Ecclesiastical Vestments: Their development and history

by Robert Alexander Stewart Macalister

III. The Amice.—This vestment was quite unknown in the earlier period: it was a mediaeval invention.

The amice was clearly originally intended to serve as a hood; and a survival of this use remains in the ritual of vesting, in which the priest first places the vestment on his head, with the prayer 'Impone Domine capiti meo galeam salutis ad expugnandum diabolicos incursus,' before adjusting it round his neck.

In several dioceses of France the amice was worn as a hood upon the head from All Saints' Day till Easter, and something of the same kind may have been the practice elsewhere; thus, we find an effigy of a priest in Towyn, Merionethshire, and another in Beverley Minster, in which the amice is drawn over the head hoodwise.

In shape the amice was a rectangle (the dimensions are given as thirty-six inches by twenty-five inches). At each end strings were sewn, which were of sufficient length to cross over the breast and encircle the body. An apparel of embroidered work ran along one of the long sides; so that when the vestment was in position it was turned down, like a collar, over the other vestments round the neck, and so far open as to leave the throat of the wearer exposed. A small cross was marked in the centre of the upper edge of the vestment.

So much of this vestment was concealed that there appears to have been little or no scope for variety of treatment, either in form or material. The latter seems always to have been linen. The orphreys (embroidered edges), of course, are subject to the same unlimited variation of design as the corresponding ornaments on other vestments; but the shape is constant.

The same uniformity is not, however, observable in the symbolism of this vestment. The variety of meanings is even greater than is the case with the alb and its girdle. We are told that it signifies (inter alia) the Holy Incarnation; the purity of good works; the subjugation of the tongue; the earthy origin and heavenly goal of the human body; the necessity of justice and mercy in addition to temperance and abstention from evil; and the endurance of present hardships.

IV. The Stole.—The early history of the stole has been discussed in the preceding chapter, in considering the orarium.

Why, or when, the proper name of the vestment became 'stole,' or stola, does not appear. It is named stola in the later ecclesiastical canons of our second period; but it is not clear how stola, which in its original significance denoted a flowing tunic, like the under-garment of the Roman or the alba of the priests of the second period, came to signify a narrow strip of orphrey-work. It is quite certain that it cannot be explained (as some writers have attempted to do) as the orphrey of a lost vestment which has survived while the bulk of it has disappeared; for the continuity of the stole and the orarium is a matter of historic certainty, and we have already shown reason for assigning an entirely different origin to the latter vestment. Such an evolution, too, as that of a narrow strip from a large vestment is not natural, and is contrary to our observation in the history of other vestments; and it assumes the existence of embroidered 'orphreys' at a time far too remote for such ornamentation to be found. This hypothesis has suggested one of the less probable etymologies which have been proposed for the word orarium.

Fig. 6.—Stole-ends, showing Varieties in Form and Ornament.