E M E D 2 0 1 Operator: Yu Yanjun Dispatch: 12.02.07 PE: Catherine Hodgkinson Journal Name Manuscript No. Proofreader: Li aijiao No. of Pages: 32 Copy-editor: Acquiring, flaunting and destroying silk Original Blackwell Oxford, Early EMED © 0963-9462 XXX 2007 Robin Silk Article inMedieval The UKPublishing Author. Fleming late Europe Journal Ltd England Anglo-Saxon Compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd in late Anglo-Saxon England R  F  F O This paper argues that silk was ubiquitous in England in the late Anglo- O Saxon period. It also contends that when examined in the context of its use, it becomes clear that the deployment of silk was symbolic. People of means moved heaven and earth to get silk because it allowed them to appropriate its associated meanings for themselves. So, after establishing silk’s ubiquity and its uses, the paper teases out its ideological underpinnings. Finally, the paper investigates the economics of silk. In the end it strives PR D to prove that a whole spectrum of people acquired, displayed, and some- times even destroyed silk, because it made others see them as they wished TE to be seen. Before I began this research, when I pictured the men we study – EC Merelsweinn the Sheriff, Tovi the Proud, the Godwinesons – I imagined them dressed in the earth-toned woollens of the Bayeux Tapestry. Now, however, I know better. Men like these – men who served as royal councillors, oversaw the executions of criminals, bullied peasants, and R fought and died at Hastings – hard, tough, serious individuals, dressed like peacocks, kitting themselves out, on important occasions, in loud, R shiny get-ups, dressing in robes decorated with elephants or wild cats, O and sporting garish tunics banded with gold-embroidered trim. This paper will argue that vibrantly coloured silks and other elaborate textiles C were ubiquitous in England in the late Anglo-Saxon period. 1 This is a more difficult case to make than it should be, not for lack of evidence, N but because of the way textiles have been studied, written about, and used. Historians, by and large, do not employ cloth as historical evidence, U and it is generally the preserve of museum curators, restoration experts, 1 There was silk in early Anglo-Saxon England as well. Early textual notices are published in D. King, ‘English Embroidery before Alfred the Great’, in M.M. Brooks (ed.), Textiles Revealed: Object Lessons in Historic Textile and Costume Research (London, 2002), pp. 33–7, at pp. 33–4. For the most complete treatment of silk in Anglo-Saxon England, see C.R. Dodwell, Anglo-Saxon Art: A New Perspective (Ithaca, 1982), pp. 141–53. Early Medieval Europe   () 127–158 © 2007 The Author. Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd,  Garsington Road, Oxford OX DQ, UK and  Main Street, Malden, MA , USA  128 Robin Fleming archaeologists and art historians, whose publications historians are, alas, inclined to eschew. Beyond this, the textiles English people craved in the tenth and eleventh centuries were produced outside of Europe, and much of the research on them appears in the publications of Byzantine and Islamic specialists, who have little interest in the contexts in which these textiles have been preserved, and whose work is unfamiliar to historians of Europe. Finally, because of the efficiency of Henry VIII’s Reformation enterprise, the bulk of England’s ancient silks were con- signed to the flames in the sixteenth century, so one is forced, if one F wishes to know about silk in late Anglo-Saxon England, to ferret out O parallel material across the Channel. The consequence of these historical and historiographical circumstances is that the evidence surrounding O textiles is so diffuse and so scattered among fields, disciplines and national histories, that it is very nearly invisible. Nonetheless, when the PR surviving, and, so it turns out, substantial corpus of textiles is marshalled, it becomes clear that pre-Conquest England was awash with silk. This paper not only argues for the widespread availability of silk, but it contends that silk and other exotic textiles are worth thinking about, D because when they are examined in the context of their use, it becomes clear that their deployment was symbolic. People of means moved TE heaven and earth to get silk because it allowed them to appropriate its associated meanings for themselves. So, after establishing silk’s ubiquity and its uses, I will attempt to tease out its ideological underpinnings. Finally, this paper will discuss the economics of silk, because one of the EC secrets of its success was the fact that in the tenth and eleventh centuries it was both rare and widely available; and to understand why this was so, one needs to know something about silk production. I hope to prove R that a whole spectrum of strivers – insecure kings, nouveaux riches earls, status-conscious burgesses, semi-literate archbishops and ambitious R minster clerks – acquired, displayed, and sometimes even destroyed silk, because it made others see them as they wished to be seen. O Let us begin with the economics of silk. The bulk of the silk acquired C by English strivers was from Byzantium, and Byzantine silk, as Liud- prand of Cremona makes clear, could be frustratingly hard to come by. 2 N The most spectacular were kekolymena, forbidden goods, made exclu- U sively in imperial workshops for the emperor.3 As a result, only the beneficiaries of imperial largess had access to this highly regulated 2 Luidprand of Cremona, Relatio de legatione Constantinopolitana, ed. B. Scott (London, 1993), Ch. 54. 3 B. Jacoby, ‘Silk in Western Byzantium before the Fourth Crusade’, Byzantinische Zeitschrift, 84/5 (1991–2), pp. 452–500, at p. 490; A.E. Laiou, ‘Exchange and Trade, Seventh–Twelfth Centuries’, in A.E. Laiou (ed.), The Economic History of Byzantium: from the Seventh through the Fifteenth Century (Washington, DC, 2002), pp. 697–770, at pp. 706, 718 –19. Early Medieval Europe   () © 2007 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd  Silk in late Anglo-Saxon England 129 Color image F O O PR D TE Fig. 1 A lion silk, made in a Byzantine imperial workshop, and placed in the tomb EC of Bishop Heribert of Cologne (from M. Brandt and A. Eggebrecht, Bernward von Hildesheim und das Zeitalter der Ottonen, 2 vols (Hildesheim, 1993), II, no. II-19) commodity.4 It was probably in this way, therefore, that German emperors R came to possess their most spectacular Byzantine pieces, including the R magnificent lion silks now in Cologne and the elephant silk from Aachen (see Fig. 1).5 Few English kings, however, were in a position to receive O diplomatic offerings from the emperor. It seems likely, therefore, that the bulk of the finest silks acquired by English kings arrived as hand-me-downs C 4 A. Muthesius, Studies in Byzantine and Islamic Silk Weaving (London, 1995), pp. 165–72, 201– N 15, 231–44. Earlier Carolingian kings had certainly received textiles from Byzantine delega- tions. Louis the Pious, for example, got ten silks from one group of Greek diplomats visiting his court (M. McCormick, Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce U AD 300 – 900 (Cambridge, 2001), p. 724). 5 One of the lion silks was placed in Bishop Heribert’s tomb (M. Brandt and A. Eggebrecht, Bernward von Hildesheim und das Zeitalter der Ottonen, 2 vols (Hildesheim, 1993), II, no. II-19), the other in Bishop Anno’s tomb (A. Muthesius, Byzantine Silk Weaving AD 400 to AD 1200, ed. E. Kislinger and J. Koder (Vienna, 1997), M52 and nos. 1a, 1b, 2a). Otto II put the elephant silk in Charlemagne’s sepulchre (W.D. Wixom, ‘Byzantine Art and the Latin West’, in H.C. Evans and W.D. Wixom (eds), The Glory of Byzantium: Art and Culture of the Middle Byzantine Era AD 843–1261 (New York, 1997), pp. 435–49, at p. 436). A detail of this silk’s Greek inscription is printed in A. Guillou and J. Durand, Byzance: L’art byzantin dans les collections publiques françaises (Paris, 1992), p. 372, Fig. 2. Early Medieval Europe   () © 2007 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd  130 Robin Fleming from popes or German emperors, who were much more frequently the beneficiaries of Constantinople’s gifts. 6 We know that this did happen on occasion. During Cnut the Great’s visit to Germany, for example, when the king wrote home to his English subjects, he excitedly recounted Emperor Conrad’s gift of ‘silk robes and very costly garments’. 7 Although special silks woven in imperial ateliers would have been rare in England, more pedestrian pieces were widely available by the time of the Conquest; indeed, an astonishing twenty-two per cent of all textiles recovered from the York archaeological site 16 –22 Coppergate, are silk.8 F This is in part because the production of medium- and low-grade Byzan- O tine silk was many times greater than it had been earlier, and in part because the manufacturing and sale of these lower-quality fabrics were O not controlled by the Byzantine state.9 As a result, foreign merchants and pilgrims could now purchase silk more easily,10 and from the second half PR of the tenth century on, we have interesting notices of English travellers buying silk abroad.11 We also have a telling description of a party of English pilgrims travelling back from Rome in 1061. As they left the city, they were set upon by brigands who not only stole their baggage, but stripped D the very clothes off their backs, which suggests that the entourage had not only visited Italy’s shrines, but also its market places. 12 TE 6 Muthesius, Byzantine Silk Weaving, pp. 34 – 43. 7 English Historical Documents c.500 – 1042, vol. 1, ed. D. Whitelock, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1979), no. 53. Similarly, during Archbishop Ealdræd’s year-long mission to the German court in EC 1054, he received ‘many gifts’, some of which may have been textiles (The Vita Wulfstani of William of Malmesbury, ed. R.R. Darlington (London, 1928), Chs 1, 9). The pope was also known to give gifts. Earl Tostig received ‘great gifts from the bounty of St Peter’, which may have included textiles (The Life of King Edward who rests at Westminster, ed. F. Barlow, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1992), pp. 56–7). There are also earlier examples of this. Charlemagne, for R example, sent two silk pallia to King Offa and other pallia and dalmatics to bishops in Mercia and Northumbria (King, ‘English Embroidery’, p. 34). R 8 P. Walton Rogers, ‘Textile Production at Coppergate, York: Anglo-Saxon or Viking?’, Northern European Symposium for Archaeological Textiles, NESAT 3 (1990), pp. 61–72, at p. 68. 9 Jacoby, ‘Silk in Western Byzantium’, pp. 472–5; Laiou, ‘Exchange and Trade’, p. 740. For O an overview of the organization of silk production in the late antique period, see J.P. Wild, ‘The Later Roman and Early Byzantine East, AD 300 –1000’, in D.T. Jenkins (ed.), The Cambridge History of Western Textiles, 2 vols (Cambridge, 2003), I, pp. 140 –53. For an over- C view of the organization of silk production in Byzantium and the Islamic world, see A. Muthesius, ‘Silk in the Medieval World’, in ibid., pp. 325–54, at pp. 325–31. N 10 Jacoby, ‘Silk in Western Byzantium’, p. 500. This is not only true for Europe. There is evidence, for example, that pattern-woven silks became widely available in Christian Nubia around the year 1000 (K.C. Innemée, Ecclesiastical Dress in the Medieval Near East (Leiden, 1992), pp. 162–3). U 11 Anglo-Saxon Wills, ed. D. Whitelock (Cambridge, 1930), no. 1; R.S. Lopez, ‘Silk Industry in the Byzantine Empire’, Speculum 20 (1945), pp. 1–42, at p. 37; C.R. Dodwell, The Pictorial Arts of the West 800 – 1200 (New Haven, 1993), p. 9. 12 Life of King Edward, pp. 54 –5. At a later synod, the thieves responsible for this attack were accused of stealing £1,000 Pavian worth of goods from the party (Life of King Edward, p. 55, n. 135). Clothing was also vulnerable to thievery at home. In a tenth-century Welsh text, a man admonished his servant, while he was away, not only to guard his gold and silver but to ‘stay behind and guard my clothes’ (De Raris Fabulis, in Early Scholastic Colloquies, ed. W. Stevenson (Oxford, 1929), pp. 1–11, Ch. 4). Early Medieval Europe   () © 2007 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd  Silk in late Anglo-Saxon England 131 By the turn of the millennium people could also purchase silk from merchants within the kingdom. It is the long-distance trader in Ælfric’s Colloquy who supplies the wealthy with ‘purple cloth and silks, precious jewels and gold, [and] unusual clothes . . .’13 There is also archaeological evidence that silk was available in the kingdom’s most important cities, like London and York.14 Merchants, though, were hawking silk in less august places as well: the monks of Ely, for example, managed to pro- cure an embroidered silk chasuble from a Thetford burgess. 15 And inter- estingly, textile finds from York suggest that bolts of lower-quality silk F were being brought into the kingdom and then tailored into articles of O clothing by local craftsmen.16 By the year 1000, moreover, not all of England’s silk would have O come from the Greek east. Silk weavers were now manufacturing small amounts in Italy and Sicily,17 so some of the textiles brought back by PR pilgrims and traders may have had western origins. The west also had access to Central Asian and Islamic silks.18 It is hard to say how many ended D 13 Ælfric’s Colloquy, ed. G.N. Garmonsway, 2nd edn (London, 1947), p. 33. 