, figured with elephants and a bird, belonging to Exeter: “Palla
rubea cum quibusdam literis et elephantis et quadam avi in superiori
parte.”[214] Later, our trade with the South of Spain and the Moors
there, led us to call such words on woven stuffs Moorish, as we find
in old documents, thus Joane Lady Bergavenny bequeaths (A.D. 1434) a
“hullyng (hangings for a hall) of black, red, and green, with morys
letters, &c.”[215]

The weaving of letters in textiles is neither a Moorish, nor Saracenic
invention; ages before, the ancient Parthians used to do so, as we
learn from Pliny: “Parthi literas vestibus intexunt.” A curious
illustration of silken stuffs so frequently bearing letters, borrowed
in general from some real or supposed oriental alphabet, is the custom
which many of the illuminators had of figuring very often on frontals
and altar canopies, made of silk, meaningless words; and the artists
of Italy up to the middle of the sixteenth century did the same on the
hems of the garments worn by great personages, in their paintings. On
the inscribed textiles here, the real or pretended Arabic sentence is
written twice on the same line, once forwards, once backwards.

 [213] Silvestre De Sacy, Chrestomathie Arabe, t. ii. p. 287.

 [214] Oliver, p. 298.

 [215] Test. Vet. i. p. 228.

THE EAGLE,

single and double-headed, may frequently be found in the patterns of
old silks. In all ages certain birds of prey have been looked upon by
heathens as ominous for good or evil. Of this our own country affords
us a mournful example. Upon the standard which was carried at the head
of the Danish masters of Northumbria was figured the raven, the bird of
Odin. This banner had been woven and worked by the daughters of Regnar
Lodbrok, in one noontide’s while; and those heathens believed that if
victory was to follow, the raven would seem to stand erect, and as if
about to soar before the warriors, but if a defeat was impending, the
raven hung his head and drooped his wings; as we are told by Asser:
“Pagani acceperunt illud vexillum quod Reafan nominant: dicunt enim
quod tres sorores Hungari et Habbæ filiæ videlicet Lodebrochi illud
vexillum texuerunt et totum paraverunt illud uno meridiano tempore:
dicunt etiam quod, in omni bello ubi præcederet idem signum, si
victoriam adepturi essent, appereret in medio signi quasi corvus vivens
volitans: sin vero vincendi in futuro fuissent, penderet directe nihil
movens.”[216] Another and a more important flag, that which Harold and
his Anglo-Saxons fought under and lost at Hastings, is described by
Malmesbury as having been embroidered in gold, with the figure of a man
in the act of fighting, and studded with precious stones, all done in
sumptuous art:

“Quod (vexillum) erat in hominis pugnantis figura auro et lapidibus
arte sumptuosa intextum.”[217]

Still farther down in past ages, known for its daring and its lofty
flight, the eagle was held in high repute; throughout all the East,
where it became the emblem of lordly power and victory, often it is to
be seen flying in triumph over the head of some Assyrian conqueror,
as may be witnessed in Layard’s Work on Nineveh.[218] Homer calls it
the bird of Jove. Upon the yoke in the war chariot of the Persian king
Darius sat perched an eagle as if outstretching his wings wrought all
in gold: “Auream aquilam pinnas extendenti similem.”[219] The sight of
this bird in the air while a battle raged was, by the heathen looked
upon as an omen boding victory to those on whose side it hovered. At
the battle of Granicus those about Alexander saw or thought they saw
fluttering just above his head, quite heedless of the din, an eagle,
to which Aristander called the attention of the Macedonians as an
unmistakable earnest of success: “Qui circa Alexandrum erant, vidisse
se crediderunt, paululum super caput regis placide volantem aquilam
non gemitu morientium territam Aristander ... militibus in pugnam
intentis avem monstrabat, haud dubium victoriæ auspicium.”[220] The
Romans bore it on their standards; the Byzantine emperors kept it as
their own device, and following the ancient traditions of the east,
and heedless of their law that forbids the making of images, the
Saracens, especially when they ruled in Egypt, had the eagle figured on
several things about them, sometimes single at others double-headed,
which latter was the shape adopted by the emperors of Germany as their
blazon; and in this form it is borne to this day by several reigning
houses. No wonder then that eagles of both fashions are so often to be
observed woven upon ancient and eastern textiles.

Very likely, as yet left to show itself upon the walls of the citadel
at Cairo, and those curious old glass lamps hung up there and elsewhere
in the mosques, the double-headed eagle with wings displayed, which
we find on royal Saracenic silks, was borrowed by the Paynim from
the Crusaders, as it would seem, and selected for its ensign by the
government of Egypt in the thirteenth century, which will easily
account for the presence of that heraldic bird upon so many specimens
from Saracenic looms, to be found in this collection. The “tiraz,” in
fact, was for silk like the royal manufactory of Dresden and Sèvres
china, or Gobelin’s looms for tapestry, and as the courts of France for
its mark or ensign fixed upon the two LLs interlaced, and the house of
Saxony the two swords placed saltire wise, so at least for Saladin
and Egypt, in the middle ages the double-headed eagle with its wings
outstretched, was the especial badge or ensign. In the same manner
the sacred “horm,” or tree of life, between the two rampant lions or
cheetahs may be the mark of Persia.

As early as A.D. 1277 Exeter Cathedral reckoned among her vestments
several such; for instance, a cope of baudekin figured with small
two-headed eagles: “Capa baudekyn cum parvis aquilis, ij capita
habentibus;”[221] and our Henry III.’s brother, Richard the king
of Germany, gave to the same church a cope of black baudekin, with
eagles in gold figured on it: “Una capa de baudek, nigra cum aquilis
deauratis.”[222] Many other instances might be noticed all through
England.

 [216] Asserius, De Rebus Gestis Ælfredi, ed. Wise, p. 33.

 [217] Will. Malmes. Gesta Regum Anglorum, t. ii. p. 415, ed. Duffus
    Hardy.

 [218] Plates, 18, 20, 22.

 [219] Quintus Curtius, Lib. III. cap. iii. p. 7.

 [220] Ibid. Lib. IV. cap. xv. p. 72.

 [221] Oliver, p. 299.

 [222] Ibid.

As in architecture, sculpture, and painting, ancient and modern, so

IN WOVEN STUFFS THERE ARE STYLES NICELY DEFINED, AND EPOCHS EASILY
DISCERNIBLE.

Hitherto no attempt has been anywhere made to distribute olden silken
textiles into various schools, and as the present is the first and only
collection which has in any country been thrown open as yet to the
public, the occasion seems a fitting one to warrant such an endeavour
of classification.

With no other than the specimens here before us, we think we see them
fall into these several groups--Chinese, Persian, Byzantine, Oriental
or Indian, Syrian, Saracenic, Moresco-Spanish, Sicilian, Italian,
Flemish, British, and French.

_Chinese_ examples here are very few; but what they are, whether plain
or figured, they are beautiful in their own way. From all that we know
of the people, we are led to believe their own way two thousand years
ago is precisely theirs still, so that the web wrought by them this
year or two hundred years ago, like No. 1368, p. 75, would not differ
hardly in a line from their textiles two thousand years gone by, when
Dionysius Periegetes wrote that, the “Seres make precious figured
garments, resembling in colour the flowers of the field, and rivalling
in fineness the work of spiders.” In the stuffs, warp and woof are of
silk, and both of the best kinds.

_Persian_ textiles, even as we see them in this collection, must have
been for many centuries just as they were ever figured, and may be,
even now, described by the words of Quintus Curtius, with some little
allowance for those influences exercised upon the mind of the weaver by
his peculiar religious belief, which would not let the lowliest workman
forget the “homa,” or tree of life. When Marco Polo travelled through
those parts, in the thirteenth century, and our countryman, Sir John
Mandeville, a hundred years later, the old love for hunting wild beasts
still lived, and the princes of the country were as fond as ever of
training the cheetah, a kind of small lion or leopard, for the chase,
as we have noticed, p. 178.

When the design is made up of various kinds of beasts and birds, real
or imaginary, with the sporting cheetah nicely spotted among them; and
the “homa” conspicuously set forth above all; sure may we be that the
web was wrought by Persians, and on most occasions the textile will be
found in all its parts to be woven from the richest materials.

As an illustration of the Persian type of style, No. 8233, p. 154, may
be taken as a specimen.

For trade purposes, and to make the textile pass in the European market
as from Persia, the manner of its loom was often copied by the Jewish
and the Christian weavers in Syria, as we shall have to notice just now.

_The Byzantine_ Greeks, for their textiles from the time when in the
sixth century they began to weave home-grown silk, made for themselves
a school of design which kept up in their drawing not a little of the
beauty, breadth, and flowing outline which had outlived among them
the days of heathenish art. Along with this a strong feeling of their
Christianity showed itself as well in many of the subjects which they
took out of holy writ, as in the smaller elements of ornamentation.
Figures, whether of the human form or of beasts, are given in a much
larger and bolder size than on any other ancient stuffs. Though there
be very few known specimens from the old looms of Constantinople, the
one here, No. 7036, p. 122, showing Samson wrestling with a lion, may
serve as a type. In the year 1295 old St. Paul’s Cathedral, here in
London, would seem to have possessed several splendid vestments made of
Byzantine silk, as we note in the samples to be named _infra_ under the
head of Damask.

The way in which those Greeks gave a pattern to the stuff intended more
especially for liturgical purposes is pointed out while speaking about
“Stauracin” and the “Gammadion,” a form of the cross with which they
powdered their silks; p. lii.

The world-wide fame of the Byzantine purple tint is attested by our
Gerald Barry, whose words we quote further on. As a sample of the
Byzantine loom in “diaspron,” or diapering, we would refer to No. 1239,
p. 26.

The specimens here from the Byzantine, and later Greek loom, are
not to be taken as by any means appropriate samples of its general
production. They are poor in both respects--material and, when
figured, design--as may be seen at pp. 27, 28, 33, 36, 123, 124, 126,
219, &c.

_Oriental_ ancient silks and textiles have their own distinctive marks.

From Marco Polo, who wandered much over the far east, some time during
the thirteenth century, we learn that the weaving there was done by
women who wrought in silk and gold, after a noble manner, beasts and
birds upon their webs:--“Le loro donne lavorano tutte cose a seta e ad
oro e a uccelli e a bestie nobilmente e lavorano di cortine ed altre
cose molto ricamente.”[223]

Out of the several specimens here from Tartary and India, during our
mediæval period, we pick one or two which show well the meaning of
those words uttered by that great Venetian traveller, while speaking
about the textiles he saw in those countries. The dark purple piece of
silk, figured in gold with birds and beasts, of the thirteenth century,
No. 7086, p. 137, is good; but better still for our purpose is the
shred, No. 7087, p. 138, of blue damask, with its birds, its animals,
and flowers wrought in gold, and different coloured silks.

What India is, it has ever been, famous for its cloud-like transparent
muslins, which since Marco Polo’s days have kept till now even that
oriental name, through being better than elsewhere woven at Mosul.

 [223] I Viaggi di Marco Polo, ed. A. Bartoli, Firenze, 1865, p. 345.

The _Syrian_ school is well represented here by several fine pieces.

The whole sea-board of that part of Asia Minor, as well as far
inland, was inhabited by a mixture of Jews, Christians, and Saracens;
and each of these people were workers in silk. The reputation of
the neighbouring Persia had of old stood high for the beauty and
durability of her silken textiles, which made them to be sought for by
the European traders. Persia’s outlet to the west for her goods, lay
through the great commercial ports on the coast of Syria. Setting, like
Persia used to do, as it were, her own peculiar seal upon her figured
webs, by mingling in her designs the mystic “homa,” to the European
mind this part of the pattern became, at first, a sort of assurance
that those goods had been thrown off by Persian looms. By one of those
tricks of imitation followed then, as well as now, the Syrian designers
for the loom threw this “homa” into their patterns. This symbol of
“the tree of life,” had no doubt been a borrow by Zoroaster from Holy
Writ.[224] Neither to the Christian’s eye, nor to the Jew’s, nor
Moslem’s, was there in it anything objectionable; all three, therefore,
took it and made it a leading portion of design in the patterns of
their silks; and hence is it that we meet it so often. Though done
with perhaps a fraudulent intention of palming on the world Syrian for
real Persian silks, those Syrians usually put into their own designs a
something which spoke of their peculiar selves and their workmanship.
Though there be seen the “homa,” the “cheetah,” and other elements of
Persian patterns, still the discordant two-handled vase, the badly
imitated Arabic sentence, betray the textile to be not Persian,
but Syrian. No. 8359, p. 213, will readily exemplify our meaning.
Furthermore, perhaps quite innocent of any knowledge about Persia’s
first belief, and her use of the “homa” in her old religious services,
the Christian weavers of Syria, along with the Zorasterian symbol, put
the sign of the cross by the side of that “tree of life,” as we find
upon the piece of silk, No. 7094, p. 140. Another remarkable specimen
of the Syrian loom is No. 7034, p. 122, whereon the Nineveh lions come
forth so conspicuously. As a good example of well-wrought “diaspron” or
diaper, No. 8233, p. 154, may be mentioned, along with No. 7052, p. 127.

 [224] Genesis ii. 9.

_Saracenic_ weaving, as shown by the design upon the web, is
exemplified in several specimens before us.

