s made for us." There were
certainly then purveyors and masters of the craft. Stephen Vigner, in
the fourteenth century, is so warmly commended by the Duke of Berri
and Auvergne to Edward III., that Richard II. appointed him his chief
embroiderer, and Henry IV. pensioned him for his skilful services.

John Garland, in the beginning of the thirteenth century, is a good
authority for the use by our women of small hand-looms. In these they
wove, in flax or silk (often mixed with gold), the "cingulae" or
"blode-bendes" so often mentioned, supposed to be gifts between
friends for binding the arm, when blood-letting was so much in fashion
that the operation was allowed to assume a certain air of coquetry.
But the idea suggests itself that this was oftener the gift of the
fair weaver to her favoured lover, to fold round his arm as a scarf in
battle or tourney, to be ready in case it was needed for binding up a
wound, and had possibly served as a snood to bind her own fair hair.
There is an account of a specimen of this kind of weaving by M.
Leopold Delisle.[591] He describes the attachment of a seal to a grant
from Richard Coeur de Lion to Richard Hommet and Gille his wife,
preserved in the archives of the Abbey of Aunai, in the department of
Calvados. He considers it to be either French or English, and says it
was a "lac d'amour," or "tie of love," cut up to serve its present
purpose. It is woven with an inscription in white on a ground of
green, backed with pale blue, and the material is silk. The woven
legend is thus translated from the old French--"Let him perish who
would part us."

[Illustration: Opus Anglicanum, XIII. Century
British Museum]

The term "opus Anglicanum" is first recorded in the thirteenth
century, and is supposed simply to mean "English work." But there is
also good authority for its having been applied, on the Continent
especially, to a particular style of stitchery, of which the Syon cope
in the Kensington Museum is the best preserved great example known.
Its peculiarity consists in its fine split-stitch being moulded so as
to give the effect of a bas-relief; and this appears to have been
generally reserved for the medallions representing sacred subjects,
and especially employed in modelling the faces and the nude parts of
the figures delineated. The effect of this work has often been
destroyed, as time has frayed and discoloured the parts that are
raised, exhibiting the canvas ground, revers