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/124



While telling of a coronation, a royal marriage, the queen's 'taking her chamber,' her after-churching, a baptism, a progress, or a funeral, the historian or the painter cannot bring before his own mind, much less set forth to ours, a fit idea of the circumstances in the splendour shown on any one of these imperial occasions, unless he can see old samples of those cloths of gold, figured velvets, curious embroidery, and silken stuffs, such as are gathered in this collection, and used to be worn of old for those functions.

Of the many valuable, though indirect uses to which this curious collection of textiles may, on occasions, be turned, a few there are to which we call particular attention, for the ready help it is likely to afford. In the first place, to

in some at least of his researches, as he not only writes of bloodshed and of wars, that make or unmake kings, but follows his countrymen in private life through their several ways onward to civilization and the cultivation of the arts of peace.

Besides a tiny shred (No. 675, p. 6) of the very needlework itself, we have here a coloured plaster-cast of one of the figures in the so-called Bayeux Tapestry, which, among some, it has of late been a fashion to look upon as a great historic document, because it was, they say, worked by no less a personage than William's own queen, Matilda, helped by her handmaids.

Its present and modern title is altogether a misnomer. It is needlework, and no tapestry. Not Normandy, but England, is most likely to have been the country; not Bayeux, but London, the place wherein it was wrought. Probabilities forbid us from believing that either Matilda herself, or her waiting ladies, ever did a stitch on this canvas; nay, it is likely she never as much as saw it.

Coarse white linen and common worsted would never have been the materials which any queen would have chosen for such a work by which her husband's great achievement was to be celebrated.

But three women are seen upon the work, and Matilda is not one or them. Surely the dullest courtier would never have forgotten such an opportunity for a compliment to his royal mistress by putting in her person.

A piece, nineteen inches broad and two hundred and twenty-six feet long, crowded with fighting men—some on foot, some on horseback—with buildings and castles, must have taken much time and busied