Queen Mathilda bequeathed to the
Abbey of the Holy Trinity at Caen a tunic embroidered at Winchester by
the wife of one Alderet; and when William presented himself to the
English nobles, after the Battle of Hastings, he wore a mantle covered
with Anglo-Saxon embroideries, which is probably, M. Lefebure suggests,
the same as that mentioned in the inventory of the Bayeux Cathedral,
where, after the entry relating to the broderie a telle (representing the
conquest of England), two mantles are described--one of King William,
'all of gold, powdered with crosses and blossoms of gold, and edged along
the lower border with an orphrey of figures.' The most splendid example
of the opus Anglicanum now in existence is, of course, the Syon cope at
the South Kensington Museum; but English work seems to have been
celebrated all over the Continent. Pope Innocent IV. so admired the
splendid vestments worn by the English clergy in 1246, that he ordered
similar articles from Cistercian monasteries in England. St. Dunstan,
the artistic English monk, was known as a designer for embroideries; and
the stole of St. Thomas a Becket is still preserved in the cathedral at
Sens, and shows us the interlaced scroll-forms used by Anglo-Saxon MS.
illuminators.

How far this modern artistic revival of rich and delicate embroidery will
bear fruit depends, of course, almost entirely on the energy and study
that women are ready to devote to it; but I think that it must be
admitted that all our decorative arts in Europe at present have, at
least, this element of strength--that they are in immediate relationship
with the decorative arts of Asia. Wherever we find in European history a
revival of decorative art, it has, I fancy, nearly always been due to
Oriental influence and contact with Oriental nations. Our own keenly
intellectual art has more than once been ready to sacrifice real
decorative beauty either to imitative presentation or to ideal motive. It
has taken upon itself the burden of expression, and has sought to
interpret the secrets of thought and passion. In its marvellous truth of
presentation it has found its strength, and yet its weakness is there
also. It is never with impunity that an art seeks to mirror life. If
Truth has her revenge upon those who do not follow her, she is often
pitiless to her worshippers. In Byzantium the two arts met--Greek art,
with its intellectual sense of form, and its quick sympathy with
humanity; Oriental art, with its gorgeous materialism, its frank
rejection of imitation, its wonderful secrets of craft and colour, its
splendid textures, its rare metals and jewels, its marvellous and
priceless traditions. They had, indeed, met before, but in Byzantium
they were married; and the sacred tree of the Persians, the palm of
Zoroaster, was embroidered on the hem of the garments of the Western
world. Even the Iconoclasts, the Philistines of theological history,
who, in one of those strange outbursts of rage against Beauty that seem
to occur only amongst European nations, rose up against the wonder and
magnificence of the new art, served merely to distribute its secrets more
widely; and in the Liber Pontificalis, written in 687 by Athanasius, the
librarian, we read of an influx into Rome of gorgeous embroideries, the
work of men who had arrived from Constantinople and from Greece.