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.