However much against what looks like a heedlessness of the Koran’s
teachings, certain it is that the Saracens, those of the upper
classes in particular, felt no difficulty in wearing robes upon which
animals and the likenesses of other created things were woven; with
the strictest of their princes, a double-headed eagle was a royal
heraldic device, as we have shown, p. lxiii. Stuffs, then, figured
with birds and beasts, with trees and flowers, were not the less of
Saracenic workmanship, and meant for Moslem wear. What, however, may
be looked for upon real Saracenic textures is a pattern consisting of
longitudinal stripes of blue, red, green, and other colour; some of
them charged with animals, small in form, other some written, in large
Arabic letters, with a word or sentence, often a proverb, often a good
wish or some wise saw.

As examples we would point to No. 8288, p. 178, and 7051, p. 127.
For a fair specimen of diapering, No. 7050, p. 127, while No. 8639,
p. 243, presents us with a design having in it, besides the crescent
moon, a proof that architectural forms were not forgotten by the
weaver-draughtsman, in his sketches for the loom.

Later, in our chapter on Tapestry, we shall have occasion to speak
about another sort of Saracenic work or tapestry, of the kind called
abroad, from the position of its frame, of the basse lisse.

_Moresco-Spanish_, or Saracenic textiles, wrought in Spain, though
partaking of the striped pattern, and bearing words in real or imitated
Arabic, had some distinctions of their own. The designs shown upon
these stuffs are almost always drawn out of strap-work, reticulations,
or some combination or another of geometrical lines, amid which are
occasionally to be found different forms of conventional flowers.
Specimens are to be seen here at pp. 51, 55, 121, 124, 125, 186, 240,
&c. Sometimes, but very rarely, the crescent moon is figured as in the
curious piece, No. 8639, p. 243. The colours of these silks are usually
either a fine crimson, or a deep blue with almost always a fine toned
yellow as a ground. But one remarkable feature in these Moresco-Spanish
textiles is the presence, when gold is brought in, of an ingenious
though fraudulent imitation of the precious metal, for which shreds of
gilded parchment cut up into narrow flat strips are substituted, and
woven with the silk. This, when fresh, must have looked very bright,
and have given the web all the appearance of those favourite stuffs
called here in England “tissues,” of which we have already spoken, p.
xxiii.

We are not aware that this trick has ever been found out before, and it
was only by the use of a highly magnifying glass that we penetrated the
secret. Our suspicion was awakened by so often observing that the gold
had become quite black. Examples of this gilt vellum may be seen here,
at Nos. 7095, p. 140; 8590, p. 224; 8639, p. 244; &c.

When the Christian Spanish weavers lived beyond Saracenic control, they
filled their designs with beasts, birds, and flowers; but even then the
old Spanish fine tone of crimson is rather striking in their webs, as
is evidenced in the beautiful piece of diaper, No. 1336, p. 64.

Spanish velvets--and they were mostly wrought in Andalusia--are
remarkably fine and conspicuous both for their deep soft pile, and
their glowing ruby tones; but when woven after the manner of velvet
upon velvet, are very precious: a good specimen of rich texture, and
mellow colouring is furnished by the chasuble at No. 1375, p. 81.

The _Sicilian_ school strongly marked the wide differences between
itself and all the others which had lived before; and the history of
its loom is as interesting as it is varied.

The first to teach the natives of Sicily the use of cotton for their
garments, and how to rear the silkworm and spin its silk, were, as
it would seem, the Mahomedans, who, in coming over from Africa,
brought along with them, besides the art of weaving silken textiles,
a knowledge of the fauna of that vast continent--its giraffes, its
antelopes, its gazelles, its lions, its elephants. These Mussulmans
told them, too, of the parrots of India and the hunting sort of
lion,--the cheetahs, that were found in Asia; and when the stuff had to
be wrought for European wear, imaged both beast and bird upon the web,
at the same time that they wove a word in Arabic, of greeting to be
read among the flowers. Like all other Saracens, those in Sicily loved
to mingle gold in their tissues; and, to spare the silk, cotton thread
was not unfrequently worked up in the warp. When, therefore, we meet
with beasts taken from the fauna of Africa, such, especially, as the
giraffe, and the several classes of the antelope family--in particular
the gazelle--with, somewhere about, an Arabic motto--and part of the
pattern wrought in gold, which, at first poor and thin, is now become
black, as well as cotton in the warp, we may fairly take the specimen
as a piece of Sicily’s work in its first period of weaving, all so
Saracenic to the eye. Even when that Moslem nation had been driven out
by the Normans, if many of its people did not stay as workmen in silk
at Palermo, yet they left their teachings in weaving and design behind
them, and their practices were, years afterwards, still followed.

Now we reach Sicily’s second epoch.

While at war with the Byzantines, in the twelfth century, Roger, King
of Sicily, took Corinth, Thebes, and Athens, from each of which cities
he led away captives all the men and women he could find who knew how
to weave silks, and carried them to Palermo. To the Norman tiraz there,
these Grecian new comers brought fresh designs, which were adopted
sometimes wholly, at others but in part and mixed up with the older
Saracenic style, for silks wrought under the Normano-Sicilian dynasty.
In this second period of the island’s loom we discover what traces the
Byzantine school had impressed upon Sicilian silks, and helped so much
to alter the type of their design. On one silk, a grotesque mask amid
the graceful twinings of luxuriant foliage, such as might have been
then found by them upon many a fragment of old Greek sculpture, was the
pattern, as we witness, at No. 8241, p. 158; on another, a sovereign on
horseback wearing the royal crown, and carrying as he rides a hawk upon
his wrist--token both of the love for lordly sports at the period, and
the feudalism all over Italy and Christendom, shown in the piece, No.
8589, p. 223; on a third, No. 8234, p. 154, is the Greek cross, along
with a pattern much like the old netted or “de fundato” kind which we
have described, p. liii.

But Sicily’s third is quite her own peculiar style. At the end of the
thirteenth and beginning of the fourteenth century, she struck out of
herself into quite an unknown path for design. Without throwing aside
the old elements employed till then especially, all over the east,
and among the rest, by the Mahomedans, Sicily put along with them the
emblem of Christianity, the cross, in various forms, on some occasions
with the letter V. four times repeated, and so placed together as to
fall into the shape of this symbol, like what we find at No. 1245, p.
28; in other instances the cross is floriated, as at No. 1293, p. 47.

From the far east to the uttermost western borders of the
Mediterranean the weavers of every country had been in the habit
of figuring upon their silks those beasts and birds they saw around
them: the Tartar, the Indian, and the Persian gave us the parrot
and the cheetah; the men of Africa the giraffe and the gazelle; the
people of each continent the lions, the elephants, the eagles, and
the other birds common to both. From the poetry and sculpture of the
Greeks and Romans could the Sicilians have easily learned about the
fabled griffin and the centaur; but it was left for their own wild
imaginings to figure as they have, such an odd compound in one being as
the animal--half elephant, half griffin--which we see in No. 1288, p.
45. Their daring flights of fancy in coupling the difficult with the
beautiful, are curious; in one place, No. 1302, p. 50, large eagles
are perched in pairs with a radiating sun between them, and beneath
dogs, in pairs, running with heads turned back, &c.; in another, No.
1304, p. 51, running harts have caught one of their hind legs in a cord
tied to their collar, and an eagle swoops down upon them; and the same
animal, in another place, on the same piece has switched its tail into
the last link of a chain fastened to its neck; on a third sample, No.
8588, p. 222, we behold figured, harts, the letter M floriated, winged
lions, crosses floriated, crosses sprouting out on two sides with
_fleurs-de-lis_, four-legged monsters, some like winged lions, some
biting their tails. Exeter Cathedral had a cloth of gold purple cope,
figured with “draconibus volantibus ac tenentibus caudas proprias in
ore,”[225] doves in pairs upholding a cross, &c. Hardly elsewhere to
be found are certain elements peculiar to the patterns upon silks from
mediæval Sicily; such, for instance, as harts, and demi-dogs with very
large wings, both animals having remarkably long manes streaming far
behind them, No. 1279, p. 41; harts again, but lodged beneath green
trees, in a park with paling about it, as in No. 1283, p. 43, and No.
8710, p. 269; that oft-recurring sun shedding its beams with eagles
pecking at them, or gazing undazzled at the luminary, pp. 48, 50, 137,
but sometimes stags, as at pp. 54, 239, carrying their well attired
heads upturned to a large pencil of those sunbeams as they dart down
upon them amid a shower of rain-drops. Of birds, the hawk, the eagle,
double and single headed, the parrot, may be found on stuffs all over
the east; not so, however, with the swan, yet this majestic creature
was a favourite with Sicilians, and may be seen here often drawn with
great gracefulness, as at Nos. 1277, p. 41; 1299, p. 49; 8264, p. 166;
8610, p. 232, &c.

 [225] Oliver, p. 345.

The Sicilians showed their strong affection for certain plants and
flowers. On a great many of the silks in this collection, from
Palermitan looms, we see figured upon a tawny-coloured grounding,
beautifully drawn foliage in green; which, on a nearer inspection,
bears the likeness of parsley, so curled, crispy and serrated are its
leaves. Besides their cherished parsley along with the vine-leaf for
foliage, they had their especial favourite among flowers; and it is the
centaurea cyanus, our corn blue-bottle, shown among others in No. 1283,
&c. p. 43, No. 1291, p. 47, No. 1308, p. 53.

Another peculiarity of theirs is the introduction of the letter U,
repeated so as at times to mark the feathering upon the tails of birds;
at others, to fall into the shape of an O, as we pointed out at pp. 40,
225, 227, 228.

Whether it was that, like our own Richard I., crusaders in after times
often made Sicily the halting spot on their way to the Holy Land, or
that knights crowded there for other purposes, and thus dazzled the
eyes of the islanders with the bravery of their armorial bearings,
figured on their cyclases and pennons, their flags and shields, certain
is it that these Sicilians were particularly given to introduce a deal
of heraldic charges--wyverns, eagles, lions rampant, and griffins--into
their designs; and the very numerous occasions in which such elements
of blazoning come in, are very noticeable, so that one of the features
belonging to the Sicilian loom in its third period, is that, bating
tinctures, it is so decidedly heraldic.

Not the last among the peculiarities of the third period in the
Sicilian school is the use, for many of its stuffs, of two certain
colours--murrey, for the ground, and a bright green for the pattern.
When the fawn-coloured ground is gracefully sprinkled with parsley
leaves, and nicely trailed with branches of the vine, and shows beasts
and birds disporting themselves between the boughs of lively joyous
green; the effect is cheerful, as may be witnessed in those specimens
No. 8594, p. 226, No. 8602, p. 229, No. 8607, p. 231, Nos. 8609, 8610,
p. 232, all of which so admirably exemplify the style.

All their beauty and happiness of invention, set forth by bold, free,
spirited drawing, were bestowed, if not thrown away, too often upon
stuffs of a very poor inferior quality, in which the gold, if not
actually base, was always scanty, and a good deal of cotton was sure to
be found wrought up along with the silk.

Though Palermo was, without doubt, the great workshop for weaving
Sicilian silks, that trade used to be carried on not only in other
cities of the island, but reached towns like Reggio and other such in
Magna Græcia, northward up to Naples. We think that, as far as the two
Sicilies are concerned, the growth of the cotton plant always went
along with the rearing of the silkworm. Of the main-land loom we would
specify No. 8256, p. 163, No. 8634, p. 242, No. 8638, p. 243.

Till within a few years the royal manufactory at Sta. Leucia, near
Naples, produced silks of remarkable richness; and the piece, likely
from that city itself, No. 721, p. 13, does credit to its loom, as
it wove in the seventeenth century. Northern Italy was not idle; and
the looms which she set up in several of her great cities, in Lucca,
Florence, Genoa, Venice and Milan, earned apart for themselves a good
repute in some particulars, and a wide trade for their gold and silver
tissues, their velvets, and their figured silken textiles. Yet, like
as each of these free states had its own accent and provincialisms
in speech, so too had it a something often thrown into its designs
and style of drawing which told of the place and province whence the
textiles came.

_Lucca_ at an early period made herself known in Europe for her
textiles; but her draughtsmen, like those of Sicily, seem to have
thought themselves bound to follow the style hitherto in use, brought
by the Saracens, of figuring parrots and peacocks, gazelles, and even
cheetahs, as we behold in the specimens here No. 8258, p. 163, and No.
8616, p. 234. But, at the same time, along with these eastern animals,
she mixed up emblems of her own, such as angels clothed in white, like
in the example the last mentioned. She soon dropped what was oriental
from her patterns, which she began to draw in a larger, bolder manner,
as we observe, under No. 8637, p. 243, No. 8640, p. 244, and showing an
inclination for light blue, as a colour.