14 F.A. Pritchard, ‘Late Saxon Textiles from the City of London’, Medieval Archaeology 28 TE (1984), pp. 46–76, at pp. 61–2; N. Crummy, ‘From Self-Sufficiency to Commerce: Structural and Artifactual Evidence for Textile Manufacture in Eastern England in the pre-Conquest Period’, in D.G. Koslin and J.E. Snyder (eds), Encountering Medieval Textiles and Dress: Objects, Texts, Images (New York, 2002), pp. 25–43, p. 36. 15 Liber Eliensis, ed. E.O. Blake, Camden Third Series 92 (London, 1962), Bk III, Ch. 50. EC 16 P. Walton, Textiles, Cordage and Raw Fibre from 16 – 22 Coppergate, The Archaeology of York: The Small Finds 17/5 (1989), pp. 374–5; P. Walton Rogers, Textile Production at 16–22 Coppergate, The Archaeology of York: The Small Finds 17/11 (1997), pp. 1779, 1801–2; N. Crummy, ‘From Self-Sufficiency’, p. 36. 17 M. Gil, ‘References to Silk in Geniza Documents of the Eleventh Century AD’, Journal of R Near Eastern Studies 61 (2002), pp. 31– 8, at pp. 32–3. 18 For a collection of translated texts pertaining to the medieval Islamic textile industry and R trade, see R.B. Serjeant, Islamic Textiles: Material for a History up to the Mongol Conquest (Beruit, 1972). For a general discussion of these Central Asian and Islamic silks in Europe, see L. von Wilckens, ‘Seiden aus China, Mittelasien, Persien und Mesopotamien, die vom 7. O bis zum Frühen 13. Jahrhundert nach Mitteleuropa gekommen sind’, Jahrbuch des Museums für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg 9 –10 (1990 –91), pp. 55–68. For published examples, see J. Beckwith, ‘Byzantine Tissues’, in J. Beckwith (ed.), Studies in Byzantine and Medieval C Western Art (London, 1989), pp. 37–70, at pp. 42–3; K. von Folsach and A.-M. Keblow Bernsted, Woven Treasures: Textiles from the World of Islam (Copenhagen, 1993), pp. 98 –9; N J.-P. Laporte, Le trésor des saints de Chelles (Chelles, 1988), nos. 33, 38, 47; B. Schmedding, Mittelalterliche Textilien in Kirchen und Klöstern der Schweiz (Bern, 1978), pp. 66 –7, 72, 89, 145, 229, 236 and nos. 4–7; L. von Wilckens, ‘Byzantinishe Seidenweberei in der Zeit vom späten 8. U bis zum 12. Jahrhundert’, in A. von Euw and P. Schreiner (eds), Kunst im Zeitalter der Kaiserin Theophanue (Cologne 1993), pp. 79–93, at pp. 84–7; L. Dolcini, ‘San Marco papa o Giovanni VIII nuove ipotesi per due sciamiti post-Sassanidi e una confezione Carolingia’, in L. Dolcini (ed.), La casula di San Marco Papa: sciamiti orientali alla corte Carolingia (Florence, 1992), pp. 1–51; L’Ile-de-France de Clovis à Hugues Capet du Ve siècle au Xe siècle (Saint-Ouen-l’Aumôme, 1993), pp. 112–13; Ornamenta ecclesiae: Kunst und Künstler der Romanik, 3 vols (Cologne, 1985), II, nos. E48, E103; C. Stiegemann and M. Wemhoff (eds), 799, Kunst und Kultur der Karolingerzeit: Karl der Große und Papst Leo III. in Paderborn, 2 vols (Paderborn, 1999), II, no. IX- 37. Early Medieval Europe   () © 2007 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd  132 Robin Fleming up in England,19 but excavations of Viking Age Dublin have uncovered a remarkable number of silk tabbies likely to have been produced in Baghdad; similar silk tabbies survive from London, Lincoln and York. 20 Very finely embroidered textiles were also being produced in Britain itself, some embellished with designs taken from Central Asian silks, a sure sign that Islamic textiles were present in the British Isles. The tablet-woven braid from St Cuthbert’s coffin, for example, is an insular copy of a Central Asian floral design; 21 the silk-embroidered fabric found at Llan-gorse crannóg in Wales was embroidered in Britain, but F artisans copied one of the designs – long-necked birds nestled in vine O scrolls – from the figured silks of Central Asia. 22 Although much of the silk circulating in England would have come O through Europe, around the middle of the tenth century the silk trade rapidly organized and intensified between the Rus and both Syria/Iraq PR (a region called Serkeland, or ‘Silk-land’, in Old Norse) and Byzantium. From this date archaeologists can trace silk moving from Constantinople or Rayy, in Iran, to Kiev and Novgorod, then into the Baltic and Scandinavia, and finally into York and Dublin. 23 Thus, new channels, D which had not existed in earlier centuries, developed over the course of the tenth century through which silk could travel. By the eleventh TE century, although silk doubtless continued to conjure up imperial and exotic associations, it was available not only to those with ties to the Byzantine and German imperial courts and the papacy, or to the privileged few wealthy enough to journey to Rome, but to people with cash in EC Britain itself. 19 The silk found in Edward the Confessor’s tomb may be Islamic (D. Buckton, Byzantium: R Treasures of Byzantine Art and Culture from British Collections (London, 1994), p. 153). Two of St Cuthbert’s silks are also Islamic, but they were placed in his tomb in the twelfth century R or later (A. Muthesius, ‘Silk and Saints: The Rider and Peacock Silks from the Relics of St Cuthbert’, in G. Bonner, D. Rollason, and C. Stancliffe (eds), St Cuthbert, His Cult and His Community to AD 1200 (Woodbridge, 1989), pp. 343–66, at pp. 358, 364). O 20 E.W. Heckett, Viking Age Headcoverings from Dublin (Dublin, 2003), pp. 106, 111. A Tabby is a plain weave, with an equal number of warp and weft threads. 21 H. Granger-Taylor, ‘The Weft-Patterned Silks and their Braid: The Remains of an Anglo-Saxon C Dalmatic of c.800?’, in Bonner, et al. (eds), St Cuthbert, pp. 303–27, at p. 322. 22 H. Granger-Taylor and F.A. Pritchard, ‘A Fine Quality Insular Embroidery from Llan-gors N Crannóg, near Brecon’, in M. Redknap, N. Edwards, S. Youngs, A. Lane and J. Knight (eds), Pattern and Purpose in Insular Art (Oxford, 2001), pp. 91–99, at pp. 95–6 and nos. 8.1 and 8.3, and Plates 4–5. U 23 D. King, ‘The Textiles Found near Rayy about 1925’, in D. King, Collected Textile Studies (London, 2004), pp. 17–56; Serjeant, Islamic Textiles, pp. 220 –1; J. Shepard, ‘Constantinople– Gateway to the North: The Russians’, C. Mango and G. Dagron (eds), Constantinople and its Hinterland (Aldershot, 1995), pp. 243 – 60, at pp. 246–7; M.A. Brisbane, The Archaeology of Novgorod, Russia: Recent Results from the Town and its Hinterland, (Lincoln, 1992), p. 196. It is interesting that the Old Norse word gu∂vefr, a cognate of the Old English godweb, meaning ‘exotic textile’ or ‘silk’, was borrowed into Russian and Old Church Slavonic (C.D. Buck, A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages (Chicago, 1949), p. 403. Early Medieval Europe   () © 2007 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd  Silk in late Anglo-Saxon England 133 Much of the silk that came into England ended up on the backs of the well-to-do,24 and preachers in the late Anglo-Saxon period worried over the luxurious dress of the lay aristocracy. 25 The Blickling homilist, for example, felt it necessary to exhort his listeners that ‘we must be adorned with good and proper deeds, not with gold and lavish silk clothing (godwebbenum hræglum), if we wish to be at the right hand of the Lord Saviour Christ’.26 He also reminded his audience: where will [a dead man’s] frivolous garments be? Where will the F ornaments and expensive attire be with which he once clothed O his body? . . . Where you once saw luxury textiles [godweb] embellished with gold, you now see a bit of dust and the remnants O of worms.27 PR Homiletic fulminations did little, however, to dampen laypeople’s enthusiasm for finery. When King Edgar’s famously well-dressed daughter, for example, was chastised by St Æthelwold for wearing costly attire, William of Malmesbury has her retort: ‘Pride may just as easily exist D under mean clothes. Indeed, it strikes me that a mind can be as pure under my robes as under your tattered skins.’ 28 TE English manuscript illustrations of the period allow us to see some- thing of what the critics saw. They show great men dressed in short tunics with flared skirts, edged around their cuffs, collars and hems with EC 24 For the most complete discussions of English clothing before the Conquest, see Dodwell, R Anglo-Saxon Art, pp. 129 – 87 and G.R. Owen-Crocker, Dress in Anglo-Saxon England, 2nd edn (Woodbridge, 2004), pp. 232–71. R 25 This was not a new concern. Church fathers in late antiquity regularly criticized silk wearing (R. Delmaire, ‘Le vêtement, symbole de richesse et de pouvoir, d’après les textes patristiques et hagiographiques du Bas-Empire’, in F. Chausson and H. Inglebert (eds), O Costume et société dans l’Antiquité et le haut Moyen Age (Paris, 2003), pp. 85– 98, at pp. 89, 98); and as early as the eighth century, St Boniface had worried that clothes worn by English monks, decorated with broad, silk-embroidered bands, would not only lead to lust, but to C fornication (King, ‘English Embroidery’, p. 34). A contemporary English example of the kind of embroidery Boniface was critiquing may survive in the Maaseik embroideries. N See, M. Budny and D. Tweddle, ‘The Maaseik Embroideries’, Anglo-Saxon England 13 (1984), pp. 65–96. 26 The Blickling Homilies, ed. R.J. Kelly (London, 2003), pp. 66 –7. U 27 Blickling Homilies, pp. 78–81 (my translation). The Old English word godweb can be translated ‘luxury textile’, and doubtless describes cloth made from or embellished with silk. The word is used as a gloss for a range of Latin words with connotations of silk, e.g. purpura, serica, ostrum, ostrinus (s.v. Old English Corpus <http://ets.umdl.umich.edu/cgi/o/ oec/oec-idx?index=Fragmentary&type=simple&q1=godweb&restrict=Cameron+number&res- val=&class=All&size=First+100> accessed 21/2/2006). For a useful discussion of the meaning of purpura, a word often glossed as godweb, see Dodwell, Anglo-Saxon Art, pp. 145–50. 28 William of Malmesbury, De gestis regum Anglorum, ed. W. Stubbs, 2 vols (London, 1887), I, pp. 269 –70. Early Medieval Europe   () © 2007 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd  134 Robin Fleming broad bands of fancy textiles.29 The elaborate borders on these clothes appear to have been stitched onto garments fashioned from linen or wool, something that would have minimized the use of expensive trim and maximized its effect. Still, bordered garments were rich-men’s attire, and peasants drawn labouring in the period’s calendars never wear them. 30 The banded style was not only an elite style, but an international one, embraced by the great across Europe. High-status fashions current in late Anglo-Saxon England were related to those developed in ninth- century Francia, as well as to dress current at the German court: F certainly, in ninth-, tenth- and eleventh-century Frankish, Ottonian O and Flemish manuscripts we catch glimpses of elegantly clad gentlemen in short, banded tunics.31 These fashions, in turn, bore a distant affinity O PR 29 The Old English Illustrated Hexateuch: British Museum Cotton Claudius B. IV, ed. C.R. Dodwell and P. Clemoes (Copenhagen, 1974), passim; Bayeux Tapestry, ed. D.M. Wilson (New York, 1985), passim. The head of the line of laymen awaiting the Last Judgement in New Minster’s Liber Vitae has a tunic with a decorative band at its bottom (London, British Library, Stowe 944, fol. 6v, printed in D.M. Wilson, Anglo-Saxon Art: from the Seventh Century to the D Norman Conquest (London, 1984), no. 232), as does the man who spears Christ’s side in London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius C. VI, fol. 13r (printed in Wilson, Anglo-Saxon Art, TE no. 234), and those serving at a feast on fol. 5v (printed in R. Fleming, ‘Lords and Labour’, in W. Davies (ed.), Britain and Ireland in the Ninth through Eleventh Centuries (Oxford, 2003), pp. 107–38, no. 4.5). Similarly, the ancestors of Christ, depicted in the Boulogne Gospels (Boulogne-sur-Mer, Bibiothèque Municipale, 11, fol. 11r–v), are wearing cloaks edged with coloured bands (printed in T.H. Ohlgren, Anglo-Saxon Textual Illustrations (Kalamazoo, EC MI, 1992), nos. 5.19, 5.20). Powerful figures in the Old English Hexteuch, British Library, Cotton Claudius Biv, fol. 13r, also wear highly ornate banded garments (Fleming, ‘Lords and Labour’, Fig. 4.4). King David is wearing a bordered garment (in M. Budny, Insular, Anglo-Saxon, and Early Anglo-Norman Manuscript Art at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge: An Illustrated Catalogue, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1997), II, Plate 11). Women also wore banded garments. See, R for example, the portrait of Countess Judith in Fulda, Hessische Landesbibliothek, Aa 21, fol. 2r (printed in A. Riolini-Unger and B. Bushart, Suevia sacra: frühe Kunst in Schwaben R (Augsburg, 1973), no. 173, Fig. 159.). There is also specific mention in a late Anglo-Saxon will of a blue robe that was untrimmed at the bottom (blæwenan cyrtel is neapene unrendod ) (The Will of Æthelgifu, ed. D. Whitelock (Oxford, 1968), pp. 12–13). O 30 See, for example, illustrations in the late Anglo-Saxon calendars London, British Library, Cotton Julius A. VI, fol. 5v and London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius B. V, fols 5r, 8v (printed in Wilson, Anglo-Saxon Art, nos. 235–7). The Stuttgart Psalter, produced in the first quarter C of the ninth century, also consistently portrays kings and other powerful figures in banded robes (e.g. The Stuttgart Psalter, ed. E.T. de Wald (Princeton, 1930), fols. 2v, 11v, 22r, 32r, N 134r). Peasants in the Psalter, on the other hand, are in unbanded clothing (e.g. Stuttgart Psalter, fols. 124v, 146r, 156r, 164v). 