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/107

 and copes, wrought even late in the fifteenth century. When, therefore, such angel-figures are found on embroideries, still to be seen in foreign hands, a presumption exists that the work is of English production.

How highly English embroideries were at one period appreciated by foreigners may be gathered from the especial notice taken of them abroad; and spoken of in continental documents. Matilda, the first Norman William's queen, stooped to the meanness of filching from the affrighted Anglo-Saxon monks of Abingdon their richest church vestments, and would not be put off with inferior ones. Other instances we have given. In his will, dated 1360, Cardinal Talairand, bishop of Albano, speaks of the English embroideries on a costly set of white vestments. Ghini, by birth a Florentine, but, in the year 1343, bishop of Tournai, bequeathed to that cathedral an old English cope, as well as a beautiful corporal of English work—"cappam veterem cum imaginibus et frixio operis Anglicani. Item unum corporale de opere Anglicano pulchrum," &c. Among the copes reserved for prelates' use in the chapel of Charles, Duke of Bourgogne, brother-in-law to our 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, façon d'Engleterre, à plusieurs histoires de N.D. et anges et autres ymages, estans en laceures escriptes, garnie d'un orfroir d'icelle façon fait à apostres, desquelles les manteulx sont tous couvers de perles, et leur diadesmes pourphiler de perles, estans en manière de tabernacles, faits de deux arbres, dont les tiges sont toutes couvertes de perles et à la dite chappe y a une bille des dites armes, garnie de perles comme la dessus dicte.

Besides textiles, leather was at one time the material upon which our embroiderers exercised the needle; and the Exeter inventory, drawn up 1277, mentions, for its bier, a large pillow covered with leather figured with flowers: "magnum cervical co-opertum coreo cum floribus."

While so coveted abroad, our English embroidery was highly prized and well paid for here at home. Henry III. had a chasuble embroidered by Mabilia of Bury St. Edmund's; and Edward II. paid a hundred marks—a good round sum in those days—to Rose, the wife of John de Bureford, a citizen and mercer of London, for a choir-cope of her em-*