Gone Medieval - The Crusades and the Chertsey Tiles

Episode Date: January 24, 2023

The largest group of tiles in The British Museum was found at the site of Chertsey Abbey in Surrey. These fragmented floor tiles depict the fictional killing of Sultan Saladin during the Crusades by Richard the Lionheart. Groundbreaking technological research has now revealed what the tile fragments originally looked like on the floor of the Chapter House, as well as some surprising revelations.In this episode of Gone Medieval, Dr. Cat Jarman talks to Dr. Amanda Luyster, to find out how the Chertsey Tiles shed light on the impact that the Crusades had on the medieval visual culture of England.This episode was edited and produced by Rob Weinberg.The exhibition, Bringing the Holy Land Home: The Crusades, Chertsey Abbey, and the Reconstruction of a Medieval Masterpiece, is at the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Gallery, College of the Holy Cross, Worcester MA, USA, 27 January - 9 April 2023.If you’re enjoying this podcast and are looking for more fascinating Medieval content then subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here >If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android > or Apple store > Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman. The Crusades are a very well-known part of European history, but now some new and quite important knowledge has come up from a rather unexpected source, a set of fragmented floor tiles known as the Chertsey tiles. The tiles were created in the 13th century and featured images and Latin texts.

Texts that have remained untranslated until now. Along with an international team, a researcher has now made a new painstaking reconstruction of the entire mosaic, along with the translation of the lost Latin texts. And those texts revealed something a little bit surprising. The designs also show us something about influence on art from Islamic and Dersentan textiles. Today's guest is the person in charge of this project and this is a series. discovery, Dr. Amanda Lister, who is an assistant professor in medieval art at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts. So welcome to Gone Medieval Amanda.

Thank you so much, Kat. I'm so pleased to be here. So this is such an exciting project. I'm really pleased that we can talk about it today. You've also curated a brand new exhibition that's opening this week, I believe. Is that right? That's exactly right. So where is this exhibition and where can people go to see it? It's at the Cantor Gallery at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. So that's my home institution. And it's actually taking place in this beautiful new building that's just been completed, the prior arts center, the gallery is up on the third floor, there's lots of glass. It's going to be a glorious exhibition. We've been awarded all kinds of grants, which are very welcome. It's an NEH-supported exhibition. We're getting loans from

the British Museum of the Churchy Tiles themselves. We're getting loans from the Metropolitan Museum of art, loans from the Worcester Art Museum, from the Dunbar and Oaks collection. It's really going to be a fabulous collection of medieval objects. Fantastic. Well, I'm kind of slightly sad. I probably won't be able to see you myself, but it sounds absolutely brilliant. Now, I want to talk about the discovery that you made in a moment, but I thought maybe we should do a little bit of background just to sort of understand what these tiles are and where they've come from, because obviously that's a crucial part of the story. So I mentioned in the introduction of the day to about the 13th century, But where are they from? When were they discovered?

That's actually a little bit more of a complicated story than you might imagine, because they were commissioned for a place, which is not the same place where they were discovered. So scholars have long agreed that the Chertze tiles, these fragmented tiles with pictures in Latin text, were commissioned for Westminster Palace somewhere around 1250. So that makes them a commission of the English king, Henry III, although I think it's actually much more likely to have been under the authority of his queen, or of Provence, which is an interesting story, commissioned for Westminster Palace around 1250. But these tiles are mold made. So once you have the molds, you can bring the molds anywhere you want to.

And apparently the molds did travel around. So we have a couple of the tiles were found at Winchester Cathedral, but that's only more recently. Most of the tiles were found at Churchy Abbey in Surrey, and that's about 25 miles outside of London on the Thames. The tiles were not found in C2. They were not part of any kind of intact pavement or even an intact chamber. They were found as a big pile of rubble, basically. They were discovered in the 1850s by some workmen who were working for a local landowner who was interested in building a house there. So the landowner was annoyed that his workmen had found all these old pictorial tiles and the workmen were all getting really interested in looking at them.

