One of the most revelatory experiences, as one of the authors of a book on medieval garments, was the good condition in which so many of them had survived to the present. Some were examples of deliberate deposition – in formal burial according to the rites and traditions of the time, modified by the relative wealth and social standing of the buried; or to conceal a crime, as in the case of a murder victim buried in a peat bog. Others were brought about through accidental loss in the same favourable environment, as suggested in the case of a child's hood from Orkney, ca. ad 250–615. Textiles of almost all fibres can have a surprisingly long life, and survive in surprisingly good condition, if the circumstances of burial are right, though few conditions involving intentional or accidental deposition favour textiles of both animal and vegetable origin. Very little underwear, which was usually of linen, has survived, for example, from either intentional or incidental burial in Western Europe, while linen survives very well in the dry sands of Egypt. But the survival of buried remains, human or material, was not the purpose of Christian burial. Textile coverings, whether shrouds or dress, were never intended to be seen again by human eye after deposition, though in the case of royal persons and high-ranking ecclesiastics they were probably seen in versions of what we would now call “lying in state” before burial (and see evidence of actual practice in the case of an English king, below, p. 72). This is probably why in these cases status-proclaiming dress was employed: the majority of corpses seem to have had only shrouds.

However, it was the ability of textile (which we assume to be a fragile medium) which had never been buried, or buried for only a short time, to survive above ground for hundreds of years – sometimes in use or for display over a large part of its history – which seemed to me to merit more thought. Textiles which are in constant use, as garments or furnishings, are subject to wear, damage, and even decay: for example through long exposure to light, as in curtains and hangings; through soiling and subsequent laundering; or through the action of pests such as moths.

This paper arose out of another project on Mrs A. G. I. Christie and English Medieval Embroidery: it began as a paragraph and ended as an appendix as long as the original paper. My editor for that paper and my friend and colleague for over 30 years on several textile projects, Gale R. Owen-Crocker, encouraged me to pursue the topic as of interest in its own right, and for this, and for her interest in the medieval terminology for clothing and textiles, expressed especially through the “Lexis of Cloth and Clothing”, I am delighted to offer it to her on the occasion of this festschrift.

In one brief section of her magnum opus on English medieval embroidery (based on a lifetime's work but published in 1938), Christie included some Medieval Latin terms believed to refer to techniques of embroidery: opus pulvinarium, opus plumarium, opus consutum, opus pectineum, and opus saracenum, as set out in Table 2.1. I have included in the table a further term, opus phrygionum, important to the discussion of embroidery to her predecessors and contemporaries, although not found in Christie's cited source, an inventory of St Paul's Cathedral dating to 1295, published in 1818 but based on a seventeenth-century publication, supplemented by manuscript sources by the original editor. She seems to have been unaware of any other medieval sources, including two other inventories from St Paul's, published in 1887; these, while published too late for some nineteenth-century writers on embroidery such as Lady Marian Alford (1817–88), whose work is discussed below, also seem to have been ignored by other textile historians of the late nineteenth and certainly the first half of the twentieth centuries. These too included lists of vestments and mention of technique, and together they are a unique resource, as they cover the same collection at three points in its medieval history. While Christie's work has proved authoritative for continued acceptance, or at least repetition of these terms in the context of medieval embroidery, their meaning (except for opus consutum) has not been much discussed in recent times, and never with reference to the whole medieval period in England, including the pre-Conquest period. This is at first sight all the more surprising in that Christie herself acknowledged pre-Conquest embroidery, though only in the early tenth-century embroideries from the tomb of St Cuthbert in Durham.

Now I command you, beloved man, that you tell people about this sight, reveal in words that it is the tree of glory on which Almighty God suffered for the many sins of mankind and Adam's ancient deeds.

Introduction

Free-standing sculptures are, apart from buildings and the rather surprising case of the Bayeux Tapestry, the largest artefacts to have come down to us from the pre-Conquest period in England. They range in size from (for example) the Ruthwell cross at more than 518 centimetres (17 ft) in height, to small grave markers complete at less than 30.5 centimetres (1 ft). They come also in a variety of forms, some recognisable as cross shafts and heads, occasionally as steles, as bases of other monuments or as grave markers of a considerable variety of forms, and with a range of decoration both figural and aniconic, with or without inscriptions, which can be dated by comparison with decoration in other media, or, in the case of inscriptions, with changing styles of lettering or linguistic forms. With the doubtful exception of some of the smallest grave slabs, which may have been buried below the surface in the grave, all these monuments were meant to be seen, whether placed inside churches, in the precincts around a church or an ecclesiastical community or in the wider landscape. What these sculptures meant to those who commissioned and made them, or to the contemporary viewer, has been a preoccupation of serious scholars of this material since the nineteenth century. Indeed, W.O. Stevens, in 1904, though now out-of-date in many ways, listed most of the categories of possible function still of interest today – titling them memorial, mortuary, boundary, sanctuary, standard and oratory crosses – and many of the relevant contemporary sources. Nevertheless, this interest has increased and become more speculative since the 1990s: Rosemary Cramp has summed up both past concerns and more recent trends in a historiographical analysis which also provides a useful, though still only partial, bibliography to the topic.

