Perhaps the cleric and the layman worked on the cope may have been the donors. Dr. Rock suggests that possibly Coventry may have been the place of its origin, “where the famous Corpus Christi plays” (which this cope so well illustrates) “drew crowds every year to see them, as is testified by the Paston letters. Taking this old city as a centre, with a radius of no great length, we may draw a circle on the map enclosing Tamworth, tower and town, Chartley castle, Warwick, Charlcote, and Althorp. The lords of these broad lands would, in accordance with the religious feelings of those times, become brothers of the famous Guild of Coventry, and on account of their high rank find their arms embroidered on the vestments belonging to their fraternity. That such a pious queen as the gentle Eleanor, wife of Edward the First, who died 1290, should have in her lifetime become a sister is very likely, so that we may easily account for the shield—Castile and Leon.”
The other noble shields may possibly record munificent benefactions. “The whole must have taken very long in the working, and the probability is that it was embroidered by the nuns of some convent which stood in or near Coventry....
“Upon the banks of the Thames at Isleworth, near London, Henry V. built and munificently endowed a monastery, to be called ‘Syon,’ for the nuns of St. Bridget’s order. Among the earliest friends of this new house was a Master Thomas Graunt, an official in one of the Ecclesiastical Courts of the kingdom. In the Syon Nun’s Martyrologium—a valuable MS. lately bought by the British Museum—this Churchman is gratefully recorded as the giver to their convent of several precious ornaments, of which this very cope seemingly is one. It was the custom for a guild or religious body to bestow some rich church vestment upon an ecclesiastical advocate who had befriended it by his pleadings before the tribunal, and thus to convey their thanks to him with his fee. After such a fashion this cope might easily have found its way, through Dr. Graunt, from Warwickshire to Middlesex.
“At the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign it went with the nuns, as they wandered in an unbroken body through Flanders, France, and Portugal, where they halted. About sixty years ago it came back again from Lisbon to England, and has found a home in the South Kensington Museum.”
For want of space I have been obliged to omit a great deal of Dr. Rock’s interesting account of the Syon Cope. The reader is referred for further details, especially regarding the heraldry and the subjects in the quatrefoils, to Rock’s “Textile Fabrics,” pp. 275-291, in the South Kensington Museum (No. 9182).
Appendix VII., to Page [350].
The Assyrians were great in fringes. Of this we can judge from their sculptures, in which the rich deep and broad fringe forms the ornament and accentuates the shaping of the garments of kings and priests and nobles. Loftus, in his “Babylon and Susiana,” tells of the only actually existing remnant of their textile art of which I can find any record. Some terra-cotta coffins were opened at Warka (the ancient Erech), and in one of them was a cushion, on which the head, gone to dust, had reposed. It was covered with linen—fringed. Nothing else had survived the ages except a huge wig of false hair. Such fragmentary echoes from a life, a civilization, and an art dead for thousands of years, are curiously pathetic, and touch and startle the thinking mind.
Appendix VIII., to Page [369].
The following poem from the Anglo-Saxon poem of Beowulf shows that the hospitable hall of the Saxon earl was hung with tapestry embroidered with gold.
Fœla pœra was
Much people were
Wera and Wifa pe pat win rued
Men and women who that wine house
Gest sele gyredon gold fag scinon
That guest-hall garnished. Cloths embroidered with gold
Web-after wagum. Wundersiòna feld
Those along the walls many wonderful sights
Sioga gustryleum para pe on swyle stara ♀
To every person of those that gaze on such.