English Embroidered Bookbindings. Cyril Davenport
cognate to Mr. Davenport's book, may fairly be treated at rather greater length. If the French dictum 'la reliure est un art tout français' is not without its historical justification, it is at least possible to show that England has done much admirable work, and that now and again, as in the other bookish arts, she has attained preeminence.
The first point which may fairly be made is that England is the only country besides France in which the art has been consistently practised. In Italy, binding, like printing, flourished for a little over half a century with extraordinary vigour and grace, and then fell suddenly and completely from its high estate. From 1465 to the death of Aldus the books printed in Italy were the finest in the world; from the beginning of the work of Aldus to about 1560 Italian bindings possess a freedom of graceful design which even the superior technical skill quickly gained by the French does not altogether outbalance. But just as after about 1520 a finely printed Italian book can hardly be met with, so after 1560, save for a brief period during which certain fan-shaped designs attained prettiness, there have been no good Italian bindings. In Germany, when in the fifteenth century, before the introduction of gold tooling, there was a thriving school of binders working in the mediæval manner, the Renaissance brought with it an absolute decline. Holland, again, which in the fifteenth century had made a charming use of large panel stamps, has since that period had only two binders of any reputation, Magnus and Poncyn, of Amsterdam, who worked for the Elzéviers and Louis xiv. Of Spanish bindings few fine specimens have been unearthed, and these are all early. Only England can boast that, like France, she has possessed one school of binders after another, working with varying success from the earliest times down to the present century, in which bookbinding all over Europe has suffered from the servility with which the old designs, now for the first time fully appreciated, have been copied and imitated.
In this length of pedigree it must be noted that England far surpasses even France herself. The magnificent illuminated manuscripts, the finest of their age, which were produced at Winchester during the tenth century, were no doubt bound in the jewelled metal covers of which the rapacity of the sixteenth century has left hardly a single trace in this country. But early in the twelfth century, if not before, the Winchester bookmen turned their attention also to leather binding, and the school of design which they started, spreading to Durham, London, and Oxford, did not die out in England until it was ousted by the large panel stamps introduced from France at the end of the fifteenth. The predominant feature of these Winchester bindings (of which a fine example from the library of William Morris recently sold for £180), and of their successors, is the employment of small stamps, from half an inch to an inch in size, sometimes circular, more often square or pear-shaped, and containing figures, grotesques, or purely conventional designs. A circle, or two half-circles, formed by the repetition of one stamp, within one or more rectangles formed by others, is perhaps the commonest scheme of decoration, but it is the characteristic of these bindings, as of the finest in gold tooling, that by the repetition of a few small patterns an endless variety of designs could be built up. The British Museum possesses a few good examples of this stamp-work, but the finest collections of them are in the Cathedral libraries at Durham and Hereford. Any one, however, who is interested in this work can easily acquaint himself with it by consulting the unique collection of rubbings carefully taken by Mr. Weale and deposited in the National Art Library at the South Kensington Museum. In these rubbings, as in no other way, the history of English binding can be studied from the earliest Winchester books to the charming Oxford bindings executed by Thomas Hunt, the English partner of the Cologne printer, Rood, about 1481.
During the first half of this period the English leather binders were the finest in Europe; during the second, the Germans pressed them hard, and when the large panel stamps, three or four inches square and more, were introduced in Holland and France, the English adaptations of them were distinctly inferior to the originals. The earliest English bindings with gold tooling were, of course, also imitative. The use of gold reached this country but slowly, as the first known English binding, in which it occurs, is on a book printed in 1541, by which time the art had been common in Italy for a generation. The English bindings found on books bound for Henry viii., Edward vi., and Mary i., all of which are roughly assigned to Berthelet as the Royal binder, resemble the current Italian designs of the day, with sufficient differences to make it probable that they were produced by Englishmen. We know, however, that until the close of the century there were occasional complaints of the presence of foreign binders in London, and it is probable that the Grolieresque bindings executed for Wotton were foreign rather than English. Where, however, we find work on English books distinctly unlike anything in France or Italy, it is reasonable to assign it to a native school, and such a school seems to have grown up about 1570, in the workshop of John Day, the helper of Archbishop Parker in so many of his literary undertakings. These bindings attributed to Day, especially those in which he worked with white leather on brown, although they have none of the French delicacy of tooling, perhaps for this reason attack the problem of decoration with a greater sense of the difference between the styles suitable for a large book and a small than is always found in France, where the greatest binders, such as Nicholas Eve and Le Gascon, often covered large folios with endless repetitions of minute tools whose full beauty can only be appreciated on duodecimos or octavos. The English designs with a large centre ornament and corner-pieces are rich and impressive, and we may fairly give Day and his fellows the palm for originality and effectiveness among Elizabethan binders. In the next reign the French use of the semé or powder, a single small stamp, of a fleur-de-lys, a thistle, a crown, or the like, impressed in rows all over the cover, was increasingly imitated in England, very unsuccessfully, and, save for a few traces of the style of Day, the leather bindings of the first third of the century deserve the worst epithets which can be given them.
Until, however, French fashions came into vogue after the Restoration, English binders had never been content to regard leather as the sole material in which they could work. Embroidered bindings had come early into use in England, and a Psalter embroidered by Anne Felbrigge towards the close of the fourteenth century is preserved at the British Museum, and shown in one of Mr. Davenport's illustrations. In the sixteenth century embroidered work was very popular with the Tudor princesses, gold and silver thread and pearls being largely used, often with very decorative effect. The simplest of these covers are also the best—but great elaboration was often employed, and on a presentation copy of Archbishop Parker's De Antiquitate Ecclesiæ Britannicæ we find a clever but rather grotesque representation of a deer-paddock. Under the Stuarts the lighter feather-stitch was preferred, and there seems to have been a regular trade in embroidered Bibles and Prayer-books of small size, sometimes with floral patterns, sometimes with portraits of the King, or Scriptural scenes. A dealer's freak which compelled the British Museum to buy a pair of elaborate gloves of the period rather than lose a finely embroidered Psalter, with which they went, was certainly a fortunate one, enabling us to realise that in hands thus gloved these little bindings, always pretty, often really artistic, must have looked exactly right, while their vivid colours must have been admirably in harmony with the gay Cavalier dresses.
Besides furnishing a ground for embroidery, velvet bindings were often decorated, in England, with goldsmith work. One of the most beautiful little bookcovers in existence is on a book of prayers, bound for Queen Elizabeth in red velvet, with a centre and corner pieces delicately enamelled on gold. Under the Stuarts, again, we frequently find similar ornaments in engraved silver, and their charm is incontestable.
Thus while for English bindings of this period in gilt leather we can only claim that Berthelet's show some freedom in their adaptation of Italian models, and Day's a more decided originality, we are entitled to set side by side with this scanty record a host of charming bindings in more feminine materials, which have no parallel in France, and certainly deserve some recognition. After the Restoration, however, leather quickly ousted its competitors, and a school of designers and gilders arose in England, which, while taking its first inspiration from Le Gascon, soon developed an individual style. In effectiveness, though not in minute accuracy of execution, this may rank with the best in Europe. We can trace the beginnings of this lighter and most graceful work as early as the thirties, and it might be contended with a certain plausibility that it began at the Universities. Certainly the two earliest examples known to me—the copy of her Statutes presented to Charles i. by Oxford in 1634, and the Little Gidding Harmony of 1635, the tools employed in which have been