Carpets
are somewhat akin to tapestry, and though the use of them may perhaps be not so ancient, yet is very old. Here, again, to the people of Asia, must we look for the finest as well as earliest examples of this textile. Few are the mediæval specimens of it anywhere, and we are glad to recommend attention to two pieces of that period fortunately in the collection, No. 8649, p. 248, of the fourteenth century, and No. 8357, p. 209, of the sixteenth, both of Spanish make.
As even the antechambers of our royal palaces, so the chancels in most of our country parish churches used to be strewed with rushes. When, however, they could afford it, the authorities of our cathedrals, even in Anglo-Saxon times, sought to spread the sanctuary with carpets; and at last old tapestry came to be so employed, as now in Italy. Among such coverings for the floor before the altar, Exeter had a large piece of Arras cloth figured with the life of the Duke of Burgundy, the gift of one of its bishops, Edmund Lacy, A.D. 1420, besides two large carpets, one bestowed by Bishop Nevill, A.D. 1456, the other, of a chequered pattern, by Lady Elizabeth Courtney: "Carpet et panni coram altari sternendi—i pannus de Arys de historia Ducis Burgundie—i larga carpeta, &c."[1] In an earlier inventory, we find that among the "bancaria," or bench-coverings, in the choir of the same cathedral, A.D. 1327, one was a large piece of English-made tapestry, with a fretted pattern—"unum tapetum magnum Anglicanum frettatum."[2] And we think that as the Record Commission goes on under the Master of the Rolls, to print our ancient historians, evidences will turn up showing that the looms at work in all our great monasteries, among other webs, wrought carpets. From existing printed testimony we know that, in all likelihood, such must have been the practice at Croyland, where Abbot Egelric, the second of the name bestowed before the year 992, when he died, upon his church: "two large foot-cloths (so carpets were then called) woven with lions to be laid out before the high altar on great festivals, and two shorter ones trailed all over with flowers, for the feast days of the Apostles: "Dedit etiam duo magna pedalia leonibus intexta, ponenda ante magnum altare in festis principalibus et duo breviora floribus respersa pro festis Apostolorum."[3] The quantity of carpeting in our palaces may be seen by the way in which "my lady the queen's rooms were strewed with them 'when she took her chamber.'"[4]