As in other places abroad, so at Lucca, cloths of gold and of silver
were often wrought, and the Lucchese cloths of this costly sort
were, here in England, during the fourteenth century, in particular
request. In all likelihood they were, both of them, not of the
deadened but sparkling kind, afterwards especially known as “tissue.”
Exeter Cathedral, A.D. 1327, had a cope of silver tissue, or cloth
of Lucca:--“una capa alba de panno de Luk.”[226] At a later date,
belonging to the same church, were two fine chasubles--one purple, the
other red--of the same glittering stuff, “casula de purpyll panno,”
&c.,[227] where we find it specified that not only was the textile
of gold, but of that especial sort called tissue. York cathedral was
particularly furnished with a great many copes of tissue shot with
every colour required by its ritual, and among them were--“a reade cope
of clothe of tishewe with orphry of pearl, a cope with orphrey, a cope
of raised clothe of goulde,”[228] making a distinction between tissue
and the ordinary cloth of gold. But at the court of our Edward II. its
favour would seem to have been the highest. In the Wardrobe Accounts
of that king, we see the golden tissue, or Lucca cloth, several times
mentioned. Whether the ceremony happened to be sad or gay, this
glistening web was used; palls made of Lucca cloth were, at masses for
the dead, strewed over the corpse; at marriages the care-cloth was
made of the same stuff; thus when Richard de Arundell and Isabella,
Hugh le Despenser’s daughter, had been wedded at the door of the royal
chapel, the veil held spread out over their heads as they knelt inside
the chancel during the nuptial mass, for the blessing, was of Lucca
cloth.[229] Richard II.’s fondness for this cloth of gold was lately
noticed, p. xxx.

Just about Edward II.’s time was it that velvet became known, and
got into use amongst our churchmen for vestments, and our nobles for
personal wear, and the likelihood is that Lucca was among the first
places in Europe to weave it. The specimens here of this fine textile
from Lucchese looms, though in comparison with those from Genoa, they
be few and mostly after one manner--the raised or cut--still have now a
certain historical value for the English workman: No. 1357, p. 72, with
its olive green plain silken ground, and trailed all over with flowers
and leaves in a somewhat deeper tone, and the earlier example, No.
8322, p. 192, with its ovals and feathering stopped with graceful cusps
and artichokes, afford us good instances of what Lucca could produce in
the way of artistic velvets.

 [226] Oliver, p. 315.

 [227] P. 344.

 [228] York Fabric Rolls, p. 308.

_Genoa_, though in far off mediæval times not so conspicuous as she
afterwards became for her textile industry, still must have from
a remote period, encouraged within her walls, and over her narrow
territory, the weaving of silken webs. Of these the earliest mention we
anywhere find, is to be seen in the inventory of those costly vestments
once belonging to our own St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, in the year
1295: besides a cope of Genoa cloth, that church had, from the same
place, a hanging patterned with wheels and two-headed birds.[230]
Though this first description be scant, we read in it quite enough
to gather that these Genoese cloths must have entirely resembled the
textiles wrought at Lucca, but, in particular, in Sicily. Perhaps
they had been carried by trade from Palermo to the north-west shores
of Italy, whence they were brought in the same way to England, so
that they may be deemed to have reached us not so much from the looms
themselves of Genoa, as those of some other place, but through her then
great port.

Of Genoa’s own weaving of beautiful velvets there can be no doubt,
a reputation she keeps to the present day as far as plain velvet is
concerned.

In this collection we have samples in every kind of Genoese velvets,
from those with a smooth unbroken surface to the elaborately patterned
ones--art-wrought velvets in fact--showing, together with wonderful
skill in the weaving, much beauty of design. Among the plain velvets in
which we have nothing but great softness and depth of pile, along with
clear bright luminous tones of colour, No. 540, p. 3, is a very fair
specimen for its delicious richness of pile; and No. 8334, p. 199, not
merely for this property, but as well for its lightsome mellow deep
tint of crimson.

Getting to what may be truly called art-velvets, we come to several
specimens here. Some are raised or cut, the design being done in a pile
standing well up by itself from out of a flat ground of silk, sometimes
of the same, sometimes of another colour, and not unfrequently wrought
in gold, as at pp. 18, 90, 107, 110, 263. Then we have at No. 7795, p.
145, an example of that precious kind--velvet upon velvet--in which the
ground is velvet, and again of velvet is the pattern itself, but raised
one pile higher and well above the other, so as to show its form and
shape distinctly. Last of all we here find samples, as in No. 8323, p.
192, how the design was done in various coloured velvet. Such was a
favourite in England, and called motley; in his will, A.D. 1415, Henry
Lord Scrope bequeathed two vestments, one, motley velvet rubeo de auro;
the other, motley velvet nigro, rubeo et viridi, &c.[231]

 [229] Archæologia, t. xxvi. pp. 337, 344.

 [230] Hist. of St. Paul’s, ed. Dugdale, pp. 318, 329.

 [231] Rymer’s Fœdera, t. 9, p. 274.

_Venice_ does not seem to have been at any time, like Sicily and
Lucca, smitten with the taste of imitating in her looms at home the
patterns which she saw abroad upon textile fabrics, but appears to have
borrowed from the Orientals only one kind of weaving cloth of gold: the
yellow chasuble at Exeter Cathedral, A.D. 1327, figured with beasts,
cum bestiis crocei coloris,[232] is the solitary instance we know,
upon which she wove, like the east, animals upon silks. She, however,
set up for herself a new branch of textiles, and wrought for church
use certain square webs of a crimson ground on which she figured, in
gold, or on yellow silk, subjects taken from the New Testament, or the
persons of saints and angels. These square pieces were as they yet are,
employed, when sewed together in squares as frontals to altars, but
when longwise much more generally as orphreys to chasubles, copes and
other vestments. Of such stuffs must have been those large orphreys
upon a dalmatic and tunicle, at St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, A.D.
1295.[233]

Though not of so early a date as the thirteenth century, there are
in this collection specimens of this Venetian web belonging to the
sixteenth, which are very fine, No. 5900, p. 112, represents the
resurrection of our Lord; so does No. 8976, p. 271, while No. 8978, p.
272, presents us with the coronation of the Virgin, and No. 8976, the
Virgin and the Child, as also No. 1335, p. 71. Far below in worth are
the same kind of webs wrought at Cologne, as will be noticed just now.

Any one that has ever looked upon the woodcuts done at Venice in
the sixteenth century, such as illustrate, for instance, the Roman
Pontifical, published by Giunta, the “Rosario della G. V. Maria,” by
Varisco, and other such religious books from the Venetian press, will,
at a glance, find on the webs before us from that state, the self-same
style and manner in drawing, the same broad, nay, majestic fold and
fall of drapery, and in the human form the same plumpness, and not
unfrequently with the facial line almost straight; and there, but more
especially about the hands and feet, a somewhat naturalistic shape;
so near is the likeness in design that one is led to think that the
men who cut the blocks for the printers also worked for the weavers of
Venice, and sketched out the drawings for their looms.

By the fifteenth century Venice knew how to produce good damasks in
silk and gold, and of an historiated kind: if we had nothing more than
the specimen, No. 1311, p. 54, where St. Mary of Egypt is so well
represented, it would be quite enough for her to claim for herself such
a distinction. That like her neighbours, Venice wrought in velvet,
there can be little or no doubt, and if she it was who made those deep
piled stuffs, sometimes raised, sometimes pile upon pile, in which
her painters loved to dress the personages, men especially, in their
pictures, then, of a truth, Venetian velvets were beautiful. Of this,
any one may satisfy himself by one visit to our National Gallery.
There, in the “Adoration of the Magi,” painted by Paulo Veronese, A.D.
1573, the second of the wise men is clad in a robe all made of crimson
velvet, cut or raised after a design quite in keeping with the style of
the period.

No insignificant article of Venetian textile workmanship was her laces
wrought in every variety--in gold, in silk, in thread. The portrait of
a Doge usually shows us that dignitary clothed in his dress of state.
His wide mantle, having such large golden buttons, is made of some rich
dull silver cloth; and upon his head is that curiously Phrygian-shaped
ducal cap bound round with broad gold lace diapered after some nice
pattern, as we see in the bust portrait of Doge Loredano, painted
by John Bellini, and now in our National Gallery. Not only was the
gold in the thread particularly good, but the lace itself in great
favour at our court during one time, where it used to be bought, not
by yard measure, but by weight; a pounde and a half of gold of Venys
was employed “aboutes the making of a lace and botons for the king’s
mantell of the garter.”[234] “Frenge of Venys gold,” appears twice, pp.
136, 163, in the wardrobe accounts of Edward IV.

Laces in worsted or in linen thread wrought by the bobbin at Venice;
but more especially her point laces, or such as were done with the
needle, always had, as indeed they still have, a great reputation:
sewed to table-covers, two specimens are found in this collection,
described at p. 141.

Venetian linens, for fine towelling and napery in general, at one time
were in favourite use in France during a part of the fifteenth century.
In the “Ducs de Bourgogne,” by Le Comte de Laborde,[235] more than
once we meet with such an entry, as “une pièce de nappes, ouvraige de
Venise,” &c.

 [232] Oliver, p. 313.

 [233] Ed. Dugdale, p. 321.

 [234] Privy Purse Expenses of Elizabeth of York, p. 8.

 [235] T. ii. Preuves, p. 107.

_Florence_, always so industrious and art-loving, got for its loom,
about the middle of the fourteenth century, a place in the foremost
rank amid the weavers of northern Italy. Specimens of her earliest
handicraft are yet few--only two--here; but one sample of the able way
in which she knew how to diaper, well shows her ability: No. 8563, p.
215, woven in the fifteenth century, will prove this with reference
to her secular silks. The pieces described at pp. 202, 264, witness
the boldness of her design during the sixteenth century. In her webs,
expressly woven for church-use, is it that she displays her great taste
in design, and wonderful power--at least for that time, the fourteenth
century--in gearing the loom: the violet silk damask, No. 1265, p. 36,
and another like piece, No. 7072, p. 133, figured with angels swinging
thuribles, or bearing crowns of thorns in the hands, or holding a
cross, will warrant our remarks. The style of doing the face and hands
in white of those otherwise yellow angels, is a peculiarity of the
Tuscan loom.

The orphrey-webs of Florence are equally conspicuous for drawing and
skill in weaving as her vestment textiles, and in beauty come up to
those done at Venice, and far surpass anything of the kind ever wrought
at Cologne; specimens of this sort of Florentine work may be seen at
Nos. 4059, p. 89; 7080, p. 136; 7674, p. 142; 7791, p. 143; 197, p.
291. Along with these may be classed the hood of a cope, described at
No. 8692, p. 260, as well as the apparels to the dalmatic and tunicle,
p. 143, where the cherubic heads have white faces.

But it was of her velvets that Florence might be so warrantably proud.
Our Henry VII. in his will, “Testamenta Vetusta,”[236] bequeathed
“to God and St. Peter, and to the abbot and prior and convent of
our monastery of Westminster, the whole suit of vestments to be made
at Florence in Italy.” Gorgeous and artistically designed was this
textile, as we may yet see in one of these Westminster Abbey copes
still in existence, and belonging to Stonyhurst college. The golden
ground is trailed all over with leaf-bearing boughs of a bold type, in
raised or cut ruby-toned velvet of a rich soft pile, which is freckled
with gold thread sprouting up like loops. Though nothing so rich in
material, nor so beauteous in pattern, there are here, pp. 144, 145,
two specimens of Florentine cut, crimson velvet on a golden ground,
quite like in sort to the royal vestments, and having too that strong
peculiarity upon them--the little gold thread loop shooting out of the
velvet pile. Though a full century later than the splendid cope at
Stonyhurst, and the two pieces Nos. 7792, 7799, these illustrate the
peculiar style of Tuscan velvets.

Among the truly prince-like gifts of vestments to Lincoln Cathedral,
by John of Gaunt and his duchess, are many made of the richest crimson
velvet of both sorts, that is, plain, and cut or raised to a pattern
upon a ground of gold, as for instance:--two red copes, of the which
one is red velvet set with white harts lying in colours, full of these
letters S. S., with pendents silver and gilt, the harts having crowns
upon their necks with chains silver and gilt; and the other cope is of
crimson velvet of precious cloth of gold, with images in the orphrey,
&c.[237]

That peculiar sort of ornamentation--the little loop of gold thread
standing well up, and in single spots--upon some velvets, seems at
times to have been replaced, perhaps with the needle, by small dots of
solid metal, gold or silver gilt, upon the pile; of the gift of one of
its bishops, John Grandisson, Exeter cathedral had a crimson velvet
cope, the purple velvet orphrey to which was so wrought:--De purpyll
velvete operata cum pynsheds de puro auro.[238]

 [236] Ed. Nicolas, t. i. p. 33.

 [237] Mon. Anglic. viii. 1281.

 [238] Oliver, p. 345.

_Milan_, though now-a-days she stands in such high repute for the
richness and beauty of her silks of all sorts, was not, we believe,
at any period during mediæval times, as famous for her velvets,
her brocades, or cloths of gold, as for her well wrought admirably
fashioned armour, so strong and trustworthy for the field--so furbished
and exquisitely damascened for courtly service. Still, in the sixteenth
century she earned a name for her rich cut velvets, as we may see in
the specimen, No. 698, p. 7; her silken net-work, No. 8336, p. 200,
which may have led the way to weaving silk stockings; and her laces
of the open tinsel kind once in such vogue for liturgical, as well as
secular attire, as we have in No. 8331, p. 197.

_Britain_, from her earliest period, had textile fabrics varying in
design and material; of the colours in the woollen garments worn by
each of the three several classes into which our Bardic order was
apportioned. Of the checkered pattern in Boadicea’s cloak we have
spoken just now, p. xii.

Of the beauty and wide repute of English needlework, we shall have to
speak when, a little further on, we reach the subject of embroidery.

From John Garland’s words, which we gave at p. xxii, it would seem that
all the lighter and more tasteful webs wrought here came from women’s
hands; and the loom, one of which must have been in almost every
English nunnery and homestead, was of the simplest make.

