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/539



Besides their ecclesiastical meanings these same symbols had belonging to them a secular significance. Found upon a piece of stuff quite apart from that of the cope itself, and worked for the adornment of that fine vestment after a lapse of many years, made up too of an ornamentation the whole of which is heraldic and thus bringing to mind worldly knights and their blazons and its age's chivalry, it is easy to find out for it an adaptation to the chivalric notions and customs of those times. The Bethlehem star overtopping the Islam badge of the crescent moon showed forth the wishes of every one who had been or meant to be a crusader, or rather more, not merely of our men at arms but of every true believer throughout Christendom whose untiring prayers were that the Holy Land might be wrested from the iron hand of the Mahometan. At great national festivities and solemn gatherings of the aristocracy, not the young knight alone then newly girt, but the grey-haired warrior would often, in that noble presence, bind himself by vow to do some deed of daring, and swore it to heaven, and the swan, the pheasant, or the peacock as the bird of his choice, was brought with a flourish of trumpets, and amid a crowd of stately knights waiting on a bevy of fair young ladies, and set before him. This sounds odd at this time of day; not so did it in mediæval times, when those birds were looked upon with favour on account of the majestic gracefulness of their shape, or the sparkling beauty of their plumage. It must not be forgotten that this orphrey was blazoned by English hands in England, and while all the stirring doings of our first Edward were yet fresh in our people's remembrance. That king had been and fought in the Holy Land against the Saracens. At his bidding, towards the end of life, a scene remarkable even in that period of royal festive magnificence, took place, when he himself, in the year 1306, girded his son, afterwards Edward II, with the military belt in the palace of Westminster, and then sent him to bestow the same knightly honour, in the church of that abbey, upon the three hundred young sons of the nobility, who had been gathered from all parts of the kingdom to be his companions in the splendours of the day. But that grand function was brought to an end by a most curious yet interesting act; to the joyous sounds of minstrelsy came forwards a procession, bearing along a pair of swans confined in a net, the meshes of which were made of cords fashioned like reeds and wrought of gold. These birds were set in solemn pomp before the king; and there and then Edward swore by the God in heaven and the swans that he would go forth and wage war against the Scots: Matthew Westminster, p. 454. No wonder, then, that along with the star and crescent we find the knightly swan and peacock mingled in the heraldry