I watched a series on BBC iPlayer “The Fabric of Britain”. This series had three episodes, focusing on different crafts: knitting, wallpaper and embroidery.

What I found particularly interesting was the history discussed in the episode “The Wonder of Embroidery“. England was a leader in the craft of embroidery in the western world in the 13th – 14th centuries, elevating it to an art form known as “Opus Anglicanum” (meaning “English work”), which was highly valued and hence commanded premium prices. This “golden age” of English embroidery recognised the skilled work of English embroiderers, and their work was difficult to emulate. This type of embroidery was often used in ecclesiastical settings, and examples survive to this day.

A typical stitch used in Opus Anglicanum is split stitch, which requires careful working in order to keep the stitches the same size and control the flow of the work to create the detail required for representing faces.

One example of Opus Anglicanum is the Syon Cope, at the Victoria & Albert Museum. This church vestment illustrates the highly detailed embroidery, using split stitch for facial contouring and underside couching to hold gold thread in place as the main embroidery techniques. Couching holds a thread in position on top of the fabric by small stitches travelling underneath, so the visible decorative thread does not pierce the fabric. This maintains continuity and avoids damage to the thread being couched and the fabric itself. 

The Syon cope, English, early 14th century. Copyright Victoria and Albert Museum, acc. no. 83-1864

In the “golden age” they did not have the vibrant modern colours we have today; they relied on natural dyes from flowers, leaves, seeds, roots, bark, moss and mushrooms etc.  Yellow could be made from yarrow and dandelions; shades of pink from roses and lavender; red from madder; orange from onions; blue from indigo or woad.

The boom in brightly coloured synthetic dyes did not occur until much later, in the mid-19th century, when the vivid purple dye mauveine was created by William Henry Perkin. This discovery was made during research to create a synthetic form of quinine (as a treatment for malaria). Synthetic dyes were much cheaper than natural dyes, and so lent themselves to mass production.

Find out more about using natural dyes

The dye could create a different colour on animal fabrics (wool) or plant materials (linen). The dyes are fixed with a mordant, which could change the colour of the dyed thread or fabric. Salt, vinegar, alum or iron can be used for this purpose, or other plants such as rhus typhina (also known as stag’s horn sumach) which contains tannin.

It’s astonishing how grass stains can be so difficult to remove from sports clothes, when natural dyes can be difficult to “fix” in a fabric!