out that monasteries became treasure-houses, the only safe
ones, were built strong, were sufficiently manned, and therefore were
the safe-deposit of whatever articles of concentrated value the great
lord of the Middle Ages might accumulate. Many tapestries thus
deposited became gifts to the institution which gave them asylum.

The arts and crafts of the Middle Ages were in the hands of the
monasteries, monks and friars being the only persons with safety and
leisure. Weaving fell naturally to them to execute as an art. In the
castles, necessary weaving for the family was done by the women, as on
every great lord's domains were artisans for all crafts; and great
ladies emulated Penelope and Helen of old in passing their hours of
patience and anxiety with fabricating gorgeous cloths. But these are
exceptional, and deal with such grand ladies as Queen Matilda, who
with her maidens embroidered (not wove) the Bayeux Tapestry, and with
the Duchess Gonnor, wife of Richard First, who embroidered for the
church of Notre Dame at Rouen a history of the Virgin and Saints.[2]

To the monasteries must be given the honour of preserving this as
many other arts, and of stimulating the laity which had wealth and
power to present to religious institutions the best products of the
day. The subjects executed inside the monastery were perforce
religious, many revelling in the horrors of martyrology, and those
intended as gifts or those ordered by the clergy were religious in
subject for the sake of appropriateness. It is interesting to note the
sweet childlike attitude of all lower Europe toward the church in
these years, a sort of infantile way of leaving everything in its
hands, all knowledge, all wisdom, all power. It was not even necessary
to read or write, as the clergy conveniently concerned themselves with
literacy. As late as the beginning of the Fifteenth Century Philip the
Hardy, the great Duke of Burgundy, in ordering a tapestry, signed the
order, not with his autograph, for he could not, but with his mark,
for he, too, left pen-work to the clerks of the church.

That pile of concentrated royal history, the old abbey of St. Denis,
received, late in the Tenth Century, one of the evidences of royal
patronage that every abbey must have envied. It was a woven
representation of the world, as scientists of that day imagined our
half-discovered planet, and was presented by Queen Adelaide, the wife
of Hugh Capet, whose descendants reigne