Embroidery and Tapestry Weaving

E-text prepared by Susan Skinner and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net/c/)
Flowers, Plants and Fishes, Birds, Beasts, Flyes, and Bees, Hils, Dales, Plaines, Pastures, Skies, Seas, Rivers, Trees, There's nothing neere at hand, or farthest sought, But with the needle may be shap'd and wrought.
—John Taylor ( The Praise of the Needle ).
SECOND EDITION REVISED ( A reprint of the First Edition, with various slight alterations in text ) THIRD EDITION REVISED ( A reprint of the Second Edition )
PUBLISHED BY JOHN HOGG 13 PATERNOSTER ROW LONDON 1912
Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson & Co. At the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh
Needlework, which is still practised traditionally in every house, was once a splendid art, an art in which English workers were especially famous, so that, early in the XIIIth century, vestments embroidered in England were eagerly accepted in Rome, and the kind of work wrought here was known over Europe as English Work. Embroideries façon d'Angleterre often occupy the first place in foreign inventories.
At Durham are preserved some beautiful fragments of embroidery worked in the Xth century, and many examples, belonging to the great period of the XIIIth and XIVth centuries, are preserved at the South Kensington Museum, which is particularly rich in specimens of this art. In order to judge of what were then its possibilities it is worth while to go and see there three notable copes, the blue cope, the Sion cope, and the rose-colour Jesse-tree cope, the last two of which are certainly English, and the former probably so. The Sion cope bears a remnant of an inscription which has unfortunately been cut down and otherwise injured, so that all that I have been able to read is as follows: DAVN PERS : DE : V ...; probably the name of the donor.
In the XIIIth century the craft of embroidery was practised both by men and women.
That great art patron, Henry the Third, chiefly employed for his embroideries, says Mr. Hudson Turner, a certain Mabel of Bury St. Edmund's, whose skill as an embroideress seems to have been remarkable, and many interesting records of her curious performances might be collected. And I have found a record of an embroidered chasuble made for the king by Mabilia of St. Edmund's in 1242. The most splendid piece of embroidery produced for this king must have been the altar frontal of Westminster Abbey, completed about 1269. It was silk, garnished with pearls, jewels, and translucent enamels. Four embroideresses worked on it for three years and three-quarters, and it seems to have cost a sum equal to about £3000 of our money.