31 So Count Dietrich II of Holland is depicted in the donation miniature, added to the Egmont U Gospels in the late tenth century (The Hague, Koninkijke Bibliotheek, 761 F 1, fol. 214v, printed in Brandt, Bernward von Hildesheim, II, no. V-8); and Henry the Wrangler, duke of Bavaria, in the Bamberg Rule Book (Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek, Lit. 142, fol. 4v, printed in ibid., I, no. 5). An eleventh-century French parallel of this dress is found in the illustrated life of St Aubin of Anger, Paris, Bibliothèque National, Nal. 1390 (printed in F. Piponnier and P. Mane, Dress in the Middle Ages (New Haven, 1997), no. 21 and Das Reich der Salier, 1024–1125: Katalog zur Ausstellung des Landes Rheinland-Pfalz (Sigmaringen, 1992), no. V29). For a discussion of high-status Carolingian clothing, see Tissu et vêtement: 5000 ans de savoir-faire (Guiry-en-Vexin, 1986), pp. 119 –29. Early Medieval Europe   () © 2007 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd  Silk in late Anglo-Saxon England 135 to those found at the Byzantine court, 32 and in elegant circles through- out the Islamic world.33 Of course, there is always the possibility that costumes depicted in English manuscripts are the result of artistic convention rather than ‘real life’, but in the case of the banded style, there is considerable material evidence as well. Archaeologists have excavated remnants of high-status, silk-trimmed clothing from some seventy-five tenth- and eleventh-century Scandinavian graves. 34 Here, Carolingian, English and Byzantine dress had heavily influenced elite fashions, 35 and here we can F see the ways in which the rich trimmed their wool and linen garments O with elaborate textile borders. Tablet-woven silk, gold, and silver deco- rative trim, for example, edged a number of burial costumes in rural O cemeteries, including that of a wealthy Danish woman placed in the ground in the second half of the tenth century. 36 Similar tablet-woven PR braids were recovered from almost four dozen graves in Birka’s ceme- teries.37 In other Scandinavian burials we find evidence for the use of bands of imported silk cloth as trim. Wool cloth excavated from the D 32 For a detailed eleventh-century depiction of the clothes worn by the Byzantine emperor and TE four of his courtiers, see Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Coislin 79, fol. 2r (printed in Evans and Wixom (eds), Glory of Byzantium no. 143). For a discussion of this illustration, see H. Maguire, ‘Images of the Court’, in ibid., pp. 182–91, at pp. 184–5. For the banded style as a fashion restricted by law to late Roman imperial officers, see Delmaire, ‘Le vêtement’, pp. 89, 95. 33 A sixth- or seventh-century Iranian wool riding habit, excavated at Antinoë, is trimmed with EC patterned silk (M. Flury-Lemberg, ‘A Recent Silk Find from Antinoë’, in I. Estham and M. Nockert (eds), Opera textilia variorum temporum (Stockholm, 1988), pp. 33 – 40, at pp. 35, 38 and nos. 11 and 12). Strips of silk trim, probably at one time appliquéd onto some other fabric clothing also survive from eighth- or ninth-century Egypt (Buckton, Byzantium, pp. 125–6 and no. 138). Similar silk strips have been preserved in church treasuries. Some, dating from the R seventh or eighth century, were recovered from the shrine of St Madelbert (J. Lafountaine- Dosogne, Splendeur de Byzance (Brussels, 1982), p. 212 and no. Tx6). Tenth-century bands R survive from the Schlosskirke in Quedlingburg (R. Schorta, Monochrome Seidengewebe des hohen Mittelalters: Untersuchungen zu Webtechnik und Musterung (Berlin, 2001), no. 50). For two other unprovenanced bands, see M. Martiniani-Reber, Lyon, Musée historique de tissus: O soieries Sassanides, Coptes et Byzantines Ve–XIe siècles (Paris, 1986), no. 98 and S. Desrosiers, Soieries et autres textiles de l’antiquité au XVIe siècle (Paris, 2004), no. 127. Pattern-woven silk bands have also been excavated from Viking Age Dublin (F.A. Pritchard, ‘Silk Braids and Textiles of the C Viking Age from Dublin’, Archaeological Textiles, NESAT 2 (1988), pp. 149 – 61, at p. 158). 34 A. Hedeager Krag, ‘Denmark-Europe: Dress and Fashion in Denmark’s Viking Age’, Northern N Archaeological Textiles, NESAT 7 (2005), pp. 29–35, at p. 30 and n. 2. 35 E. Andersson, Tools for Textile Production from Birka and Hedeby, Birka Studies 8 (Stockholm, 2003); A. Hedeager Madsen, ‘Women’s Dress in the Viking Period in Denmark, Based on U the Tortoise Brooches and Textile Remains’, Textiles in Northern Archaeology, NESAT 3 (1990), pp. 101– 6, at pp. 101–5; A. Hedeager Krag, ‘New Light on a Viking Garment from Ladby, Denmark’, North European Symposium for Archaeological Textiles, NESAT 8 (2004), pp. 81– 6, at pp. 83– 4. 36 L. Ræder Knudsen, ‘Brocaded Tablet-Woven Bands: Same Appearance, Different Weaving Technique, Hørning, Hvilehøj and Mammen’, Northern Archaeological Textiles, NESAT 7 (Oxford, 2005), pp. 36 – 43, at p. 38 and no. 7.3. 37 A. Geijer, ‘The Textile Finds from Birka’, Acta Archaeologica 50 (1980), pp. 209–22, at pp. 213–19; Andersson, Tools for Textile Production, p. 38. Early Medieval Europe   () © 2007 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd  136 Robin Fleming Oseberg ship burial, for example, which dates to 834, was appliquéd with long, narrow strips of eighth-century, Byzantine silk. 38 By the late-tenth century combinations of tablet weaving, embroidery, and silk bands could all be found on the same deluxe outfit. One Danish example, in particular, is a stunning witness to this development. It comes from the grave of a wealthy man buried, according to dendro dates, in the winter of 970 –1 in the famous chamber grave excavated at Bjerringhøy, Mammen. Those who oversaw the great man’s funeral dressed him in a sleeved kaftan or shirt finished with padded, red silk F cuffs, embellished with gold, silver and silk tablet-woven bands. His O cloak was edged in some places with lines of embroidered acanthus leaves and in others with rows of masks or faces. It was also decorated O with fancy tablet-woven gold and silk ribbons, things that can also be found on Cnut the Great’s cloak in New Minster’s liber vitae.39 So, in PR this one grave we find tablet-woven silk, gold, and silver trim, fancy embroidery, and strips of silk cloth. Less material evidence for the banded style survives in England, but what there is, is consistent with this Scandinavian material and with the D illustrations found in English manuscripts. Archaeologists, for example, have discovered tablet-woven gold-and-silk braids and gold embroidery TE on the funeral garb of a half dozen people buried at Old Minster, Winchester in the tenth and eleventh centuries. 40 Silk-cloth trims in England have also turned up outside of cemetery contexts. A number of silk ribbons have been excavated from tenth- and eleventh-century EC York, Winchester, London and Lincoln, and they probably once served as fancy edgings around cuffs and tunic openings. 41 We also know that R 38 A.S. Ingstad, ‘Tekstilene i Osebergskipet’, in A.E. Christensen, A.S. Ingstad and B. Myhre (eds), Osebergdronningens Grav (Oslo, 1992), pp. 176 –208, at p. 182. R 39 For a description of this grave and its contents, see J. Brøndsted, ‘Danish Inhumation Graves of the Viking Age: A Survey’, Acta Archaeologica 7 (1936), pp. 81–328, at pp. 106 –7. For a discussion of the textiles, see M. Hald, Ancient Danish Textiles from Bogs and Burials, 2nd edn O (Copenhagen, 1980), pp. 102, 106, 231–33; E. Munksgaard, ‘The Embroideries from Bjerringhøy, Mammen’, Festskrift til Torleif Sjøvold på 70-årsdagen, Universitetets oldsaksamlings skrifter, ny rekke 5 (1984), pp. 159 –71; E. Østergård, ‘Textilfragmenterne fra Mammengraven’, in C M. Iversen (ed.), Mammen: Grav, kunst og samfund i vikingetid (Århus, 1991), pp. 123 – 38 and nos. 1a−18e). For the depiction of Cnut, see London, British Library, Stowe 944, fol. 6r N (printed in The Golden Age of Anglo-Saxon Art 966–1066, eds J. Backhouse, D.H. Turner and L. Webster (London, 1984), no. 62). 40 No textile threads survive from these braids, only the thin strips of gold wire once wrapped around U the fibre (M. Biddle, Object and Economy in Medieval Winchester: Artefacts from Medieval Winchester, 2 vols, Winchester Studies 7 (Oxford, 1990), II, pp. 468–71). The gold border on a fancy headdress, found on a grave inside the church itself, is printed in ibid., II, no. xxvia. 41 Walton Rogers, ‘Textile Production’, p. 69; Walton, Textiles, Cordage and Raw Fibre, pp. 367– 8 and no. XXIXb; Biddle, Object and Economy, II, pp. 472–4. Similar silk braids and ribbons have also been found in Dublin (Pritchard, ‘Silk Braids’, pp. 150 – 8). For pictures of the silk ribbons and cords found in the Milk Street excavation in London, see B. Hobley, ‘Lundenwic and Lundenburg: Two Cities Rediscovered’, in R. Hodges and B. Hobley, The Rebirth of Towns in the West AD 700 –1050, Council for British Archaeology 68 (1988), 69 – 82, Figs 39a– d. Early Medieval Europe   () © 2007 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd  Silk in late Anglo-Saxon England 137 some wealthy women had chests full of fancy clothes. One tenth-century matron, for example, bequeathed not one, but three silk robes (godwebbenan cyrtlas) to her kinswomen;42 and there are reports that the Italians (of all people) were stunned by the magnificence of a visiting Yorkshire thegn’s attire.43 And if the textile finds from Dublin are anything to go by, silk scarves were ubiquitous as townswomen’s headdresses and silk thread was readily available to women of leisure, who used it to hem garments and make fancy braids.44 It was not only townspeople and aristocrats who wore banded clothes: F English kings wore them too, and had done so as early as Æthelstan’s O reign. The author of the Vita Ædwardi Regis, writing from the vantage point of the mid-eleventh century, relates that ‘it had not been the O custom for earlier English kings in bygone days to wear clothes of great splendour, apart from cloaks and robes adorned at the top with gold in PR the national style’.45 By the mid-tenth century, however, Anglo-Saxon kings not only wore banded costumes, but they sometimes sported clothes made entirely from silk. By this time kings across Europe had adopted all-silk clothing. Indeed, numerous textual witnesses describe the use of all-silk clothes at the Ottonian court, 46 and there is interest- D ing material evidence as well. The tunic, for example, that the German TE emperor Henry II (d. 1024) is said to have worn for his coronation is still extant. The body of the tunic is white, patterned-silk damask, and its trim is fashioned from broad bands of red silk, embroidered with metallic-gold and purple-silk thread.47 Two magnificent eleventh-century EC robes associated with Henry II are also still at hand, both heavily embroidered silks. The king of Hungary’s coronation mantle, too, survives from this period, as does the body of a silk robe once belonging to King R Ladislaus of Hungary (d. 1095).48 It is hardly surprising, given silk’s popularity at eleventh-century courts across the west, to find English R kings following this fashion as best they could on their own important ceremonial occasions. O 42 Whitelock, Will of Æthelgifu, pp. 12–13. C 43 Life of King Edward, pp. 56 –7. 44 Rogers, Textile Production, p. 1802; Ræder Knudsen, ‘Brocaded Tablet-Woven Bands, pp. 36 – 41. N 45 Life of King Edward, pp. 24 –5. This is most dramatically depicted in the portrait of Edgar the Peaceable found in London, British Library, Cotton Vespasian A. VIII, fol. 2v (printed in Wilson, Anglo-Saxon Art, no. 261). U 46 For a list, see Muthesius, Byzantine Silk Weaving, p. 126. 47 As if all of this were not enough, the tunic was lined in parrot-decorated silk (A.F. Kendrick, Catalogue of Early Medieval Woven Fabrics (London, 1925), pp. 50, 53; K. Guth, Die Heiligen Heinrich und Kunigunde: Leben, Legende, Kult und Kunst (Bamberg, 1986), p. 106). 48 For Henry II’s robes, see Dodwell, Pictorial Arts, pp. 28– 9. For the King of Hungary’s robes, see S. Kovács and Z. Lovag, The Hungarian Crown and Other Regalia (Budapest, 1980); <http://www.fotomarburg.de/gaeste/szelenyi/katalog1.html> accessed 20/2/2006. For King Ladislaus’s robe, see M. Flury-Lemberg, Textile Conservation and Research (Bern, 1988), pp. 176 – 8 and nos. 308 –20; Schorta, Monochrome Seidengewebe, Fig. 64. Early Medieval Europe   () © 2007 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd  138 Robin Fleming Although no royal vestments survive in England, monastic artists there drew them. The portrait of King Edgar accompanying one of the two extant manuscripts of the Regularis Concordia shows the king in what looks to be a long, silk-damask gown, sewn from at least two different patterned fabrics.49 Biblical kings in English manuscripts also begin to appear in brocade robes. The Boulogne Gospels’ King David, for example, wears a rosette-patterned gown.50 There are textual witnesses for this practice, too. We know, for example, that King Edgar wore special vestments during his coronation, including a silk cloak that he F eventually gave to Glastonbury Abbey. 51 More interesting, the Liber O Eliensis reports that Edgar wore silk buskins (caligae): silk buskins are special clothes borrowed from a repertoire of pontifical and imperial O insignia.52 Edward the Confessor also wore silk. Fragments of a proto- damask silk, woven in a pattern of repeating panthers and griffins, were PR discovered when his tomb was opened in the seventeenth century, and they apparently come from an article of clothing. 