And, again:—
“I wol give him all that falles
To his chambre and to his halles,
I will do painte him with pure golde,
And tapite hem ful many a folde.”
These modes of decorating the walls and chambers with paintings, and with tapestry, were indeed contemporaneous; though the greater difficulty of obtaining the latter—for as it was not made at Arras until the fourteenth century, all that we here refer to is the painful product of the needle alone—many have made it less usual and common than the former. Pithy sentences, and metrical stanzas were often wrought in tapestry: in Wresil Castle and other mansions, some of the apartments were adorned in the Oriental manner with metrical descriptions called Proverbs. And Warton mentions an ancient suit of tapestry, containing Ariosto’s Orlando, and Angelica, where, at every group, the story was all along illustrated with short lines in Provençal or old French.
It could only be from its superior comfort that an article so tedious in manufacture as needlework tapestry could be preferred to the more quickly-produced decorations of the pencil; it was also rude in design; and the following description of some tapestry in an old Manor House in King John’s time, though taken from a work of fiction, probably presents a correct picture of the style of most of the pieces exhibited in the mansions of the middle ranks at that period.
“In a corner of the apartment stood a bed, the tapestry of which was enwrought with gaudy colours representing Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. Adam was presenting our first mother with a large yellow apple, gathered from a tree that scarcely reached his knee. Beneath the tree was an angel milking, and although the winged milkman sat on a stool, yet his head overtopped both cow and tree, and nearly covered a horse, which seemed standing on the highest branches. To the left of Eve appeared a church; and a dark robed gentleman holding something in his hand which looked like a pincushion, but doubtless was intended for a book: he seemed pointing to the holy edifice, as if reminding them that they were not yet married. On the ground lay the rib, out of which Eve (who stood the head higher than Adam) had been formed; both of them were very respectably clothed in the ancient Saxon costume; even the angel wore breeches, which, being blue, contrasted well with his flaming red wings.”
No one who has read the real blunders of artists and existing anachronisms in pictures detailed in “Percy Anecdotes,” will think the above sketch at all too highly coloured; though doubtless the tapestry hangings introduced by Queen Eleanor which would be imitated and caricatured in ten thousand different forms, were in much superior style. The Moors had attained to the highest perfection in the decorative arts, and from them did the Spaniards borrow this fashion of hangings,[76] and “the coldness of our climate (says her accomplished biographer, Miss Agnes Strickland, speaking of Eleanor,) must have made it indispensable to the fair daughter of the South, chilled with the damp stone walls of English Gothic halls and chambers.” Of the chillness of these walls we may form some idea, from a feeling description of a residence which was thought sufficient for a queen some centuries later. In the year 1586, Mary, the unhappy Queen of Scots, writes thus:—
“In regard to my lodging, my residence is a place inclosed with walls, situated on an eminence, and consequently exposed to all the winds and storms of heaven. Within this inclosure there is, like as at Vincennes, a very old hunting seat, built of wood and plaister, with chinks on all sides, with the uprights; the intervals between which are not properly filled up, and the plaister dilapidated in the various places. The house is about six yards distant from the walls, and so low that the terrace on the other side is as high as the house itself, so that neither the sun nor the fresh air can penetrate it at that side. The damp, however, is so great there, that every article of furniture is covered with mouldiness in the space of four days.—In a word, the rooms for the most part are fit rather for a dungeon for the lowest and most abject criminals, than for a residence of a person of my rank, or even of a much inferior condition. I have for my own accommodation only wretched little rooms, and so cold, that were it not for the protection of the curtains and tapestries which I have had put up, I could not endure it by day, and still less by night.”[77]
The tapestries, whether wrought or woven, did not remain on the walls as do the hangings of modern days: it was the primitive office of the grooms of the chamber to hang up the tapestry which in a royal progress was sent forward with the purveyor and grooms of the chamber. And if these functionaries had not, to use a proverbial expression, “heads on their shoulders,” ridiculous or perplexing blunders were not unlikely to arise. Of the latter we have an instance recorded by the Duc de Sully.
“The King (Henry IV.) had not yet quitted Monceaux, when the Cardinal of Florence, who had so great a hand in the treaty of the Vervins, passed through Paris, as he came back from Picardy, and to return from thence to Rome, after he had taken leave of his Majesty. The king sent me to Paris to receive him, commanding me to pay him all imaginable honours. He had need of a person near the Pope, so powerful as this Cardinal, who afterwards obtained the Pontificate himself: I therefore omitted nothing that could answer His Majesty’s intentions; and the legate, having an inclination to see St. Germain-en-Laye, I sent orders to Momier, the keeper of the castle, to hang the halls and chambers with the finest tapestry of the Crown. Momier executed my orders with great punctuality, but with so little judgment, that for the legate’s chamber he chose a suit of hangings made by the Queen of Navarre; very rich, indeed, but which represented nothing but emblems and mottos against the Pope and the Roman Court, as satirical as they were ingenious. The prelate endeavoured to prevail upon me to accept a place in the coach that was to carry him to St. Germain, which I refused, being desirous of getting there before him, that I might see whether everything was in order; with which I was very well pleased. I saw the blunder of the keeper, and reformed it immediately. The legate would not have failed to look upon such a mistake as a formed design to insult him, and to have represented it as such to the Pope. Reflecting afterwards, that no difference in religion could authorise such sarcasms, I caused all those mottos to be effaced.”[78]
In the sixteenth century[79] a sort of hanging was introduced, which, partaking of the nature both of tapestry and painting on the walls, was a formidable rival to the former. Shakspeare frequently alludes to these “painted cloths.” For instance, when Falstaff persuades Hostess Quickly, not only to withdraw her arrest, but also to make him a further loan: she says—