Those patterns, after so many fashions, which we see figured upon the garments worn by men and women on Egyptian and Assyrian monuments, but especially on the burned-clay vases made and painted by the Greeks in their earliest as well as in later times, or which we read about in the writings of that people, were not wrought in the loom, but worked by the needle.
The old Egyptian loom—and that of the Jews must have been like it—was, as we know from paintings, of the simplest shape, and seems to have been able to do little more diversified in design than straight lines in different colours; and at best nothing higher in execution than checker-work: beyond this, all was put in by hand with the needle. In Paris, at the Louvre, are several pieces of early Egyptian webs coloured, drawings of which have been published by Sir Gardner Wilkinson in his work ‘The Egyptians in the time of the Pharaohs.’ There are two pieces wrought up and down with needlework; the second piece of blue is figured all over in white embroidery with a pattern of netting, the meshes of which shut in irregular cubic shapes, and in the lines of the reticulation the mystic “fylfot” is seen. Sir J. G. Wilkinson says of them: “They are mostly cotton, and, though79 their date is uncertain, they suffice to show that the manufacture was Egyptian; and the many dresses painted on the monuments of the eighteenth dynasty show that the most varied patterns were used by the Egyptians more than 3000 years ago, as they were at a later period by the Babylonians, who became noted for their needlework.”
It is clear from the book of Exodus that the Israelites from very early times, having learnt the art in Egypt, embroidered their garments; although the word “embroidery” which occurs so frequently in every English version probably sometimes means merely weaving in stripes, and not work with the needle. The embroidering also of the sails of vessels was not uncommon in the east; boats used in sacred festivals on the Nile were so decorated; and the prophet Ezekiel says to the people of Tyre, “Fine linen with broidered work from Egypt, was that which thou spreadest forth to be thy sail.” The reader will here also remember Shakspeare’s description of the barge of Cleopatra;
The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne
Burned on the water:
Purple the sails, and so perfumed, that
The winds were love-sick with them; she did lie
In her pavilion, cloth of gold, of tissue, etc.
Pliny says that the Phrygians invented embroidery, and that garments so ornamented were called Phrygionic. Of such a fashion were “the art-wrought vests of splendid purple tint” brought forth by Dido, and the cloak given by Andromache to Ascanius. Hence, an embroiderer was called in Latin “Phrygio,” and needlework “Phrygium” or “Phrygian” work. When the design, as often happened, was wrought in solid gold wire or golden thread, the embroidery so worked was named “auriphrygium.” From this term comes the old English word “orphrey.”
While Phrygia in general, Babylon in particular (as Pliny also tells us) became celebrated for the beauty of its embroideries. All who have seen the sculptures in the British museum brought80 from Nineveh, and described and figured by Layard, must have remarked how lavishly the Assyrians adorned their robes with the needlework for which one of their greatest cities was so famous. Up to the first century of our era the reputation which Babylon had won for her textiles and needlework still lived. We know from Josephus, who had often been to worship at Jerusalem, that the veils of the Temple were Babylonian; and of the outer one that writer says: “there was a veil of equal largeness with the door. It was a Babylonian curtain, embroidered with blue and fine linen, and scarlet and purple, and of a texture that was wonderful.”
What the Jews did for the Temple we may be sure was done by Christians for the Church. The faithful, however, went even further, and wore garments figured all over with sacred subjects in embroidery. We learn this from a stirring sermon preached by St. Asterius, bishop of Amasia in Pontus, in the fourth century. Taking for his text “a certain rich man who was clothed in purple and fine linen” he upbraids the world for its follies in dress, and complains that some people went about arrayed like painted walls, with beasts and flowers all over them; while others, pretending a more serious tone of thought, dressed in clothes depicting the doings and wonders of our Lord. “Strive,” St. Asterius exhorts them, “to follow in your lives the teachings of the Gospel, rather than have the miracles of our Redeemer embroidered upon your outward dress.” To have had so many subjects shown upon one garment it is clear that each must have been done very small, and wrought in outline; a style which is being brought back, with great effect, into modern ecclesiastical use.
The discriminating accuracy with which our old writers noted the several kinds of textile gifts bestowed upon a church is as instructive as praiseworthy. Ingulph did not think it enough to say that abbot Egelric had given many hangings to the church at Croyland, the great number of which were silken, but he explains81 also that some were ornamented with birds wrought in gold and sewed on; in fact, of cut-work; others with those birds woven into the stuff; others quite plain. We find the same care taken in old inventories.
