Gold, and Silver gilt,

[333]Vite de’ piu Eccellenti Pittori, &c., di G. Vasari, t. v. p. 121; English translation, t. ii. p. 239.

There are some accessories, in mediæval embroidery, which ought not to be overlooked here.

In some few instances,

in very many more, wrought after the smith’s cunning into little star-like flowers—broader, bigger, and more craftily fashioned than our modern spangles—are to be found sewed upon the silks or amid the embroidery in the specimens before us, particularly those from Venice and its main-land provinces in Italy, and from Southern Germany. AtNo. 8274, pp. 168-9, we have a part of an orphrey embroidered on parchment, and having along with its coral, gold beads, and seed pearls, small bosses and ornaments in gilded silver stars; it is Venetian, and of the second half of the twelfth century.No. 8307, pp. 185-6 is a linen amice, the silken apparel of which has sewed to it large spangle-like plates in gilded silver struck with a variety of patterns, showing how the goldsmith’s hand had been sought by the Germans of the fifteenth century to give beauty to this silken stuff. The fine piece of ruby-tinted Genoa velvet, which was once the apparel for the lower hem of an alb, is sprinkled somewhat thickly with six-rayed stars of gold and silver; but those made of the latter metal have turned almost black: here we have a sample of Lombard taste in this matter, of the ending of the fifteenth century. Silver-gilt spangles wrought to figure six-petalled flowers on a fine example of gold tissue, underNo. 8588, pp. 222-3, present us with a German craftsman’s work, in the fourteenth century.No. 8612, p. 233, is not without its value in reference to Italian taste. All over,this curious now fragmental piece of silk damask, has at one time been thickly strewed with trefoils cut out of gilt metal, but very thin, and not sewed but glued on to the silk: many of these leaves have fallen off, and those remaining turned black.

From among these examples a few will show the reader how the goldsmith had been tasked to work upon them as jeweller also, and gem the liturgical garments to which these shreds belong, with real or imitated precious stones. In the orphrey upon the back of that very rich fine crimson velvet chasuble,No. 1375, pp. 81-2, the crossed nimb about our Lord’s head is gemmed with stones set in silver gilt; and the sockets still left on the piece of crimson velvet,No. 8334, p. 199, unmistakably speak for themselves.

Besides precious stones, coral, and seed-pearls,

coloured and wrought into small beads and bugles, is another of those hard materials, the presence of which we find in this collection. As now, so far back during the mediæval period, the Venetians, at the island of Murano, wrought small glass beads and bugles of all colours, as well as pastes—smalti—in every tint for mosaics, and imitations of jewels. This art, which they had learned from the Greeks, they followed with signal success; and likely is it that from Venice came the several specimens of glass—blue, like lapis lazuli—which we still see on that beautiful frontal in Westminster Abbey,[334]—the work of our countryman Peter de Ispagna,[335]the member of an old Essex family. AtNo. 8276, pp. 168-9, is a piece of an orphrey for a chasuble, plentifully embroidered with glass beads and bugles, which shows how much such a style of ornament was used towards the latter end of the twelfth century, at least in Lower Germany, and some of the Italian provinces. Belonging to St. Paul’s, London,A.D.1295, among many other amices, there was one having glass stones upon it; “amictus ... ornatus lapidibus vitreis magnis et parvis per totum in capsis argenteis deauratis, &c.”[336]

[334]Church of our Fathers, 1, p. 235.

[335]Monumenta Vetusta, vi. p. 26.

[336]Dugdale’s St. Paul’s, p. 318.

Another form of glass fastened by heat to gold and copper—enamel, the invention neither of Egypt, Greece, nor Italy, but of our own old Britons,[337]was extensively employed as an adornment upon textiles. Besides the examples we have given,[338]that gorgeous “chesable of red clothof gold with orphreys before and behind set with pearls, blue, white and red, with plates of gold enamelled, wanting fifteen plates, &c.”[339]bestowed by John of Gaunt’s duchess of Lancaster, upon Lincoln Cathedral, is another instance to show how such a kind of rich ornamentation was sewed to garments, especially for church use, in such large quantities.

[337]Philostratus, Icon. L. 1. cap. 528.

[338]Church of our Fathers, t. i. p. 469.

[339]Dugdale’s Mon. Anglic. t.VIII.p. 1281.