He just wanted his workman to work. So he took all the tiles and he locked them away in a shed. That was all he wanted to do with them. But then words started to spread that there were these strange and unusual medieval tiles. different people came to look at them. Eventually, they started to become famous. And so it's that core group of churchy tiles, discovered in the 850s,

that are now largely owned by the British Museum. And the British Museum now has the two most famous roundels of those tiles, a roundel depicting King Richard the Lionheart, fighting the Ayubid Sultan of Egypt Saladin. And Richard is running his lance through Saladin. Those are on display in the British Museum. So if you go to the medieval gallery in the British Museum, you'll see those two roundels.

those were among the fragments that were discovered at Churchy Abbey in the 1850s. Now, one other point I want to make is that those tiles, it seems like we're in the chapter house at Churchy Abbey. Now, a chapter house is not the same as a church. A chapter house is where the monks of Churchy Abbey would have conducted their business. So that's where we need to imagine that the tiles were. Okay, so do we think that they were commissioned for Westminster, but they never ended up there? Or do we think that this is just a different version of the same tiles?

What's the thinking behind why they weren't there? It is assumed that they were actually used at Westminster. But so much of medieval Westminster Palace has been destroyed by fire and other calamities over the centuries, there is very little left. So it is assumed that they were commissioned for and used at Westminster Palace, despite the fact that there are no remains of them there. So why are they important? these tiles? The churchy tiles are important because they are probably the most famous and most admired

floor tiles from medieval England, indeed arguably from medieval Europe. They are famous because of their incredible artistry. They are beautiful. Their line is articulate and fine. They have evocative and emotional detail. They show people doing lots of interesting things. They have been named the high watermark of medieval tile manufacture, and they've been called one of the finest, if not the finest, inlaid pavements in existence. Inlaid means that it's not somebody drawing on a tile because they're mold made. The molds make an indentation in a red clay body, and then you pour white clay into those indentations and that makes the design. But they're also famous because of their subject matter. Their iconic pairing, Richard the Lionheart and Saladin, is actually one of the most often used

medieval representations of crusading combat. So whenever you go and you look up Richard the Lionheart or Third Crusade or Crusades, I give you at least 50% odds that these floor tiles are going to be used as the illustration. I'm talking about textbooks. I'm talking about scholarly works. I'm talking about the internet all over the place. You see these tiles. And I think that they're also famous because they've long seemed to hint at a larger story. So there's Richard the Lionheart. Sure, but those are only two of the 14 designs that we have. And no one until now was sure what that larger story was. it was just said that, oh, this group of the Chertsey tiles is a series of combats. Fine.

But now we can see how all of these scenes that might have been seen as disconnected. So Richard Fighting Saladin, a classical hero on horseback fighting a lion. Two men engaged in a trial by combat. The Old Testament hero, Samson, fighting a lion on foot. Now we can see how all these come together under one rubric, because we now see they're all about the Crusades. Why do I think they're even more important than has previously been recognized? The tiles are important because they offer us a glimpse into a world that a lot of people have

heard of and are interested in, the world of the Crusades. Indeed, this is a world that retains power in our own contemporary discourse. The Crusades still give rise to emotion today. Fascination with these larger-than-life personalities like crusading King Richard the Lionheart, his opponent, the Sultan Salad, give rise to people just feeling really impressed at the crazy length of the crusading journey and the practicalities of the supply routes and the ships and so on. Other emotions that still are brought about by thinking about the Crusades Day includes shock and horror at some of the really violent actions that took place.

So contemporary political actors and writers still refer to the Crusades as setting up some kind of monochromatic continuous battle between the United Forces of Christianity and the United Forces of Islam. That last bit is not really true, by the way. But we think we know the medieval world of the Crusades. And I'm going to argue that the Churchy tiles give us a much more complicated and, for me, much more interesting understanding of what the medieval Crusades were actually like. This is complicated, multi-layered, nuanced. What do I mean by this. I mean, the tiles give us a glimpse of a world in which a woman, in this case, the Queen of England, can commission crusading themed art. I can't prove that, but I think it's pretty good.

The tiles show us a world in which propaganda, and in particular, propagandistic retellings of the past are used by present-day actors, and here by present-day, I actually mean the English king and queen around 1250, to suggest that their new plans have a good shot at the time. success. The tiles show us a world in which the good guy English people, Richard the Lionheart's men, are beating up on Saladin's men. Okay, we might actually have expected that. But what we didn't expect is that these tiles also show us while they're making out the Muslim enemy to be weak and bad at fighting and so on. They also show us how impressed the English and other Western Europeans were with the art objects, with the cultural production of the Muslim.

Muslim artists and the Orthodox Christian artists of the Eastern Mediterranean that Europeans encountered when they went on Crusade. In particular, English and other crusaders were so impressed with Eastern Mediterranean figural silks. That is silks that have woven into them, often woven along with gold, thread, and so on, with beautiful images of people and animals. So the crusaders found these silks in the Eastern Mediterranean. They brought them home to England and elsewhere.

