From _The V&A Museum's Textile Collection: Embroidery in Britain from 1200 to 1750_, I take the following excerpts...intrepret them as you will...Silk textiles with repeating patterns, woven on the drawloom, were extensively used in Britain [in the MA], but these were not home-produced, but imported from Italy, Spain, Byzantium, or the Islamic world. Pictoral wall-hangings, woven by the tapestry technique, were imported in the later middle ages from France and Flanders....
..only two classes of patterened textiles are certainly known, from surviving examples, to have been produced in England during the middle ages. One of these comprised narrow bands or ribbons, from a few millimeters up to about three inches wide, woven with silk and gold thread in tablet-looms....the second class of English patterned textiles, far more important both artistically and economically, were the embroideries...
...from the middle of the 14th century onwards, although the English workshops continued to be extremely active, making large quantities of excellent embroidery, they were no longer called upon to produce work of such luxurious quality as in the preceding period. Economic resources were now diverted from luxury goods into military expenditure; the wages of skilled workers rose; and at the same time the embroidery workshops had to meet increasing competition from imports of Italian patterned silks. The responded by simplifying techniques: underside couching, for example, was replaced by surface couching. Designs were also simplified....Large pieces, such as copes and altar frontals, were no longer embroidered throughout to specially commissioned designs. Instead, they were decorated by embroidering standardized motifs on linen, which were then cut out around their outlines, and applied to a silk or velvet background....
...the surviving specimens of this embroidery were almost all...made for church use.....we know from documentary evidence that some of the richest of all medieval embroideries were produced for court costumes, or for furnishing items, such as bed-hangings. Virtually none of this work survives, since it either went out of fashion and was broken up, or it remained in constant use and was worn out; the church embroidery has survived better, since it was less subject to fasion, and less continuously used.
there are 5 notes, two of which may be interesting:
4. the standard work on English embroidery of the 12th to 14th century is Mrs. A.G.I. Christie, English Medieval Embroidery, 1938. D. King, Opus Anglicanum, 1963, is an exhibition catalogue describing many English embroideries of the 11th to 16th century.
5. A surviving English secular embroidery of the 14th century, in the Museé de Cluny, Paris, is described by D. King, op. cit, item 76.
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posted 05-01-2001 10:47 AM
) would rely on good quality wool dyed with expensive rich dyes.
