Like weaving and fine needlework, the art of tapestry came from Egypt and Asia, westward; and in the days of Virgil our old British sires were employed in the theatres at Rome as scene-shifters, where they had to take away those tapestries on which they themselves, as examples of imperial triumph, had been figured:—
Juvat . . .
Vel scena ut versis discedat frontibus, utque
Purpurea intexti tollant aulæa Britanni.[1]
From Egypt through Western Asia the art of tapestry-making found its way to Europe, and at last to us; and among the other manual labours followed by their rule in religious houses, this handicraft was one, and the monks became some of its best workmen. The altars and the walls of their churches were hung with such an ornamentation. Matthew Paris tells us, that among other ornaments which, in the reign of Henry I, Abbot Geoffrey had made for his church of St. Alban's monastery, were three reredoses, the first a large one wrought with the finding of England's protomartyr's body; the other two smaller-ones figured with the gospel story of the man who fell among thieves, the other with that of the prodigal son: "dedit quoque dossale magnum in quo intexitur inventio Sancti Albani, cujus campus est aerius, et aliud minus ubi effigiatur Evangelium de sauciato qui incidit in latrones, et tertium ubi historia de filio prodigo figuratur."[2] While in London, A.D. 1316, Simon Abbot, of Ramsey, bought for his monks' use looms, staves, shuttles and a slay: "pro weblomes emptis xx^s. Et pro staves ad easdem vj^d. Item pro iiij shittles pro eodem opere ij^s vj^d. Item in j. slay pro textoribus viij^d."[3]
What was done in one monastery was but the reflex of every other; hence, Giffard, one of the commissioners for the suppression of the smaller houses, in the reign of Henry VIII., thus writes to Cromwell, while speaking of the monastery of Wolstrope, in Lincolnshire:—"Not one religious person there but that he can and doth use either imbrothering, writing books with very fair hand, making their own garments, carving, painting, or graving, &c."[4]
Pieces of English-made tapestry still remain. That fine, though mutilated specimen at St. Mary's Hall, Coventry, is one; a second is the curious reredos for an altar, belonging to the London Vintners' Company; it is figured with St. Martin on horseback cutting with his sword