Here, in England, the old custom was to sew a great deal of goldsmith’s work, for enrichment, upon articles meant for personal wear, as well as on ritual garments. When our first Edward’s grave, in Westminster Abbey, was opened,A.D.1774, on the body of the king, besides other silken robes, was seen, a stole-like band of rich white tissue put about the neck, and crossed upon his breast: it was studded with gilt quatrefoils in filigree work and embroidered with pearls. From the knees downwards the body was wrapped in a pall of cloth of gold. Concerning attire for liturgical use, the fact may be verified in those instances we have elsewhere given.[340]When Henry III., in the latter end of his reign, bestowed a frontal on the high altar in Westminster Abbey, besides carbuncles in golden settings, as we have just read,p. xxxvi, we may have observed that along with several larger pieces of enamel, there were as many as 866 smaller ones—the “esmaux de plique” of the French—all fastened on this liturgical embroidery.

A good instance of the appliance of figured solid gold or silver, upon church vestments, is the following one of a cope beaten all over with lions in silver, given by a well-wisher to Glastonbury Abbey:—“dederat unam capam rubeam cum leonibus laminis argenteis capæ infixis, &c.”[341]

In the Norman-French, for so long a period in use at our Court, silken stuffs thus ornamented were said to be “batuz,” or as we now say beaten with hammered-up gold. Among the liturgical furniture provided by Richard II. for the chapel in the castle of Haverford, were “ii rydell batuz”—two altar-curtains beaten (no doubt with ornaments in gilt silver.)[342]

[340]Church of Our Fathers, i. 360, 362, 469, &c.

[341]Johannes Glastoniensis, p. 203.

[342]Kalendars of the Treasury, &c. ed. Palgrave, t. iii. p. 359.

For the secular employment of this same sort of decoration, we have several curious examples. Our ladies’ dresses for grand occasions were so adorned, as we may see in the verses following:—

In a robe ryght ryall bowne,Of a redd syclatowne,Be hur fadur syde;A coronell on hur hedd sett,Hur clothys wyth bestes and byrdes wer bete,All abowte for pryde.[343]

In a robe ryght ryall bowne,Of a redd syclatowne,Be hur fadur syde;

In a robe ryght ryall bowne,

Of a redd syclatowne,

Be hur fadur syde;

A coronell on hur hedd sett,Hur clothys wyth bestes and byrdes wer bete,All abowte for pryde.[343]

A coronell on hur hedd sett,

Hur clothys wyth bestes and byrdes wer bete,

All abowte for pryde.[343]

A.D.1215 our King John sent an order to Reginald de Cornhull and William Cook to have made for him, besides five tunics, five banners with his arms upon them, well beaten in gold: “quinque banerias de armis nostris bene auro bacuatas” (sic).[344]Thecfortmust be a misprint in the last word.

An amice at St. Paul’s had on it the figures of two bishops and a king hammered up out of gilt silver: “amictus ornatus cum duobus magnis episcopis et uno rege stantibus argenteis deauratis.”[345]

From the original bill for fitting out one of the ships in which Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, during the reign of Henry VI., went over to France, where he had been appointed to a high command, we gather hints which throw light upon this as well as several matters belonging to this Introduction. Among other items for the above-named equipage are these:—“Four hundred pencils (long narrow strips, may be of silk, used as flags), beat with the Raggedstaff in silver; the other pavys (one of two shields, likely of wood, and fastened outside the ship at its bows), painted with black, and a Raggedstaff beat with silver occupying all the field; one coat (perhaps of silk, but no doubt blazoned with the Beauchamp’s arms,) for my Lord’s body, beat with fine gold; two coats (like the foregoing) for heralds, beat with demi gold; a great streamer for a ship of forty yeards in length and eight yeards in breadth, with a great Bear and Griffin holding a Raggedstaff poudred full of Raggedstaffs; three penons (small flags) of satten; sixteen standards of worsted entailed with the Bear and a chain.”[346]The quatrefoils on the robe of our First Edward, the silver lions on the Glastonbury cope, the beasts and birds on the lady’s gown, the Bear, and Griffin, and Raggedstaff belonging to the Beauchamp’s blazoning, and all such like enrichments—mostly heraldic—put upon silken stuffs, were cut out of very thin plates of gold or silver, so as to hang upon them lightly, and were hammered up to show in low relief the fashion of the flower and the lineaments of the beast or bird meant to be represented.

In fact, such a style of ornamentation done in gold or silver, stitched on silken stuffs made up into liturgical garments, knights’ coats of arms, ladies’ dresses, heralds’ tabards, or flags and penoncels, was far more common once than is now thought. It had struck out for itself a technicalexpression. In speaking of it men would either write or say, “silk beaten with gold or silver,” as the case might be—a meaning, by the way, for the word “beat,” quite overlooked by our lexicographers; yet, making her will as late as the year 1538, Barbara Mason bequeathed to a church “a vestment of grene sylke betyn with goold.”[347]

[343]Ancient English Metrical Romances, t. iii. pp. 8, 9.

[344]Close Rolls, ed. D. Hardy, p. 193.

[345]Dugdale, p. 318.

[346]Dugdale’s Baronage of England, i. 246.

