d for three hundred years.[3]

While dealing with records rather than with objects on which the eye
can gaze and the hand can rest, note must be made of an order of a
Count of Poitou, William V, to a factory for tapestries then existing
in Poitiers, showing that the art of weaving had in that spot jumped
the monastery walls in 1025.[4] The order was for a large hanging with
subjects taken from the Scriptures, but given the then modern touch by
introducing portraits of kings and emperors and their favourite
animals transfixed in ways peculiar to the nature of the day.

A century later, another Abbot of St. Florent in Saumur had hangings
made important enough to be recorded. One of these represented the
four and twenty elders of the Apocalypse with musical instruments, and
other subjects taken from the Revelation of John. This subject was one
of unending interest to the artists of that time who seemed to find in
its depicting a serving of both God and imagination.

Among the few tapestries of this period, those of the Cathedral at
Halberstadt must be mentioned, partly by way of conscientious
chronicling, partly that the interested traveller may, as he travels,
know where to find the rare specimens of the hobby he is pursuing.
This is a high-warp tapestry which authorities variously place as the
product of the Eleventh or the Twelfth Centuries. Entirely regardless
of its age, it has for us the charm of the craft of hands long
vanished, and of primitive art in all its simplicity of artifice. The
subject is religious--could hardly have been otherwise in those
monastic days--and for church decoration, and to fit the space they
were woven to occupy, each of the two parts was but three and a half
feet high although more than fourteen yards long.

Each important event recorded in history has its expression in the
material product of its time, and this is one of the charms of
studying the liberal arts. Tapestry more than almost any other
handicraft has left us a pictured history of events in a time when
records were scarce. The effect of the Crusades was noticeable in the
impetus it gave to tapestry, not only by bringing Europe into fresh
contact with Oriental design but by increasing the desire for
luxurious stuffs. The returning crusaders--what traveller's tales did
they not tell of the fabrics of the great Oriental sovereigns and
their subjects, the soft rugs, the tent coverings, the gorgeous
raiment; and these tales they