page_title: English embroidery
section_title: Pattern sources
hierarchical_section_title: English embroidery / Renaissance to Restoration / Pattern sources
caption_attribution_description: Blackwork embroidery of the 1530s (left) and 1590s (right)
context_page_description: English embroidery includes embroidery worked in England or by English people abroad from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day. The oldest surviving English embroideries include items from the early 10th century preserved in Durham Cathedral and the 11th century Bayeux Tapestry, if it was worked in England. The professional workshops of Medieval England created rich embroidery in metal thread and silk for ecclesiastical and secular uses. This style was called Opus Anglicanum or "English work", and was famous throughout Europe.
  With the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, the focus of English embroidery increasingly turned to clothing and household furnishings, leading to another great flowering of English domestic embroidery in the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras. The end of this period saw the rise of the formal sampler as a record of the amateur stitcher's skills. Curious fashions of the mid-17th century were raised work or stumpwork, a pictorial style featuring detached and padded elements, and crewel work, featuring exotic leaf motifs worked in wool yarn.
context_section_description: Pattern books for geometric embroidery and needlelace were published in Germany as early as the 1520s. These featured the stepped, angular patterns characteristic of early blackwork, ultimately deriving from medieval Islamic Egypt.  These patterns, seen in the portraits of Hans Holbein the Younger, were worked over counted threads in a double running stitch (later called Holbein stitch by English embroiderers).
  The first pattern book for embroidery published in England was Moryssche & Damaschin renewed & encreased very popular for Goldsmiths & Embroiderers by Thomas Geminus (1545).  Moryssche or Moresque refers to Moorish or arabesque designs of spirals, scrolls, and zigzags, an important part of the repertoire of Renaissance ornament in many media.  Scrolling patterns of flowers and leaves filled with geometric filling stitches are characteristic of blackwork from the 1540s through 1590s, and similar patterns worked in coloured silks appear from the 1560s, outlined in backstitch and filled with detached buttonhole stitch.
  Additional pattern books for embroiderers appeared late in the century, followed by Richard Shorleyker's A Schole-house for the Needle published in London in 1624.  Other sources for embroidery designs were the popular herbals and emblem books.  Both domestic and professional embroiderers probably relied on skilled draughtsmen or pattern-drawers to interpret these design sources and draw them out on linen ready to be stitched.
caption: Blackwork embroidery of the 1530s (left) and 1590s (right).
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