gs or
for clothing, are woven, with the decorative pattern executed by the
needle on woven cloth. In Persia and neighbouring states, however, the
high-warp loom was used.[1]

Europe in the Middle Ages was a place so savage, so devastated by war
and by neighbouring malice, that to consider it is to hear the clash
of steel, to feel the pangs of hunger, to experience the fearsome
chill of dungeons or moated castles. It was a time when those who
could huddle in fortresses mayhap died natural deaths, but those who
lived in the world were killed as a matter of course. Man was man's
enemy and to be killed on sight.

In such gay times of carnage, art is dead. Men there were who drew
designs and executed them, for the _luxe_ of the eye is ever
demanding, but the designs were timid and stunted and came far from
the field of art. Fabrics were made and worn, no doubt, but when looms
were like to be destroyed and the weavers with them, scant attention
was given to refinements.

By the time the Tenth Century was reached matters had improved. We
come into the light of records. It is positively known that the town
of Saumur, down in the lovely country below Tours, became the
destination of a quantity of wall-hangings, carpets, curtains, and
seat covers woven of wool. This was by order of the third Abbot Robert
of the Monastery of St. Florent, one of those vigorous, progressive
men whose initiative inspires a host. It is recorded that he also
ordered two pieces of tapestry executed, not of wool exclusively, but
with silk introduced, and in these the figures of the designs were the
beasts that were then favourites in decoration and that still showed
the influence of Oriental drawing.

Before enumerating other authentic examples of early tapestries it is
well to speak of the reason for their being invariably associated with
the church. The impression left by history is that folk of those days
must have been universally religious when not cutting each other in
bits with bloody cutlass. The reason is, of course, that when poor
crushed humanity began to revive from the devastating onslaughts of
fierce Northern barbarians, it was with a timid huddling in
monasteries, for there was found immunity from attack. The lord of the
castle was forced to go to war or to resist attack in his castle, but
the monastery was exempt from whatever conscription the times imposed,
and frocked friars were always on hand were defence needed. Thus it
came ab