page_title: English embroidery
section_title: Anglo-Saxon
hierarchical_section_title: English embroidery / Medieval period / Anglo-Saxon
caption_attribution_description: Scene 6 Français&#160;: Tapisserie de Bayeux «&#160;Ici Harold navigua sur la mer...&#160;» English: fragment of the bayeux tapestry showing harold as he comes to normandy to inform william he is the sucesor of king eduard.
context_page_description: English embroidery includes embroidery worked in England or by English people abroad from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day. The oldest surviving English embroideries include items from the early 10th century preserved in Durham Cathedral and the 11th century Bayeux Tapestry, if it was worked in England. The professional workshops of Medieval England created rich embroidery in metal thread and silk for ecclesiastical and secular uses. This style was called Opus Anglicanum or "English work", and was famous throughout Europe.
  With the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, the focus of English embroidery increasingly turned to clothing and household furnishings, leading to another great flowering of English domestic embroidery in the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras. The end of this period saw the rise of the formal sampler as a record of the amateur stitcher's skills. Curious fashions of the mid-17th century were raised work or stumpwork, a pictorial style featuring detached and padded elements, and crewel work, featuring exotic leaf motifs worked in wool yarn.
context_section_description: Little physical evidence survives to reconstruct the early development of English embroidery before the Norman Conquest of 1066.  Stitches reinforcing the seams of a garment in the Sutton Hoo ship burial may have been intended as decoration, and so be classed as embroidery, and fragments of a scrolling border worked in stem stitch were recovered from a grave in Kempston, Bedfordshire.  Some embroidered pieces of about 850 preserved in Maaseik, Belgium, are generally assumed to be Anglo-Saxon work based on their similarity to contemporary manuscript illustrations and sculptures of animals and interlace.
  The documentary evidence is rather richer than the physical remains.  Part of the reason for both these facts is the taste among the late Anglo-Saxon elite for embroidering using lavish amounts of precious metal thread, especially gold, which both gave items a magnificence and expense worth recording, and meant that they were well worth burning to recover the bullion.  Three old vestments, almost certainly Anglo-Saxon, recycled in this way at Canterbury Cathedral in the 1370s, produced over £250 of gold – a huge amount.  Richly embroidered hangings were used in both churches and the houses of the rich, but vestments were the most richly embellished of all, of a "particularly English" richness.    Most of these were sent back to Normandy or burnt for their metal after the Norman conquest.  An image of part of a huge gold acanthus flower on the back of a gold-bordered chasuble, almost certainly depicting a specific real vestment, can be seen in the Benedictional of St. Æthelwold (fol. 118v).
  Scholars agree that three embroidered items from the coffin of St Cuthbert in Durham are Anglo-Saxon work, based on an inscription describing their commission by Queen Ælfflæd between 909 and 916. These include a stole and maniple ornamented with figures of prophets outlined in stem stitch and filled with split stitch, with halos in gold thread worked with underside couching.   The quality of this silk embroidery on a gold background is "unparalleled in Europe at this time."
  Scholarly consensus favours an Anglo-Saxon, probably Kentish origin for the Bayeux Tapestry. This famous narrative of the Conquest is not a true woven tapestry but an embroidered hanging worked in wool yarn on a tabby-woven linen ground using outline or stem stitch for lettering and the outlines of figures, and couching or laid work for filling in figures.
caption: Detail of stitching on the Bayeux Tapestry.
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