53 All-silk clothing seems to have been banded in exactly the same way that wool or linen clothes were. This was true for Henry II’s coronation D tunic, but it was also the case for the clothes in which the Confessor’s contemporary, Pope Clement II (d. 1047), was buried. The dead Clement TE wore a yellow silk dalmatic, embellished with strips of elephant-patterned silk.54 The Pope’s silk gloves were similarly decorated with a contrasting silk trim.55 And an illustration of Henry the Wrangler shows him in what can only be a banded, all-silk outfit. 56 EC By Edward the Confessor’s reign it seems that the king wore elaborate textiles not only for ceremonial attire, but as part of his everyday wear. According to the contemporary Vita Ædwardi Regis: R [Queen] Edith, from the very beginning of her marriage, clad [the king] R in raiments either embroidered by herself or of her choice, and of such a kind that it could not be thought that even Solomon in all his glory was O ever thus arrayed. In the ornamentation of these no count was made of the cost of the precious stones, rare gems and shining pearls that were C N 49 London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A. III, fol. 2b (printed in Golden Age, no. 28). 50 Boulogne Gospels, Boulogne-sur-Mer, Bibiothèque Municipale, 11, fol. 10v (printed in Ohlgren, Anglo-Saxon Textual Illustrations, no. 5.18). U 51 William of Malmesbury, The Early History of Glastonbury: An Edition, Translation, and Study of William of Malmesbury’s De Antiquitate Glastonie Ecclesie, ed. John Scott (Woodbridge, 1981), Ch. 62. 52 Liber Eliensis, Bk III, Ch. 50; P. Johnstone, High Fashion in the Church: The Place of Church Vestments in the History of Art from the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century (Leeds, 2002), p. 15. 53 Buckton, Byzantium, pp. 151–3 and no. 166. 54 S. Müller-Christensen, Das Grab des Papstes Clemens II. im Dom zu Bamberg (Munich, 1960), pp. 41–4 and nos. 25–30. 55 Müller-Christensen, Das Grab, pp. 50 – 1 and nos. 52–4. 56 Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek, Lit. 142, fol. 4v (printed in Brandt, Bernward von Hildesheim, I, Fig. 5). Early Medieval Europe   () © 2007 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd  Silk in late Anglo-Saxon England 139 used. As regards mantles, tunics, boots and shoes, the amount of gold which flowed in the various complicated floral designs was not weighed. 57 One of the things that stands out in this passage is the emphasis on gold embroidery and the use of jewels and pearls. This fashion is sometimes depicted in contemporary illustrations, as we can see in the Encomuium Emmae Reginae’s portraits of Edward the Confessor’s mother, his half-brother, and Edward himself, while still an æthling.58 Texts also describe jewelled cloths, including those of Tovi the Proud’s wife and F King Edgar’s daughter.59 Although no jewel-, enamel- or pearl-sewn silks O survive from England, a handful exist elsewhere, including a tenth- century relic bag, the eleventh-century orphrey (those highly ornate O bands found on chasubles, copes, and dalmatics) attached to the so- called chasuble of St Vitalis (see Fig. 2), and the King of Hungary’s PR coronation robe.60 Laypeople were not the only ones with voracious appetites for silk. When distinguished churchmen performed the liturgy, celebrated important religious feasts, or made appearances at court, they, too, wore banded, silk costumes.61 Vestments, like secular clothing, had been D TE 57 Life of King Edward, pp. 24–5. 58 London, British Library, Additional 33241 (printed in Golden Age, no. 148). Another similarly dressed man is pictured in the eleventh-century Norman manuscript Avranches, Bibliothèque Municipale, 90, fol. 1v (printed in J.J.G. Alexander, Norman Illumination at Mont St Michel EC 966 –1100 (Oxford, 1970), no. 24a). 59 The Waltham Chronicle: An Account of the Discovery of our Holy Cross at Montacute and its Conveyance to Waltham, ed. L. Watkiss and M. Chibnall (Oxford, 1994), Ch. 13; Goscelin, ‘La légende de Ste. Edith en prose et vers par le moine Goscelin’, ed. A. Wilmart, Analecta Bollandiana 56 (1938), p. 44. R 60 For the relic bag, see L. von Wilckens, Die Textilen Künste von der Spätantike bis um 1500 (Munich, 1991), no. 194. For the chasuble, see Flury-Lemberg, Textile Conservation, p. 158 and R nos. 264–73. For the King of Hungary’s robe, see <http://www.fotomarburg.de/gaeste/szelenyi/ zoom-m13.html>, accessed 20/2/2006 (although the sewn pearls may date to the twelfth century (Kovác and Lovag, The Hungarian Crown, pp. 75–9)). The gold embroidered, silken O slippers of both Sebír bishop of Prague (d. 1067) and St Gotthard also survive (N. Brazantová, ‘Romanesque and Early Gothic Silk Textiles from Czech Sources’, in P. Charvát and J. Prosecky (eds), Ibrahim ibn Ya’qub at-Turtushi: Christianity, Islam and Judaism Meet in East- C Central Europe, c.800 –1300 AD (Prague, 1996), pp. 92 – 102, at p. 96 and no. 23; S. Müller- Christensen (ed.), Sakrale Gewänder des Mittelalters (Munich, 1955), no. 14 and Plate 5). Based N on stitching holes, Pritchard suggests that some of the silk bands excavated in Dublin might have also been sewn with pearls or gems (Pritchard, ‘Silk Braids’, p. 158). 61 Johnstone, High Fashion, pp. 7– 18. Bands of patterned silk are often found sewn inside U chasubles, so that when the priest raised his arms during Mass, he would reveal the trim (Flury-Lemberg, Textile Conservation, pp. 20–1 and no. 2). For official attitudes of the church on clerical dress in the early Middle Ages, see B. Effros, ‘Appearance and Ideology: Creating Distinctions between Clerics and Lay Persons in Early Medieval Gaul’, in Koslin and Snyder, Encountering Medieval Textiles, pp. 7–24. For the wholesale adoption of Roman imperial dress and the ‘Roman-ing up’ of vestments during the Carolingian period, see G. Lobrichon, ‘Le vêtement liturgique des éveques au IXe siècle’, in Chausson and Inglebert (eds), Costume et société, pp. 129– 41, at pp. 140 – 1. Books in this period were also ‘dressed’ in silk. For some examples, see Schorta, Monochrome Seidengewebe, nos. 8, 46, 143, 148, 150, and Figs 33–4. Early Medieval Europe   () © 2007 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd  Color image 140 Robin Fleming F O O PR Fig. 2 A detail of the magnificent jewel- and pearl-sewn, eleventh-century orphrey attached to the so-called chasuble of St Vitalis (from M. Flury-Lemberg, Textile Conservation and Research (Bern, 1988), no. 265) D TE banded from at least the tenth century. It was in the tenth century, for example, that the amice commonly came to have a gold edging; and EC chasubles, which were quite plain, began to have narrow decorative bands at their neck openings. Then, from the eleventh century on, orphreys grew commonplace.62 On the Continent a surprising number of silk and /or banded vestments survive from before 1100 (see Fig. 2).63 R R 62 Johnstone, High Fashion, pp. 8–13. See Flury-Lemberg, Textile Conservation, pp. 158 –75 and nos. 251–90 for an extant eleventh-century orphrey. 63 Inventories of many continental church treasuries list large numbers of silk vestments. For an O example, see Muthesius, ‘Silk and Saints’, p. 354, n. 34. For a general discussion of these early, silk liturgical garments, see Muthesius, Byzantine Silk Weaving, p. 122. The following is a list of extant vestments dating before 1100. For a fragment of the chasuble of St Adelbert II, see C Schorta, Monochrome Seidengewebe, nos. 47–8. For the chasuble of Bishop Albuin, see Müller- Christensen, Sakrale Gewänder, no. 17 and Plates 7–8. For the mantel of St Alexander from N the Abbey of Ottobruren, see R. Baumstark, with B. Borkopp, R. Kahsnitz and M. Restle, Rom und Byzanz: Schatzkammerstücke aus bayerischen Sammlungen (Munich, 1998), no. 24. For the eleventh-century chasuble of St Ambrose, see Baumstark, Rom und Byzanz, no. 30. U For the stola of St Anno, see G. Sporbeck, Die liturgischen Gewänder, 11. bis 19. Jahrhundert (Cologne, 2001), pp. 55–62 and no. 1. For the chasuble of St Bernard of Brauweiler, see Martiniani-Reber, Lyon, nos. 101, 103–4; Cambridge History of Western Textiles, I, Plate 9. For the alb of St Bernulf of Utrecht, see Flury-Lemberg, Textile Conservation, pp. 190–1 and nos. 322–30. For the chasuble of St Bernward, see Brandt, Bernward von Hildesheim, II, nos. VIII-33 and IX-21 (although this may date to the twelfth century (Schorta, Monochrome Seidengewebe, no. 115 and Fig. 50)). For Pope Clement II’s liturgical outfit, see Müller-Christensen, Das Grab, pp. 33–55, Plates I–III and nos. 15–45, 49–62. For the chasuble of St Cnut of Denmark, see Muthesius, Byzantine Silk Weaving, M95 and no. 94b. For the chasuble of St Ebbo, Early Medieval Europe   () © 2007 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd  Silk in late Anglo-Saxon England 141 The alb of St Bernulf of Utrecht (d. 1056) gives some idea of what the most lavish English vestments might have looked like. Every seam on this fine, linen alb was embellished with gold and silk tablet-woven bands.64 Its stunning gold trim is reminiscent of the description in an Ely Abbey inventory of a silk cloak given to that community by King Edgar, which was embellished with so much precious-metal thread that we are told that it looked like a hauberk. 65 We have clear evidence that English churchmen were wearing elaborate vestments by the late Anglo-Saxon period. There are numerous F illustrations of bejewelled, banded vestments in English manuscripts; 66 O and we know that this was more than artistic convention because communities fondly remembered a number of eleventh-century O abbots and bishops for having given chasubles decorated with jewelled PR see Guillou and Durand, Byzance, pp. 378–9 and no. 286; Schorta, Monochrome Seidengewebe, nos. 177–8. For the tunic of St Gerlach of Valkenburg, see M. Flury-Lemberg, ‘De tunicella van de heilige Gerlach’, in A.B. Mulder-Bakker (ed.), De kluizenaar in de eik Gerlach va Houthem en zijn verering (Hilversum, 1995), pp. 101–8. For the chasuble of St Gotthard, see D Baumstark, Rom und Byzanz, no. 69. For the chasuble of Heribert, see Reich der Salier, p. 331 and no. vitrine 1–2. For the chasuble of Pope John VIII, see L. Dolcini, ‘San Marco papa’, TE pp. 1–51 and no. 1. For the dalmatic of St Kunigund, see Desrosiers, Soieries, no. 150; Schorta, Monochrome Seidengewebe, no. 9. For the chasuble of St Marc from the Abbey of San Salva- tore, see P. Williamson, The Medieval Treasury (London, 1986), p. 59. For the dalmatic of Bishop Meinwerk of Paderborn, see Schorta, Monochrome Seidengewebe, nos. 151–2. For a possible fragment of the vestments of either Abbot Morard or Abbot Ingon of St-Germain- EC des-Prés, see Desrosiers, Soieries, nos. 71, 73, 122. For a possible fragment of the chasuble of Rothos bishop of Paderborn, see Schorta, Monochrome Seidengewebe, no. 155 and Fig. 57. For the chasuble of St Sixtus, see E. Jägers, Die Sixtus-Kasel in Vreden: Untersuchung und Restau- rierung einer mittelalterlichen Gewandreliquie (Bonn, 1997), nos. 1–74b. For the chasuble given by King Stephen of Hungary in 1031 see Kovác and Lovag, Hungarian Crown, pp. 58 – 82. R For the chasuble of St Ulrich, see S. Müller-Christensen, ‘Liturgische Gewänder mit dem Namen des Heiligen Ulrich’, Augusta 955–1955 (Augsburg, 1955), pp. 53–60 and Plates 13–16; R Schorta, Monochrome Seidengewebe, nos. 3–5, 7 and Figs 39, 54. For the chasuble of St Vitalis, see M. Flury-Lemberg, Textile Conservation, pp. 158–75 and nos. 264–73. For the chasuble of Archbishop Willigis, see Brandt, Bernward von Hildesheim, II, no. IV-1; Baumstark, Rom und O Byzanz, no. 65. For the chasuble of Bishop Wolfgang of Regensburg, see Schorta, Monochrome Seidengewebe, no. 163. For the eleventh-century German chasuble in Boston, see K. von Lerber, ‘A Medieval Bell-Shaped Chasuble from St Peter in Salzburg’, Journal of the Museum C of Fine Arts, Boston 4 (1992), pp. 27–51. For three other anonymous German chasubles, see Schorta, Monochrome Seidengewebe, no. 80; E. Jordan-Fahrbach, ‘Eine “Seidengewebte Decke N mit grünem geflechtartigem Gitter” – eine mehrfach veränderte Glockenkasel aus dem 8.− 9. Jahrhundert”, in L. Bender Jørgensen, J. Banck-Burgess and A. Rast-Eicher (eds), Textilien aus Archäologie und Geshichte (Neumünster, 2003), pp. 148–64 and nos. 1 and 4; Williamson, U Medieval Treasury, p. 85. For the pluvial from Halberstädt, see U. Bednarz, P. Findeisen, H.-J. Krause, B. Pregla and P. Sevrugian, Kostbarkeiten aus dem Domschatz zu Halberstadt (Halle, 2001), pp. 32–3. 64 Flury-Lemberg, Textile Conservation, pp. 190 – 1 and nos. 322 – 30. 65 Liber Eliensis, Bk III, Ch. 50. 