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Kempston Anglo-Saxon Embroidery

Fragment of Anglo-Saxon embroidery, from Kempston cemetery, Bedfordshire, England, 7th century. Fragment of Anglo-Saxon embroidery, from Kempston cemetery, Bedfordshire, England, 7th century. © The Trustees of the British Museum, acc. no. 1891,0624.141.

A woman's grave excavated 1863-1864 at Kempston, Bedforshire, UK, contained a relic box (Box. No. 141) that yielded a fragment of purple, woollen embroidery, dated to the seventh century AD. It has been classed as the earliest extant piece of Anglo-Saxon embroidery. The same grave also contained the so-called Kempston Beaker.

The design is a scrolling floral border outlined in a single thread and filled with double lines of stem stitch, yellow or white in some places, and blue or green in others. Elizabeth Crowfoot, who studied the fragment, compared it to the tenth century fragment from a woollen cushion found at Mammen, Denmark.

Sources:

  • CROWFOOT, Elisabeth (1990). 'Textile fragments from 'relic boxes' in Anglo-Saxon graves', in: Textiles in Northern Archaeology, ed. by Penelope Walton and John-Peter Wild, pp. 47-56. North European Symposium for Archaeological Textiles, Monograph 3. London: Archetype Publications. 
  • HORN, Peter C. (2015). The Kempston Embroiderydownload here.

Digital source of illustration (retrieved 29 Octobeer 2016).

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Last modified on Thursday, 12 January 2017 18:03