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/128

 erat indumentum regis Henrici quinti dum regaliter equitaret per Londonias pridie ante coronationem suam. Item dedit et aliam gounam de viridi velvetto auro texto unde fieri posset integrum vestimentum quæ similiter fuit ejusdem regis." Naturally wishful to know something about such costly stuffs, the historian will have to come hither, where he may find specimens in the gorgeous velvet and gold chasubles in this collection. Whilst here perchance his eye may wander toward such pieces as those Nos. 1310, p. 53, and 8624, p. 239, whereon he sees figured, stags with tall branching horns, couchant, chained, upturning their antlered heads to sunbeams darting down upon them amid a shower of rain; and beneath the stags are eagles; p. 239. This Sicilian textile, woven about the end of the fourteenth century, brings to his mind that bronze cumbent figure of a king in Westminster Abbey. It is of Richard II. made for him before his downfal, and by two coppersmiths of London, Nicholas Broker and Godfrey Prest. This effigy, once finely gilt, is as remarkable for its beautiful workmanship, as for the elaborate manner in which the cloak and kirtle worn by the king are diapered all over with the pattern (now hid under coats of dirt) on that silken stuff out of which those garments must have been cut for his personal wear while living; and it consists of a sprig of the Planta genesta, the humble broom plant—the haughty Plantagenets' device—along with a couchant hart chained and gazing straight forwards, and above it a cloud with rays darting up from behind. With Edward III. Richard's grandfather, "sunbeams issuing from a cloud" was a favourite cognizance. The white hart he got from the white hind, the cognizance of his mother Joan, the fair maid of Kent, and rendered remarkable by the unflinching steadfastness of the faithful Jenico in wearing it as his royal master's badge after Richard's downfal. Sometimes, did that king take as a device a white falcon, for, at a tournament held by him at Windsor, forty of his knights came clothed in green with a white falcon on the stuff. During a foppish reign, Richard was the greatest fop. When he sat to those two London citizens for his monument, which they so ably wrought, and which still is at Westminster, our own belief is that he wore a dress of silk which had been expressly woven for him at Palermo. We think, too, that the couple of specimens here, Nos. 1310, p. 53, and 8624, p. 239, were originally wrought in Sicily, after designs from England, and for the court of Richard: they quite answer the period, and show those favourite devices, the chained hart, sunbeams issuing from a cloud, the falcon or eagle—a group in itself quite peculiar to that