Taking thin (usually red) silk, and while fastening the golden or silver passing, they dotted it all over in small stitches set exactly after a way that showed the one same pattern. So teeming were their brains in this matter that hardly the same design in diapering is twice to be found upon the same embroidered picture. With no other appliance they were thus enabled to lend to their draperies the appearance of having been, not wrought by the needle, but actually cut out of a piece of textile, and for which they have been sometimes mistaken.
Of the many samples here of this kind of diapering we select one or two—Nos. 1194-5, p. 21, which is so very fine, and of itself quite enough for showing what we wish to point out, and to warrant our praises of the method; No. 8837, p. 200, is another worth attention.
Thread Embroidery,
after several of its modes, is represented here; and though the specimens are not many, some of them are splendid.
By our English women, hundreds of years gone by, among other applications of the needle, one was to darn upon linen netting or work thereon with other kinds of stitchery, religious subjects for Church-use; or flowers and animals for household furniture.
In this country such a sort of embroidering was called net-work—filatorium—as we learn from the Exeter Inventory, where we read that its cathedral possessed, A.D. 1327, three pieces of it, for use at the altar—one in particular for throwing over the desk: "tria filatoria linea, unde unum pro desco."[1] From their liturgical use, as we have noticed, p. 212, they were more generally named lectern-veils, and as such are spoken of, in the same Devonshire document: "i lectionale de panno lineo operato de opere acuali, &c."[2] Of those narrow, light, and moveable lecterns over which these linen embroideries were cast, Exeter had three—two of wood, another which folded up (see p. 212 here,) of iron: "i descus volubilis de ferro, pro Evangelio supra legendo; ii alia lectrina lignea."[3]
Almost every one of these thread embroideries were wrought during the fourteenth century, and several of them for the service of the sanctuary, either as reredos, frontal, or lectern-veil; and while those described at pp. 19, 20, 31, 53, 60, 71, 99, 120, 242-3, 249, 261-7, deserve consideration, a more complete and an especial notice is due to those two very fine ones under Nos. 8358, p. 210, and 8618, p. 235. As
