Plate IV.—Sampler by Elizabeth Calthorpe.
Dated 1656.
Mrs Charles Longman.
This small Sampler (it measures only 17 × 7) is a remarkable testimony to the goodness of the materials used by our ancestors, and the care that has been taken in certain instances to preserve these early documents of family history. For it is over two hundred and sixty years since Elizabeth Calthorpe’s very deft fingers produced what even now appears to be a very skilled performance, and every thread of silk and of the canvas groundwork is as fresh as the day that it emerged from the dyer’s hands. The design is one of the unusual pictorial and ornamental combinations, the pictorial representing the Sacrifice of Isaac in two scenes.
Texts and mottoes also furnish a clue to age, for they extend backwards beyond 1686 on but one known sampler, namely that of Martha Salter in the Victoria and Albert Museum, dated 1651, which has the maxim, “The feare of God is an excellent gift,” although on such articles as purses and the like they are to be found much earlier, and the “Sonnet to Queen Elizabeth,” to which we have referred, shows that they were in vogue in 1612.
Age may also be approximated by the ornament and by the material of which the sampler is made, which differs as time goes on. The following table has been formed from many specimens that have come under my inspection; it shows the earliest date at which various forms of ornament appear on dated samplers so far as I have been able to trace them.
| Adam and Eve, figure of | 1709 | |
| Alphabet | 1643 | |
| Border enclosing sampler | 1726 | |
| Border of flowing naturalistic flowers | 1730 | |
| Boxers (and until 1758) | 1648 | |
| Crown | 1691 | |
| Eyelet form of lettering (? Anne Gover’s, circ. 1610) | 1672 | |
| Fleur-de-Lys (see, however, [Plate III.]) | 1742 | |
| Flower in vase | 1742 | |
| Heart | 1751 | |
| House | 1765 | |
| Inscription | 1662 | |
| Motto or text | 1651 | |
| Mustard-coloured canvas | 1728 | |
| Name of maker (? Anne Gover’s, circ. 1610) | 1648 | |
| Numerals | 1655 | |
| Rows of ornament (latest 1741) | 1648 | |
| Stag (but only common between 1758 and 1826) | 1648 | |
| The Spies to Canaan | 1804 | |
| Verse (? Lora Standish, circ. 1635) | 1696 |
Lettering on Samplers
It is from this, rather than from any other feature, that we trace the evolution of the sampler. Originally a pattern sheet of devices and ornaments, there were added to it in time alphabets and numerals of various kinds, which the increased luxury of the house called for as aids to the marking of the linen and clothes. Later on the monotony of alphabets and numerals was varied by the addition of the maker’s name, the year, an old saw or two, and ultimately flights into moral or religious verse.
Alphabets and Numerals
Although a sampler without either alphabets or numerals would seem to be lacking in the very essence of its being, it is almost certain that the earliest forms did not contain either, but (like that in [Plate II.]) were merely sheets of decorative designs. For the need of pattern-books of designs would as certainly precede that of copy-books of alphabets and numerals, as the pleasure of embroidering designs upon garments preceded that of marking their ownership by names, and their quantity by figures. A sampler would seldom, if ever, be used as a text-book for children to learn letters or figures from, except with the needle, and the need for lettering and figuring upon them would, therefore, as we have said, only arise when garments or napery became sufficiently common and numerous to need marking. This period had clearly been reached when our earliest dated samplers were made, for, out of dated specimens of the seventeenth century that I have examined, two-thirds carry the alphabet upon them, and the majority have the numerals. It is rare to find later samplers without them, those of the eighteenth century containing assortments of every variety of lettering, Scottish ones especially laying themselves out for elaborately designed and florid alphabets. With the advent of the nineteenth century, however, the sampler began to lose its raison d’être, and quite one-half of those then made omit either the alphabet, or numerals, or both.