Today being the feast of the martyrdom of St Thomas of Canterbury is a suitable day on which to write about the vestments of one of St Thomas’ immediate successors, Hubert Walter, who died in 1205. When his tomb was opened in the nineteenth century his vestments were found to be largely intact and they have been preserved in the cathedral collection. The Friends of Canterbury Cathedral have now had one of the probably Iberian iridescent silk textiles recreated to provide new copes for the Canons.
There is a short online article about this at Medieval fabric is proudly displayed in Refectory Restaurant
From what the article says the vestments are yet another reminder of the splendour of medieval textiles and their use in the liturgy. The new copes can complement the copy of the set of vestments at Sens that are traditionally said to have been used by St Thomas during his exile there in the 1160s.
I think it was Hubert Walter in the early 1200s who invented or refined "tails of fines" AKA tally sticks. This was a system for validating land grants by taking a thin slice of wood, shaped rather like a broad ruler, and hammering it at random with a mallet down a central line before snapping it into two long halves.
ReplyDeleteThe person granted the land would retain one half, and the other half, called the tail of fine, would be retained in storage in the Exchequer for possible future comparison with the broken half in the event of disputes.
By the early 19th century, a vast collection of these tails of fines had built up over the centuries. So, because better methods such as deeds had long since been used exclusively to record and validate land tenure, in 1834 it was decided to burn the lot.
However, either they turned out to be more flammable than anticipated or someone was impatient to get through the task and fed the fire too generously, because the fire went out of control and resulted in the entire Houses of Parliament burning down!
Tally sticks were also used, with systems of notches indicating amounts, to record debts. I can't actually find a single reference on Google to "tails of fine", but I'm pretty sure, from memory, that was the official name for them, at least originally and when used for land tenure validation.
John R Ramsden