In olden times, the Egyptians wove in an upright loom, and beginning
at top so as to weave downwards, sat at their work. In Palestine the
weaver had an upright loom too, but beginning at bottom and working
upwards, was obliged to stand. During the mediæval period the loom,
here at least, was horizontal, as is shown by the one figured in that
gorgeously illuminated Bedford Book of Hours, fol. 32, at which the
Blessed Virgin Mary is seated weaving curtains for the temple.

As samples of one of the several kinds of work wrought by our nuns
and mynchens, as well as English ladies, we refer to Nos. 1233, p.
24, 1256, p. 33, 1270, p. 38, demonstrating the ability of their
handicraft as well as elegance in design during the thirteenth century.
For specimens of the commoner sorts of silken textiles and of wider
breadth, which began to be woven in this country under Edward III.,
it would be as hard as hazardous to direct the reader. Very recent
examples of all sorts--velvets among the rest--may be found in the
Brooke collection. To some students the piece of Old English printed
chintz, No. 1622, p. 84, will not be without an interest.

For the finer sort of linen napery, Eylisham or Ailesham in
Lincolnshire was famous during the fourteenth century. Exeter
cathedral, A.D. 1327, had “unum manutergium de Eylisham”--a hand towel
of Ailesham cloth.[239]

Our coarser native textiles in wool, in thread or in both, woven
together, forming a stuff called “burel,” made of which St. Paul’s
London, A.D. 1295, had a light blue chasuble;[240] and Exeter
cathedral, A.D. 1277, a long pall;[241] all sorts, in fine, of heavier
work, were wrought in our monasteries for men. By their rule the
Benedictine monks, and all their offsets, were bound to give a certain
number of hours every week-day to hand work, either at home or in the
field.[242]

Weeping over the wars and strife in England during the year 1265 and
the woes of the people, our Matthew of Westminster sums up, among our
losses, the fall in our trade of woollen stuffs, with which we used
to supply the world. O Anglia olim gloriosa ... licet maris angustata
littoribus ... tibi tamen per orbem benedixerunt omnium latera nationum
de tuis ovium velleribus calefacta.[243]

The weaving in this country of woollen cloth, as a staple branch of
trade, is older than some are willing to believe. Of the monks at
Bath abbey we are told by a late writer, “the shuttle and the loom
employed their attention, (about the middle of the fourteenth century,)
and under their active auspices the weaving of woollen cloth (which
made its appearance in England about the year 1330, and received the
sanction of an Act of Parliament in 1337) was introduced, established,
and brought to such perfection at Bath as rendered this city one of the
most considerable in the west of England for this manufacture.”[244]
Worcester cloth, which was of a fine quality, was so good, that by
a chapter of the Benedictine Order, held A.D. 1422, at Westminster
Abbey, it was forbidden to be worn by the monks, and declared smart
enough for military men.[245] Norwich, too, wove stuffs that were
in demand for costly household furniture, for, A.D. 1394, Sir John
Cobham bequeathed to his friends “a bed of Norwich stuff embroidered
with butterflies.”[246] In one of the chapels at Durham Priory there
were four blue cushions of Norwich work.[247] Worsted, a town in
Norfolk, by a new method of its own for the carding of the wool with
combs of iron well heated, and then twisting the thread harder than
usual in the spinning, enabled our weavers to produce a woollen stuff
of a fine peculiar quality, to which the name itself of worsted was
immediately given. Unto such a high repute did the new web grow that
liturgical raiment and domestic furniture of the choicest sorts were
made out of it; Exeter cathedral, among its chasubles, had several
“de nigro worsted” in cloth of gold. Elizabeth de Bohun, A.D. 1356,
bequeathed to her daughter the Countess of Arundel “a bed of red
worsted embroidered;”[248] and Joane Lady Bergavenny leaves to John of
Ormond “a bed of cloth of gold with lebardes, with those cushions and
tapettes of my best red worsted,”[249] &c. Of the sixteen standards of
worsted entailed with the bear and a chain which floated aloft in the
ship of Beauchamp Earl of Warwick, we have spoken before (p. xliii.)
In the “Fabric Rolls of York Minster” vestments made of worsted--there
variously spelt “worsett,”[250] and “woryst”[251]--are enumerated.

 [239] Oliver, p. 314.

 [240] Dugdale’s St. Paul’s, p. 323.

 [241] Oliver, p. 298.

 [242] Reg. S. Ben. c. xlviii. De Opere Manuum quotidiano, p. 129; c.
    lvii. De Artificibus Monasterii, p. 131; ed. Brockie, t. i. “Lena”
    is the mediæval Latin for a bed coverlet.

 [243] Flores Histor. p. 396. Frankfort, A.D. 1601.

 [244] Monasticon Anglicanum, t. ii. p. 259.

 [245] Benedict. in Anglia, ed. Reyner, App. p. 165.

 [246] Testamenta Vetusta, ed. Nicolas, t. i. p. 136.

 [247] Hist. Dunelm. Scriptores Tres. Append. p. cclxxxvi.

 [248] Testamenta Vetusta, i. 61.

 [249] Ibid. p. 227.

 [250] Pp. 301, 305.

 [251] P. 302.

_Irish_ cloth, white and red, in the reign of John, A.D. 1213, was much
used in England; and in the household expenses of Swinford, bishop of
Hereford, A.D. 1290, an item occurs of Irish cloth for lining.[252]

But our weavers knew how to throw off from their looms, artistically
designed and well-figured webs; in the “Wardrobe Accounts” of our
Edward II. we read this item: “to a mercer of London for a green
hanging of wool wove with figures of kings and earls upon it, for the
king’s service in his hall on solemn feasts at London.”[253] Such
“salles,” as they were called in France, and “hullings,” or rather
“hallings,” the name they went under here, were much valued abroad, and
in common use at home: under the head of “Salles d’Angleterre,” among
the articles of costly furniture belonging to Charles V. of France,
A.D. 1364, who began his reign some forty years after our Edward
II.’s death, one set of such hangings is thus put down: “une salle
d’Angleterre vermeille brodée d’azur, et est la bordeure à vignettes et
le dedens de lyons, d’aigles et de lyepars,” quoted from the MS. No.
8356, in the Imperial Library, Paris, by Michel;[254] while here in
England, Richard Earl of Arundel, A.D. 1392, willed to his dear wife
“the hangings of the hall which was lately made in London, of blue
tapestry with red roses with the arms of my sons,”[255] &c.; and Lady
Bergavenny, after bequeathing her hullying of black, red, and green, to
one friend, to another left her best stained hall.[256]

 [252] Ed. Web. for the Camden Society, p. 193, t. i.

 [253] Archæologia, t. xxvi. p. 344.

 [254] Tom. i. p. 49.

 [255] Test. Vetust. t. i. p. 130.

 [256] Ibid. pp. 228, 229.

_Flemish_ textiles, at least of the less ambitious kinds, such as
napery and woollens, were much esteemed centuries ago, and our
countryman, Matthew of Westminster, says of Flanders, that from the
material--perhaps wool--which we sent her, she sent us back those
precious garments she wove.[257]

Though industrious everywhere within her limits, some of her towns
stood foremost for certain kinds of stuff, and Bruges became in
the latter end of the fifteenth century conspicuous for its silken
textiles. Here in England, the satins of Bruges were in great use
for church garments; in Haconbie church, A.D. 1566, was “one white
vestmente of Bridges satten repte in peces and a clothe made thereof
to hange before our pulpitt;”[258] and, A.D. 1520, York cathedral had
“a vestment of balkyn (baudekin) with a crosse of green satten in
bryges.”[259]

Her damask silks were equally in demand; and the specimens here
will interest the reader. Nos. 8318, p. 190, 8332, p. 197, show the
ability of the Bruges loom, while the then favourite pattern with the
pomegranate in it, betrays the likings of the Spaniards, at that time
the rulers of the country, for this token of their beloved Isabella’s
reconquered Granada. No. 8319, p. 191, is another sample of Flemish
weaving, rich in its gold, and full of beauty in design.

In her velvets, Flanders had no need to fear a comparison with anything
of the kind that Italy ever threw off from her looms, whether at
Venice, Florence, or Genoa, as the samples we have here under Nos.
8673, p. 254, 8674, p. 255, 8704, p. 264, will prove. Nay, this last
specimen, with its cloth of gold ground, and its pattern in a dark
blue deep-piled velvet, is not surpassed in gorgeousness even by that
splendid stuff from Florence yet to be seen in one of the copes for
Westminster Abbey given it by Henry VII.

Block-printed linen was, toward the end of the fourteenth century,
another production of Flanders, of which pieces may be seen at Nos.
7022, p. 118, 7027, p. 120, 8303, p. 184, 8615, p. 234. Though to
the eyes of many, these may look so poor, so mean; to men like the
cotton-printers of Lancashire and other places they will have a
strong attraction; to the scholar they will be deeply interesting as
suggestive of the art of printing. Such specimens are rare, but it is
likely that England can show, in the chapter library at Durham, the
earliest sample of the kind as yet known, in a fine sheet wrapped about
the body of some old bishop discovered, along with several pieces of
ancient silks, and still more ancient English embroidery, in a grave
opened by Mr. Raine, A.D. 1827, within that grand northern cathedral.

What Bruges was in silks and velvets Yprès, in the sixteenth century,
became for linen, and for many years Flemish linens had been in
favourite use throughout England. Hardly a church of any size, scarcely
a gentleman’s house in this country, but used a quantity of towels and
other napery that was made in Flanders, especially at Yprès.[260] Of
this textile instances may be seen at pp. 34, 73, 75, 124, 203, 205,
255, 263.

 [257] Hist. p. 396, Frankfort, A.D. 1601.

 [258] Church Furniture, ed. Peacock, p. 94.

 [259] Fabric Rolls, p. 302.

 [260] Oliver’s Exeter, p. 356.

_French_ silks, now in such extensive use, were until the end of the
sixteenth century not much cared for in France itself, and seldom
heard of abroad. The reader, then, must not be astonished at finding
so few examples of the French loom, in a collection of ancient silken
textiles.

France, as England, used of old to behold her women, old and young,
rich and poor, while filling up their leisure hours in-doors, at work
on a small loom, and weaving certain narrow webs, often of gold, and
diapered with coloured silks, as we mentioned before (p. xxii.) Of such
French wrought stuffs belonging to the thirteenth century, some samples
are described at pp. 29, 130, 131.

In damasks, her earliest productions are of the sixteenth century, and
are described at pp. 13, 205, 206; and the last is a favourable example
of what the loom then was in France; everything later is of that type
so well known to everybody. In several of her textiles a leaning
towards classicism in design is discernible.

Though so few, her cloths of gold, pp. 9, 15, are good, more especially
the fine one at p. 104.

Her velvets, too, pp. 14, 89, 106, are satisfactory.

Satins from France are not many here.

The curious and elaborately ornamented gloves, p. 105, which got into
fashion, especially for ladies, at the end of the sixteenth century,
will be a welcome object for such as are curious in the history of
women’s dress, in France and England.

Quilting, too, on coverlets, shown at pp. 13, 104, displays the taste
of our neighbours in such stitchery, so much in use among them and
ourselves from the sixteenth century.

Like Flanders, France knew how to weave fine linen, which here in
England was much in use for ecclesiastical as well as household
purposes. Three new cloths of Rains (Rennes in Brittany) were, A.D.
1327, in use for the high altar in Exeter cathedral,[261] and many
altar-cloths of Paris linen. In the poem of the “Squier of Low Degree,”
the lady is told

    Your blankettes shal be of fustyane,
    Your shetes shal be of cloths of rayne;

and, A.D. 1434, Joane Lady Bergavenny devises in her will, “two
pair sheets of Raynes, a pair of fustians,” &c.[262] For her
Easter “Sepulchre” Exeter had a pair of this Rennes sheeting; “par
linthiaminum de Raynys pro sepulchro.”[263]

 [261] Oliver, p. 314.

 [262] Test. Vet. i. 227.

 [263] Oliver, p. 340.

_Cologne_, the queen of the Rhine, became famous during the whole of
the fifteenth and part of the sixteenth century for a certain kind of
ecclesiastical textile which, from the very general use to which it
has been applied, we have named “orphrey web.” Since by far the greater
part of this collection, as it now exists, had been made in Germany,
beginning with Cologne, it is, as might be expected, well supplied with
specimens of a sort of stuff, if not peculiar, at least abounding in
that country. Those same liturgical ornaments which Venice and Florence
wove with such artistic taste for Italian church use, Cologne succeeded
in doing for Germany. Her productions, however, are every way far below
in beauty Italy’s like works. The Italian orphrey-webs are generally
done in gold or yellow silk, upon a crimson ground of silk. Florence’s
are often distinguished from those of Venice by the introduction of
white for the faces; Cologne’s vary from both by introducing blue,
while the material is almost always very poor, and the weaving coarse.

The earliest specimen here of this Cologne orphrey-web is No. 8279, p.
174; but it is far surpassed by many others, such as are, for instance,
to be found at pp. 61, 62, 63, 64, 69, 80, 82, 116, 117, 118, 119, 174,
175, 252, 253. Among these some have noticeable peculiarities; No.
1329, p. 61, a good specimen, has the persons of the saints so woven
that the heads, hands, and emblems are wrought with the needle; the
same, too, in Nos. 7023, p. 118, and 8667, p. 252; in No. 1373, though
the golden ground looks very fresh and brilliant, the gilding process,
as on wood, has been employed. Here in England this orphrey web was in
church use and called “rebayn de Colayn.”[264]

The piece of German napery at No. 8317, p. 190, of the beginning of the
fifteenth century will be to those curious about household linen, an
acceptable specimen.