By the latter end of the thirteenth century embroidery obtained for its several styles and various sorts of ornamentation a distinguishing and technical nomenclature. One of the earliest documents in which we meet with this set of terms is the inventory drawn up, in 1295, of the vestments belonging to St. Paul’s cathedral, printed by Dugdale: herein, the “opus plumarium,” the “opus pectineum,” the “opus pulvinarium,” “consutum de serico,” “de serico consuto,” may be severally found.
“Opus plumarium” was the then usual term for what is now commonly called embroidery; and was given to needlework of this kind because the stitches were laid down longwise and not across: that is, so put together that they seemed to overlap one another like the feathers in the plumage of a bird. This style was aptly called “feather-stitch” work, in contradistinction to that done in cross and tent stitch, or the “cushion-style.”
The “opus pulvinarium,” or “cushion-style,” was like the modern so-called Berlin work. As now, so then it was done in the same stitching with pretty much the same materials and generally, if not always, put to the same purpose; for cushions, to sit or to kneel upon in church or to uphold the mass-book at the altar; hence its name of “cushion-style.” In working it silken thread is known to have been often used. Among other specimens, and in silk, there is a beautiful cushion of a date corresponding to the London inventory at South Kensington, no. 1324. Being well adapted for working heraldry this stitch has been used from an early period for the purpose; and emblazoned orphreys, like the narrow hem on the Syon cope, were wrought in it.
The “opus pectineum” was a kind of woven work imitative of embroidery, and employed to supply it. John Garland, in his82 dictionary, explains that it was made by means of a comb, or some comb-like instrument: and from this the work itself received the distinctive appellation of “pectineum,” or comb-wrought. Before John Garland left England for France, to teach a school there, he must have often seen his countrywomen at such an occupation; and the amice given by Katherine Lovell to St. Paul’s, “de opere pectineo,” may perhaps have been the work of her own hands.
Women in the middle ages were so ready at the needle that they could make their embroidery look as if it had been done in the loom, really woven. A shred of crimson cendal figured in gold and silver thread with a knight on horseback, armed as of the latter time of Edward the first, was shown to us some time ago. At first sight the mounted warrior seemed to have been not hand-worked but woven; so flat, so even was every thread. Looking at it however through a glass and turning it about, we found it to have been embroidered by the finger in such a way that the stitches laid down upon the surface were carried through into the canvas lining at the back of the thin silk. In this same manner all the design, both before and behind, upon the fine English-wrought chasuble at South Kensington, no. 673, was probably worked.
At the latter end of the thirteenth century our countrywomen invented a new way of embroidery. Without giving up altogether the old “opus plumarium” or feather-stitch, they mixed it with a new style, both of needlework and mechanism. So beautiful was the novel method deemed abroad that it won for itself the complimentary appellation of “opus Anglicum,” or English work. In what its peculiarity consisted has long been a question and a puzzle among foreign arch?ological writers; and a living one of eminence, M. Voisin, noticing a cope of English work given to the church of Tournai, says: “Il serait curieux de savoir quelle broderie ou quel tissu on designait sous le nom de opus Anglicum.”
83 But if we examine that very fine piece of English needlework, the Syon cope, at South Kensington, no. 9182, we find that the first stitches for the human face were begun in the centre of the cheek, and worked in circular lines; falling (after the further side had been made) into straight lines, which were so carried on through the rest of the fleshes; in some instances, also, through the draperies. But this was done in a sort of chain-stitch, and a newly practised mechanical appliance was brought into use. After the whole figure had thus been wrought with this kind of chain-stitch in circles and straight lines, then with a little thin iron rod ending in a small bulb or smooth knob slightly heated, those middle spots in the faces that had been worked in circular lines were pressed down; and the deep wide dimples in the throat, especially of aged persons. By the hollows thus lastingly sunk a play of light and shadow is brought out, which at a short distance lends to the portion so treated the appearance of low relief. Chain-stitch, then, worked in circular lines and relief given to parts by hollows sunk into the faces and other portions of the persons, constitute the elements of the “opus Anglicum,” or embroidery after the English manner. How the chain-stitch was worked into circles for the faces, and straight lines for the rest of the figures, is well shown by a woodcut, after a portion of the Steeple Aston embroideries, given in the arch?ological journal, vol iv. p. 285.
Although not merely the faces and the extremities but the dresses also of the persons figured were generally wrought in chain-stitch, and afterwards treated as we have just described, another practice was to work the draperies in feather-stitch, which was also employed for the grounding, and diapered after a simple, zigzag design; as we find in the Syon cope.