66 London, Lambeth Palace Library, 200 (part ii), fol. 68r (printed in Golden Age, no. 30); London, British Library, Additional 49598, fol. 118v (in printed Dodwell, Anglo-Saxon Art, no. D); London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius C VI, fol. 71v (printed in Dodwell, Anglo-Saxon Art, no. 49). Early Medieval Europe   () © 2007 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd  142 Robin Fleming orphreys.67 Some of the tenth-century tablet-woven braids, moreover, found in St Cuthbert’s tomb encircled the holyman’s wrists, so it seems that when his body was re-dressed in the tenth century, it was put into a banded garment.68 Cuthbert’s clothes, are, alas, rare English survivals, since Henrician reformers oversaw the destruction of ancient vestments.69 Medieval inventory lists, though, often describe Anglo-Saxon vestments embroidered with jewels, gold thread and pearls, 70 as well as ones fash- ioned from silk, especially pattern-woven silk. 71 Because high-status churchmen wanted silk, laypeople in England F gave their own precious garments as pious donations.72 King Edgar, for O O 67 Most Benedictine communities by the eleventh century needed large collections of vestments. The Glastonbury consuetudines suggest this, when they stipulate that on some feast days all of the monks wear copes, and on others all wear albs (William of Malmesbury Early History, PR Ch. 80). Doubtless because of this necessity, many bishops and abbots bequeathed silk vestments to their communities. Lanfranc, for example, left an extraordinary collection of vestments to Christchurch. Two of the three chasubles he gave were later burned for their gold and jewels, bringing the community £138 12s. Another of his vestments, one of the four copes he left Christchurch, realized £116 6s 7d when burned. Another of the copes was black, decorated with gems and gold, and embellished with fifty-one silver-gilt bells. Another had a D fastening made from a topaz and four emeralds ( J.W. Legg and W.H. St.J. Hope, Inventories of Christchurch, Canterbury (Westminster, 1902), p. 13 and n. 2). Lanfranc also gave a fancy TE dalmatic (ibid., p. 57). For other examples of the donation of vestments by churchmen, see Hugh Candidus, The Chronicle of Hugh Candidus a Monk of Peterborough, ed. W.T. Mellows (Oxford, 1949), p. 66; Legg and Hope, Inventories, p. 51; W.T. Simpson, ‘Two Inventories of the Cathedral Church of St Paul’s, London’, Archaeologia 50 (1887), pp. 439 –524, at p. 482. 68 The Relics of Saint Cuthbert, ed. C.F. Battiscombe (Oxford, 1956), p. 434. EC 69 Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the Period of the Reformation, ed. W.H. Frere, 3 vols (London, 1910), III, pp. 255, 285, 311, 332. 70 Earl Harold gave one such vestment to the canons of Waltham Holy Cross. The canons called this magnificent garment ‘The Lord Spake unto Me’. It was decorated with scenes of Christ’s nativity embroidered with twenty-six marks worth of gold (Waltham Chronicle, R Ch. 16). Other vestments given by wealthy patrons, although they may or may not have been silk, were expensively dyed, like the red chasuble Countess Gytha gave Ely Abbey (Liber R Eliensis, Bk III, Ch. 50). 71 In many of the surviving inventory lists, these vestments are not specifically called silk, but are described, rather, by the patterns of their weave. In the eleventh century Glastonbury, for O example, had two copes decorated with lions and a set of vestments ornamented with white birds (William of Malmesbury Early History, Chs 67–8), and St Paul’s had a chasuble woven with lions and birds, which a thirteenth-century inventory claims belonged to St Ælfheah’s C (d. 1012) (Simpson, ‘Two Inventories’, p. 482). These patterned vestments sound like the description of tenth-century Byzantine silks, detailed in the Book of Gifts, which, we are told, N were woven with the figures of flowers, trees, ducks, birds, eagles, winged beasts, lions, leopards, horses, rhinoceroses, wild goats, elephants, unicorns, hunters and horsemen (G. al-H. al-Qaddumi (trans.), Book of Gifts and Rarities (Kitab al-Hadaya wa al-Tuhaf ): Selections Compiled in the U Fifteenth Century from an Eleventh-Century Manuscript on Gifts and Treasures (Cambridge, MA, 1996), pp. 100 –1). 72 The church had long encouraged lay people to give the gift of silk. Indeed, at the Council of Aix-la-Chapelle (836), laypeople were specifically admonished to leave their silk to the church rather than their heirs (Guillou and Durand, Byzance, p. 371). One such benefaction, a pillow made from a swatch of Byzantine silk, was lovingly embroidered by Alpheide, sister of Charles the Bald, for the long-dead St Remigius. Her stitched inscription speaks to some of the motives behind silk giving: that she had ‘finished this little cushion by which the gentle and venerable head of St Remigius might be supported and throughout relieved through the Early Medieval Europe   () © 2007 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd  Silk in late Anglo-Saxon England 143 example, bequeathed one of his gold-embroidered cloaks and his hose to the monks of Ely, who remade them into a chasuble and a gold-worked alb.73 We also know that Queens Emma and Edith and Countess Godgifu each presented bishoprics with copes and chasubles, but what they may, in fact, have given were their own fancy garments to be rework into vestments.74 In other cases, secular clothing may have been used by monks as is. A king or queen, so Elizabeth Coatsworth has convincingly argued, probably wore the embroidered girdle found in St Cuthbert’s coffin before it was used to clothe the saint. 75 Whether remade or used F as is, we also find this practice a common one outside of England. Henry O II’s Sternenmantel, for example, after it was given to Bamberg cathedral, was used as a cope, and the pallium of King Ladislaus of Hungary was O reworked into a chasuble for Zagreb cathedral. 76 Valuable garb also moved in the other direction. Just after the Norman PR Conquest, Queen Edith demanded and got a ‘wondrously worked’ gold-embroidered chasuble and a choir cope and stole banded with gold and jewels from Abingdon Abbey.77 During the same period, William the Conqueror confiscated a chasuble that the disgraced Archbishop D TE merits of Alpheide. May her prayers be conveyed beyond the stars.’ (Quoted in E. Coatsworth, ‘The Embroideries from the Tomb of St Cuthbert’, in N.J. Higham and D.H. Hill (eds), Edward the Elder 899–924 (London, 2001), pp. 292–306, at p. 299.) Another silk donation, a chasuble that was probably given as a gift by Emperor Henry II or Emperor Henry III, has an embroidered inscription that reads ‘Henry the sinner has given this noble garment to St EC Peter’s altar, that it may be his helper’ (von Lerber, ‘Medieval Bell-Shaped Chasuble’, p. 27). 73 Liber Eliensis, Bk III, Ch. 50. For other examples of royal gifts of silk in late Anglo-Saxon England, see Liber Eliensis, Bk III, Ch. 50; William of Malmesbury Early History, Chs 62, 64; and references below in n. 75. For examples of aristocratic gifts, see Waltham Chronicle, Ch. 16; Liber Eliensis, Bk III, Ch. 50; W.S. Simpson, ‘Two Inventories of the Cathedral Church of R St Paul’s, London’, Archaeologia 50 (1887), pp. 439 –524, at p. 482; Legg and Hope, Inventories, p. 53; and references below in n. 74. R 74 R. Fleming, ‘Christchurch’s Sisters and Brothers: An Edition and Discussion of the Canter- bury Obituary Lists’, in M.A. Meyer (ed.), The Culture of Christendom: Studies in Medieval History in Memory of Denis L.T. Bethell (London, 1993), pp. 115–53, at p. 122; Simpson, ‘Two O Inventories’, p. 482. 75 Coatsworth, ‘Embroideries from the Tomb’, p. 305. Similarly, the wife of one of Cnut’s stallers had used her girdle (‘of purest gold of the kind which women of the highest rank C wore in those days, and it was adorned with a marvellous decoration of gemstones’) to dress a statue of the crucified Christ (Waltham Chronicle, Ch. 13). In the twelfth century both N Waltham Holy Cross and Westminster Abbey possessed chasubles that had once served as Edward the Confessor’s cloaks (F. Barlow, Edward the Confessor (Berkeley, 1970), pp. 279 – 80, 311–12; N. Rogers, ‘The Waltham Abbey Relic-List’, in Carola Hicks (ed.), England in the U Eleventh Century (Stamford, 1992), pp. 157–81, at p. 175). 76 Johnstone, High Fashion, p. 29; Flury-Lemberg, Textile Conservation, p. 176. Still other valuable hand-me-downs were reused not as vestments, but as altar cloths. King Edgar, for example, gave the robe in which he had been crowned, his ‘most precious’, to Glastonbury Abbey, where it came to be used ‘as an ornament for the altar’ (William of Malmesbury Early History, Ch. 62). King Cnut presented the same community with a robe ‘woven from many-coloured peacock feathers’, an apt description of pattern-woven silk, which was used to cover Edmund Ironside’s tomb (William of Malmesbury Early History, Ch. 64). 77 Chronicon monasterii de Abingdon, ed. J. Stevenson, 2 vols (London, 1858), I, p. 485. Early Medieval Europe   () © 2007 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd  144 Robin Fleming Stigand had given Ely Abbey.78 Perhaps Edith and William used their ill-gotten vestments as gifts for more favoured ecclesiastical communities: then again, they may have had them retailored into outfits for them- selves.79 Whatever the case, it seems that a good deal of recycling was taking place. On the one hand, churchmen could transform royal garments into vestments suitable for the mass, which would, nonetheless, maintain the prestige of their royal associations. On the other hand, by the eleventh century many rulers, including English kings, wore long robes, copes, albs, dalmatics and silk stockings,80 so ecclesiastical garments might F be worked into outfits suitable for kings (or would-be kings), and these O would underscore the sacerdotal nature of their offices. It is difficult to appreciate this clothing from the faded scraps that O remain, but the Marriage Role of Theophanou does hint at their beauty. This is a long, scarf-shaped text, written in gold on deep purple PR parchment, edged with a delicate gold trim, and painted with a series of roundels inhabited by animals. The work clearly strives to imitate a very fine Byzantine silk.81 Beyond this, several spectacular early eighth- century, all-silk, Sassanian kaftans, one lined with fur, have been excavated D from a cemetery in the northern Caucasus, and they are largely intact (see Fig. 3).82 These rare survivals, like Theophanou’s Marriage Roll, TE give us some indication of the startling beauty of all-silk clothes. No wonder one of the words for silk in Old English is godweb, ‘divine’ or ‘godly cloth’.83 The word godweb, though, may have been applied to silk for another EC reason – because it was not just the living who wore silk: the holy dead wore it as well. People in the early Middle Ages often wrapped frag- mentary relics in silk; indeed, before the ninth and tenth centuries, R relics wore silk much more often than kings or bishops. At places like R 78 Liber Eliensis, Bk II, Ch. 113. O 79 We can see a similar long-term recycling of precious garments in contemporary Byzantium. There, so Luidprand of Cremona reports, the Byzantine emperor wore ‘a robe, of linen indeed, but very old, and smelly and faded by reason of its antiquity’, and he described court C nobles in their ancient tunics: ‘there was not one among them whose grandfather had owned as new the garment he was now wearing’ (Luidprand, Relatio, Chs 3, 9). N 80 All of which had began their lives as pontifical or episcopal garb ( Johnstone, High Fashion, pp. 15, 29). 81 For a discussion of this object and its iconography, and for detailed photographs, see A. von U Euw, ‘Ikonologie der Heiratsurkunde der Kaiserin Theophanu’, in von Euw and P. Schreiner (eds), Kaiserin Theophanu, II, pp. 175–191, and W. Georgi, ‘Ottonianum und Heiratsurkunde 962/972’, in ibid., pp. 135–160. A twelfth-century, Italian Christ is wearing a textile very similar to this one (P. Amato, Tesori d’arte dei musei diocesani (Rome, 1986), pp. 78 – 80). 82 A.A. Ierusalimskaja, Die Gräber der Moscevaja Balka: frühmittelalterliche Funde an der nord- kaukasischen Seidenstrasse (Munich, 1996), nos. 1, 3, 9. 83 Owen-Crocker, Dress, p. 302. This meaning would certainly have come to the minds of the speakers of Old English. The first element of the word, however, may, in fact, stem from the Arabic word qutn, or ‘cotton’ (Buck, Dictionary of Selected Synonyms, p. 403). Early Medieval Europe   () © 2007 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd  Silk in late Anglo-Saxon England 145 Color image F O O PR Fig. 3 One of the early eighth-century, all-silk, Sassanian kaftans excavated from a cemetery in the northern Caucasus (from A.A. Ierusalimskaja, Die Gräber der Moscevaja Balka: frühmittelalterliche Funde an der nordkaukasischen Seidenstrasse D (Munich, 1996), p. 97 and no. 1) TE Sens, Chelles, Farmoutiers, St-Maurice and St-Truiden large caches of fragmentary relics and /or the silks used to wrap them still survive. 84 In EC other places, individual reliquaries continue to contain impressive little caches of relics in silk (see Fig. 4). Even reliquaries made long after our period sometimes hold early relics and their textile wrappings. The head R reliquary of St Eustace, the early thirteenth-century shrine once in Basel and now at the British Museum, was found, when opened in 1955, to R house almost two dozen small, textile-swathed relics. Some were still identified with labels written in the early Middle Ages, including bits O of Saints Anastasius and Nicholas, both of which are wrapped in C 84 For a general discussion of this practice in the Middle Ages, see R. Schorta, ‘Reliquienhüllen N und Textile Reliquien in Welfenschatz’, in J. Ehlers and D. Kötzshe (eds), Der Welfenschatz und sein Umkreis (Mainz, 1998), pp. 139–76. For an example of silk-wrapping of relics as early as the sixth century, see A. Minchev, Early Christian Reliquaries from Bulgaria 4th −6th Century U AD (Varna, 2003), pp. 15–18. For published examples of silk-wrapping in early medieval Europe, see L’Ile-de-France, pp. 103, 112–13; Trésors sacrés, trésors cachés: patrimoine des églises de Seine-et-Marne (Paris, 1988), pp. 53–5; Stof uit de kist: de middeleeuwse textielschat uit de abdij van Sint-Truiden (Leuven, 1991), nos. 4–7 and addendum no. 1; Schmedding, Mittela- lterliche Textilien, nos. 128–30, 138, 145–6, 149; Tissu et vêtement, pp. 153–72. Other important early collections of silk, which at one time served as relic wrappings, are from Liège, Maestricht, Aix-la-Chapelle, Cologne, Chur, the Sancta Sanctorum at the Vatican (Tissue et vêtement, p. 103) and Regensburg (Ratisbona sacra: Das Bistum Regensburg im Mittelalter (Munich, 1989), pp. 47–51, 322 and nos. 33–6). Early Medieval Europe   () © 2007 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd  Color image 146 Robin Fleming F O O PR D Fig. 4 A seventh- or eighth-century Rhineland reliquary containing a clutch of TE textile-wrapped relics tagged with cedulae (from Ornamenta ecclesiae: Kunst und Künstler der Romanik, 3 vols (Cologne, 1985), II, pp. 77, 79 and no. E 110) EC Central Asian silks dating from the seventh to the ninth centuries. 