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/369



middle part of the earliest portion of the 14th century, embroidered with so many fantastic figures; the lion passant with the human head, at the left end, of the beginning of the 13th; and the green letter M, poorly worked on the red garment laid bare at the right end by the loss of the circular piece of embroidery once sewed on there, no doubt in the style and of the same period of the human-faced lion, of the latter part of the 15th century.

The whole of the middle piece is of needlework, and figured with sixteen figures, four-legged beasts in the body, and human in the heads, all of which are seen, by the hair, to be female. All are statant gardant or standing and looking full in the face of the spectator. Eight of them are playing musical instruments, most of which are stringed and harp-shaped, one a clarionet-like pipe, another castanets, and two cymbals, and are human down to the waist; the other eight seem meant for queens wearing crowns, and having the hair very full, but reaching no further than the shoulders, while the minstrel females show a long braid of dark brown hair falling all down the back. The queens have wings, and are human only in head and neck; the musical figures are wingless, and human as far as the waist. All these monsters display large tails, which end in an open-mouthed head like that of a fox, and are all noued. Each of these figures stands within a square, which is studded at each corner with the curious four-pointed love-knot, and in the ornamentation of its sides the crescent is very conspicuous; besides which, upon the bodies of these figures themselves numerous ring-like spots are studiously marked, as if to show that the four-legged animal was a leopard. Grotesques like those in this curious piece of embroidery abound in the MSS. of the 14th century; and those cut in stone on the north and south walls outside Adderbury Church, Oxon, bear a strong likeness to them. These fictitious creatures, made up of a woman, a leopard—the beast of prey, a fox—the emblem of craftiness and sly cunning, wielding too the power of wealth and authority, shown in those regal heads, and bringing those siren influences of music, love, and revelry into action, lead to the belief that under such imagery there was once hidden a symbolic meaning, which still remains to be found out, and this embroidery may yield some help in such an interesting study.

All the figures are wrought on fine canvas in gold thread, and shaded with silk thread in various colours, the ground being filled in, in short stitch, with a bright-toned crimson silk that has kept its colour admirably. The narrow tape with a gold ornament upon a crimson ground, that encloses the square at each end of this liturgical appliance,