Page:Textile fabrics; a descriptive catalogue of the collection of church-vestments, dresses, silk stuffs, needle-work and tapestries, forming that section of the Museum (IA textilefabricsde00soutrich).pdf/103

 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 all wrought in outline; a style which is being brought back, with great effect, into ecclesiastical use.

Of the embroidery done by Christian ladies abroad during the Lower Roman Empire, we have already spoken, p. xxxv. Coming to our own land, and its mediæval times, we find how at the beginning of that period our Anglo-Saxon sisters knew so well to handle their needle. The many proofs of this we have brought forward in another place.

The discriminating accuracy with which our old writers sought to follow while noting down 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 of Croyland, the great number of which were silken, but he must tell us, too, that some were ornamented with birds wrought in gold, and sewed on—in fact, of cut-work—other some with those birds woven into the stuff, other some quite plain:—"Dedit etiam multa pallia suspendenda in parietibus ad altaria sanctorum in festis, quorum plurima de serico erant, aureis volucribus quædam insita, quædam intexta, quædam plana."

So also the care often taken by the writers of inventories, like him who wrote out the Exeter one, to mention how some of the vestments had nothing about them but true needlework, or, as they at times express it, "operata per totum opere acuali," may be witnessed in that useful work, "The Lives of the Bishops of Exeter," by Oliver.

By the latter end of the thirteenth century embroidery, as well as its imitation, got for its several styles and various sorts of ornamentation mixed up with it a distinguishing and technical nomenclature; and the earliest document in which we meet with this set of terms is the inventory drawn up, 1295, of the vestments belonging to our London St. Paul's Cathedral: herein, the "opus plumarium," the "opus pectineum," the "opus pulvinarium," cut-work, "consutum de serico," "de serico consuto," may be severally found in Dugdale's "History of St. Paul's."

The "opus plumarium" was the then usual general term for what is now commonly called embroidery; and hence, in some old inventories,