How highly English embroideries were at one period appreciated by foreigners may be gathered from the especial notice taken of them abroad; as we may find in continental documents. Matilda, queen of William the conqueror, carried away from the abbey of Abingdon its richest vestments, and would not be put off with inferior ones. In his will A. D. 1360 cardinal Talairand, bishop of Albano, speaks of the English embroideries on a costly set of white vestments. A bishop of Tournai, in 1343, bequeathed to that cathedral an old English cope, as well as a beautiful corporal “of English work.” Among the copes reserved for prelates’ use in the chapel of Charles duke of Bourgogne, brother-in-law to John duke of Bedford, there was one of English work very elaborately fraught with many figures, as appears from this description of it: “une chappe de brodeure d’or, façon d’Engleterre, à plusieurs histoires de N.D. et anges et autres ymages, estans en laceures escriptes, garnie d’un orfroir d’icelle façon fait à apostres, desquelles les manteulx sont tous couvertes de perles, et leur diadesmes pourphiler de perles, estans en manière de tabernacles, faits de deux arbres, dont les tiges sont touts couvertes de perles, et à la dite chappe y a une bille des dites armes, garnie de perles comme la dessus dicte.” While so coveted abroad, our English embroidery was highly prized and well paid for at home. We find in the Issue Rolls that Henry the third had a chasuble embroidered by Mabilia of Bury St. Edmund’s; and that Edward the second paid a hundred marks to Rose the wife of John de Bureford, a citizen and mercer of London, for a choir-cope of her embroidering, and which was to be sent to the Pope as an offering from the queen.