To face page 292.
About this time, too, lace gradually dawns upon us in the church inventories. Among the churchwardens' accounts of St. Mary-at-Hill, date 1554, we find entered a charge of 3s. for making "the Bishopp's (boy bishop) myter with stuff and lace."[[789]] The richly-laced corporax cloths and church linen are sent to be washed by the "Lady Ancress," an ecclesiastical washerwoman, who is paid by the churchwardens of St. Margaret's, Westminster, the sum of 8d.; this Lady Ancress, or Anchoress, being some worn-out old nun who, since the dissolution of the religious houses, eked out an existence by the art she had once practised within the walls of her convent.
At the burial of King Edward VI., Sir Edward Waldgrave enters on his account a charge of fifty yards of gold passement lace for garnishing the pillars of the church.
Fig. 121.
Fisher, Bishop of Rochester.—(M. de Versailles.)
The sumptuary laws of Henry VIII. were again renewed by Queen Mary:[[790]] in them ruffles made or wrought out of England, commonly called cut-work, are forbidden to anyone under the degree of a baron; while to women of a station beneath that of a knight's wife, all wreath lace or passement lace of gold and silver with sleeves, partlet or linen trimmed with purles of gold and silver, or white-works, alias cut-works, etc., made beyond the sea, is strictly prohibited. These articles were, it seems, of Flemish origin, for among the New Year's Gifts presented to Queen Mary, 1556, we find enumerated as given by Lady Jane Seymour, "a fair smock of white work,[[791]] Flanders making." Lace, too, is now in more general use, for on the same auspicious occasion, Mrs. Penne, King Edward's nurse, gave "six handkerchers edged with passamayne of golde and silke."[[792]] Two years previous to these New Year's Gifts, Sir Thomas Wyatt is described as wearing, at his execution, "on his head a faire hat of velvet, with broad bone-work lace about it."[[793]]
Lace now seems to be called indifferently purle, passamayne or bone-work, the two first-mentioned terms occurring most frequently. The origin of this last appellation is generally stated to have been derived from the custom of using sheep's trotters previous to the invention of wooden bobbins. Fuller so explains it, and the various dictionaries have followed his theory. The Devonshire lace-makers, on the other hand, deriving their knowledge from tradition, declare that when lace-making was first introduced into their county, pins,[[794]] so indispensable to their art, being then sold at a price far beyond their means, the lace-makers, mostly the wives of fishermen living along the coast, adopted the bones of fish, which, pared and cut into regular lengths, fully answered as a substitute. This explanation would seem more probable than that of employing sheep's trotters for bobbins, which, as from 300 to 400 are often used at one time on a pillow, must have been both heavy and cumbersome. Even at the present day pins made from chicken bones continue to be employed in Spain; and bone pins are still used in Portugal.[[795]]
Shakespeare, in Twelfth-Night, speaks of
"The spinsters and the knitters in the sun,