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/542



of English tapestry—figured with Henry VI, Cardinal Beaufort, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, and other courtiers, on the left or men's side, and on the women's, Queen Margaret, the Duchess of Buckingham, and other ladies, most of them on their knees, and all hearing mass—still hanging on the wall of the dining hall of St. Mary's gild, of which that king, with his queen and all his court became members; and at whose altar, as brethren, they heard their service, on some Sunday, or high festival, which they spent at Coventry. Taking this old city as a centre, with a radius of no great length, we may draw a circle on the map which will enclose Tamworth, tower and town, Chartly Castle, Warwick, Charlcote, Althorp, &c. where the once great houses of Ferrers, Beauchamp, Lucy, and Spencer held, and some of them yet hold, large estates; and from being the owners of broad lands in its neighbourhood, their lords would, in accordance with the religious feeling of those times, become brothers of the famous gild of Coventry; and on account of their high rank, find their arms emblazoned upon the vestments belonging to their fraternity. That such a pious queen as the gentle Eleanor, our First Edward's first wife, who died 1290, should have, in her lifetime, become a sister, and by her bounties made herself to be gratefully remembered after death, is very likely, so that we may with ease account for her shield—Castile and Leon—as well as for the shields of the other great families we see upon the orphrey, being wrought there as a testimonial that, while, like many others, they were members, they also had been munificent benefactors to the association. A remembrance of brotherhood for those others equally noble, but less generous in their benefactions, may be read in those smaller shields upon the narrow hem going along the lower border of this vestment. The whole of it must have taken a long, long time in the doing; and the probability is that it was worked by the nuns of some convent which stood in or near Coventry.

Upon the banks of the Thames, at Isleworth, near London, in the year 1414, Henry V. built, and munificently endowed, a monastery to be called "Syon," for nuns of St. Bridget's order. Among the earliest friends of this new house was a Master Thomas Graunt, an official in one of the ecclesiastical courts of the kingdom. In the Syon nuns' martyrologium—a valuable MS. lately bought by the British Museum—this churchman is gratefully recorded as the giver to their convent of several precious ornaments, of which this very cope seemingly is one. It was the custom for a gild, or religious body, to bestow some rich church vestment upon an ecclesiastical advocate who had befriended it by his pleadings before the tribunals, and thus to convey their thanks