How highly English embroideries were at one period appreciated by foreigners may be gathered from the especial notice taken of them abroad; as we may find in continental documents. Matilda, queen of William the conqueror, carried away from the abbey of Abingdon its richest vestments, and would not be put off with inferior ones. In his will A. D. 1360 cardinal Talairand, bishop of Albano, speaks of the English embroideries on a costly set of white vestments. A bishop of Tournai, in 1343, bequeathed to that cathedral an old English cope, as well as a beautiful corporal “of English work.” Among the copes reserved for prelates’ use in the chapel of Charles duke of Bourgogne, brother-in-law to 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 couvertes de perles, et leur diadesmes pourphiler de perles, estans en manière de tabernacles, faits de deux arbres, dont les tiges sont touts couvertes de perles, et à la dite chappe y a une bille des dites armes, garnie de perles comme la dessus dicte.”
While so coveted abroad, our English embroidery was highly prized and well paid for at home. We find in the Issue Rolls that Henry the third had a chasuble embroidered by Mabilia of Bury St. Edmund’s; and that Edward the second paid a hundred marks 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 the Pope as an offering from the queen.
English embroidery afterwards lost its first high reputation. 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 at South Kensington, no. 4045. Nothing of the celebrated chain-stitch with dimpled faces in the figures can be found about it: every part is worked in the feather-stitch, slovenly put down. During the early part of the seventeenth century our embroiderers again struck out a new style, which consisted in throwing up the figures a good height above the grounding. Of this raised work there is a fine specimen in the fourth of the copes preserved in the chapter library at Durham. It is said to have been wrought for and given by Charles the first 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 David, holding in one hand the head of Goliah; the whole done in highly raised embroidery. Bibles of the large folio size, covered in rich silk or satin and embroidered with the royal arms done in bold raised-work, are still to be found in our libraries. More than one of these volumes is said to have been a gift from the king to a forefather of the present owner.
This style of raised embroidery remained in use for many years. Not only large Bibles but smaller volumes, especially prayer-books, had bindings enriched with it. Generally such examples are attributed, and in most cases wrongly, to the so-called nuns of Little Gidding. The same kind of work is sometimes found on the broad frames of old looking-glasses: setting forth perhaps, as in the specimen no. 892, the story of Ahasuerus and Esther, or a passage in some courtship carried on after the manners of Arcadia.
Few people at the present day have a just idea of the labour, the money, and 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 his time. In behalf of England plenty of evidence has been produced already: as a proof of the same labour elsewhere a remarkable passage may be quoted, given, in his life of Antonio Pollaiuolo, by Vasari: “For San Giovanni in Florence there were made certain very rich vestments after the design of this master, all of gold-wove velvet with pile upon pile (di broccato riccio sopra riccio), each woven of one entire piece and without seam, embroidered with the most subtile mastery of that art by Paolo da Verona, a man most eminent of his calling, and of incomparable ingenuity. This work took twenty-six years for its completion, being wholly in close stitch (questi ricami fatti con punto serrato); 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.” These vestments may yet be seen framed and glazed in presses around the sacristy of San Giovanni. Antonio died in 1498. The magnificent cope before referred to, now at Stonyhurst, 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; probably it came from the same loom that threw off these famous San Giovanni vestments.
Embroidered Saddle-cloth of the sixteenth century.
CHAPTER IX.
The old English “opus consutum” or cut-work, called in French “appliqué,” is a term of rather wide meaning, as it takes in several sorts of decorative accompaniments to needlework.