And after we reconstruct the tiles, we found that the crusading theme tiles use the format and the subject of these imported Eastern Mediterranean silks as a framework to deliver their own message of English crusading superiority. So in this floor, the English are saying, hey, we're great and we'll dominate you in these crusading battles. But they're learning from and borrowing from the language

of the dominated in order to do so, which suggests that actually English are pretty impressed with the art objects, with the culture of production of the people that they're trying to dominate. So when I say that the tiles are important, I see it now as for a small collection of reasons because they point to female patronage, which we don't always see or expect to see in the context of the Crusades,

because they connect us in our 21st century world of propaganda to a 13th century world of propaganda. up. And finally, because they deliver a multi-layered understanding of what the Crusades meant to the English. They reveal the impact the Crusades had on the English and other Western Europeans. That includes some pretty awful violence against non-Christians and also at the same time reveals a clear respect for the artistic production of non-Europeans. Let me add in here that I'm not trying to pretend that the world of the Crusades was a medieval love fest. It absolutely was not. There was a lot of prejudice and violence against people who are not

European Christians. And that violence was not just against soldiers, against Muslims in the Eastern Mediterranean. That's what I assumed originally. I think a lot of people assume that. The violence of the Crusades took place against other kinds of Christians, not just against Muslims. It took place in various places all around Europe, including England, not just in the Holy Land. That violence took place against women, children, and families, not just against soldiers. There's that recent discovery in Norfolk in the UK that I want to introduce here, in which a group of bodies in the medieval well were gene sequenced and were determined to belong to various Jewish individuals, including some sisters, including a toddler, a family. So what seems to have happened there is that around

1190. So Richard the Lionheart, the guy in my tiles, is heading out on the Third Crusade and feeling against non-Christians in England is running very high. There are riots in the course of which Jewish families who have been living in England for generations are run out of their homes and murdered. So that's part of the Crusades too. And at the same time, the tiles help us to see that the medieval English would not have been the same without the contact that they had with the Eastern Mediterranean and the Crusades, without the experiences, the ideas, the stuff they brought back from there. That contact with the Byzantine and Muslim worlds really impacted the English and other Western Europeans. They started to think about their own identities in relationship to that

part of the world. There's this fabulous text written by Fulché of Schart about how when the Crusaders move in and set up the Kingdom of Jerusalem, which only lasts for about a century. about how all these people who had called themselves Westerners are now becoming so-called Easterners. He says those who were born in Paris and Rome now see themselves as citizens of Tyre and Antioch, that people are speaking multiple languages, that people who are marrying people who have been baptized into the Christian faith. So there's an idea that the identity and the material culture of the Eastern Mediterranean is relevant to the Europeans and can be part of their own expression of self. The point I really want to make is that the tiles help us to see that the English,

while expressing their desire to totally dominate the Muslims and everyone else in Eastern Mediterranean, that they're expressing their desires in languages that they learned from that area of the world. It's a kind of cultural interdependence that I don't think we often get a chance to see as clearly as we do with the Churchy tiles. That's fantastic. And actually, what's so important here is that it is this new reconstructions that you've now made that is allowing you to actually make these new interpretations actually. Hello everyone, James Rogers here, the host of the warfare podcast by History Hit. I'm a war historian who works with the UN, NATO and governments around the world.

Twice a week, every week we bring you the defining wars of history and learn about the history of emerging wars. The passengers and crew of 149 were trapped, trapped and delivered into the hands. of Saddam Hussein. We hear from the veterans who served. Guards there would grab a machine gun and fire had us as we went over and could see the splinter flying in all directions. Through to world leading historians providing context to understand current conflicts.

Finland obviously couldn't join NATO, which makes the two Finnish leaders' statements about Finland deciding for itself whether it will join NATO. That makes those statements even more important. Subscribe to Warfare from History Hits on Apple Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and join us on the front lines of military history. So I wanted to ask you a little bit more about that and the actual reconstruction and more specifically what that has been able to show you that they didn't know initially when they first came up. So can you first talk us through? How is that made? I mean are you talking about physically putting

the separate puzzle pieces or are you using digital methods? What sort of methods did you use to reconstruct the fold pavements? Let me just preface this by saying that it's the reconstruction of the text and images that's allowed us to see that the tiles are all about the Crusades. Nobody knew that before. Everyone just said, series of combats. One of those combats is Richard the Lionheart and sell it in, another combat is this, another combat is that, and so on and so on. The reconstruction allows us to see that they are all about the Crusades.

