A visit to the Embroiderers’ Guild Collection

Many years ago, I was preparing to teach a class on 17^th century raised embroidery techniques.  As I was also working on a history module for the BA, I made my first appointments to study extant examples in museum stores.  At that time, the Embroiderers’ Guild collection was housed in their apartments at Hampton Court Palace.  Those apartments now house the Historic Royal Palaces Dress Collection, and the Embroiderers’ Guild Collection has moved to dedicated space in an accredited museum store and items are on display on a rotating basis in a permanent gallery space in the Discover Buck’s Museum in Aylesbury.

On our way to the museum store, we stopped in at St. Peter’s Church in East Halton.  Challe’s main interest is not embroidery but church brasses and there was one she hadn’t yet photographed.  As I wandered around, I spied this beautiful banner of the Archangel Michael defeating the dragon.  The figures are painted and the details are embroidered.  The brownish velvet panels are also embroidered but the narrow trim is painted. The painted areas have held together but the horizontal threads of the background silk hang loose because the vertical threads have disappeared.  The angel has such a lovely face but the banner will probably disintegrate as it hangs on the church wall so I thought I’d take a few images so it would be remembered… I have come across many beautiful banners such as this as I travel through the country and it saddens me to think they will all eventually turn to dust.

We arrived at the museum storage building and were greeted by the curator, the photographer and the creative director of the Embroiderers’ Guild Collection who guided us through the earliest embroideries in the collection.  Unfortunately, there are few 16^th century examples but there are some lovely early (and later) 17^th century embroideries that were well worth examining.

These two small blackwork motifs are dated to the Tudor period.  The gillyflower is quite threadbare but the honeysuckle is in very good condition with most of the black thread still in place.  It looks like it has been damaged, possibly in a fire, and that is likely the reason that they have been cut from their original ground and secured to new pieces of linen.   The counted patterns are classic and can probably be found in the older books on blackwork such as the ones by Moyra McNeil and Elisabeth Geddes, Margaret Pascoe and Louisa Pesel.

We looked at two coifs – the berry coif and the more colourful flower coif.  More information on the berry coif can be found in Jacqui Carey’s Elizabethan Stitches.  The pea pods on the colourful coif are detached buttonhole and can be lifted to reveal little peas but I didn’t get a very good image.

The rest of the items we saw were much later but still very informative.  The raised work picture is actually the top of a box illustrating a biblical Bathsheba bathing in a square pool with a water spout in the shape of a fish head.  The close ups show quite a few remarkable details such as the carved wooden hands of the figure on the left. Her collar has a pattern and a tatted (?) lace edging and quite a large insect is hovering just over her shoulder.  Her left shoe is covered very delicately with buttonhole and you can see the looped shoelace.  I love that the tops of the shoes are blue and the heal and soles are easily distinguished because they are stitched at an angle to the blue tops and in a different colour.  Althea very carefully lifted the lined skirt panel to reveal the striped petticoat underneath with a lace trim and a fringe.

The final two pictures this week are of brasses in a Sussex church.  The first is a 17^th century brass image of Elizabeth Culpepper (d. 1534) whose dress is quite similar to the one on the box.  The second is another Elizabeth Culpepper but her costume reflects the date of her death at a much earlier date (c. 1510).