The crescent moon, on the shields with the Holy Lamb, represents the Church, for the reason that small at first, but getting her light from the true Sun of justice, our Lord, she every day grows larger, and at the end of time, when all shall believe in her, will at last be in her full brightness. This symbolism is set forth, at some length, by Petrus Capuanus as quoted by Dom (now Cardinal) Pitra in his valuable “Spicilegium Solesmense,” t. ii. 66. But for an English mediæval authority on the point, we may cite our own Alexander Neckam, born A.D. 1157 at St. Albans, and who had as a foster-brother King Richard of the Lion-Heart. In his curious work, “De Naturis Rerum,” not long since printed for the first time, and published by the authority of Her Majesty’s treasury, under the direction of the Master of the Rolls, Neckam thus writes:—“Per solem item Christus, verus sol justiciæ plerumque intelligitur; per lunam autem ecclesia, vel quæcunque fidelis anima. Sicut autem luna beneficium lucis a sole mendicat, ita et fidelis anima a Christo qui est lux vera.” P. 53.
Not always was the peacock taken to be the unmitigated emblem of pride and foolish vanity. Osmont the cleric, in his “Volucraire, or Book of Birds,” after noticing its scream instead of song, its serpent-like shape of head that it carries so haughtily, but lowers quite abashed as it catches a glimpse at its ugly feet, and its garish plumage with the many bright-eyed freckles on its fan-like tail which it loves to unfold for admiration, draws these comparisons. As the peacock affrights us by its cry, so does the preacher, when he thunders against sin startle us into a hatred of it; if the step of the bird be so full of majesty, with what steadiness ought a true Christian fearlessly tread his narrow path. A man may perhaps find a happiness, nay, show a pride in the conviction of having done a good deed, perhaps may sometimes therefore carry his head a trifle high, and, strutting like the peacock, parade his pious works to catch the world’s applause; as soon as he looks into Holy Writ and there learns the weakness, lowliness, of his own origin, he too droops his head in all humility. Those eye-speckled feathers in its plumage warn him that never too often can he have his eyes wide open, and gaze inwardly upon his own heart and know its secret workings. Thus spoke an Anglo-Norman writer.
About the swan an Englishman, our Alexander Neckam, says:—“Quid quod cygnus in ætate tenella fusco colore vestitus esse videtur, qui postmodum in intentissimum candorem mutatur? Sic nonnulli caligine peccatorum prius obfuscati, postea candoris innocentiæ veste spirituali decorantur.”—De Naturis Rerum, p. 101. Here our countryman hands us the key to the symbolic appearance of the swan upon this liturgical garment; for, as while a cygnet, its feathers are always of a dusky hue, but when the bird has grown up its plumage changes into the most intensely white, just so, some people who are at first darkened with the blackness of sin, in after days become adorned with the garb of white innocence.
Besides their ecclesiastical meanings these same symbols had belonging to them a secular significance. Found upon a piece of stuff quite apart from that of the cope itself, and worked for the adornment of that fine vestment after a lapse of many years, made up too of an ornamentation the whole of which is heraldic and thus bringing to mind worldly knights and their blazons and its age’s chivalry, it is easy to find out for it an adaptation to the chivalric notions and customs of those times. The Bethlehem star overtopping the Islam badge of the crescent moon showed forth the wishes of every one who had been or meant to be a crusader, or rather more, not merely of our men at arms but of every true believer throughout Christendom whose untiring prayers were that the Holy Land might be wrested from the iron hand of the Mahometan. At great national festivities and solemn gatherings of the aristocracy, not the young knight alone then newly girt, but the grey-haired warrior would often, in that noble presence, bind himself by vow to do some deed of daring, and swore it to heaven, and the swan, the pheasant, or the peacock as the bird of his choice, was brought with a flourish of trumpets, and amid a crowd of stately knights waiting on a bevy of fair young ladies, and set before him. This sounds odd at this time of day; not so did it in mediæval times, when those birds were looked upon with favour on account of the majestic gracefulness of their shape, or the sparkling beauty of their plumage. It must not be forgotten that this orphrey was blazoned by English hands in England, and while all the stirring doings of our first Edward were yet fresh in our people’s remembrance. That king had been and fought in the Holy Land against the Saracens. At his bidding, towards the end of life, a scene remarkable even in that period of royal festive magnificence, took place, when he himself, in the year 1306, girded his son, afterwards Edward II, with the military belt in the palace of Westminster, and then sent him to bestow the same knightly honour, in the church of that abbey, upon the three hundred young sons of the nobility, who had been gathered from all parts of the kingdom to be his companions in the splendours of the day. But that grand function was brought to an end by a most curious yet interesting act; to the joyous sounds of minstrelsy came forwards a procession, bearing along a pair of swans confined in a net, the meshes of which were made of cords fashioned like reeds and wrought of gold. These birds were set in solemn pomp before the king; and there and then Edward swore by the God in heaven and the swans that he would go forth and wage war against the Scots: Matthew Westminster, p. 454. No wonder, then, that along with the star and crescent we find the knightly swan and peacock mingled in the heraldry of the highest families in England, wrought upon a work from English hands, during the fourteenth century. A long hundred years after this elaborate orphrey was worked we find that Dan John Lydgate, monk of Bury St. Edmund’s, in his poem called “All stant in chaunge like a mydsomer Rose,” upon the fickleness of all earthly things, while singing of this life’s fading vanities, counts among them—
“Vowis of pecok, with all ther proude chere.”
Minor Poems, ed. Halliwell for Percy Society, p. 25.
To the wild but poetic legend of the swan and his descendants, we have already alluded in our Introduction.
A word or two now upon the needlework, how it was done, and a certain at present unused mechanical appliance to it after it was wrought, so observable upon this vestment, lending its figures more effect, and giving it, as a teaching example of embroidery, much more value than any foreign piece in this numerous collection.
Looking well into this fine specimen of the English needle, 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 middle had been made, they fell, and were so carried on through the rest of the fleshes. After the whole figure had thus been wrought; then with a little thin iron rod ending in a small bulb or smooth knob slightly heated, were pressed down those spots upon the faces worked in circular lines, as well 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. Upon the slightly-clothed person of our Lord this same process is followed in a way that tells remarkably well; and the chest with the upper part of the pelvis in the figure of our Saviour overcoming Thomas’s unbelief, shows a noteworthy example of the mediæval knowledge of external anatomy.
We must not, however, hide from ourselves the fact that the edges, though so broad and blunt, given by such a use of the hot iron to parts of an embroidery, expose it somewhat to the danger of being worn out more in those than other portions which soon betray the damage by their thread-bare dingy look, as is the case in the example just cited.