If by hazard while reading some old inventory of church vestments the
reader should stumble upon some entry mentioning a chasuble made of
cloth of Cologne, let him understand it to mean not a certain broad
textile woven there, but merely a vestment composed of several pieces
of this kind of web sewed together, just as was the frontal made out of
pieces of woven Venice orphreys at No. 8976, p. 271.

 [264] Testamenta Eborac, iii. 13.

The countries whence silks came to us are numerous; with confidence,
however, we may say, that till the middle of the fifteenth century,
when we began to weave some of them for ourselves, the whole geography
of silken textiles lay within the basin of the Mediterranean to the
west, and the continent of Asia to the east.

Though mention is often made of tissues coming from various places,
those cities are always to be found upon the map we have just marked
out. Among those spoken of _Antioch_, _Tarsus_, _Alexandria_,
_Damascus_, _Byzantium_, _Cyprus_, _Trip_ or _Tripoli_, and _Bagdad_,
are easily recognized, as well as the later centres of trade and
manufacture, Venice, Genoa and Lucca. To fix the localities of a few
others would be but guess-work.

At the beginning of the fourteenth century is mentioned occasionally
a silk called “_Acca_,” and, from the description of it, it must have
been a cloth of gold shot with coloured silk, figured with animals:
William de Clinton, Earl of Huntingdon, gave to St. Alban’s monastery a
whole vestment of cloth of gold shot with sky-blue, and called cloth of
Acca; “unum vestimentum ... de panno quem Accam dicimus; cujus campus
est aerius. In reliquis vero partibus resultat auri fulgor.”[265] To
some it would look as if this stuff took its name from having been
brought to us through the port of Acre. We lean towards this belief
on finding, on the authority of Macri, in his valuable Hierolexicon,
Venice, 1735, pp. 5, 542, that so used to be written the name of the
ancient Ptolemais in Syria.

What in one age, and at a particular place, happened to be so well
made, and hence became so eagerly sought for, at a later period, and
in another place, got to be much better wrought and at a lower price.
Time, indeed, changed the name of the market, but did not alter in any
great degree either the quality of the material, or the style of the
design wrought upon it. All over the kingdom of the Byzantine Greeks
the loom had to change its gearing very little. The Saracenic loom,
whether in Asia, Africa, or Spain, was always Arabic, though Persia
could not forget her olden Zoroasterian traditions about the “hom”
or tree of life separating lions, and having all about lion-hunting
cheetahs, and birds of various sorts.

With regard to the whole of Asia, we learn that its many peoples,
from the earliest times, knew how not only to weave cloth of gold,
but figure it too with birds and beasts. Almost two thousand years
afterwards, Marco Polo, in the thirteenth century, found exactly
the very same kinds of textile known in the days of Darius still
everywhere, from the shores of the Mediterranean to far Cathay, in
demand and woven. What he says of Bagdad, he repeats in fewer words
about many other cities.[266]

In finding their way to England these fabrics had given them not so
often the names of the places where they had been wrought, but, if not
in all, at least in most instances, the names of the seaports in the
Mediterranean where they had been shipped.

 [265] Mon. Anglic. ii. 221.

 [266] I Viaggi di Marco Polo, ed. A. Bartoli, Firenze, 1863.

For beautifully wrought and figured silk, of the few terms that still
outlive the mediæval period, one is _Damask_.

China, no doubt, was the first country to ornament its silken webs
with a pattern. India, Persia and Syria, then Byzantine Greece,
followed, but at long intervals between, in China’s footsteps. Stuffs
so figured brought with them to the west the name “diaspron” or diaper,
bestowed upon them at Constantinople. But about the twelfth century,
so very far did the city of Damascus, even then long celebrated for
its looms, outstrip all other places for beauty of design, that her
silken textiles were eagerly sought for everywhere, and thus, as often
happens, traders fastened the name of Damascen or Damask upon every
silken fabric richly wrought and curiously designed, no matter whether
it came or not from Damascus. After having been for ages the epithet
betokening all that was rich and good in silk, “Samit” had to be
forgotten, and Diaper, from being the very word significant of pattern,
became a secondary term descriptive of merely a part in the elaborate
design on Damask.

_Baudekin_, that sort of costly cloth of gold spoken of so much during
so many years in English literature, took, as we said before, its
famous name from Bagdad.

Many are the specimens in this collection furnishing proofs of the
ancient weavers’ dexterity in their management of the loom, but
especially of the artists’ taste in setting out so many of their
intricate and beautiful designs.

What to some will be happily curious is that we have this very day
before our eyes pieces, in all likelihood, from the self-same web which
furnished the material, centuries ago, for vestments and ornaments used
of old in the cathedrals of England. Let any one turn to p. 122, and,
after looking at number 7036, compare that silk with this item in the
inventory of St. Paul’s, London, A.D. 1225: “Item, Baudekynus rubeus
cum Sampsone constringente ora leonum,” &c.[267] See also number 8589,
and number 8235.

An identification between very many samples, brought together here, of
ancient textiles in silk, and the descriptions of such stuffs afforded
us in those valuable records--our old church inventories--might be
carried on, if necessary, to a very lengthened extent.

 [267] Dugdale’s St. Paul’s, p. 328.

_Dorneck_ was the name given to an inferior kind of damask wrought
of silk, wool, linen thread and gold, in Flanders. Towards the end
of the fifteenth century, mostly at Tournay, which city, in Flemish,
was often called Dorneck--a word variously spelt as Darnec, Darnak,
Darnick, and sometimes even Darness.

The gild of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Boston had a care cloth of
silke dornex and church furniture.[268] The “care cloth” was a sort of
canopy held over the bride and bridegroom as they knelt for the nuptial
blessing, according to the Salisbury rite, at the marriage mass. At
Exeter it was used in chasubles for orphreys.[269] A specimen of Dornex
may be seen, No. 7058, p. 129. See also York Fabric Rolls, pp. 291,
297, 298, 300, 305.

 [268] Peacock, p. 204.

 [269] Oliver, pp. 359, 365.

_Buckram_, a cotton textile, has a history and a reputation somewhat
varied.

In our oldest inventories mention is often made of a “panus Tartaricus”
or Tartary cloth, which was, if not always, at least often purple.
Asia, especially in its eastern borders, became famous for the fine
textiles it wove out of cotton, and dyed in every colour. Cities got
for themselves a reputation for some especial excellence in their
looms, and as Mosul had the name of Muslin from that place given to the
fine and delicate cotton webs it wrought, so the term of buckram for
another sort of cotton textile came from the city of Bokhara in Tartary
where this cloth was made. All along the middle ages buckram was much
esteemed for being costly and very fine, and consequently fit for use
in church vestments, and for secular personal wear. John Grandison,
consecrated bishop of Exeter, A.D. 1327, gave to his cathedral flags
of white and red buckram;[270] and among the five very rich veils for
covering the moveable lectern in that church, three were lined with
blue “bokeram.”[271] As late as the beginning of the sixteenth century
this stuff was held good enough for lining to a black velvet gown for a
queen, Elizabeth of York.[272] The coarse thick fabric which now goes
by the name was anything but the olden production known as “bokeram.”

 [270] Ib. p. 319.

 [271] Ib. p. 329.

 [272] Her Privy Purse Expenses, ed. Nicolas, p. 22, &c.

_Burdalisaunder_, _Bordalisaunder_, _Bourde de Elisandre_, with other
varieties in spelling, is a term often to be met with in old wills and
church inventories. In the year 1327 Exeter had a chasuble of Bourde de
Elisandre of divers colours.[273] It was wide enough for half a piece
to form the adornment of a high altar.[274]

The difficulty of understanding what this textile was will vanish when
we remember that in Arabic “bord” to this day means a striped cloth;
and we know, both from travellers and the importation of the textile
itself, that many tribes in North and Eastern Africa weave stuffs for
personal wear of a pattern consisting of white and black longitudinal
stripes. St. Augustin too, living in North Africa near the modern
Algiers, speaks of a stuff for clothing called “burda,” in the end of
the fourth and beginning of the fifth century. Burdalisaunder was a
silken web in different coloured stripes, and specimens of this, at
one time known as “stragulata” may be found here at pp. 21, 27, 33,
56, 57, 161, 225, 226, &c. Though made in so many places round the
Mediterranean, this silk took its name, at least in England, from
Alexandria, because it was to be had in that Egyptian city, always
celebrated for its silks, either better made or at a much lower price
than elsewhere.

In all likelihood the curtains for the tabernacle, as well as the
girdles for Aaron and his sons, of fine linen and violet and purple,
and scarlet twice dyed, were wrought with this very pattern, so that
in the “stragulata” or “burd Aliscaunder” we behold the oldest known
design for any textile.

 [273] Oliver, p. 312.

 [274] Yorkshire Wills. Part i. p. 174.

_Fustian_, of which two of its forms we still have in velveteen and
corduroy, was originally wove at Fustat, on the Nile, with a warp of
linen thread and a woof of thick cotton, which was so twilled and cut
that it showed on one side a thick but low pile; and the web so managed
took its name of Fustian from that Egyptian city. At what period it was
invented we do not rightly know, but we are well aware it must have
been brought to this country before the Normans coming hither, for our
Anglo-Saxon countryman, St. Stephen Harding, when a Cistercian abbot
and an old man, _circ._ A.D. 1114, forbade chasubles in his church to
be made of anything but fustian or plain linen: “neque casulas nisi
de fustaneo vel lino sine pallio aureo vel argenteo,” &c.[275] The
austerity of his rule reached even the ornament of the church. From
such a prohibition we are not to draw as a conclusion that fustian
was at the time a mean material; quite the contrary, it was a seemly
textile. Years afterwards, in the fourteenth century, Chaucer tells us
of his knight:--

 Of fustian he wered a gepon.[276]

Fustian, so near akin to velvet, is more especially noticed along with
what is said upon that fine textile.

In the fifteenth century Naples had a repute for weaving fustians, but
our English churchwardens, not being learned in geography, made some
laughable bad spelling of this, like some other continental stuffs:
“Fuschan in appules,” for fustian from Naples, is droll; yet droller
still is “mustyrd devells,” for a cloth made in France at a town
called Mustrevilliers.

 [275] Mon. Anglic. ed. Dugdale, v. 225.

 [276] The Prologue, Poems, ed. Nicolas, ii. 3.

_Muslin_, as it is now throughout the world, so from the earliest
antiquity has been everywhere in Asia in favourite use, both as an
article of dress and as furniture. Its cloud-like thinness, its
lightness, were, as they still are to some Asiatics, not the only
charms belonging to this stuff: it was esteemed equally as much for
the taste in which stripes of gold had been woven in its warp. As we
learn from the travels of Marco Polo, the further all wayfarers in Asia
wandered among its eastern nations, the higher they found the point of
excellence which had been reached by those people in weaving silk and
gold into splendid fabrics. If the silkworm lived, nay, thrived there,
the cotton plant was in its home, its birth-place, in those regions.
Where stood Nineveh Mosul stands now.

Like many cities of Middle Asia, Mosul had earned for itself a
reputation of old for the beauty of its gold-wrought silken textiles.
Cotton grew all around in plenty; the inhabitants, especially the
women, being gifted with such quick feeling of finger, could spin
thread from this cotton of more than hair-like fineness. Cotton then
took with them, on many occasions, the place of silk in the loom;
but gold was not forgotten in the texture. This new fabric, not only
because it was so much cheaper, but from its own peculiar beauty and
comeliness, won for itself a high place in common estimation. At once,
and by the world’s accord, on it was bestowed as its distinctive name,
the name of the place where it was wrought in such perfection. Hence,
whether wove with or without gold, we call to this day this cotton web
Muslin, from the Asiatic city of Mosul.

_Cloth of Areste_ is another of those terms for woven stuffs which
students of textiles had never heard of were it not to be found in our
old English deeds and inventories. The first time we meet it is in an
order given, A.D. 1244, by Henry III. for finding two of these cloths
of Areste with which two copes had to be made for royal chapels: “Duos
pannos del Areste ad duas capas faciendas,” &c.[277] Again it comes
a few years later at St. Paul’s, which cathedral, A.D. 1295, had,
besides a dalmatic and tunicle of this silk--“de serico albo diasperato
de Arest,”[278]--as many as thirty and more hangings of this same
texture.[279]

From the description of these pieces we gather that this so-called
cloth of Areste must have been as beautiful as it was rich, being for
the most part cloth of gold figured elaborately, some with lions and
double-headed eagles, others, for example, with the death and burial
of our Lord--“campus aureus cum leonibus et aquilis bicapitibus de
aurifilo contextis--campus rubeus cum historia Passionis Domini et
sepulturæ ejusdem.” These designs speak of the looms at work in the
middle ages on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, and we are much
strengthened in this thought by beholding how the death and burial
of our Lord, like the sample here, number 8278, p. 170-1, are shown
on a crimson ground, as we shall have to instance further on under
Symbolism, § VII.

That this sort of stuff, wove of silk and gold, was of any kind of
Arras, or made in that town, to our seeming is a very unhappy guess.
Arras had not won for itself a reputation for its tapestry before the
fourteenth century. Tapestry itself is too thick and heavy for use in
vestments; yet this cloth of Areste was light enough for tunicles, and
when worn out was sometimes condemned at St. Paul’s to be put aside for
lining other ritual garments--“ad armaturam faciendam.”[280] The term
“Areste” has little or nothing in it common to the word “Arras,” as
written either in French, or under its Latin appellation “Atrebatum.”

