Vel scena ut versis discedat frontibus, utque
Purpurea intexti tollant aulæa Britanni.[352]
From Egypt through Western Asia the art of tapestry-making found its way to Europe, and at last to us; and among the other manual labours followed by their rule in religious houses, this handicraft was one, and the monks became some of its best workmen. The altars and the walls of their churches were hung with such an ornamentation. Matthew Paris tells us, that among other ornaments which, in the reign of Henry I, Abbot Geoffrey had made for his church of St. Alban’s monastery, were three reredoses, the first a large one wrought with the finding of England’s protomartyr’s body; the other two smaller-ones figured with the gospel story of the man who fell among thieves, the other with that of the prodigal son: “dedit quoque dossale magnum in quo intexitur inventio Sancti Albani, cujus campus est aerius, et aliud minus ubi effigiatur Evangelium de sauciato qui incidit in latrones, et tertium ubi historia de filio prodigo figuratur.”[353] While in London, A.D. 1316, Simon Abbot, of Ramsey, bought for his monks’ use looms, staves, shuttles and a slay: “pro weblomes emptis xxs. Et pro staves ad easdem vjd. Item pro iiij shittles pro eodem opere ijs vjd. Item in j. slay pro textoribus viijd.”[354]
What was done in one monastery was but the reflex of every other; hence, Giffard, one of the commissioners for the suppression of the smaller houses, in the reign of Henry VIII., thus writes to Cromwell, while speaking of the monastery of Wolstrope, in Lincolnshire:—“Not one religious person there but that he can and doth use either imbrothering, writing books with very fair hand, making their own garments, carving, painting, or graving, &c.”[355]
[352] Georg. L. iii. 24, &c.
[353] Vitæ S. Albani Abbatum, p. 40.
[354] Mon. Anglic. ii. p. 585.
[355] Collier, Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain, ed. Lathbury, t. v. p. 3.
Pieces of English-made tapestry still remain. That fine, though mutilated specimen at St. Mary’s Hall, Coventry, is one; a second is the curious reredos for an altar, belonging to the London Vintners’ Company; it is figured with St. Martin on horseback cutting with his sword his cloak in two, that he might give one-half to a beggar man; and with St. Dunstan singing mass, and wrought by the monks of St. Alban’s.
Though practised far and wide, the art of weaving tapestry became most successfully followed in many parts of France and throughout ancient Flanders where secular trade-gilds were formed for its especial manufacture, in many of its towns. Several of these cities won for themselves an especial fame; but so far, at last, did Arras outrun them all that arras-work came, in the end, to be the common word, both here and on the Continent, to mean all sorts of tapestry, whether wrought in England or abroad. Thus is it, we think, that those fine hangings for the choir of Canterbury Cathedral, now at Aix-en-Provence, though made at home, perhaps too by his own monks, and given to that church by Prior Goldston, A.D. 1595, are spoken of as, not indeed from Arras, but arras-work—“pannos pulcherrimos opere de arysse subtiliter intextos.”[356]