We must now speak of embroidery. The art of working with the needle flowers, fruits, human and animal forms, or any fanciful design, upon webs woven of silk, linen, cotton, wool, hemp, besides other kinds of stuff, is of the highest antiquity. 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 la............