tion,
marriages, wars, and funeral of his patron King Edward I., to be
painted in the great hall of his episcopal palace, which he had newly
built.

Chaucer frequently refers to this custom of painting the walls with
historical or fanciful designs.

"And soth to faine my chambre was
Ful wel depainted----
And all the wals with colours fine
Were painted bothe texte and glose,
And all the Romaunt of the Rose."

And again:--

"But when I woke all was ypast,
For ther nas lady ne creture,
Save on the wals old portraiture
Of horsemen, hawkis, and houndis,
And hurt dere all ful of woundis."

Often emblematical devices were painted, which gave the artist
opportunity to display his fancy and exercise his wit. Dr. Cullum, in
his History of Hawsted, gives an account of an old mansion, having a
closet, the panels of which were painted with various sentences,
emblems, and mottos. One of these, intended doubtless as a hint to
female vanity, is a painter, who having begun to sketch out a female
portrait, writes "Dic mihi qualis eris."

But comfort, or at least a degree of comfort, had progressed hand in
hand with decoration. Tapestry, that is to say needlework tapestry,
which, like the Bayeux tapestry of Matilda, had been used solely for
the decoration of altars, or the embellishment of other parts of
sacred edifices on occasions of festival, or the performance of solemn
rites, had been of much more general application amongst the luxurious
inhabitants of the South, and was introduced into England as furniture
hanging by Eleanor of Castile. In Chaucer's time it was common. Among
his pilgrims to Canterbury is a tapestry worker who is mentioned in
the Prologue, in common with other "professors."

"An haberdasher and a carpenter,
A webbe, a dyer, and a tapiser."

And, again:--

"I wol give him all that falles
To his chambre and to his halles,
I will do painte him with pure golde,
And _tapite_ hem ful many a folde."

These modes of decorating the walls and chambers with paintings, and
with tapestry, were indeed contemporaneous; though the greater
difficulty of obtaining the latter--for as it was not made at Arras
until the fourteenth century, all that we here refer to is the painful
product of the needle alone--many have made it less usual and common
than the former. Pithy sentences, and metrical stanzas were often
wrought in tapestry: in Wresil Castle and