Techniques. let me take a step back briefly and just fill you in on the previous history, because there is a previous history of attempted reconstructions of these tiles. Because when you find something in hundreds and hundreds of fragments, regardless if you're in the 1850s or 1950s or whenever, there's a temptation to try and put it back together, figure out what have we got. The most important, and this is really pivotal reconstruction work, was done by the former British Museum tiles. curator Elizabeth Eames. And she had artists in the 1970s look at the different fragments of tile and hand-draw black-and-white reconstructions of what the figural tiles looked like before fragmentation. So the image of Richard Leinhardt, the image of Samson, the image of an archer. And she published those hand-drawn black-and-white reconstructions in her big catalog of

floor tiles from the British Museum. She also organized a physical reconstruction of the Richard the Lionheart and Saladin tiles that you can see at the British Museum and that you'll be able to see in our exhibition at Worcester. Now, when she reconstructed those two pictorial roundels, she did include some of the surrounding tiles, but she didn't know what to do with the texts. So she just put pictorial pieces in around in the area where we know texts would originally have been placed. So when I came to the scene, that's what we had. We had black and white hand drawings of the pictorial roundels, and we had two tiles physically reconstructed in the British Museum. No one had touched the Latin texts, and no one had yet attempted a photograph.

reconstruction of the tiles. Now, it's been, what, nearly 50 years since that previous reconstruction, and we have a heck of a lot more technology these days than existed then. So the first stage was a photographic reconstruction of the tiles. This did not have me putting actual tiles together. What it required was me going to the British Museum with some nice camera equipment and individuals at the British Museum very kindly bringing out all the extant fragments, setting them up on my copy stand. I would photograph them at a set distance and come up with hundreds and hundreds of photographs, which a team of mine at Holy Cross headed by our digital imaging expert, Janice DeMarre, and with the assistance of students and others, undertook the painstaking progress of digitally cutting out each tile image and reassembling them into each pictorial roundel.

So that was stage one, the pictorial roundels and the photographs. Stage two, how then are we going to deal with the lost Latin texts? There's some 85 fragments of these. Because they are mold made, you can't look at the broken edges or anything handy like that when you want to put the pieces of text together. So each little block of text is between one and four letters. And you can imagine that people have been trying since the 1850s to try to figure out how to put these texts together. But it was really difficult. So we looked at different methods of textual reconstruction. Now, if you're looking at what's

going on in the world of medieval textual reconstruction these days, you'll realize there's a lot of really fabulous techniques out there. So if you have a parchment and the ink is faded on the parchment, then there are techniques to get that image of the ink to fluoresce and you can read it again. Or if you're looking at a single three-dimensional object that's been fragmented, then you can use three-dimensional digital manipulation to try and figure out how those pieces go back together again. We don't have either of those situations. We have mold-made sequences of what's called letter strings, basically, between one and four letters. So how do we put those back? With a additional thematic analysis of the images that we'd reconstructed, it was becoming pretty clear to me

that the theme of the whole mosaic was the Crusades. So we undertook a comparison between looking at the strings of text, which are one to four letters, and comparing those to Crusader texts that were present in England in the late 12th century. And so we had a team. again at Holy Cross, so this is our Classics Professor Neil Smith, and again some students who wrote a computer program that would compare each of these strings of letters to words found in crusading texts. And that gave us a list of likely words that we could consider for inclusion. The texts are in Latin. We get letter strings like F-R-E, R-I-C-A, I-A, something like that. So when we compared those letter strings to crusading texts, we came up with a list of likely words.

In English, those words are, I grow in power or violence. Enemies by the claw, by the spear, lion, knight, victory, king, courage. So that was one set of data from the crusading texts. We also needed to check each letter string against other extant times. So obviously it makes more sense to reconstruct a word where we have both pieces of the word, rather than a word where we only have one part of it. And we also needed to check each letter string against vocabulary frequency lists. We then had a list of words, but the words around each roundel weren't in isolation.

They were in phrases. So I tried to look for information as to how I could connect the words into phrases. And this is actually not too difficult to do when you're looking for phrases that you know have to do with particular individuals. So we know that there must have been a phrase about Richard the Lionheart. And there must have been a phrase about Samson, the Old Testament hero, who tears a lion with his bare hands showing how strong he is. And this also happens in the Holy Land. So what I did was I looked all over the place and especially on art objects. to find phrases about Richard the Lionheart and phrases about Samson.

