As a specific name for productions of this class the word is now quite obsolete, though familiar enough in early days; tapestry indeed, in general, has ceased to be popular, and is now all but entirely confined professionally to the weaving of carpets, and as an amateur art among ladies to those figured screens so much in vogue not more than one or two generations ago, traces of which still remain in the framed embroideries yet lingering in many of our drawing-rooms—embroideries of cats with grizzly whiskers and tawny terriers—embroideries which as children we heard with bated breath had been worked by our grandmothers when they were little girls, and thus we realised for the first time, not so much that they had done these wonderful things as that they had once been small at all, like ourselves.
We have no surname to represent the weaving of carpets, as this was an introduction of much later date than most of our other household comforts in the way of furniture. In Brand’s ‘Popular Antiquities’ an interesting quotation is given from Hentzner’s ‘Itinerary,’ who, describing Queen Elizabeth’s Presence Chamber at Greenwich, says, ‘The floor, after the English fashion, was strewed with hay.’ The strewing of church pews with rushes was common until recent times, and in the North of England the peculiar customs attaching to the ‘Rush-bearing,’ a kind of ‘wakes,’ are not yet extinct. It is fair to add, however, that carpets were in course of introduction at the beginning of the sixteenth century; an old poem of that date mentions—
Broudurers, strayners, and carpyte-makers,
Spooners, turners, and hatters.
Before proceeding any further we had better introduce our ‘Lavenders,’ or washers, for be it linen or woollen stuff, be it garment for the back or covering for the bed, all needed washing then as now. The contracted feminine ‘laundress’ is still in common use. That the masculine form, however, was early applied to the other sex is proved in the ‘Legend of Good Women,’ where we are told—
Envie is lavender of the court alway,
For she ne parteth neither night ne day.
The gradation from ‘lavenderie’ to ‘laundry’ is marked by Stowe, who in his ‘Chronicles’ writes it ‘laundery.’ By similar contractions our ‘Lavenders’ are now found also in the other forms of ‘Launder’ and ‘Lander.’ An old poem says—
Thou shalt be my launder,
To washe and keep clean all my gere.[[368]]