it we learn that, besides the usual homely textiles, those more costly cloth-of-gold webs were wrought by our women, and very likely, among their other productions—cingula—were those "blodbendes," the weaving of which had been forbidden to ankresses and nuns; perhaps, too, of those narrow gold-wrought ribbons in this collection, pp. 24, 33, 38, 217, 218, 219, 221, &c., some may have been so employed by our high-born dames on occasion of their being bled, since as late as the sixteenth century some seasons were deemed fit, others quite unfitting for the operation. Hence, in his Richard II. act 1, scene i. Shakespeare makes the king to warn those wrath-kindled gentlemen, Bolingbroke and Norfolk:
Our doctors say this is no month to bleed.
And our most popular books in olden time, one the Shepherd's Kalendar, speaking about the signs of the zodiack, tell us which of the twelve months are either good, evil, or indifferent for blood-letting.
John Garland's "cingula" may also mean those rich girdles or sashes worn by our women round the waist, and of which we have one in this collection, No. 8571, p. 218. Of this sort, is that border—amber coloured silk and diapered—round a vestment found in a grave at Durham, and like "a thick lace, one inch and a quarter broad—evidently owing its origin, not to the needle, but to the loom," &c.[1] For the artist wishful to be correct concerning the head-gear of ladies from Anglo-Saxon times till the end of the later Plantagenets, this collection can furnish examples of those bands in those narrow textiles spoken of by our John Garland. For an after-period those bands are shown on the statuary, and amid the limning in illuminated MSS. of the thirteenth century; as instances of the narrow girdle, may be viewed a lady's effigy, in Romney church, Hants; and that of Ann of Bohemia, in Westminster Abbey; both to be found in Hollis's Monumental Effigies of Great Britain; for the band about the head, the examples in the wood-cuts in Planchè's British Costumes, p. 116.
Of such head-bands we have one at number 8569, p. 217, and other three mentioned upon p. 221. They are, no doubt, the old snôd of the Anglo-Saxon period. For high-born dames they were wrought of silk and gold; those of lower degree wore them of simpler stuff. The silken snood, affected to the present hour by young unmarried women in Scotland, is a truthful witness to the fashion in vogue during Anglo-Saxon and later times in this country.
With regard to what John Garland says of stoles so made, there is one here, No. 1233, p. 24, quite entire.
- ↑ Raine's St. Cuthbert, p. 196.
