Enamel.
Another form of glass fastened by heat to gold and copper—enamel, the invention neither of Egypt, Greece, nor Italy, but of our own old Britons,[337] was extensively employed as an adornment upon textiles. Besides the examples we have given,[338] that gorgeous “chesable of red cloth of gold with orphreys before and behind set with pearls, blue, white and red, with plates of gold enamelled, wanting fifteen plates, &c.”[339] bestowed by John of Gaunt’s duchess of Lancaster, upon Lincoln Cathedral, is another instance to show how such a kind of rich ornamentation was sewed to garments, especially for church use, in such large quantities.
[337] Philostratus, Icon. L. 1. cap. 528.
[338] Church of our Fathers, t. i. p. 469.
[339] Dugdale’s Mon. Anglic. t. VIII. p. 1281.
Here, in England, the old custom was to sew a great deal of goldsmith’s work, for enrichment, upon articles meant for personal wear, as well as on ritual garments. When our first Edward’s grave, in Westminster Abbey, was opened, A.D. 1774, on the body of the king, besides other silken robes, was seen, a stole-like band of rich white tissue put about the neck, and crossed upon his breast: it was studded with gilt quatrefoils in filigree work and embroidered with pearls. From the knees downwards the body was wrapped in a pall of cloth of gold. Concerning attire for liturgical use, the fact may be verified in those instances we have elsewhere given.[340] When Henry III., in the latter end of his reign, bestowed a frontal on the high altar in Westminster Abbey, besides carbuncles in golden settings, as we have just read, [p. xxxvi], we may have observed that along with several larger pieces of enamel, there were as many as 866 smaller ones—the “esmaux de plique” of the French—all fastened on this liturgical embroidery.
A good instance of the appliance of figured solid gold or silver, upon church vestments, is the following one of a cope beaten all over with lions in silver, given by a well-wisher to Glastonbury Abbey:—“dederat unam capam rubeam cum leonibus laminis argenteis capæ infixis, &c.”[341]
In the Norman-French, for so long a period in use at our Court, silken stuffs thus ornamented were said to be “batuz,” or as we now say beaten with hammered-up gold. Among the liturgical furniture provided by Richard II. for the chapel in the castle of Haverford, were “ii rydell batuz”—two altar-curtains beaten (no doubt with ornaments in gilt silver.)[342]
[340] Church of Our Fathers, i. 360, 362, 469, &c.
[341] Johannes Glastoniensis, p. 203.
[342] Kalendars of the Treasury, &c. ed. Palgrave, t. iii. p. 359.
For the secular employment of this same sort of decoration, we have several curious examples. Our ladies’ dresses for grand occasions were so adorned, as we may see in the verses following:—
In a robe ryght ryall bowne,
Of a redd syclatowne,
Be hur fadur syde;
A coronell on hur hedd sett,
Hur clothys wyth bestes and byrdes wer bete,
All abowte for pryde.[343]
A.D. 1215 our King John sent an order to Reginald de Cornhull and William Cook to have made for him, besides five tunics, five banners with his arms upon them, well beaten in gold: “quinque banerias de armis nostris bene auro bacuatas” (sic).[344] The c for t must be a misprint in the last word.
An amice at St. Paul’s had on it the figures of two bishops and a king hammered up out of gilt silver: “amictus ornatus cum duobus magnis episcopis et uno rege stantibus argenteis deauratis.”[345]
From the original bill for fitting out one of the ships in which Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, during the reign of Henry VI., went over to France, where he had been appointed to a high command, we gather hints which throw light upon this as well as several matters belonging to this Introduction. Among other items for the above-named equipage are these:—“Four hundred pencils (long narrow strips, may be of silk, used as flags), beat with the Raggedstaff in silver; the other pavys (one of two shields, likely of wood, and fastened outside the ship at its bows), painted with black, and a Raggedstaff beat with silver occupying all the field; one coat (perhaps of silk, but no doubt blazoned with the Beauchamp’s arms,) for my Lord’s body, beat with fine gold; two coats (like the foregoing) for heralds, beat with demi gold; a great streamer for a ship of forty yeards in length and eight yeards in breadth, with a great Bear and Griffin holding a Raggedstaff poudred full of Raggedstaffs; three penons (small flags) of satten; sixteen standards of worsted entailed with the Bear and a chain.”[346] The quatrefoils on the robe of our First Edward, the silver lions on the Glastonbury cope, the beasts and birds on the lady’s gown, the Bear, and Griffin, and Raggedstaff belonging to the Beauchamp’s blazoning, and all such like enrichments—mostly heraldic—put upon silken stuffs, were cut out of very thin plates of gold or silver, so as to hang upon them lightly, and were hammered up to show in low relief the fashion of the flower and the lineaments of the beast or bird meant to be represented.
In fact, such a style of ornamentation done in gold or silver, stitched on silken stuffs made up into liturgical garments, knights’ coats of arms, ladies’ dresses, heralds’ tabards, or flags and penoncels, was far more common once than is now thought. It had struck out for itself a technical expression. In speaking of it men would either write or say, “silk beaten with gold or silver,” as the case might be—a meaning, by the way, for the word “beat,” quite overlooked by our lexicographers; yet, making her will as late as the year 1538, Barbara Mason bequeathed to a church “a vestment of grene sylke betyn with goold.”[347]
[343] Ancient English Metrical Romances, t. iii. pp. 8, 9.
[344] Close Rolls, ed. D. Hardy, p. 193.
[345] Dugdale, p. 318.
[346] Dugdale’s Baronage of England, i. 246.
[347] Bury Wills, p. 134.
The badge on the arm of the livery coat once commonly worn, and yet rowed for by the Thames watermen, as well as the armorials figured, before and behind, upon the fine old picturesque frocks of our buffetiers—the yeomen of the Royal guard, called in London “beefeaters,”—help to keep up the tradition of such a style of ornament in dress.
Spangles, when they happened to be used, were not like such as are now employed, but fashioned after another and artistic shape, and put on in a different manner. Before me lies a shred from the chasuble belonging to the set of vestments wrought, it is said, by Isabella of Spain and her maids of honour, and worn the first time high mass was sung in Granada, after it had been taken by the Spaniards from the Moors. Upon this shred are flowers, well thrown up in relief, done in spangles on a crimson velvet ground. These spangles—some in gold, some in silver—are, though small, in several sizes; all are voided—that is, hollow in the middle—with the circumference not flat, but convex, and are sewed on like tiles one overlapping the other, and thus produce a rich and pleasing effect. Our present spangles, in the flat shape, are quite modern.
Sadly overlooked, or but scantily employed on modern embroideries, is the process of