Among the three meanings for the mediæval “Aresta,” one is, any kind of
covering. To us, then, it seems as if these cloths of Areste took their
name not from the place whereat they had been wove, but from the use to
which, if not always, for the most part, we put them--that of hangings
about our churches, since in the St. Paul’s inventory they are usually
spoken of as such--“culcitræ pendules, panni penduli.”[281] Moreover,
tapestry, or Arras work, being thick and heavy, could never have been
employed for such light use as that of apparels, nor would it have been
diapered like silk, yet we find it to have been so fashioned and so
used--“maniculariis apparatis quodam panno rubeo diasperato de Laret,
&c.”[282]

 [277] Excerpta Historica, p. 404.

 [278] St. Paul’s Cathedral, ed. Dugdale, p. 322.

 [279] Ibid. p. 329.

 [280] St. Paul’s Cathedral, ed. Dugdale, p. 329.

 [281] Ibid. p. 329.

 [282] Ibid. p. 335.

For not a few it would be hard to understand some at least among those
epithets meant in by-gone days to tell how

SILKS WERE DISTINGUISHED THROUGH THEIR COLOURS AND SHADES OF COLOUR.

To the inventories of vestments and church-stuffs of all sorts must we
go to gather the information which we want about the textiles in use in
this country at any particular period during by-gone days. The men who
had, in the thirteenth century, the drawing up of such lists, seem to
have been gifted with a keen eye for the varieties of shade and tints
in the colour of silks then before them. For instance, a chasuble at
St. Paul’s, London, A.D. 1295, is set down thus:--“De sameto purpureo
aliquantulum sanguineo”--that is, made of samit (a thick silk) dyed
in a purple somewhat bordering on a blood-red tone. Such language is
unmistakable; not so, however, many other terms at the time in common
use, and though well understood then, are now not so intelligible.
We are told in the same inventory[283] several times of a “pannus
Tarsicus,” a Tarsus cloth, and of a “pannus Tarsici coloris,” a Tarsus
coloured cloth. What may have been the distinctive qualities of the
stuffs woven at Tarsus, what the peculiar beauty in that tint to which
that once so celebrated city had given its own name, we cannot say.
We think, however, those Tarsus textiles were partly of silk, partly
of fine goats’ hair, and for this reason Varro tells[284]--“Tondentur
(capræ) quod magnis villis sunt, in magna parte Phrygiæ; unde Cilicia,
et cætera ejus generis ferri solent. Sed, quod primum ea tonsura in
Cilicia sit instituta, nomen id Cilicas adjecisse dicunt.” Goats are
shorn in a great part of Phrygia, because there they have long shaggy
hair. Cilicia (the Latin for hair cloths) and other things of the
same sort, are usually brought from that country. For the reason that
in Cilicia such a shearing of goats arose, they say that the name of
Cilician was given to such stuffs woven of goats’ hair. As Tarsus is,
so always was it, the head city in all that part of Asia Minor known of
old as Phrygia. Hence then we think that--

 [283] Pp. 322, 323.

 [284] De Re Rustica, lii. cap. xi.

_Cloth of Tarsus_, _of Tars_, &c., was woven of fine goats’ hair and
silk. But this web was in several colours, and always looked upon as
very costly.

The _Tarsus colour_ itself was, as we take it, some shade of purple
differing from, and perhaps to some eyes more beautiful than, the
Tyrian dye. The people of Tarsus no doubt got from their murex, a
shell-fish of the class mollusca and purpurifera family to be found on
their coast, their dyeing matter; and when it is borne in mind what
changes are wrought in the animal itself by the food it eats, and
what strong effects are made by slight variations in climate, even
atmosphere, upon materials for colouring in the moments of application,
we may easily understand how the difference arose between the two tints
of purple.

We are strengthened in our conjecture that not only was the cloth of
Tarsus of a rare and costly kind, but its tint some shade of royal
purple, from the fact that while noticing the robes worn on a grand
public occasion by a king, Chaucer thus sketches the prince:--

    The gret Emetrius, the king of Inde,
    Upon a stede bay, trapped in stele,
    Covered with cloth of gold diapred wele,
    Came riding like the god of armes Mars.
    His cote armure was of a cloth of Tars,
    Couched with perles, &c.[285]

 [285] Knightes Tale, Poems, ed. Nicolas, ii. 64-5.

_Sky-blue_ was a liturgical colour everywhere in use for certain
festivals throughout England, as we have shown in another place.[286]
In the early inventories the name for that tint is “Indicus,” “Indus,”
reminding us of our present _indigo_. In later lists it is called
“Blodius,” not sanguinary, but blue.

 [286] Church of our Fathers, t. ii. p. 259.

_Murrey_, or a reddish brown, is often specified; and a good specimen
of the tint is given us, No. 709, p. 9. Old St. Paul’s, London, had
several pieces of baudekin of this colour: “baudekynus murretus cum
griffonibus datus pro anima. Alphonsi filii regis E.”[287]

Going far down, and much below the middle ages, Purple, in all its
tones, and tints, and shades, was spoken of and looked upon as
allowable to be worn in garments only to worshipful, ennobled, or royal
personages. Whether it glowed with the brightness it seemed to have
stolen from the rose, or wore its darkest tone it could borrow from
the violet, whether it put on any one of those hundred shades to be
found between those two extremes, it mattered not; it was gazed at with
an admiring, a respectful eye. Eagerly sought out, and bought at high
price, were those textiles that showed this colour, and had been dyed
at Tyre, Antioch, Tarsus, Alexandria, Byzantium, or Naples. All these
places were at one time or another, in days of old, famous for their
looms, no less than their ability in the dyeing, especially of purple,
among the nations living on the shores of the Mediterranean; and each
of them had in its own tone a shade which distinguished it from that
of all the others. What the tint of purple was which established this
difference we cannot at this distance of time, and with our means
of knowing, justly say. Of this, however, we are perfectly aware,
that silks of purple usually bore their specific name from those
above-named cities, as we perceive while reading the old inventories
of our churches and cathedrals. Moreover, our native writers let us
know that, if not always from Greece, it was through that country
that purple textiles were brought to England. Besides speaking of a
conversation held about, beside other things, the produce of Greece in
purple silks--“Græcorum purpuris, et pannis holosericis”--Gerald Barry
gives us to understand that in his days not only were our churches
sumptuously hung with costly palls and purple silks, but that these
textiles were the work of Grecian looms--“rex (Willielmus Rufus)
ecclesiam quandam (in nova foresta) intraret quam adeo pulchram et
decentius ornatam auletis historicis, et pretiosis Græcorum palliis,
pannis holosericis et purpureis undique vestitam,” &c.[288]

Silks woven of two colours, so that one of them showed itself unmixed
and quite distinct on one side, and the second appeared equally clean
on the other--a thing sometimes now looked upon as a wonder in modern
weaving--might occasionally be met with here at the mediæval period:
Exeter Cathedral had, A.D. 1327:--“Unus pannus sericus curtus rubei
coloris interius et crocei coloris exterius.”[289]

 [287] St. Paul’s, ed. Dugdale, p. 328, &c.

 [288] Giraldus Cambrensis, De Instructione Principum, pp. 168-173.

 [289] Oliver, p. 316.

_Shot_, or, as they were then called, _changeable_ silks, were
fashionable in England during the sixteenth century, for when the
King’s (Edward VI.) Lord of Misrule rode forth with great pageantry,
among other personages there came “afor xx. of ys consell on horsbake
in gownes of chanabulle lynyd with blue taffata and capes of the sam,
like sage (men); then cam my lord with a gowne of gold furyd,” &c.[290]
At York Cathedral, A.D. 1543, there was “a vestment of changeable
silke,”[291] “besides one of changeable taffety for Good Friday.”[292]

 [290] Diary of Henry Machyn, ed. Nichols for the Camden Society, p. 13.

 [291] Fabric Rolls, p. 301.

 [292] Ibid. p. 311.

_Marble_ silk had a weft of several colours so put together and woven
as to make the whole web look like marble, stained with a variety of
tints; hence it got its name. In the year 1295 St. Paul’s had “paruram
de serico marmoreo”[293]--an apparel of marble silk; “tunica de quodam
panno marmoreo spisso”[7]--a tunicle of a certain thick marble cloth;
“tunica de diaspro marmoreo spisso”[294]--a tunicle of thick diaper
marble; “casula marmorei coloris”[295]--a chasuble of marble colour.
During full three centuries this marble silk found great favour among
us since H. Machyn, in his very valuable and curious Diary tells his
readers how “the old Qwyne of Schottes rod thrught London,” and how
“then cam the Lord Tresorer with a C. gret horsse and ther cotes of
marbull,”[9] &c., to meet her the 6th of November, A.D. 1551.[296]

 [293] Ibid. p. 320.

 [294] Ibid. p. 322.

 [295] Ibid. p. 323.

 [296] Pp. 11, 12.

SECTION II.--EMBROIDERY.

The art of working with the needle flowers, fruits, human and animal
forms, or any fanciful design, upon webs woven of silk, linen, cotton,
wool, hemp, besides other kinds of stuff, is so old that it reaches far
into the prehistoric ages.

Those patterns, after so many fashions, which we see figured upon the
garments worn by men and women in Egyptian and Assyrian monuments, but
especially on the burned-clay vases made and painted by the Greeks
during their most archaic as well as later times, or we read about in
the writings of that people, were not wrought in the loom, but done by
the needle.

The old Egyptian loom--and that of the Jews must have been like
it--was, as we know from paintings, of the simplest shape, and seems
to have never been able to do anything more diversified in the
designs of its patterns than straight lines in different colours,
and at best nothing higher in execution than checker-work: beyond
this, all else was put in by hand with the needle. In Paris, at the
Louvre, are several pieces of early Egyptian webs coloured, drawings
of which have been published by Sir Gardner Wilkinson in his short
work “The Egyptians in the time of the Pharaohs.”[297] There are two
pieces of the same textile scarlet, with one brede woven of narrow
red stripes on a broad yellow stripe, the other border being a broad
yellow stripe edged by a narrow scarlet one, both wrought up and down
with needlework; the second piece of blue is figured all over in
white embroidery with a pattern of netting, the meshes of which shut
in irregular cubic shapes, and in the lines of the reticulation the
mystic “gammadion” or “fylfot” is seen. Of them Sir J. G. Wilkinson
says:--“They are mostly cotton, and, though their date is uncertain,
they suffice to show that the manufacture was Egyptian; and the many
dresses painted on the monuments of the eighteenth dynasty show that
the most varied patterns were used by the Egyptians more than 3000
years ago, as they were at a later period by the Babylonians, who
became noted for their needlework.”[298] Other specimens of Egyptian
embroidery were on those corslets sent to Grecian temples by Amasis,
about which we have before spoken (p. xiv.)

 [297] P. 42.

 [298] Ibid. p. 41.

That the Israelites embroidered their garments, especially those worn
in public worship, is clear from several passages in the Book of
Exodus. The words “embroidery” and “embroidered” that come there so
frequently in our English versions are not to be understood always to
mean needlework, but on occasions the tasteful weaving in stripes of
the gold, violet, and purple, and scarlet twice dyed, and fine twisted
linen; the pomegranates at the bottom of Aaron’s tunic between the
golden bells, and wrought of four of these stuffs, were, it is likely,
made out of such coloured shreds, and of that kind which is now called
cut-work.

Picking up from Greek and Latin writers only, as was his wont, those
scraps of which his Natural History is made, Pliny tells us, even in
Homer, mention is made of embroidered cloths, which originated such
as by the Romans are called “triumphal.” To do this with the needle
was found out by the Phrygians, hence such garments took the name
Phrygionic: “Pictas vestes jam apud Homerum fuisse unde triumphales
natæ. Acu facere id, Phryges invenerunt ideoque Phrygioniæ appellatæ
sunt.”[299] He might have added that the only word the Romans had to
mean an embroiderer was “Phrygio,” which arose from the same cause.
Many passages in Virgil show that from Western Asia the Romans learned
their knowledge of embroidery, and borrowed the employment of it on
their garments of State; besides, “those art-wrought vests of splendid
purple tint:”--“arte laboratæ vestes ostroque superbo,”[300] brought
forth for the feast by the Sidonian Dido, the Phrygian Andromache
bestows upon Ascanius, as a token of her own handicraft, garments shot
with gold and pictured, as well as a Phrygian cloak, along with other
woven stuffs--

    Fert picturatas auri subtemine vestes,
    Et Phrygiam Ascanio chlamydem, &c.[301]

and Æneas veils his head for prayer with the embroidered hem of his
raiment--

 Et capita ante aras Phrygio velamur amictu.[302]

 [299] Lib. viii. c. 47.

 [300] Æneid i. 643.

 [301] Ibid. iii. 482.

 [302] Ibid. iii. 545.

