III. Abbot Berkyng's Tapestries and Matthew Paris's Life of St Edward the Confessor

Abstract

According to John Flete, the fifteenth-century historian of Westminster Abbey, Abbot Richard de Berkyng (d. 1246) bequeathed to the Abbey two curtains or dorsalia which he had procured for the choir, depicting the story of the Saviour and St Edward. Nothing is known about the appearance of these textiles; but they were presumably of fine quality, befitting the patronage of a Treasurer of England, and were evidently intended to hang in the choir stalls. There they remained until after the Dissolution. According to a sixteenth-century commentary with transcriptions of the original texts in the hangings by Robert Hare, discovered by M. R. James (Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, MS 391 [611], they were of ‘faire arras worke’, and so were tapestries rather than embroideries; they were also described as ‘wrought in the cloth of Arras’ by Weever in 1631. They hung in the church until 1644, whence they were removed to the chamber of the House of Commons in the Palace; according to Brayley ‘a large remnant’ of the scene of the Circumcision was still preserved in the Jerusalem Chamber at the Abbey in the early nineteenth century. The tapestries were one of the most extensive recorded instances of English thirteenth-century textile production. They provide evidence too for a genre of monastic choir decoration analogous to the lost Old Testament narratives in the choir at Bury St Edmund's and the typological pictures formerly adorning the choir-stalls of Peterborough Abbey. Moreover, they anticipate the mixture of purely narrative material in the surviving fourteenth-century paintings above the dossals of the choir stalls of Cologne Cathedral, and especially the tapestries depicting the lives of St Piat and St Eleutherius from the choir of Tournai Cathedral, Arras work dated 1402.