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