The lady who owns this mantle is herself great in “workes of broderie.”

From the Conquest to the Wars of the Roses, England may claim to have gradually acquired a higher place in art. Our architecture, sculpture, manuscripts, and paintings were not surpassed on the Continent: witness Queen Eleanor’s crosses, and her tomb in Westminster Abbey; and the portrait of Richard II., surrounded by saints and angels, at Wilton House,[588] a picture which, preceding Fra Beato Angelico’s works by at least a quarter of a century, yet suggests his style, refined drawing, and tender colouring. All who saw the frescoes found in the Chapel at Eton College when it was restored, will remember their extreme beauty, and regret that they were effaced, instead of being preserved and restored. They were a lesson in what English art was in the end of the thirteenth, during the fourteenth, and into the beginning of the fifteenth centuries.

During the Wars of the Roses, when a duke of the blood-royal is said to have begged his bread in the streets of the rich Flemish towns, ladies of rank, more fortunate, were able to earn theirs by the work of their needle.[589]

The monuments of the eleventh and twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, are our best authorities for the embroideries then worn. The surcoat of the Black Prince in Canterbury Cathedral is a noteworthy example. The sculptured effigy on the tomb over which it is suspended is absolutely clothed in the same surcoat, with the same accidents of embroidery, as if it had been modelled from it.

In Worcester, when the archæologists opened King John’s tomb in 1797, they found him in the same dress and attitude as that portrayed on the recumbent statue.[590] Dress was then extravagantly expensive, and embroidered dresses were worn with borders richly set with precious stones and pearls.

The Librate Roll of Henry III. gives us a list of embroiderers’ names: Alain de Basinge, Adam de Bakeryne, John de Colonia, &c.; and in the wardrobe accompts of Richard II., William Sanstoune and Robert de Ashmede are called the “Broudatores Domini Regis.” These may have been the artists to whom the orders were delivered, for in the Librate Roll of Henry III. we find Adam de Baskeryne receiving 6s. 8d. for a “cloth of silk, and fringe, purchased by our commands to embroider a certain chasuble which Mabilia of St. Edmunds made for us.” There were certainly then purveyors and masters of the craft. Stephen Vigner, in the fourteenth century, is so warmly commended by the Duke of Berri and Auvergne to Edward III., that Richard II. appointed him his chief embroiderer, and Henry IV. pensioned him for his skilful services.

John Garland, in the beginning of the thirteenth century, is a good authority for the use by our women of small hand-looms. In these they wove, in flax or silk (often mixed with gold), the “cingulæ” or “blode-bendes” so often mentioned, supposed to be gifts between friends for binding the arm, when blood-letting was so much in fashion that the operation was allowed to assume a certain air of coquetry. But the idea suggests itself that this was oftener the gift of the fair weaver to her favoured lover, to fold round his arm as a scarf in battle or tourney, to be ready in case it was needed for binding up a wound, and had possibly served as a snood to bind her own fair hair. There is an account of a specimen of this kind of weaving by M. Léopold Delisle.[591] He describes the attachment of a seal to a grant from Richard Cœur de Lion to Richard Hommet and Gille his wife, preserved in the archives of the Abbey of Aunai, in the department of Calvados. He considers it to be either French or English, and says it was a “lac d’amour,” or “tie of love,” cut up to serve its present purpose. It is woven with an inscription in white on a ground of green, backed with pale blue, and the material is silk. The woven legend is thus translated from the old French—“Let him perish who would part us.”

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