Recreating Bishop Lyhert’s vestments

The Art Newspaper has a most interesting report arising from the extensive restoration and redisplay of the collection at the Castle Museum in Norwich. Amongst the items in the collection are some fragments of silk from the vestments found at the end of the nineteenth century in the tomb in Norwich Cathedral of Bishop Walter Lyhert. He was diocesan from 1446 until his death in 1472. His most celebrated contribution to the cathedral was the beautiful lierne vault which elegantly crowns the twelfth century nave. He also appears in the Paston Letters both in connection with disturbances at Bishop’s ( now Kings ) Lynn at the end of the 1450s and then in 1469 in the family’s unsuccessful attempts to frustrate the marriage of the younger Margery Paston and the family‘s bailiff Richard Calle. 

Before becoming Bishop of Norwich the Cornish born Lyhert had served since 1435 as Provost of Oriel College in Oxford. I have therefore, as an Orielensis and an historian of the late medieval church, a particular interest in him and his Oriel colleagues who became bishops in that era. I wrote a biographical account of Bishop Lyhert for The Oriel Record in the 1990s.  

The study of the surviving portions of the fabric in the Norwich Museum collection and in the V&A in London taken from the bishop’s tomb when it was located in 1899 has made possible both recreation of the design and the ability to produce new fabric. This will be used to make copes for use by the Canons, and thereby to recreate something of the liturgical spectacle of worship in the cathedral in the mid-fifteenth century. Other pieces will be used in the display in Norwich Castle.

The article can be seen at After 550 years, a fabric found in a Norwich bishop’s tomb is recreated