85 Interestingly, the folds and wear patterns on many of these bits of R cloth tell us that the ‘good’ side was typically turned in towards the relic.86 R Although evidence for this practice in England is scarce, we do know that Englishmen, too, wrapped their collections of fragmentary relics in O silk. The material evidence for this was almost entirely swept away by the Reformation.87 Nonetheless, as Henry VIII’s henchmen burned C relic collections across the kingdom, they occasionally described cloth- wrapped relics in their letters.88 There is also material evidence which N suggests that Englishmen were engaged in the practice of silk wrapping U 85 T. Husband, The Treasury of Basel Cathedral (New York, 2001), p. 54 and no. 9; Der Basler Münsterschatz (Basel, 2001), pp. 60 – 4. 86 C. Depierraz, Treasures of the Abegg-Stiftung (Riggisberg, 2004), pp. 78– 9. 87 Visitation Articles, II, pp. 67, 105. 88 For example, Henry VIII’s commissioners came upon two silver reliquaries at St David’s. When opened, they not only found skulls, but ‘putrified clowthes’ (Three Chapters of Letters Relating to the Suppression of Monasteries, ed. T. Wright, Camden Society, o.s. 26 (1843), p. 184). Early Medieval Europe   () © 2007 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd  Silk in late Anglo-Saxon England 147 as early as the eighth century. When in Rome, for example, the English missionary Willibrord (d. 739) was given a collection of relics by the pope to aid him in his work among the Frisians. The late medieval inscription on the eleventh-century ‘arca of St Willibrord’ claims that it contains these very relics. When the arca was opened in 1950, twenty- one fragments of textiles were found within, two contemporary with St Willibrord, and one a sixth-century Coptic textile. These may well be the cloths originally used to wrap the papal gifts. 89 A bursa made from an elaborate gold-brocade, tablet-woven braid housed a piece of Willi- F brord himself, so his followers carried on the wrapping tradition after O his death.90 The community surrounding another English missionary, Saint Leobwin (d. c.770), obtained an eighth- or ninth-century Central O Asian silk, and it was soon associated with the saint’s earthly remains (see Fig. 5). The cedula in which a fragment of this silk was rolled, and PR which notes the connection, is written in a ninth-century hand. 91 The practice of silk wrapping in England itself may be witnessed by a group of silk seal bags in use in the thirteenth century at Canterbury cathedral. There are thirty-nine seal bags in all, half a dozen of which D are made from silk dating from the eighth through the eleventh centuries, originating in places as far afield as Byzantium, North Africa, Persia and TE Central Asia.92 It is highly unlikely that eighth-century Central Asian silk would have been purchased in the thirteenth century for the making of seal bags. It is much more likely that silk like this came to Canterbury at an early date, and was then recycled. The eighth-century silk, especially EC (since it seems that there were few silk vestments in England at this date), was most likely a recycled bursa. There were also large collections of fragmentary relics in England R before the Conquest. The most famous of these is the one King Æthelstan gave to Exeter. Because Æthelstan was a serious connoisseur of relics and R a man who kept current with Frankish and German fashions, it seems O 89 H.W. van Os, ‘The Power of Memory’, in H. van Os (ed.), The Way to Heaven: Relic Veneration in the Middle Ages (Utrecht, 2000), pp. 55–101, at pp. 71, 73; C. Staal, ‘The See of C Utrecht: Relics and Reliquaries’, in ibid., pp. 163 – 98, at p. 163, and U. Spengler-Reffgen, Das Stift St. Martini zu Emmerich (Siegburg, 1997), p. 21. N 90 Walton, Textiles, Cordage and Raw Fibre, p. 378. 91 Staal, ‘The See of Utrecht’, p. 183 and fig. 210; Stiegemann and Wemhoff, Kunst und Kultur, II, p. 535. This odd, low-quality, Central Asian silk is vastly inferior to those produced in U contemporary Byzantium (E. Crowfoot, F. Pritchard, and K. Staniland. Textiles and Clothing c.1150–c.1450, 2nd edn (Woodbridge, 2001), pp. 83–4). Was the person who acquired it short of cash or connections, or simply naïve, and did not know what good-quality silk looked like? It reminds one of the advice a Jewish silk merchant in Cairo, c.1060, gave to a colleague: off-load inferior silk onto ‘the uncircumcised’ (Gil, ‘References to Silk’, pp. 32–7). 92 G. Robinson and H. Urquhart, ‘Seal Bags in the Cathedral Church of Canterbury’, Archaeologia, 84 (1934), pp. 163–211; A. Muthesius, ‘A Previously Unrecognised Lion Silk at Canterbury’, in P. Walton Rogers, L. Bender Jørgensen, and A. Rast-Eicher (eds), The Roman Textile Industry and its Influences (Oxford, 2001), pp. 148–57, at pp. 148 –52 and plates VI, VII. Early Medieval Europe   () © 2007 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd  148 Robin Fleming F Color image O O PR D TE EC R R O C Fig. 5 The eighth- or ninth-century Central Asian silk associated with the body N of the Anglo-Saxon missionary Saint Leobwin (d. c.770). This odd silk is vastly inferior to those produced in contemporary Byzantium. Nonetheless, the rarity of U silk and its distant origin must have made it precious enough to give it a place of honour next to Leobwin’s bones. (From C. Stiegemann and M. Wemhoff (eds), 799, Kunst und Kultur der Karolingerzeit: Karl der Groβe und Papst Leo III. in Paderborn, 2 vols (Paderborn, 1999), II, p. 535) Early Medieval Europe   () © 2007 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd  Silk in late Anglo-Saxon England 149 likely that some were bundled in silk. 93 Several early inventories of the Exeter collection survive, and they were composed not by borrowing from one another, but by each one independently recording the infor- mation found on these relics’ cedulae.94 It is hard to imagine how parch- ment tags could be placed on all 138 of Exeter’s relics – including the coals that roasted St Laurence, the tooth of St Maurice, and the stone St Salvanius thrice carried to Rome – without their being wrapped. The Old English version of the inventory preserved in a gospel book, more- over, seems to be a sermon, meant to be read at the annual procession F of the feast of the relics. We know that Exeter celebrated this feast by O the twelfth century, and given the sermon, it seems likely that it did so in the late Anglo-Saxon period as well. 95 The relics’ annual display, too, O suggests that individual pieces in the collection were dressed in fancy textiles to honour them and make clear to laypeople just how special PR they were.96 By the late Anglo-Saxon period individual lords and prelates also cultivated large relic collections.97 Both Harold Godwineson and Arch- bishop Ealdræd of York were enthusiastic collectors of relics, many of D which they had acquired during their travels in Germany, Italy, Flanders and northern France,98 regions with well-established traditions of silk TE wrapping. If they had not known the practice before their travels, Harold and Ealdræd certainly would have learned of it during them. EC 93 L.H. Loomis, ‘The Holy Relics of Charlemagne and King Athelstan: The Lances of Longinus and St Mauricius’, Speculum, 25 (1950), pp. 437–56. For a surviving example – a small relic of St Kunigund wrapped in eleventh-century silk and labeled with a cedula – found in the shrine of St Walpurgis, see Schorta, Monochrome Seidengewebe, no. 56. 94 M. Föster, Zur Geshichte des Reliquienkultus in Altengland (Munich, 1943), p. 45; Loomis, R ‘The Holy Relics’, p. 444; P.W. Connor, Anglo-Saxon Exeter: A Tenth-Century Cultural History (Woodbridge, 1993), p. 172. R 95 Föster, Zur Geshichte des Reliquienkultus, p. 51, n. 2; Connor, Anglo-Saxon Exeter, p. 201. There is a detailed description of just such a celebration at Sens, a great silk-wrapping centre (G. Courlon, Le livre des reliques de l’Abbaye de Saint-Pierre-le-Vif de Sens (Sens, 1887)). O 96 New Minster also had a collection of fragmentary relics, housed in three great shrines. This community, too, produced a list of relics which seem to have been composed from cedulae; and surely cedulae attached to textile wrapping were the only way to keep straight the dozens of C bits housed together in these three reliquaries (The Liber Vitae of the New Minster and Hyde Abbey Winchester, ed. S. Keynes (Copenhagen, 1996), pp. 105–6, fos. 58r–v). Similarly, Peter- N borough had a large collection of fragmentary relics, many kept together in the same shrines, and Hugh Candidus’s list of them looks to have been written from cedulae (Chronicle of Hugh Candidus, pp. 52–56). The Gandersheim reliquary, made in England sometime in the eighth U century, contains a small square of Byzantine silk dating to the first half of the tenth century (L. von Wilckens, Die mittelalterlichen Textilien (Braunschweig, 1994), no. 51). This, too, may be evidence of relic wrapping in England: we do not know when the reliquary left England, although arguments have been made that it may have been a gift of King Æthelstan (L. Webster and J. Backhouse (eds), The Making of England: Anglo-Saxon Art and Culture ad 600–900 (London, 1991), no. 138), so it is possible that the silk could have been added to the shrine after it arrived in Germany. 97 D. Rollason, Saints and Relics in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, 1989), pp. 159 – 63; 186 –7. 98 N. Rogers, ‘Waltham Abbey’, pp. 164– 6. Early Medieval Europe   () © 2007 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd  Color image 150 Robin Fleming F O O PR D TE Fig. 6 One of the two extant, early medieval silk bursae from Beromünster, made EC from ninth- or tenth-century Byzantine silk (from B. Schmedding, Mittelalterliche Textilien in Kirchen und Klöstern der Schweiz (Bern, 1978), no. 11) R Less august English people also owned relics, 99 and they, too, wrapped R them in silk. Indeed, two silk bags dating from the late Anglo-Saxon period and identified as bursae, have been excavated from contexts that O are both urban and secular.100 Although these bursae are silk, they make an interesting contrast to ones found in the treasuries of important C ecclesiastical institutions, like the two still extant from Beromünster (see Fig. 6).101 The difference in quality underscores the trickling down, in N the tenth and eleventh centuries, of both relic collecting and the use of U silk, into less rarified circles. 99 Rollason, Saints and Relics, pp. 186. 100 One, a purple silk bag, lined with contrasting silk, was recovered from Coppergate (Walton, Textiles, Cordage and Raw Fibre, pp. 369 –71, 377– 81 and no. XXVIIa) and the other was found at Winchester (Biddle, Object and Economy, II, no. 38). For a list of other extant eighth- through twelfth-century bursae, see Walton, Textiles, Cordage and Raw Fibre, pp. 378 –9. 101 Schmedding, Mittelalterliche Textilien, nos. 11 and 14. Early Medieval Europe   () © 2007 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd  Silk in late Anglo-Saxon England 151 Some of these silk wrappings were doubtless specially obtained to honour the saints, but probably collectors also acquired relics pre-wrapped. There are hints of this outside of England. The collegiate church at Beromünster, for example, possessed two silk relic-wrappings dating to the sixth century; in other words, textiles considerably older than the community itself.102 This suggests that the oldest relics in Beromünster’s collection were ancient when the community acquired them, and that they were wrapped long before their arrival.103 Perhaps for the consumers of wonder-working objects, one of the proofs of the authenticity of a F relic, one of the things that made manifest its special powers, one of O the things that made it so collectable, was its silk packaging. Religious communities also acquired more impressively sized silks O than the little squares used to wrap relics or make bursae, which they deployed to shroud the intact corpses of their saints. This was a natural, PR if fiercely expensive, extension of the practice of wrapping fragmentary relics. Some of the holy dead were wrapped in textiles manufactured in their own lifetimes, 104 but many others are centuries older than their silken shrouds. Servatius of Tongres, for example, dead since D the late fourth century, has a silk shroud that dates to the eighth cen- tury. St Amond, one of Toul’s late antique bishops, was shrouded in TE silks on two different occasions hundreds of years after his death. St Siviard (d. 680) had one shroud made from tenth-century Byzantine silk and another from an eleventh- or twelfth-century Byzantine silk. In 1030 the remains of Germanus of Auxerre (d. 448), were shrouded in a EC large eagle-patterned silk made c.1000 (see Fig. 1 for an example of a silk shroud).105 R R 102 Schmedding, Mittelalterliche Textilien, nos. 1 and 3. 