The name of ‘Tapiser,’ for one who wove this article, is familiarized to us as that of one of the immortal company who sat down together at the ‘Tabard’ in Southwark. Our modern ‘Tapsters,’ I doubt not, afford but another example of a surname engrossing what have been originally two separate and distinct titles. In an old sacred pageant given in York in 1415, amongst other trades represented we find coupled together the ‘Couchers’ and ‘Tapisers.’[365] Our ‘Couchers’ and ‘Couchmans’ are thus explained. They were evidently engaged less in the wooden framework, as we might have supposed, than in the manufacture of the cushions that covered it, and doubtless, like the broiderer mentioned above, worked in gold and silver and coloured threads the raised figures thereon.[366] Thus we must ally them with such names as ‘Robert le Dosier’ or ‘Richard le Dosyere,’ makers of the ‘doss,’ a technical term given at this time for cushions or stools worked in tapestry.[367] Thus the same book which I have just quoted says of the groom’s duties— The dosurs, curtines to hang in halle, These offices needs do he shalle. As a specific name for productions of this class the word is now quite obsolete, though familiar enough in early days; tapestry indeed, in general, has ceased to be popular, and is now all but entirely confined professionally to the weaving of carpets, and as an amateur art among ladies to those figured screens so much in vogue not more than one or two generations ago, traces of which still remain in the framed embroideries yet lingering in many of our drawing-rooms—embroideries of cats with grizzly whiskers and tawny terriers—embroideries which as children we heard with bated breath had been worked by our grandmothers when they were little girls, and thus we realised for the first time, not so much that they had done these wonderful things as that they had once been small at all, like ourselves. We have no surname to represent the weaving of carpets, as this was an introduction of much later date than most of our other household comforts in the way of furniture. In Brand’s ‘Popular Antiquities’ an interesting quotation is given from Hentzner’s ‘Itinerary,’ who, describing Queen Elizabeth’s Presence Chamber at Greenwich, says, ‘The floor, after the English fashion, was strewed with hay.’ The strewing of church pews with rushes was common until recent times, and in the North of England the peculiar customs attaching to the ‘Rush-bearing,’ a kind of ‘wakes,’ are not yet extinct. It is fair to add, however, that carpets were in course of introduction at the beginning of the sixteenth century; an old poem of that date mentions— Broudurers, strayners, and carpyte-makers, Spooners, turners, and hatters.