[347]Bury Wills, p. 134.

The badge on the arm of the livery coat once commonly worn, and yet rowed for by the Thames watermen, as well as the armorials figured, before and behind, upon the fine old picturesque frocks of our buffetiers—the yeomen of the Royal guard, called in London “beefeaters,”—help to keep up the tradition of such a style of ornament in dress.

Spangles, when they happened to be used, were not like such as are now employed, but fashioned after another and artistic shape, and put on in a different manner. Before me lies a shred from the chasuble belonging to the set of vestments wrought, it is said, by Isabella of Spain and her maids of honour, and worn the first time high mass was sung in Granada, after it had been taken by the Spaniards from the Moors. Upon this shred are flowers, well thrown up in relief, done in spangles on a crimson velvet ground. These spangles—some in gold, some in silver—are, though small, in several sizes; all are voided—that is, hollow in the middle—with the circumference not flat, but convex, and are sewed on like tiles one overlapping the other, and thus produce a rich and pleasing effect. Our present spangles, in the flat shape, are quite modern.

Sadly overlooked, or but scantily employed on modern embroideries, is the process of

after so many graceful and ever-varying forms to be found almost always upon mediæval works of the needle.

The garments worn by high personages in the embroidery, and meant to imitate a golden textile, were done in goldpassingsometimes by itself, sometimes with coloured silk thread laid down alternately aside it, so as to lend a tinge of green, crimson, pink, or blue, to the imagined tissue of the robe, as if it were made of a golden stuff shot with the adopted tint.

For putting on this gold passing, it was of course required to sew it down. Now, from this very needful and mechanical requirement, those mediæval needlewomen sought and got an admirable as well as ingenious element of ornamentation, and so truthful too. Of this our ladies at this day, seem, from their work, to have a very narrow, short idea.Taking thin (usually red) silk, and while fastening the golden or silver passing, they dotted it all over in small stitches set exactly after a way that showed the one same pattern. So teeming were their brains in this matter that hardly the same design in diapering is twice to be found upon the same embroidered picture. With no other appliance they were thus enabled to lend to their draperies the appearance of having been, not wrought by the needle, but actually cut out of a piece of textile, and for which they have been sometimes mistaken.

Of the many samples here of this kind of diapering we select one or two—Nos. 1194-5, p. 21, which is so very fine, and of itself quite enough for showing what we wish to point out, and to warrant our praises of the method;No. 8837, p. 200, is another worth attention.

after several of its modes, is represented here; and though the specimens are not many, some of them are splendid.

By our English women, hundreds of years gone by, among other applications of the needle, one was to darn upon linen netting or work thereon with other kinds of stitchery, religious subjects for Church-use; or flowers and animals for household furniture.

In this country such a sort of embroidering was called net-work—filatorium—as we learn from the Exeter Inventory, where we read that its cathedral possessed,A.D.1327, three pieces of it, for use at the altar—one in particular for throwing over the desk: “tria filatoria linea, unde unum pro desco.”[348]From their liturgical use, as we have noticed, p.212, they were more generally named lectern-veils, and as such are spoken of, in the same Devonshire document: “i lectionale de panno lineo operato de opere acuali, &c.”[349]Of those narrow, light, and moveable lecterns over which these linen embroideries were cast, Exeter had three—two of wood, another which folded up (see p.212here,) of iron: “i descus volubilis de ferro, pro Evangelio supra legendo; ii alia lectrina lignea.”[350]

Almost every one of these thread embroideries were wrought during the fourteenth century, and several of them for the service of the sanctuary, either as reredos, frontal, or lectern-veil; and while those described at pp.19,20,31,53,60,71,99,120,242-3,249,261-7, deserve consideration, a more complete and an especial notice is due to those two very fine ones under Nos.8358, p. 210, and8618, p. 235. Asearly asA.D.1295, St. Paul’s had a cushion covered with knotted thread: “pulvinar opertum de albo filo nodato.”[351]

[348]Ed. Oliver, p. 312.

[349]Ib. p. 356.

[350]Ib. p. 329.

[351]Dugdale, p. 316.

too, must not be forgotten here; and a short look at Nos.727, p. 14, and786, p. 16, will be sufficient to make us understand how, in hands guided by taste, a work of real, though humble art, may be brought out and shewn upon any article, from a lady’s skirt to a gentleman’s daily skull-cap, by such a use of the needle.

Crochet, knitting done with linen thread, and in the convents throughout Flanders, as well as the thick kinds of lace wrought there upon the cushion with bobbins, came, under the name of nun’s lace, to be everywhere much employed, from the sixteenth century and upwards, for bordering altar-cloths, albs, and every sort of towel required in the celebration of the liturgy.No. 1358, p. 72, is a good example.

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