Painting with Needles: Opus Anglicanum
As you may recall, St. Walpurga was supposed to have learned a particular type of embroidery, called Opus Anglicanum, or ‘English Work.’
This is some truly beautiful and elaborate stuff that has to be seen to be believed. There is an exhibit of them at the V & A museum in the UK, and I really wanted to put a picture of one of their samples up- but- you know. That can’t be done. Visit their website instead and check out the cope. Introducing Opus Anglicanum · V&A (vam.ac.uk)
After you are done ogling the textile work, you might wonder…what is it? How was it done?
Excellent questions. Let’s talk.
High Medieval Work
The Opus Anglicanum style of embroidery was a type of textile art that was created in the High Middle Ages in England, primarily London.
The V & A displayed a seal-bag that was made between 1100 to 1140, though the technique probably goes back a bit further. Matthew of Paris mentions it in the middle of the 1200’s, using the name we give it now.
The Great Period (this embroidery’s golden age, if you will,) was 1350 to 1450. London specialists made dozens of beautiful works for the church and state, sending things like the Toledo Cope to a cathedral in in Spain (Toledo, no less.)
The look changed with time. After the Great Plague, the embroiderers started using shortcuts and automating what they could of these works. They used more silk thread as time went on too.
Ultimately, the Reformation in England cut out one of the biggest buyers of these elaborate embroidery pieces, the Catholic Church, and the style fell into obscurity. It was revived in the 1800’s, and you can find websites with embroidery patterns of famous Opus Anglicanum pieces now. But you’re probably not going to see the current King Charles in a robe with this style of embroidery.
Of Splits and Couches
The luxurious look was created by a combination of techniques and materials. It uses a preponderance of gold and silver thread, interspersed with colored silk, and it uses two colors to make highlights in people’s hair.
There were three techniques used with these materials. They used split stitches, which is a stitch where you make a stitch and then drive the needle and thread into the middle of the stitch you just made.
Then they used surface and underside couching. If you read my earlier post about my embroidery, you have seen surface couching. You lay a thread over a cloth and then tie it down with another thread. Underside couching is a little more difficult, though the same basic concept. You take the needle and thread that you use to tie the first thread down through the hole you just created when you came up from the bottom of the cloth. You can find websites with patterns and instructions for similar, smaller works now.
The Expense
Pope Innocent IV ordered a bunch of these. Queen Isabella of England ordered a cope with this embroidery for the equivalent of 40,000 English pounds.
And these were the kinds of people who could afford these pieces. It used expensive foreign silk and had to be made by trained professionals. While nuns and noblewomen did some Opus Anglicanum pieces, the works were mostly made in one of the 100 workshops in London by people who had to go through a seven-year training process in order to get it right.
And these pieces were labor-intensive. If you checked out the link to the V & A, you saw how detailed and exacting the embroidery was. We are talking portrait-like works covered in a multitude of figures.
Conclusion
It is fascinating to see the evolution of an art form that has become something for a hobbyist, and it is a nice little detail to include in historical fiction taking place in the 1300’s. Mostly, I hope that the art form continues to get the attention it deserves.
Sources:
Technique — Opus Anglicanum (webcon.net.au)
Opus Anglicanum (trc-leiden.nl)
medievalist.net ‘Medieval English Embroidery on Display for the last time on the V & A’s Opus Anglicanum Exhibit