Another and earlier Aelfled was the widow of Brithnod, a famous Northumbrian chieftain. She gave to the cathedral of Ely, where his headless body lay buried, a large cloth, or hanging, on which she had embroidered the heroic deeds of her husband. She was the ancestress of a race of embroiderers, and their pedigree will be found in the [Appendix].[573] At this time a lady of the Queen of Scotland was famed for her perfect skill in needlework, and the four daughters of Edward the Elder were likewise celebrated embroiderers.
St. Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury, is said to have designed needlework for a noble and pious lady, Aedelwyrme, to execute in gold thread, A.D. 924.[574] He prepared and painted a drawing, and directed her work.[575] I here give the portrait of our celebrated early designer from the MS. in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, said to be by his own hand, and which represents him kneeling at the feet of the Saviour (plate [73]).
Shortly before the Norman conquest, in the beginning of the eleventh century, we have notices of sundry other very remarkable pieces of work.
The Danish Queen Emma, daughter of Richard, Duke of Normandy, when she was wife to Ethelred the Unready, and again during her second marriage to Canute, gave the finest embroideries to various abbeys and monasteries. Canute, being then a Christian, joined her in these splendid votive offerings. To Romsey and Croyland they gave altar-cloths which had been embroidered by his first queen, Aelgitha,[576] and vestments covered with golden eagles. She worked one altar-cloth on shot blood-red and green silk,[577] with golden orphreys at the side and across the top. When one considers what the life of poor Queen Emma was, one hopes that “Art the Consoler” came to her in the form of her favourite craft, and that she did find consolation in it.
Croyland Abbey seems to have been most splendidly endowed by the Anglo-Saxon monarchs. There is continual mention in the records of those times of offerings of embroideries and other Church apparels. Queen Editha, the wife of the Confessor, dispensed beautiful works from her own workrooms, and herself embroidered King Edward’s coronation mantle.
When in the eleventh century the Normans became our masters, they found cathedrals, churches, and palaces which almost vied with their own; likewise sculptures, illuminated books, embroidered hangings, and vestments of surpassing beauty.
William of Poitou, Chaplain to William the Conqueror,[578] relates that the Normans were as much struck on the Conqueror’s return into Normandy with the splendid embroidered garments of the Saxon nobles, as with the beauty of the Saxon youth. Queen Matilda, who evidently appreciated Anglo-Saxon work, left in her will, to the Abbey of the Holy Trinity, “My tunic worked by Alderet’s wife, and the mantle which is in my chamber, to make a cope. Of my two golden girdles, I give the one which is adorned with emblems to suspend the lamp before the great altar.”
I come now to the earliest large work remaining to us of the period—the Bayeux tapestry. We must claim it as English, both on account of the reputed worker, and the history it commemorates, though the childish style of which it is a type is indeed inferior in every way to the beautiful specimens which have been rescued from tombs in Durham, Worcester, and elsewhere. They seem hardly to belong to the same period, so weak are the designs and the composition of the groups. Though Mr. Rede Fowke gives the Abbé de la Rue’s doubts as to the accepted period of the Bayeux tapestry, which he assigns to the Empress Matilda, he yet leans to other equally good authorities who consider the work as being coeval with the events it records.[579]
Mr. Collingwood Bruce is of the same opinion, and for this reason—the furniture, buildings, &c., are all of the eleventh century, and our ancestors were no archæologists, and always drew what they saw around them. Mr. Bruce fancies the design to be Italian, “because of the energetic action of the figures;” this seems hardly justified when we look at the simple poverty of the style. Miss A. Strickland suggests that the artist was perhaps Turold the Dwarf, who has cunningly introduced his effigy and name. That the tapestry is not found in any catalogue before 1369, is only a piece of presumptive evidence against the earlier date, and cannot compete with the internal evidence in its favour. On 227 feet of canvas-linen, twenty inches wide, are delineated the events of English history from the time of Edward the Confessor to the landing of the Conqueror at Hastings. The Bayeux tapestry is worked in worsted on linen; the design is perfectly flat and shadowless. The outlines are firmly drawn with cords on thickly set stem-stitches. The surfaces are laid in flat stitch. Though coarsely worked, there is a certain “maestria” in the execution.
The word “orphrey” (English for auriphrigium or Phrygian gold embroidery) is first found in Domesday Book, where “Alvide the maiden” receives from Godric the Sheriff, for her life, half a hide of land, “If she might teach his daughters to make orphreys.”[580]