Part of the orphrey of the Syon cope.
How highly English embroideries were at one period appreciated by foreigners may be gathered from the especial notice taken of them abroad; as we may find in continental documents. Matilda, queen of William the conqueror, carried away from the84 abbey of Abingdon its richest vestments, and would not be put off with inferior ones. In his will A. D. 1360 cardinal Talairand, bishop of Albano, speaks of the English embroideries on a85 costly set of white vestments. A bishop of Tournai, in 1343, bequeathed to that cathedral an old English cope, as well as a beautiful corporal “of English work.” Among the copes reserved for prelates’ use in the chapel of Charles duke of Bourgogne, brother-in-law to John duke of Bedford, there was one of English work very elaborately fraught with many figures, as appears from this description of it: “une chappe de brodeure d’or, fa?on d’Engleterre, à plusieurs histoires de N.D. et anges et autres ymages, estans en laceures escriptes, garnie d’un orfroir d’icelle fa?on fait à apostres, desquelles les manteulx sont tous couvertes de perles, et leur diadesmes pourphiler de perles, estans en manière de tabernacles, faits de deux arbres, dont les tiges sont touts couvertes de perles, et à la dite chappe y a une bille des dites armes, garnie de perles comme la dessus dicte.”
While so coveted abroad, our English embroidery was highly prized and well paid for at home. We find in the Issue Rolls that Henry the third had a chasuble embroidered by Mabilia of Bury St. Edmund’s; and that Edward the second paid a hundred marks to Rose the wife of John de Bureford, a citizen and mercer of London, for a choir-cope of her embroidering, and which was to be sent to the Pope as an offering from the queen.
English embroidery afterwards lost its first high reputation. Through those years wasted with the wars of the Roses the work of the English needle was very poor, very coarse, and, so to say, ragged; as, for instance, the chasuble at South Kensington, no. 4045. Nothing of the celebrated chain-stitch with dimpled faces in the figures can be found about it: every part is worked in the feather-stitch, slovenly put down. During the early part of the seventeenth century our embroiderers again struck out a new style, which consisted in throwing up the figures a good height above the grounding. Of this raised work there is a fine specimen in the fourth of the copes preserved in the chapter library at Durham. It is said to have been wrought for and given by Charles the first to that cathedral. This red silk vestment is well86 sprinkled with bodiless cherubic heads crowned with rays and borne up by wings; while upon the hood is David, holding in one hand the head of Goliah; the whole done in highly raised embroidery. Bibles of the large folio size, covered in rich silk or satin and embroidered with the royal arms done in bold raised-work, are still to be found in our libraries. More than one of these volumes is said to have been a gift from the king to a forefather of the present owner.
This style of raised embroidery remained in use for many years. Not only large Bibles but smaller volumes, especially prayer-books, had bindings enriched with it. Generally such examples are attributed, and in most cases wrongly, to the so-called nuns of Little Gidding. The same kind of work is sometimes found on the broad frames of old looking-glasses: setting forth perhaps, as in the specimen no. 892, the story of Ahasuerus and Esther, or a passage in some courtship carried on after the manners of Arcadia.
Few people at the present day have a just idea of the labour, the money, and the length of time often bestowed of old upon embroideries, which had been sketched as well as wrought by the hands of men, each in his own craft the ablest and most cunning of his time. In behalf of England plenty of evidence has been produced already: as a proof of the same labour elsewhere a remarkable passage may be quoted, given, in his life of Antonio Pollaiuolo, by Vasari: “For San Giovanni in Florence there were made certain very rich vestments after the design of this master, all of gold-wove velvet with pile upon pile (di broccato riccio sopra riccio), each woven of one entire piece and without seam, embroidered with the most subtile mastery of that art by Paolo da Verona, a man most eminent of his calling, and of incomparable ingenuity. This work took twenty-six years for its completion, being wholly in close stitch (questi ricami fatti con punto serrato); but the excellent method of which is now all but lost, the custom being in these days to make the stitches much wider (il punteggiare87 piu largo), whereby the work is rendered less durable and much less pleasing to the eye.” These vestments may yet be seen framed and glazed in presses around the sacristy of San Giovanni. Antonio died in 1498. The magnificent cope before referred to, now at Stonyhurst, is of one seamless piece of gorgeous gold tissue figured with bold wide-spreading foliage in crimson velvet, pile upon pile, and dotted with small gold spots; probably it came from the same loom that threw off these famous San Giovanni vestments.
Embroidered Saddle-cloth of the sixteenth century.