103 Or again, an arm reliquary of St Alexander, fashioned in Rome, arrived at the Alexan- derkirche in Wildeshausen in 851. There, it remained unopened until 1994, when it was found O to contain a bone wrapped in ninth-century silk: thus, it seems that the textile-wrapped bone and the sealed reliquary arrived in Germany of a piece (Stiegemann and Wemhoff, Kunst und Kultur, II, pp. 492, 535–6 and no. VIII.21). C 104 See, for example, Guillou and Durand, Byzance, p. 195 and no. 130. Pieces of silk were sometimes also venerated as relics. At other times silk was removed from saintly tombs to be N worked into special ecclesiastical garb. Ely, for example, fashioned two golden albs from cloth in which the body of St Ætheldreda had been wrapped (Liber Eliensis, Bk III, Ch. 50). 105 There are many extant silk shrouds dating before 1100. For the two shrouds of St Amond of U Toul, see Guillou and Durand, Byzance, p. 198 and no. 133; for St Anno, see above, n. 5; for St Austremoine, see Guillou and Durand, Byzance, p. 197 and Cambridge History of Western Textiles, I, Plate 7; for St Bénigne, see Desrosiers, Soieries, no. 123; for St Calais see Lafountaine- Dosogne, Splendeur de Byzance, p. 211 and no. Tx5; for St Colombe, see E. Chartraire, Les Tissus anciens du tresor de la cathédrale de Sens (Paris, 1911), pp. 30–2; for St Foy, see Guillou and Durand, Byzance, p. 374 and no. 280; for St Germanus of Auxerre, see Evans and Wixom (eds), Glory of Byzantium, no. 149; W.D. Wixom, ‘Byzantine Art and the Latin West’, in ibid., pp. 435–49, at p. 436; for St Heribert, see above, n. 5; for St Joss, see P. Scott, The Book of Silk (London, 1994), p. 100; for St Julian of Rimini, see Cambridge History of Western Textiles, I, Early Medieval Europe   () © 2007 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd  152 Robin Fleming This practice was also alive and well in England. Evidence famously survives from St Cuthbert’s shrine. The collection of silks that accom- panied Cuthbert had been manufactured over a period of a half a millennium, and individual pieces had been added to his tomb over the centuries, often as shrouds. One, for example, dates to the first half of the ninth century. It was probably given to the saint by King Edmund, who, so we are told, wrapped the holy body ‘with his own hand . . . with two lengths of Greek cloth’.106 On the Continent silk shrouds were typically added to shrines during translations.107 Late Anglo-Saxon England F was a place busy with translations,108 and one imagines that religious O communities – both rich and modest – procured silk for such occasions. Cuthbert’s collection of silks, when seen in a broader European context, O is unlikely to have been unique in England: saints like Swithun, Mildreth, Ælfheah, and Ætheldreda likely had similar collections of fancy textiles PR in their tombs.109 The practice of shrouding in silk spread, and came to play a starring role not only in the tombs of saints, but also in those of high-status laypeople and ecclesiastics. By the late Anglo-Saxon period, simple, shrouded burials D TE Plate 8; for St Lambert, see Desrosiers, Soieries, no. 62; for St Loup, see Chartraire, Les Tissus anciens, pp. 30–2; for St Potentien’s first shroud, see M. Martiniani-Reber, ‘Le role des étoftes dans le culte des reliques au Moyen Age’, Centre International d’Étude des Textiles EC Anciens (CIETA). Bulletin de Liaison, Lyon 70 (1992), pp. 53–8, at p. 56; for St Remigius of Reims, see Schorta, Monochrome Seidengewebe, no. 166; for the two shrouds of St Servatius of Tongres, see Cambridge History of Western Textiles, I, Plate 5 and Buckton, Byzantium, pp. 123–4 and no. 137; for St Siviard’s two shrouds, see Muthesius, Byzantine Silk Weaving, M66 and M85 and Evans and Wixom (eds), Glory of Byzantium, p. 226 and no. 150. For St R Victor, see <http://www.musees-bourgogne.org/les_musees/musees_bourgogne_gallerie. php?id=43&theme=&id_ville=20&id_gallerie=25806#haut> accessed 20/2/2006; for St Viventia, R see Desrosiers, Soieries, no. 124. 106 Buckton, Byzantium, p. 128 and no. 139; Historia de Sancto Cuthberto. Symeonis Monachi Opera Omnia, ed. T. Arnold, 2 vols (1882–5), I, pp. 196–214, at Ch. 28. O 107 This was happening in Francia as early as the early eighth century. For an example, see the silk probably associated with the 726 translation of St Servais (Martiniani-Reber, Lyon, no. 84). C 108 D. Rollason, ‘The Shrines of Saints in Late Anglo-Saxon England: Distribution and Significance’, in L.A.S. Butler and R.K. Morris (eds), The Anglo-Saxon Church: Papers on N History, Architecture, and Archaeology in Honour of Dr. H.M. Taylor, Council for British Archaeology 60 (1986), pp. 32–43. 109 Eadmer hints at this when he describes how when Christchurch bought the body of U St Ouen from his impecunious community, the monks of Canterbury placed his remains in a ‘precious and handsome coffer ... in which they were decently laid and carefully wrapped in diverse wrappings’ (R. Willis, The Architectural History of Canterbury Cathedral (London, 1845), p. 5). We also have reports that textiles were removed from saintly tombs to be worked into special ecclesiastical garb, and these were likely to have been exotic. Ely, for example, fashioned two golden albs from cloth in which the body of St Ætheldreda had been wrapped (Liber Eliensis, Bk III, Ch. 50), and Westminster had a vestment made from a robe taken from the tomb of Edward the Confessor (Barlow, Edward the Confessor, pp. 279 – 80, 311–12). Early Medieval Europe   () © 2007 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd  Silk in late Anglo-Saxon England 153 seem to have been the norm.110 Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of plain shrouds, there is considerable evidence to suggest that high-status individuals were now marked in their graves as special because they were accorded the same priceless silk shrouds as saints. Many dead courtier bishops on the Continent, for example, were wrapped in silk. Heribert archbishop of Cologne (d. 1002) and Gunther bishop of Bamberg (d. 1065) were both buried in silk shrouds at their deaths, the latter in a Byzantine silk tapestry originally made as a church hanging.111 But dead kings and their kin, too, were wrapped, and sometimes even rewrapped, in precious textile shrouds. F Charlemagne may well have received a silk shroud at the time of his O burial, and he was certainly reburied in another in the year 1000.112 Remnants O 110 Franks had begun burying in plain shrouds as early as the seventh century, and this was apparently a well-established practice in rural French churchyards by the ninth and tenth PR centuries (B.K. Young, ‘Example aristocratique et mode funéraire dans la Gaule mérovingi- enne’, Annales: Economies, sociétés, civilizations 41 (1986), pp. 370–407; J. Cuisenier, and R. Gaudagnin, Un village au temps de Charlemagne: moines et paysans de l’abbaye de Saint-Denis du VIIe siècle à l’an mil (Paris, 1988), p. 169). English cemetery excavations similarly suggest that shroud burials were standard by the late Anglo-Saxon period. ‘Bone tumble’ is common in York’s medieval Jewish cemetery and in the late Anglo-Saxon (and, therefore, Christian), D cemetery at Raunds in Northamptonshire. Andy Boddington has argued that it is caused by burial in shrouds, and notes that it is not generally found in pagan-period cemeteries, where the TE dead were buried in their clothes (A. Boddington, ‘Chaos and Disturbance in an Anglo-Saxon Cemetery’, in A. Boddington, A.N. Garland and R.C. Janaway (eds), Death, Decay, and Reconstruction: Approaches to Archaeology and Forensic Science (Manchester, 1987), pp. 27– 42, at pp. 40–1). One of the Vercelli Homilies, too, suggests burial in plain shrouds, when it described burial thus: ‘[The dead man] is given the least part of all his treasures, that is, EC someone sews him into a length of cloth’ (quoted in V. Thompson, ‘Constructing Salvation: a Homiletic and Penitential Context for Late Anglo-Saxon Burial Practice’, in S. Lucy and A. Reynolds (eds), Burial in Early Medieval England and Wales, Society for Medieval Archae- ology Monograph 17 (2002), pp. 229 – 40, at. p. 236). This practice is also witnessed in a number of contemporary illustrations, which show the living sewing or winding the dead into R simple shrouds. See, for example, Edili Bible, Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Edili 125 (printed in R.T. Chasson, ‘Prophetic Imagery and Lections at Passiontide: The Jeremiah R Illustrations in a Tuscan Romanesque Bible’, Gesta 42 (2003), pp. 89 –224, no. 1); Stuttgart Psalter fols 30v, 160v. We also have the provisions left by a thegn, just after the Norman Conquest, for his own funeral. He did not stipulate what kind of shroud he wanted, but he O did leave money for a pall, suggesting that whatever fancy cloth there was, was going to adorn his coffin or bier, and thus would be visible, and not hidden away in the ground. He left twenty-one pence for his pall. He stipulated that four times more be spent on both his coffin C and on the ale for his funeral feast. It does not, therefore, look as if he was hoping for silk. Nonetheless, at twenty-one pence the cloth for the pall must have been a just a little special N (Anglo-Saxon Charters, ed. A.J. Robertson, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1956), Appendix II, no. 8). For further discussion of shroud burials in late Anglo-Saxon England, see A. Boddington, Raunds Furnells: The Anglo-Saxon Church and Churchyard, English Heritage Archaeological U Report 7 (London, 1996), pp. 47–8; V. Thompson, ‘Constructing Salvation’, pp. 230 –2. 111 For Heribert’s shroud, see Wixom, ‘Byzantine Art’, p. 436; Muthesius, Byzantine Silk Weaving, M53 and no. 81. The silk’s inscription dates it to 976 –1025, so it probably comes from his original burial. For Gunther, see Muthesius, Byzantine Silk Weaving, M90 and nos. 52b, 53a. The many silk fragments dating to the eleventh century and found in the Bamberg ossarium are suggestive of how common a practice this was (Schorta, Monochrome Seidengewebe, nos. 28 – 44). 112 For the two silks associated with Charlemagne’s body, see Beckwith, ‘Byzantine Tissues’, p. 42; Lafountaine-Dosogne, Splendeur de Byzance, p. 210 and no. Tx4; Guillou and Durand, Byzance, p. 194 and no. 129. Early Medieval Europe   () © 2007 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd  154 Robin Fleming of silk shrouds have also survived in the graves of the German emperor Henry III (d. 1056) and Conrad II’s wife Gisela (d. 1043). 113 But kings other than Carolingians and Ottonians also received silk shrouds. Archaeologists, for example, may have excavated the bodies of Prince Spytihnev (d. 915) and his wife at the Church of the Holy Virgin, the earliest chapel at Prague castle, and their bodies were covered with some kind of elaborate textile.114 The wife of King Cnut IV of Denmark (d. 1086) (re)wrapped her husband in a large pseudo-Byzantine eagle silk in 1101. 115 In England, the dead Edward the Confessor is shown in the Bayeux tapestry in a fancy F shroud, and some kind of patterned textile, according to the tapestry, O covered his bier.116 Indeed, it looks as if exotic textiles were expected at elite funerals in the late Anglo-Saxon period. Certainly, in the Old English O Hexateuch, patriarchs can be seen wound in pattern-woven silk shrouds.117 Other notables may or may not have been wrapped in fancy silk PR shrouds, but they were certainly dressed, when buried, in exotic textile clothing.118 Pope Clement II was put in his tomb dressed for Mass in a splendid collection of silk vestments (see Fig. 7), and St Desiderius, bishop of Rodez, was similarly kitted out, although in his case he had D been re-clothed several hundred years after his death. There is also the strange case of St Ludmila (d. 921), murdered grandmother of King TE Wenceslas. Sometime after her translation to Prague’s cathedral in 925, a dalmatic, tailored from early eleventh-century Byzantine or Islamic silk, was placed in her tomb, in which she may have been dressed. 119 As far as England is concerned, by 1100 we know that for centuries English EC bishops and holymen had been buried in vestments. 120 Some English saints, moreover, were probably re-dressed, as we have seen St Cuthbert R 113 S. Müller-Christensen, H.E. Kubach and G. Stein, ‘Die Gräber im Königschor’, in R H.E. Kubach and W. Haas (eds), Der Dom zu Speyer, 2 vols (Munich, 1972), I, pp. 923–1089, at pp. 943–4, 937–41; II, Figs 1415–1602. 114 Brazantová, ‘Romanesque and Early Gothic Silk’, p. 159. O 115 A. Geijer, A History of Textile Art (London, 1979), p. 249. 116 Bayeux Tapestry, nos. 29–30. 117 Old English Illustrated Hexateuch, fol. 72v. C 118 The most famous example is Pope Formosus (d. 896). His nemesis and successor had the dead pope’s corpse dug up, ritually stripped of the vestments it had been buried in, and then N dumped into the River Tiber (Luidprand of Cremona, Anapodosis, in Luidprand of Cremona, Antapodosis; Homelia paschalis; Historia Ottonis; Relatio de legatione Constantinopolitana, ed. P. Chiesa, CCCM 156 (Turnhout, Belgium, 1998), p. 23). U 119 M. Bravermanová, ‘The Oldest Textile Items from the Reliquary Tomb of St Ludmila’, in North- ern European Symposium for Archaeological Textiles, NESAT 8 (2004), pp. 87– 94, at pp. 87– 9. 