In Latin while an embroiderer was called a Phrygian, “Phrygio,”
needlework was denominated “Phrygium,” or Phrygian stuff; hence,
when, as often happened, the design was wrought in solid gold wire or
golden thread, the embroidery so worked got named “auriphrygium.” From
this term comes our own old English word “orphrey.” Though deformed
after so many guises by the witless writers of many an inventory of
church goods, or by the sorry cleric who in a moment of needful haste
had been called upon to draw up a will; other men, however small
their learning, always spelled the word “orphrey,” in English, and
“auriphrygium,” in Latin. In the Exeter inventory, given by Oliver,
“cum orphrey de panno aureo, &c. cum orphrais, &c.”[303] are found;
and the cope bequeathed by Henry Lord de Scrope, A.D. 1415, had its
“orphreis” “embraudata nobiliter cum imaginibus,” &c.[304] The many
beautiful orphreys on the Lincoln vestments are fully described in
the “Monasticon Anglicanum:”[305] no one could be more earnest in
commanding the use on vestments of the auriphrygium, or embroidered
“orphrey” than St. Charles Borromeo.[306]

While Phrygia in general, Babylon in particular became celebrated for
the beauty of its embroideries: “colores diversos picturæ intexere
Babylon maxime celebravit et nomen imposuit;”[307] and those who have
seen the sculptures in the British Museum brought from Nineveh, and
described and figured by Layard, must have witnessed how lavishly the
Assyrians must have adorned their dress with that sort of needlework
for which one of their greatest cities was so famous.

Up to the first century of our era, the reputation which Babylon had
won for her textiles and needlework still lived. Josephus, himself
a Jew, who had often been to worship at Jerusalem, tells us that
the veils of its Temple given by Herod were Babylonian, and of the
outer one that writer says:--“there was a veil of equal largeness
with the door. It was a Babylonian curtain, embroidered with blue
and fine linen, and scarlet and purple, and of a texture that was
wonderful.”[308]

 [303] Pp. 330, 335-336.

 [304] Rymer’s Fœdera, t. ix. p. 272.

 [305] T. viii. pp. 1290, new edition.

 [306] Church of our Fathers, t. i. p. 453.

 [307] Pliny, lib. viii. c. 47.

 [308] Wars of the Jews, b. v. c. 5; Works translated by Weston, t. 4,
    p. 121.

What the Jews did for the Temple we may be sure was done by Christians
for the Church. The faithful, however, went even further, and wore
garments figured all over with passages from Holy Writ wrought in
embroidery. From a stirring sermon preached by St. Asterius, bishop of
Amasia in Pontus, in the fourth century, we learn this. Taking for his
text, “a certain rich man who was clothed in purple and fine linen,”
this father of the Church, while upbraiding the world for its follies
in dress, lets us know that some people went about arrayed like painted
walls, with beasts and flowers all over them; while others, pretending
a more serious tone of thought, dressed in clothes figured with a
sketch of all the doings and wonders of our Lord. “Strive,” thunders
forth St. Asterius, “to follow in your lives the teachings of the
Gospel, rather than have the miracles of our Redeemer embroidered upon
your outward dress.”[309]

To have had so many subjects shown upon one garment, it is clear that
each must have been done very small, and all wrought in outline;
a style which is being brought back, with great effect, into
ecclesiastical use.

Of the embroidery done by Christian ladies abroad during the Lower
Roman Empire, we have already spoken, p. xxxv. Coming to our own land,
and its mediæval times, we find how at the beginning of that period
our Anglo-Saxon sisters knew so well to handle their needle. The many
proofs of this we have brought forward in another place.[310]

The discriminating accuracy with which our old writers sought to follow
while noting down the several kinds of textile gifts bestowed upon a
church is as instructive as praiseworthy. Ingulph did not think it
enough to say that abbot Egelric had given many hangings to the Church
of Croyland, the great number of which were silken, but he must tell
us, too, that some were ornamented with birds wrought in gold, and
sewed on--in fact, of cut-work--other some with those birds woven
into the stuff, other some quite plain:--“Dedit etiam multa pallia
suspendenda in parietibus ad altaria sanctorum in festis, quorum
plurima de serico erant, aureis volucribus quædam insita,
quædam intexta, quædam plana.”[311]

So also the care often taken by the writers of inventories, like him
who wrote out the Exeter one, to mention how some of the vestments had
nothing about them but true needlework, or, as they at times express
it, “operata per totum opere acuali,” may be witnessed in that useful
work, “The Lives of the Bishops of Exeter,” by Oliver.[312]

By the latter end of the thirteenth century embroidery, as well
as its imitation, got for its several styles and various sorts
of ornamentation mixed up with it a distinguishing and technical
nomenclature; and the earliest document in which we meet with
this set of terms is the inventory drawn up, A.D. 1295, of the
vestments belonging to our London St. Paul’s Cathedral: herein,
the “opus plumarium,”[313] the “opus pectineum,”[314] the “opus
pulvinarium,”[315] cut-work, “consutum de serico,”[316] “de serico
consuto,”[317] may be severally found in Dugdale’s “History of St.
Paul’s.”

 [309] Ceillier, Hist. Gen. des Auteurs Sacrés et Ecclesiastiques, t.
    viii. p. 488.

 [310] The Church of our Fathers, t. ii. p. 267, &c. &c.

 [311] Ingulphi Hist. ed. Savile, p. 505, b.

 [312] Pp. 336, 344, &c.

 [313] P. 320.

 [314] P. 316.

 [315] P. 319.

 [316] P. 320.

 [317] P. 319.

The “opus plumarium” was the then usual general term for what is now
commonly called embroidery; and hence, in some old inventories, we
meet with such notices as this:--“capæ opere plumario factæ id est,
brudatæ.”

This term was given to embroidery needlework because the stitches were
laid down never across but longwise, and so put together that they
seemed to overlap one another like the feathers in the plumage of a
bird. Not inaptly then was this style called “feather-stitch” work,
in contradistinction to that done in cross and tent stitch, or the
“cushion-style,” as we shall, a little further on, have occasion to
notice next.

Among the many specimens here done in feather-stitch, in all ages, we
would especially instance No. 84, p. 3.

The “opus pulvinarium,” or “cushion style,” was that sort of embroidery
like the present so-called Berlin-work. As now, so then it was done in
the same stitchery, with pretty much the same materials, and put if not
always, at least often, to the same purpose of being used for cushions,
upon which to sit or to kneel in church, or uphold the mass-book at
the altar; hence its name of “cushion-style.” In working it, silken
thread is known to have been often used. Among other specimens, and in
silk, the rare and beautiful liturgical cushion of a date corresponding
to the London inventory, is to be seen here, No. 1324, p. 59. Being
so well adapted for working heraldry, from an early period till now,
this stitch has been mostly used for the purpose; and the emblazoned
orphreys, like the narrow hem on the Syon cope, are wrought in it.

The oldest, the most elaborate, the best known sample in the world,
and what to us is more interesting still from being in reality not
French but English needlework, is the so-called, but misnamed, Bayeux
tapestry, a shred of which is in this collection, No. 675, p. 6. Of all
this more anon, § IV.

The “opus pectineum” was a kind of woven-work imitative of embroidery,
and used as such, in truth, about which we have a description in the
Dictionary of the Londoner, John Garland, who thus speaks of the
process: “Textrices ducunt pectines cum trama quæ trahitur a spola et
pano,” &c.[318] From this use of a comb-like instrument--“pecten”--in
the manufacture the work itself received the distinctive appellation
of “pectineum,” or comb-wrought. Before John Garland forsook England
for France, to teach a school there, he must have often seen, while
at home, his countrywomen sitting down to such an occupation; and the
“amictus de dono dominæ Kathærinæ de Lovell de opere pectineo,”[319]
may perhaps have been the doing of that same lady’s own hands.

 [318] Ed. H. Geraud, Paris sous Philippe le Bel. p. 607.

 [319] Dugdale’s Hist. of St. Paul’s, p. 319.

Of such work as this “opus pectineum,” or comb-drawn, wrought by
English women here at home, we have several specimens in this
collection, pp. 24, 33, 38, &c.

Foreign ones are plentifully represented in the many samples of such
webs from Germany, especially from Cologne, pp. 61, 62, 63, &c.

Likely is it that Helisend, the bold young lady from the south of
England, and one of the waiting maids to the English Maud, queen of
David, king of Scotland, _circa_ A.D. 1150, got, from her cunning
in such work, the reputation of being so skilful in weaving and
church-embroidery:--“operis texturæ scientia purpuraria nobilis
extiterat, et aurifrixoria artificiosæ compositionis peroptima super
omnes Angliæ mulieres tunc temporis principaliter enituerat.”[320]

Our mediæval countrywomen were so quick at the needle that they could
make their embroidery look as if it had been done in the loom--really
woven. Not long ago, a shred of crimson cendal, figured in gold and
silver thread with a knight on horseback, armed as of the latter time
of Edward I., was shown us. At the moment we took the mounted warrior
to have been, not hand-worked, but woven, so flat, so even was every
thread. Looking at it however through a glass and turning it about, we
found it to have been unmistakably embroidered by the finger in such a
way that the stitches for laying down upon the surface, and not drawing
through the gold threads and thus saving expense, were carried right
into the canvas lining at the back of this thin silk. After this same
manner was really done, to our thinking, all the design, both before
and behind upon that fine English-wrought chasuble, No. 673, p. 5.

At the latter end of the thirteenth century our women struck out for
themselves a new way of embroidery. Without leaving aside the old and
usual “opus plumarium,” or feather-stitch, they mixed it with a new
style, both of needlework and mechanism. So beautiful and telling was
the novel method deemed abroad, that it won for itself from admiring
Christendom the complimentary appellation of “opus Anglicum,” or
English work. In what its peculiarity consisted has long been a
question and a puzzle among foreign archæological writers; and a living
one of eminence, the Canon Voisin, vicar general to the bishop of
Tournai, while noticing a cope of English work given to that church,
says:--“Il serait curieux de savoir quelle broderie ou quel tissu on
designait sous le nom de _opus Anglicum_.”[321]

 [320] Reginaldi Dunelmensis Libellus, &c. Ed. Surtees Society, p. 152.

 [321] Notice sur les Anciennes Tapisseries de la Cathedral de Tournai,
    p. 16.

But the reader may ask what is

THE OPUS ANGLICUM, OR ENGLISH WORK,

about which one heard so much of old?

Happily, we have before us in the present collection, as well as
elsewhere in this country, the means of helping our continental friends
with an answer to their question.

Looking well into that very fine and invaluable piece of English
needlework, the Syon cope, No. 9182, p. 275, we find that for the human
face, all over it, the first stitches were begun in the centre of the
cheek, and worked in circular, not straight lines, into which, however,
after the further side had been made, they fell, and were so carried
on through the rest of the fleshes; in some instances, too, even all
through the figure, draperies and all. But this was done in a sort of
chain stitch, and a newly practised mechanical appliance was brought
into use. After the whole figure had thus been wrought with this kind
of chain stitch in circles and straight lines, then with a little thin
iron rod ending in a small bulb or smooth knob slightly heated, were
pressed down those middle spots in the faces that had been worked in
circular lines; as well, too, as that deep wide dimple in the throat,
especially of an aged person. By the hollows thus lastingly sunk, a
play of light and shadow is brought out, that, at a short distance,
lends to the portion so treated a look of being done in low relief.
Chain stitch, then, worked in circular lines, and relief given to parts
by hollows sunk into the faces, and other portions of the persons,
constitute the elements of the “opus Anglicum,” or embroidery after the
English manner. How the chain-stitch was worked into circles for the
faces, and straight lines for the rest of the figures, is well shown by
a wood-cut, after a portion of the Steeple Aston embroideries, given in
the Archæological Journal, t. iv. p. 285.

Though, indeed, not merely the faces and the extremities, but the dress
too of the persons figured, were sometimes wrought in chain-stitch, and
afterwards treated as we have just described, the more general practice
was to work the draperies in our so-called feather-stitch, which used
to be also employed for the grounding, but diapered after a pretty,
though simple, zig-zag design, as we find in the Syon cope.

Apart from its stitching in circles, and those hollows, there are
elements in the design for sacred art-work almost peculiar to mediæval
England. Upon the rood loft in old Westminster Abbey, stood hard by the
cross two six-winged seraphim, each with his feet upon a wheel; so,
too, in the Syon cope, as well as in English needlework on chasubles
and copes, wrought even late in the fifteenth century. When, therefore,
such angel-figures are found on embroideries, still to be seen in
foreign hands, a presumption exists that the work is of English
production.

How highly English embroideries were at one period appreciated by
foreigners may be gathered from the especial notice taken of them
abroad; and spoken of in continental documents. Matilda, the first
Norman William’s queen, stooped to the meanness of filching from
the affrighted Anglo-Saxon monks of Abingdon their richest church
vestments, and would not be put off with inferior ones.[322] Other
instances we have given.[323] In his will, dated A.D. 1360, Cardinal
Talairand, bishop of Albano, speaks of the English embroideries on
a costly set of white vestments.[324] Ghini, by birth a Florentine,
but, in the year 1343, bishop of Tournai, bequeathed to that cathedral
an old English cope, as well as a beautiful corporal of English
work--“cappam veterem cum imaginibus et frixio operis Anglicani. Item
unum corporale de opere Anglicano pulchrum,” &c.[325] Among the copes
reserved for prelates’ use in the chapel of Charles, Duke of Bourgogne,
brother-in-law to our John Duke of Bedford, there was one of English
work, very elaborately fraught with many figures, as appears from this
description of it: “une chappe de brodeure d’or, façon d’Engleterre,
à plusieurs histoires de N.D. et anges et autres ymages, estans en
laceures escriptes, garnie d’un orfroir d’icelle façon fait à apostres,
desquelles les manteulx sont tous couvers de perles, et leur diadesmes
pourphiler de perles, estans en manière de tabernacles, faits de deux
arbres, dont les tiges sont toutes couvertes de perles et à la dite
chappe y a une bille des dites armes, garnie de perles comme la dessus
dicte.”[326]

Besides textiles, leather was at one time the material upon which our
embroiderers exercised the needle; and the Exeter inventory, drawn
up A.D. 1277, mentions, for its bier, a large pillow covered with
leather figured with flowers: “magnum cervical co-opertum coreo cum
floribus.”[327]

 [322] Chronicon Monasterii de Abingdon, p. 491.