And then I compared those with the words that we already had. And in fact, some of them came together quite neatly. If you're looking at Richard the Lionheart, some of the phrases that accompany him are basically just his regnal title, which you find around his great seal. And what do you know, we actually have almost all the fragments to make Richard the Lionheart's rednal title a right. the churchy tile. So in Latin, it's Ricardus dee gratae, Rex Anglia. And in English, it's

Richard by grace of God, the King of England. So we put that in place as a very plausible reconstruction around Richard's Ramble. For the Old Testament hero Samson, Samson also appears on all kinds of medieval art, stained glass windows, ivory game pieces, manuscripts. And a lot of those medieval art representations of Samson also have short inscriptions. And when you look at those inscriptions, there are several words that those inscriptions have in common with words we'd already come up with for the Chertzey tiles. So Wirtus, which is Virtueur's Strength, Samson, his name, aura, mouth, Leonis of the Lion. There's also, in the case of Samson, there's another series of Chertsy tiles, which I'm not going to get into, the second series of Chertsey tiles because they get made

again, okay? But the relevance of those is that they give us some information as to how the words around Samson were arranged into a phrase. So we have almost all the fragments for Wirtus, Sampsonus, Fortis, frigate, or Leonus, the courage of Samson the strong broke the jaws of the lion. So we place that as a plausible reconstruction around that roundel. So I've talked to you through the photographic reconstruction of the roundels. I've talked you through the reconstruction of the texts. And now I need to talk you through the final stages, which is where we put the roundels together with the photographs of the texts in the ornamental surround. And in fact, we get a full panel of what these combat series tiles would have looked like as far as we can tell when they

were laid, so both at Westminster Palace and at Chertsey Abbey. So we have that reconstruction of three by four roundels as a digital image, and you can see it in our exhibition along with all the particular scenes in the roundels and the texts and what they say is happening. I also want to say we're embarking on yet another stage of reconstruction in conjunction with the Chertsey Museum. And they and James Cumber have created a digital walkthrough, a three-dimensional modeling of what Chertsey Abbey would have looked like. And we gave them our information about the chapter house floor. And on our exhibition, you can also watch a short walkthrough where you enter Chertsey Abbey, leave it and walk into the cloister, and then walk into the chapter house.

and you see the tiles as they would have been placed in that floor. So that's a final stage of reconstruction that I think really helps everyone, me included, to understand how these tiles appeared in their medieval environment. It's just that experience of it, isn't it, that we otherwise just can't get from the fragments what it would have been like. But I absolutely love that use of technology because actually it's so much more complicated than you would have thought. And that's a fantastic use of new technology for that particular purpose.

I wouldn't just get back to a little bit the discovery of that translation of text because I know that one of the things that you've said in that translation of the text in these images is that there was a sort of fictional victory shown there which didn't actually happen. Can you say a little bit more about that? Absolutely. So I'm going to preface my response to a very good question just by bringing everyone's attention to the fact that fiction as a category wasn't really recognized in the Middle Ages the way it was today. So today we have material that we understand to be entirely true and we call that fact or history. And then we have material that's not entirely true and we call that fiction. In the Middle Ages, there weren't those

clear demarcations. A lot of the things that you would read, even if they were called chronicles or histories, would have things in them that couldn't possibly be true. Things like miracles that a lot of people today would doubt really happened and miraculous victories. And then things that read a lot like fiction, like a story of Richard the Lionheart who, when faced with a lion, without any weapons, manages to save himself by means only of a set of silk handkerchiefs. So we today see this as a fictional victory because it shows Richard on a horse, putting a lance through salad in, and that did not happen. Richard. and Saladin never met in single combat. In a larger sense, though, it's a little bit true because

Richard and Saladin were opposed because they were on opposite sides of the Third Crusade. And now, today, most historians see the Third Crusade as not really a clear victory for either side. Richard won a bunch of lands along with his other partners in the Third Crusade, but he didn't win back Jerusalem. He came home after a truce was signed. But I'm sure if you read medieval texts about the Third Crusade, plenty of them are going to be very partisan and focus only on Richard's amazing victories. So from our perspective, this is fictional.

But it would not necessarily have been understood that way by a medieval audience. A medieval English audience could have looked at this floor and thought, yeah, that's our hero, Richard, isn't he amazing? I mean, that really shows how we need to understand something like this in its contemporary context, don't we, and not just in a 21st century context? and that's just such an important point.

