Parish Priests and Their People in the Middle Ages in England

by Edward Lewes Cutts

The cope was simply a cloak. The shape in which we first find it as an ecclesiastical vestment was an exact semicircle, usually with an ornamented border along the straight side, which, when worn, fell down in two lines of embroidery in front. It was originally a protection from the weather, as indicated by its name “Pluviale,” and by the hood, which is so integral a part of the original idea of the garment, that for centuries a flat triangular piece of ornamental work was sewn at the back of the cope, to represent this hood. It first appears as a clerical vestment about the end of the ninth century, and was worn in processions and in choir.

The surplice is the most modern of the clerical vestments. The fashion, introduced about the eleventh century, of having the tunic lined with fur, was found very comfortable by the clergy in their long services in cold churches; but the strait, girded albe looked ungraceful over it, and so the albe was enlarged into a surplice, to be worn in all minor offices over the furred robe, as its name, superpelliceum, indicates, while the albe continued to be used in the Eucharistic Service.

Bishop and Canons, from Richard II.’s “Book of Hours,” British Museum.

The shape of the surplice differs much in different examples. We give some illustrations in which it will be seen that the surplice of a canon is long and ample, while that of a clerk is little wider than an albe, but has wide sleeves and is not girded. In an inventory of the goods of St. Peter, Cornhill, at the time of the Reformation, we find “gathered surplices” for the “curate,” and “plain surplices” for the choir.[190]

Canons in choir wore over the surplice a short furred cope or cape, called an amyss, with a fur-lined hood attached, of curious shape, as shown in several of our illustrations. Bishops wore the whole series of vestments with the addition of mitre, jewelled gloves and shoes, and carried a pastoral staff.

The furniture of the churches and the vestments of its ministers were of very different degrees of beauty and cost—from altar vessels of simple silver of rude country make up to vessels of gold fashioned by great artists and enriched with jewels; from a simple linen chasuble up to copes and chasubles of cloth of gold, enriched with embroidery of high artistic merit and adorned with gems.

After these dry technicalities, we have only to illustrate the vestments as they appeared in actual use by some pictures from illuminated manuscripts and other sources, with a few explanatory notes where they seem to be necessary. Once granted that some distinctive dress is becoming and desirable for the clergy in their ministrations, and the rest is mere matter of taste. There is nothing mysterious about the mediæval vestments. They were all at first (except the Orarium) ordinary articles of everyday apparel, worn by clergy and laity alike. But it has always been thought right that the clergy should not be in too great haste to follow new fashions, and so they went on wearing fashions till they were obsolete; moreover, some of these copes and planetas were costly vestments given by kings and great men expressly to be worn in Divine service, and had been worn by saints, and had come to have venerable associations, and no one wished to discard them; and so they came to be distinctive and venerable.

Imaginative people soon invented a symbolical meaning for the various vestments, and other imaginative people varied the symbolism from time to time. St. Isidore of Seville, in the sixth century, saw in the white colour of the albe a symbol of the purity which becomes the clerical character, and that was so obvious and simple, that it continued to be the recognized meaning all through the ages. Of the chasuble, St. Germanus of Constantinople, in the eighth century, says it is a symbol of our Lord’s humility; Amalarius of Metz, in the ninth century, says it means good works; and Alcuin, in the tenth century, takes it to signify charity, because it covers all the other vestments as charity excels all other virtues. Later writers made the dalmatic, because it is in the shape of a cross, signify the Passion of our Lord; the stole, the yoke of Christ; and so forth.[191]

There is a fashion in clerical vestments as well as in the clothes of the laity; the forms of the cope, chasuble, etc., at different times are sufficiently shown in our illustrations to make description unnecessary. We may make the one remark, that whereas the cope and chasuble of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries are of pliant material and skilful fashion, and fall in graceful folds, the like vestments in the sixteenth century came to be made of stiff material unskilfully shaped; in the seventeenth century the chasuble has its sides entirely cut away, of necessity, because the arms were unable to act under the weight and rigidity of the material, while the back and front hang down like boards cut into the shape of a violoncello.[192]