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/159

 Were it not for this symbolism for the woodbine, we had been quite unable to understand why in our old testamentary bequests, the flower should have been so especially mentioned as we find in the will of Joan Lady Bergavenny who, 1434, leaves to one of her friends, a "bed of silk, black and red, embroidered with woodbined flowers of silver," &c. Besides its symbolism of those colours—black and red—for which we have but this moment given the reasons, p. cxlix., the funeral cope which we noticed before, p. cxxvi., showed a symbolism of flowers in the woodbine wrought upon it. Sure may we be that the donor's wish—perhaps the fingers of a weeping widow had worked it for Lincoln Cathedral—was to tell for her in after days the unfaltering love she ever bore towards her husband, and to say so every time this vestment happened to be worn at the services sounded for him. May be that quaint old likeness of Anne Vavasour, exhibited here 1868 among the "National Portraits," and numbered 680, p. 138 of the Catalogue, had its background trailed all over with branches of the woodbine in leaf, at the particular behest of a fond spouse Sir H. Lee, and so managed that the plant's only cyme of flower should hang just below her bosom. By Shakespeare floral symbolism was well understood; and he often shows his knowledge of it in "A Winter's Tale," act iv. scene iii. He gives us several meanings of flower-speech, and when he makes (Henry VIII. act iv. scene ii.) Queen Katherine say to Griffith "Farewell—when I am dead—strew me over with maiden flowers, that all the world may know I was a chaste wife to my grave," he tells of an olden custom still kept up among us, and more fully carried out in Wales and the Western parts of England, where the grave of a dear departed one is weekly dressed by loving hands with the prettiest flowers that may be had. The symbolism of colours is learnedly treated by Portal in his "Couleurs Symboliques."

The readers of those valuable inventories of the chasubles, copes, and other liturgical silk garments which belonged to Exeter cathedral and that of London, about the middle of the thirteenth century, will not fail to observe that some of them bore, amongst other animals, the horse, and fish of different sorts, nay, porpoises figured on them: "una capa de palla cum porphesiis et leonibus deauratis," "due cape de palla cum equis et avibus," "unum pulvinar breudatum avibus, piscibus et bestiis," "capa de quodam panno Tarsico, viridis coloris cum pluribus piscibus et rosis aurifilo contextis." Even here, under No. 8229, p. 151, we have