And that also brings me back a little bit to what you were talking about at the beginning of the importance of them. And I'm very interested in this idea of the influence of the arts that you're seeing here. And is that something that was happening more widely at the time? Was that quite common? Or is this something that's quite unique to these tiles? I would say it's more common than people recognize. So let me take a step back and lead you through the actual

connection between the tiles and these figural silks made by Muslim and Orthodox Christian and other artisans brought home from the Eastern Mediterranean. I've said one of the new things we discovered about the tiles is that they're all about the Crusades. The second thing that we discovered is that they're based on these figural silks that come home. And that's important because the crusading context, the crusading message is highlighted because of this immediate visual similarity with the stuff that people knew came home from the Crusades. So what is the similarity? The floor's medallion design overlaps precisely with the medallion design that you get on these

imported figural silks. Also, it's subject matter of combats, including specifically combats on horseback and combats with lions. You also get those exact same subjects in medallion pattern luxury silks from Byzantine and Islamic Empire. So the connection is both in the composition or the format and in the subject matter. So that's a very tight connection between the floors and these imported figural silks. So your question was, is this a wider trend that we see English or other Western European art being impacted by art that came from the Eastern Mediterranean?

It is a wider trend. It's not always easy to see. So if you're talking specifically about figural silks, you can see imitations or English or Western European interest in re-envisioning those imported silk patterns. You can see that in wall paintings. So there's wall paintings in England, there's wall paintings in France, there's wall paintings in Italy, that are clearly referencing the appearance of these luxury silks. And the reason that we see these wall paintings is that actual imported silks were all over the place in Europe and England.

And mostly we can tell this because of inventory records that describe them. I've gotten really interested in all these records that haven't necessarily been recognized yet, that witness the presence of these imported silks from very far away being used in Little English Church. in big English churches, being used as clothing by English kings and queens, being used in bed chambers, being used as diplomatic gifts between monarchs. You can see that these figural silks are really widely exchanged prestigious gifts. Now, they're not just gifted, they're also displayed as clothing and displayed as hangings in both palaces and cathedrals. And they're also converted to vestments, So we see these actual silks really deeply woven into English and Western European culture

to the degree that even during the Crusades in England we have silks that the English knew were Muslim made and they call them Muslim made or Saracen and yet they're using them at mass. They're using them within churches. They're using them in all these really. sacred ways that we might not expect. So these figural silks have come in. They're being used physically in a lot of really important ways that's hard to see now. But they also do inspire related works of art. The churchy tiles is of course this big example that I'm just bringing to everyone's attention. But there are plenty of other examples. So there's three wall paintings in church

surroundings in England where you can also see that the same thing is going on. There's also some painted chests, some painted tombs where we similarly see local imitations of imported silks. There's also not so much in England, but in other places France and Italy and Germany, local embroiderers are inspired by these imported figural silks and they make their own patterns on vestments, caves, etc. So it is absolutely a wider trend, but I don't think it's particularly one that's been recognized. It's not one that's very easy to see. And it also is a trend that doesn't have anything to do with manuscripts or the bare-bone structure of architecture. Art history as a discipline has tended to be historically focused on the arts of painting and the arts of architecture.

And so I think another reason why that wider trend hasn't been recognized is that these, fields of floor tiles and textiles, what you might call the decorative arts, haven't really yet been given their due. That just shows what an important discovery this is, which is fantastic. So congratulations again. It's really brilliant. I really want to come and see your exhibition now. How long is it on for? Can you just remind us where people can come to see it? It opens January 26. It closes April 6th. The exhibition takes place in the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor art gallery, and that's at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. We'd love to see you all there.

Brilliant. Well, such a brilliant story and the sort of thing that people have to actually see in real life. Thanks again, and thank you so much again for joining us and sharing your expertise with us today, Emma. It's been a real pleasure. Thank you so much, Kat. So this brings us to the end of this episode of Gone Medieval from History Hit. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already.

Do please recommend us to your friends and family and help all the people. people find us. And if you would like more information about the Middle Ages, direct to your inbox, do subscribe to our Medieval Monday's newsletter. Just look in the episode notes, wherever you found this podcast for instructions on how to do that. So we hope you will join us again for our next episode. My co-host, Matt Lewis, will be back on Saturday and I will be with you next Tuesday. Thank you so much for listening and hope to help you join us again soon.