The Victoria and Albert Museum in London houses a piece of dress fabric measuring 220 x 106 cm. It was probably made in Gujarat, western India, in the early eighteenth century, and consists of a cotton ground material with silk thread embroidery. The designs include birds, flowers, fruit, but also architectural motifs and are worked in chain stitch. The designs are repeated twice for every width.

The convent of Wienhausen (Germany) houses three embroideries that illustrate the medieval legend of Tristan and Iseuld (Isolde). The oldest of the three dates to c. AD 1300. It measures 2.33 x 4.04 cm. It is embroidered in wool on a linen ground material, using the kloster stitch.

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London houses a remarkable embroidered picture, representing Charles I just before his execution on 30 January 1649, with his son, Charles II, standing to the left. The embroidery is worked in silk and metallic thread, with seed pearls, on a white satin ground. It measures 36.5 x 47.3 cm.

Reputedly the oldest extant example of Russian ecclesiastical embroidery is the so-called veil or shroud of Grand Princess Maria of Tver, from c. AD 1400.

In the mid-twentieth century, excavations were carried out in the basilica of Saint Denis, the grave church of the Merovingian kings of the Franks. In this church, now in a suburb of Paris, a large number of sarcophagi were discovered. No. 49, discovered in 1959, yielded, so it appeared, the remains of Queen Arnegundis (Aregund, Aregunda, Arnegund, Aregonda, Arnegonda), the wife of the Frankish king, Clotaire I.

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London houses a silk embroidered panel with a representation of the Christian martyr, St. Sebastian. It dates to the eighteenth or early nineteenth century. The red colour of the background (now faded) corresponds with the colour normally associated in the Roman Catholic Church with martyrdoms.

Page 29 of 202