 [323] Church of our Fathers, t. iv. p. 271, &c.

 [324] Texier, Dictionnaire, d’Orfeverie, p. 195.

 [325] Voisin, Notice sur les Anciennes Tapisseries, p. 17.

 [326] Les Ducs de Bourgogne, t. ii. p. 244, ed. Le Comte de Laborde.

 [327] Ed. Oliver, p. 298.

While so coveted abroad, our English embroidery was highly prized and
well paid for here at home. Henry III. had a chasuble embroidered
by Mabilia of Bury St. Edmund’s;[328] and Edward II. paid a hundred
marks--a good round sum in those days--to Rose, the wife of John de
Bureford, a citizen and mercer of London, for a choir-cope of her
embroidering, and which was to be sent to Rome for the Pope as an
offering from the queen.[329]

Though English embroidery fell on a sudden from its high estate, it
never died. All along through those years, wasted with the wars of
the Roses, the work of the English needle was very poor, very coarse,
and, so to say, ragged; as, for instance, the chasuble here, No. 4045,
p. 88. Nothing whatsoever of the celebrated chain-stitch with dimpled
faces in the figures can be found about it. Every part was done in the
feather-stitch, slovenly put down, with some few exceptions, among
which may be enumerated the three rich English copes with pointed
hoods running, like one here, p. 207, through the orphreys, still to
be seen in the Chapter Library at Durham, and other vestments of the
period in private hands. During the early part of the seventeenth
century our embroiderers again struck out for themselves a new style,
which consisted in throwing up their figures a good height above
the grounding. Of this raised work there is a fine specimen in the
fourth of those Durham copes. It is said to have been wrought for and
given by Charles I. to that cathedral. This red silk vestment is well
sprinkled with bodiless cherubic heads crowned with rays and borne up
by wings; while upon the hood is shown David, who is holding in one
hand Goliath’s severed head; and the whole is done in highly raised
embroidery. Belonging to a few of our aristocracy are bibles of the
large folio size, covered in rich white silk or satin, and embroidered
with the royal arms done in bold raised-work. Each of such volumes is
said to have been a gift from that prince to a forefather of the man
who now owns it; and a very fine one we lately saw at Ham House.

This style of raised embroidery remained in use for many years; and
even yet to be found are certain quaint old looking-glasses, the broad
frames of which are overlaid with this kind of raised embroidery,
sometimes setting forth, as in the specimen No. 892, p. 319, of the
Brooke collection here, the story of Ahasuerus and Esther, or a passage
in some courtship carried on after the manners of Arcadia.[330]

 [328] Issue Rolls, p. 23.

 [329] Issue Rolls, p. 133.

 [330] Archæological Journal, t. xviii. 191.

Occasionally on work of an earlier period, some element or another of
this raised style may be found; for instance, in that fine Rhenish
embroidery, Nos. 1194-5, p. 21, the bushiness of hair on all the
angels’ heads, is striking, but this is done with little locks of
auburn coloured silk.

But a very few people, at the present moment, have the faintest idea
about the labour, the money, the length of time often bestowed of old
upon embroideries which had been sketched as well as wrought by the
hands of men, each in his own craft the ablest and most cunning of that
day. In behalf of this our own land, we may gather evidences strewed
all over the present Introduction: as a proof of the self-same doings
elsewhere, may be set forth a remarkable passage given, in his life
of Antonio Pollaiuolo, by Vasari, where he says: “For San Giovanni in
Florence there were made certain very rich vestments after the design
of this master, namely, two dalmatics, a chasuble, and a cope, all
of gold-wove velvet with pile upon pile--di broccato riccio sopra
riccio--each woven of one entire piece and without seam, the bordering
and ornaments being stories from the life of St. John, embroidered with
the most subtile mastery of that art by Paolo da Verona, a man most
eminent of his calling, and of incomparable ingenuity: the figures are
no less ably executed with the needle than they would have been if
Antonio had painted them with the pencil; and for this we are largely
indebted to the one master for his design, as well as to the other
for his patience in embroidering it. This work took twenty-six years
for its completion, being wholly in close stitch--questi ricami fatti
con punto serrato--which, to say nothing of its durability, makes the
work appear as if it were a real picture limned with the pencil; but
the excellent method of which is now all but lost, the custom being
in these days to make the stitches much wider--il punteggiare piu
largo--whereby the work is rendered less durable and much less pleasing
to the eye.”[331] These vestments may yet be seen framed and glazed in
presses around the sacristy of San Giovanni.[332] Antonio died A.D.
1498. The magnificent cope once belonging to Westminster Abbey, and
now at Stonyhurst and exhibited here, A.D. 1862, is of one seamless
piece of gorgeous gold tissue figured with bold wide-spreading foliage
in crimson velvet, pile upon pile, and dotted with small gold spots;
it came, it is likely, from the same loom that threw off these San
Giovanni vestments, at Florence.”

 [331] Vite de’ piu Eccellenti Pittori, &c., di G. Vasari, Firenze, F.
    Le Monnier, 1849. t. v. pp. 101, 102; English translation, by Mrs.
    Foster, t. ii. p. 229.

 [332] Ib.

OUR OLD ENGLISH OPUS CONSUTUM, OR CUT WORK,

in French, “appliqué,” is a term of rather wide meaning, as it takes in
several sorts of decorative accompaniments to needlework.

When anything--flower, fruit, or figure--is wrought by itself upon
a separate piece of silk or canvas, and afterwards sewed on to the
vestment for church use, or article for domestic purpose, it comes to
be known as “cut-work.” Though often mixed with embroidery, and oftener
still employed by itself upon liturgical garments; oftenest of all, it
is to be found in bed-curtains, hangings for rooms and halls, hence
called “hallings,” and other items in household furniture.

Of cut-work in embroidery, those pieces of splendid Rhenish needlework
with the blazonment of Cleves, all sewed upon a ground of crimson silk,
as we see, Nos. 1194-5, p. 21. The chasuble of crimson double-pile
velvet, No. 78, p. 1, affords another good example. The niches in which
the saints stand are loom-wrought, but those personages themselves are
exquisitely done on separate pieces of fine canvass, and afterwards let
into the unwoven spaces left open for them.

A Florentine piece of cut-work, No. 5788, p. 111, is alike remarkable
for its great beauty, and the skill shown in bringing together so
nicely, weaving and embroidery. Much of the architectural accessories
is loom-wrought, while the extremities of the evangelists are all
done by the needle; but the head, neck, and long beard are worked by
themselves upon very fine linen, and afterwards put together after
such a way that the full white beard overlaps the tunic. Another and
a larger example, from Florence, of the same sort, is furnished us at
No. 78, p. 1. Quite noteworthy too is the old and valuable vestment,
No. 673, p. 5, in this regard, for parts of the web in the back orphrey
were left open, in the looms for the heads, and extremities of the
figures there, to be done afterwards in needlework. Such a method of
weaving was practised in parts of Germany, and the web from the looms
of Cologne, No. 1329, p. 61, exhibits an example.

Other methods were bade to come and yield a quicker help in this
cut-work. To be more expeditious, all the figures were at once shaped
out of woven silk, satin, velvet, linen, or woollen cloth as wanted,
and sewed upon the grounding of the article. Upon the personages thus
fashioned in silk, satin, or linen, the features of the face and the
contours of the body were wrought by the needle in very narrow lines
done in brown silk thread. At times, even thus much of embroidery
was set aside for the painting brush, and instances are to be found
in which the spaces left uncovered by the loom for the heads and
extremities of the human figures, are filled in by lines from the brush.

Often, too, the cut-work done in these ways is framed, as it were, with
an edging, either in plain or gilt leather, hempen, or silken cord,
exactly like the leadings of a stained glass window.

Belonging to ourselves is an old English chasuble, the broad cross,
at the back of which is figured with “The Resurrection of the Body.”
The dead are arising from their graves, and each is wrought in satin,
upon which the features on the face, and the lineaments of the rest of
the body, are shown by thin lines worked with the needle in dark brown
silk; and the edge, where each figure is sewed on the grounding, is
covered with a narrow black silk cord, after much the same fashion as
the lectern-veil here, No. 7468, p. 141, of silk and gold cut work.
Instances there are wherein, instead of needlework, painting was
resorted to; No. 8315, p. 189, shows us a fine art-work in its way,
upon which we see the folds of the white linen garment worn by our
Lord, marked by brown lines put in with the brush, while the head and
extremities, and the ground strewed with flowers, are wrought with
the needle. No. 8687, p. 258, gives us a figure where the whole of
the person, the fleshes and clothing, are done in woven silk cut out,
shaded and featured in colours by the brush with some little needlework
here and there upon the garments. In that old specimen, No. 8713,
p. 270, such parts of the design as were meant to be white are left
uncovered upon the linen, and the shading is indicated by brown lines.

Perhaps in no collection open anywhere to public view could be found a
piece of cut-work so full of teaching about the process, and its easy
way of execution, as the one here, No. 1370, p. 76; to it we earnestly
recommend the attention of such of our readers as may wish to learn all
about this method.

For the invention of cut-work or “di commesso,” as Vasari calls
it, that writer tells us we are indebted to one of his Florentine
countrymen: “It was by Sandro Botticelli that the method of preparing
banners and standards in what is called cut-work, was invented; and
this he did that the colours might not sink through, showing the tint
of the cloth on each side. The baldachino of Orsanmichele is by this
master, and is so treated,” &c., and this work serves to show how much
more effectually that mode of proceeding preserves the cloth than do
those mordants, which, corroding the surface, allow but a short life to
the work; but as the mordants cost less, they are more frequently used
in our day than the first-mentioned method.[333]

However accurate such a statement may be regarding Italy in general,
and Tuscany in particular, it is, nevertheless, utterly untrue as
applicable to the rest of the world. In this collection may be seen a
valuable piece of this same cut-work--or as Vasari would call it “di
commesso”--by French hands, fraught with a story out of our English
Romance, and done towards the end of the fourteenth century, No. 1370,
p. 76. Now, as Botticelli was born A.D. 1457, and died A.D. 1515, he
came into being almost a whole century too late to have originated such
a process of ornamental needlework, which was well known and practised
in these parts so many years before the birth of that Florentine
painter.

 [333] Vite de’ piu Eccellenti Pittori, &c., di G. Vasari, t. v. p. 121;
    English translation, t. ii. p. 239.

There are some accessories, in mediæval embroidery, which ought not to
be overlooked here.

In some few instances,

GOLD, AND SILVER GILT,

in very many more, wrought after the smith’s cunning into little
star-like flowers--broader, bigger, and more craftily fashioned than
our modern spangles--are to be found sewed upon the silks or amid the
embroidery in the specimens before us, particularly those from Venice
and its main-land provinces in Italy, and from Southern Germany. At No.
8274, pp. 168-9, we have a part of an orphrey embroidered on parchment,
and having along with its coral, gold beads, and seed pearls, small
bosses and ornaments in gilded silver stars; it is Venetian, and of
the second half of the twelfth century. No. 8307, pp. 185-6 is a linen
amice, the silken apparel of which has sewed to it large spangle-like
plates in gilded silver struck with a variety of patterns, showing
how the goldsmith’s hand had been sought by the Germans of the
fifteenth century to give beauty to this silken stuff. The fine piece
of ruby-tinted Genoa velvet, which was once the apparel for the lower
hem of an alb, is sprinkled somewhat thickly with six-rayed stars of
gold and silver; but those made of the latter metal have turned almost
black: here we have a sample of Lombard taste in this matter, of the
ending of the fifteenth century. Silver-gilt spangles wrought to figure
six-petalled flowers on a fine example of gold tissue, under No. 8588,
pp. 222-3, present us with a German craftsman’s work, in the fourteenth
century. No. 8612, p. 233, is not without its value in reference to
Italian taste. All over, this curious now fragmental piece of silk
damask, has at one time been thickly strewed with trefoils cut out of
gilt metal, but very thin, and not sewed but glued on to the silk: many
of these leaves have fallen off, and those remaining turned black.

From among these examples a few will show the reader how the goldsmith
had been tasked to work upon them as jeweller also, and gem the
liturgical garments to which these shreds belong, with real or imitated
precious stones. In the orphrey upon the back of that very rich fine
crimson velvet chasuble, No. 1375, pp. 81-2, the crossed nimb about
our Lord’s head is gemmed with stones set in silver gilt; and the
sockets still left on the piece of crimson velvet, No. 8334, p. 199,
unmistakably speak for themselves.

Besides precious stones, coral, and seed-pearls,

GLASS,

coloured and wrought into small beads and bugles, is another of those
hard materials, the presence of which we find in this collection. As
now, so far back during the mediæval period, the Venetians, at the
island of Murano, wrought small glass beads and bugles of all colours,
as well as pastes--smalti--in every tint for mosaics, and imitations of