120 See, for example, Bede, Vita Cuthberti, Ch. 42, in Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert: A Life by an Anonymous Monk of Lindisfarne and Bede’s Prose Life, ed. B. Colgrave (Cambridge, 1940); The Life of Bishop Wilfrid by Eddius Stephanus, ed. B. Colgrave (Cambridge, 1927), Ch. 66; The Life of Gundulf Bishop of Rochester, ed. R. Thomson (Toronto, 1977), Ch. 46. In a late eleventh- or early twelfth-century Italian manuscript, an illustrated life of St Gregory, there is a drawing of the saint’s funeral (fol. 122r), in which the dead Gregory appears in a very matter-of-fact fashion in his vestments, as if this was the expected way for a prelate and saint Early Medieval Europe   () © 2007 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd  Silk in late Anglo-Saxon England 155 Color image F O O PR D TE Fig. 7 The silk buskins in which Pope Clement II was buried (from R. Schorta, Monochrome Seidengewebe des hohen Mittelalters: Untersuchungen zu Webtechnik EC und Musterung (Berlin, 2001), no. 67) was, when they were translated. It is hardly surprising, then, to find bishops and abbots buried in their graves in their ‘Sunday best’. R Kings in this period were also placed in the ground in fancy clothes. Boleslav II (d. 999) was buried in St George’s basilica in Prague wearing R silk stockings.121 As a matter of fact, kings in the eleventh century may have been both dressed in silk clothes and shrouded in silk when they were O buried. Both Emperors Conrad II (1024–39) and Henry III (1039–56) were not only wrapped in silk shrouds, but they were placed in their C graves wearing special burial crowns and hose made from Byzantine silk, N to be buried (Brandt, Bernward von Hildesheim, II, no. III-5). We also know that the legislated U burial for monks in England was clothed burial; indeed, the Regularis Concordia stipulates that monks should be buried in their shirts, cowls, stockings and shoes (Thompson, ‘Con- structing Salvation’, p. 237). 121 The ties on these stockings, cut from eagle silk, still survive (Bravermanová, ‘The Oldest Textile’, p. 94; M. Bravermanová, ‘Das Grab Boleslavs II’, in P. Sommer (ed.), Boleslav II.–der tschechische Staat um das Jahr 1000 (Prague, 2001), pp. 197–223, at pp. 208–10 and nos. 8 – 9; Brazantová, ‘Romanesque and Early Gothic Silk’, p. 97). Rudolf of Swabia’s (d. 1080) effigy tomb also makes the claim that he was laid to rest in an elaborately patterned silk tunic, robe, and stockings (B. Hinz, Das Grabdenkmal Rudolfs von Schwaben (Frankfurt, 1996), nos. 5, 21, 23 – 4). Early Medieval Europe   () © 2007 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd  156 Robin Fleming so one suspects that their other funerary garments were silk as well. 122 Edward the Confessor, too, as we have seen, was probably buried both with a fancy shroud and in silk clothing. We do not know if Anglo-Saxon noblemen were buried in silk, but a gold and silk shroud, measuring some six feet by four feet has been found in the grave of Count Luitiger of Graisbach (d. 1074), and in death Count Raymond II of Toulouse (d. 978) wore in a rare cotton tunic embellished with silk piping.123 And then, of course, hundreds of silk costumes and shrouds have been recovered from lay tombs dating from the twelfth and F thirteenth centuries.124 Silk burial, so it seems, was a pan-European practice O by the tenth and eleventh centuries, embraced and engaged in by high-status laypeople and ecclesiastics alike. It was a ritual innovation that sat at the O intersection of religious, social and economic behaviour. Its extravagance both marked the exalted social status of its beneficiaries and linked their PR final restings with those of the saints, who had long been swathed in silk. In the end, does it matter that Harold Godwineson dressed like Elvis Presley, or that he might have been buried in an outfit suitable for the king? The D answer, so I would argue, is yes. So much of the way people across both the planet and the centuries have lived status, engaged with ideas, deployed TE ideology, and made statements about themselves, has been done not with words, but with things. Human beings, present and past, engage with the material world and exploit their culture’s shared understanding of objects and their meanings to communicate with their betters, their equals, and EC their inferiors, and to reinforce or manipulate the status quo. Unfortunately, when early medievalists attempt to piece together the history of our period, the world of things is often irretrievably gone, and all we have left are a R few words written on a page. Some objects do, however, survive from our period, and in the case of textiles, hundreds are still extant in Europe R that date from before 1100. Still, much is gone. We have no silk church hangings or altar clothes from the pre-Conquest period, although we O know they once existed, and no silk secular furnishings survive, in spite of the fact that wealthy English people probably used silk in their houses.125 C Beyond this, contemporary objects from other parts of the world, like N the eighth- or ninth-century Central Asian silk saddle cover and saddle cloth U 122 Müller-Christensen, ‘Die Gräber im Königschor’, I, pp. 930–7, 943–4. 123 Kendrick, Catalogue, p. 37; Schorta, Monochrome Seidengewebe, no. 81. É. Crubézy and C. Dieulafait, Le comte de l’an mil, Aquitania 9 (1996), pp. 183–5. 124 For the extraordinary shrouds and fabulously well-preserved clothing of kings and nobles (as well their as hats, spurs, jewellery and swords) found in the tombs of a Spanish monastery, see C.H. Carretero, Museo de Telas Medievales Monasterio de Santa María la Real de Huelgas (Madrid, 1988). 125 Dodwell, Anglo-Saxon Art, pp. 129–41. For depictions of the Confessor’s silk-trimmed bedclothes and cushions, see Bayeux Tapestry, nos. 28, 30. Early Medieval Europe   () © 2007 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd  Silk in late Anglo-Saxon England 157 now at the Abegg-Stiftung Museum, or the eighth-century toy silk duck and the silk-trimmed doll clothes excavated in the northern Caucasus, should make us wonder about all the things that we have lost. 126 In spite of its patchy nature, though, in looking at this material, we can begin to recover something of the lost world of things, and see the ways material objects engaged with, created, and perpetuated the world of ideas. So, what should we make of the deployment of silk? Behind its acquisition, display, and occasional wilful destruction, we can see people making social, ideological and religious assertions. On the most basic F level, silk marked status, and its deployment was often aspirational. The O contrast between garments sewn from exotic textiles and most people’s brown-, dun-, or russet-coloured garb would have been profound. 127 O Because access to silk was restricted to influential people tied into exclu- sive networks of high-status gift exchange or to wealthy and cash-flush PR landholders or traders, exotic textiles were an effective way for those who could get their hands on them to underscore their special positions. Because silk was available in a highly articulated and quite obvious range of qualities, its popularity as an aspirational device was assured. Prosperous D burgesses could make self-aggrandizing statements about themselves with their silk tabbies, but these did not undercut the even grander claims TE of earls, who had access to elaborate, pattern-woven brocades, or kings, who occasionally got hold of the glorious silks produced in imperial workshops. That silk clothing was so effective as a social marker is surely proven by its near universal adoption by elites at this time not only in EC Europe, but across the whole of the Middle East, North Africa, and Central, South and East Asia as well. 128 On top of this, the power and prestige of the families and religious communities who could afford to R sacrifice priceless silk by burying it in the tombs of their dead was made manifest at every society funeral and saint’s translation. This practice, R too, was remarkably widespread. Not only could it be found in the west, but in the Greek east and in tenth- and eleventh-century Iran as well. 129 O There was also, however, a rhetorical component to silk wearing. Statements about kingship, imperial power, and sacrality were being C articulated with silk. Kings who dressed themselves on ceremonial N 126 Depierraz, Treasures, pp. 46–7; A.A. Ierusalimskaja and B. Borkopp, Von China nach Byzanz (Munich, 1996), Fig. 27; Ierusalimskaja, Die Gräber, nos. 27–32. U 127 For interesting discussions of the symbolic use of clothing, see L.R. Baumgarten, ‘Leather Stockings and Hunting Shirts’, in A.S. Martin and J.R. Garrison (eds), American Material Culture: The Shape of the Field (Knoxville, 1997), pp. 251–76, and T.J. Shannon, ‘Dressing for Success on the Mohawk Frontier: Hendrick, William Johnson, and the Indian Fashion’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. 53 (1996), pp. 13 – 42. 128 G.C. Maniatis, ‘Organization, Market Structure and Modus Operandi of the Private Silk Industry in Tenth-Century Byzantium’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 53 (1999), pp. 263 –332, at pp. 327– 9. 129 King, ‘The Textiles Found near Rayy’, pp. 17–26; G. Wiet, Soieries persanes, Mémoires de L’Institut d’Égypte 52 (1948). Early Medieval Europe   () © 2007 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd  158 Robin Fleming occasions in special silk and banded clothes, taken from a repertoire of ecclesiastical wear, were making assertions about the priestly nature of their office. And English kings, who sometimes wore the same exotic outfits as German emperors, did so not only for fashion’s sake, but because they were commenting on the exalted nature of their own kingship. Similarly, the silk-clad, imperial-garb-wearing bishops of the tenth and eleventh centuries were articulating ideological and political positions. Silk-wearing was also about sophistication and cosmopolitanism. English wearers of silk provided proof that the greatest people in the F kingdom, to borrow a phrase from Luidprand of Cremeona, were no O longer ‘poverty-stricken, fur-coated, [and] skin-wearing’. 130 Finally, a crucial component of silk’s allure was its close association O with the cult of the saints. Pious churchmen strove to honour God and his saints when they wore silk for Christian rituals and feasts, and when PR they wrapped and displayed their relics in textiles that were so beautiful that they looked, so we are told, as if they were ‘woven from many-coloured peacock feathers’.131 Ecclesiastical impresarios of saints cults were also locked in competition with one another, driven, one imagines, by the extravagant D wrappings and shroudings of other communities, to acquire, at whatever price, silk for their own feasts and translations. The living, anxious for the TE salvation of their dead and for the maintenance of their families’ or their communities’ positions after the death of an important member, shrouded their loved ones in the same silk winding sheets as saints. And when monastic artists in this period wished to depict the awesome power of Christ EC and his saints they did so by dressing them in the same fine, silk brocades and banded garments as those worn by the greatest people in the land. 132 R Boston College R 130 Luidprand, Relatio, Ch. 53. For a useful discussion of the rhetorical uses of luxury commodities, particularly commodities associated with fashion, see A. Appadurai, ‘Introduction: Commodities O and the Politics of Value’, in A. Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 3 – 63, at p. 38. 131 William of Malmesbury Early History, Ch. 64. C 132 Examples are legion. See, for example, the Christ in Majesty, found in Orléans, Bibliothèque Municipale, 175, fol. 149r (printed in Dodwell, Anglo-Saxon Art, no. 11); the Virgin Mary in N New York, Pierpoint Morgan Library, 709, fol. 105v; St Ætheldreda in London, British Library, Additional 49598, fol. 90v (printed in Wilson, Anglo-Saxon Art, no. 216); St Benedict in London, British Library, Arundel 155, fol. 133r (printed in Golden Age, no. 57 and Plate 18); U the Apostles in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, 198 (printed in Budny, Insular, Anglo- Saxon, and Early Anglo-Norman Manuscript Art, II, no. 464); Saint Æthelwold in London, British Library, Additional 49598, fol. 118v (printed in Dodwell, Anglo-Saxon Art, no. D); St Jerome in London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius C VI, fol. 71v (printed in Dodwell, Anglo-Saxon Art, no. 49); Saint Elizabeth in Boulogne Gospels, Boulogne-sur-Mer, Bibiothèque Municipale, 11, fol. 11v (printed in Ohlgren, Anglo-Saxon Textual Illustrations, no. 5.20); St Aldhelm in London, Lambeth Palace Library, 200 (part ii), fol. 68r (printed in Backhouse 1984 no. 30); King David in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, 291, pp. 24–5 (printed in Budny, Insular, Anglo-Saxon, and Early Anglo-Norman Manuscript, Plate 11). Early Medieval Europe   () © 2007 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd  MARKED PROOF Please correct and return this set Please use the proof correction marks shown below for all alterations and corrections. If you wish to return your proof by fax you should ensure that all amendments are written clearly in dark ink and are made well within the page margins. 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