A. F. Kendrick began his review of A. G. I. Christie’s English Medieval Embroideryby congratulating her on her “formidable undertaking” involving “no less than visiting, examining and (where necessary) photographing every known example of opus anglicanum in Europe. With an exemplary thoroughness and experience in stitchery few can rival, and, it seems, regardless of expense, she has laid all students of the beautiful art under a lasting debt.” This judgment, written in the year the book came out, surely still stands. There was a major exhibition of opus anglicanum in the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1963, with a helpful but brief catalogue, but this in no way replaced Mrs. Christie’s 1938 volume, with, as Kendrick also said, its “admirable illustrations, careful descriptions, and arguments on both sides.” The recently proposed project to create a new exhibition of thirteenth-century to fifteenth-century opus anglicanum and a new catalogue of English medieval embroideries from 700 to the middle of the fifteenth century cannot but build on the earlier work, and is in fact a testament to the thoroughness of the original project in establishing a true field of study.

Not all reviews of Christie’s earlier work had been as sympathetic to her approach as Kendrick’s. One, on her book Embroidery and Tapestry Weaving, while generally positive, considered she spent too much time on “unimportant stitches” at the expense of those the reviewer thought more significant, a view unlikely to be upheld by modern researchers on the development of stitch. In this respect, Christie was ahead of the game, though she was not alone, nor the first, to attempt a study of stitch. It seems useful to see where she reflected, or differed from, the intellectual background which informed her education as an embroiderer and teacher, and influenced her working life.

Who was Mrs. A. G. I. Christie?

In view of the interest in her work, which seems never to have wavered until the present, one might expect a great deal to be known about Mrs. Christie. Published details of her life are, however, surprisingly sparse, given her fame among students and specialists of early medieval embroidery.

AS was said at the beginning of the last chapter, the dividing line between manufacturing and decorative techniques is not always clear-cut. Some of the decorative techniques, such as engraving, inlay and Pressblech, are largely concerned with changes to the surface or form of the metal. Enamel and garnet cloisonne’, on the other hand, are non-metallic additions to the jewel, comprising a complex of distinct skills. In this chapter and the next, we have attempted to divide the techniques into these two broad categories.

Carving

Carving may be defined as the removal of material by the use of sharp implements. The term normally refers to the removal of relatively large amounts of material, and can be used to produce fully three-dimensional forms, although we have found no such examples in Anglo-Saxon fine metalwork. In a less overtly three-dimensional way, however, we believe it to have been a crucial aspect of Anglo-Saxon decorative ideas in many media. Its use in stone, ivory, bone, antler and wood is well attested, but while there is some evidence for direct carving into metal, this was probably only done as a means of redefining designs which had been cast. This will either have been done with small hammer-driven chisels of iron, or for some of the finer work engraving tools will have been used (see below and chapter 2).

Much use has been made of the term ‘chip-carving’ to characterise a particular decorative technique, typified by such eighth-century objects as the nasal on the Coppergate Helmet, York (88, pl. 12), and a mount from Whitby (82) in the British Museum. The essence of the technique is that a basically flat design is left visible against a faceted background, formed by the removal of small angular ‘chips’. The term implies an origin in wood- carving, but it is found widespread in stone, bone and ivory as well as in metalwork.

Our experiments have shown that this type of carving is relatively easy to reproduce in non-metallic substances, especially in antler, and rather difficult to achieve in metal. This reinforces the evidence from those metal objects which have been examined critically, which are clearly cast from models that already had the decoration in place. The skill of the metalwor- ker in carving, therefore, was exercised at the stage of making the three- dimensional model, rather than directly on the metal object (see pp. 64--86, above).

HAVING looked at the Anglo-Saxon goldsmith through contemporary references, through traces of his activity on archaeological sites, and above all through an examination of his products, we should ask: is this figure any less shadowy than he was before this study was begun? With respect to his achievements, we may say with some confidence that he is, but it is still necessary to pull all the evidence together in respect of his social position. In the period covered by this book, Anglo-Saxon England itself changed and developed, from a collection of kin-based units of diverse origin into a single political entity with a small but growing urban market economy. It might be argued that technological studies per se can reveal nothing of the social standing or economic function of the goldsmith. This has not, however, been the position of many archaeologists or social and economic historians, who have used the material remains of metalworking in their discussions of issues such as the development of craft specialisation, the relationship of this to the growth of towns, whether (and when) people with craft skills worked at their craft full-time or part-time, were fixed at one site or itinerant, free or unfree, ecclesiastics or laymen.

The documentary sources laid out in the last chapter provide a partial answer for goldsmiths working for the ecclesiastical and secular elites, but only for southern England and only for the tenth and eleventh century. This leaves the question as to the status of goldsmiths (and, indeed, all smiths) in the centuries before the tenth, and particularly the status of those in towns. In the case of the early centuries, this begs the further question of what is meant by a town. Arguments for the development of towns, and indeed about what constitutes a town, and the physical evidence for specific working practices all impinge on, and are sometimes held to define, the social role and status of craftsmen. Some of the discussion around these issues has concentrated on the period from the fifth to the seventh or early eighth centuries. This is because the bulk of the surviving products of the fine metalworker comes from grave finds of this period. Grave finds can be compared with finds from other cemeteries of comparable or other dates to provide evidence for period or regional groupings, and with the contents of other graves in the same cemetery to give indications of gender and social distinctions.