Leland tells us that “my lady the queen’s rooms” were strewed with them “when she took her chamber.” CHAPTER XI. The value of such a collection of textile fabrics as that at South Kensington can scarcely be overrated. Without such aid it is not possible for the painter or the historian to bring before his own mind, much less bring before another’s, a true representation of ancient ceremonies and pageants. Whether his subject be a coronation or a royal marriage, a queen’s “taking her chamber,” a progress, or a funeral, he cannot correctly set forth the splendour or the details of the occasion, unless he can refer to existing examples of the cloths of gold, the figured velvets, the rich embroidery, or the splendid silks, which used to be worn of old. Take for example nos. 1310 and 8624. Upon these are figured stags with tall branching horns, couchant, chained, upturning their antlered heads to sunbeams darting down upon them amid a shower of rain; and beneath the stags are eagles. This Sicilian textile, woven about the end of the fourteenth century, brings to one’s mind the bronze recumbent figure of a king in Westminster abbey. It is that of Richard the second; made for him before his downfall, and by two coppersmiths of London, Nicholas Broker and Godfrey Prest. This effigy, once finely gilt, is as remarkable for its beautiful workmanship as for the elaborate manner in which the cloak and kirtle worn by the king are diapered all over with a pattern, copied from the silken stuff out of which those garments must have been cut for his personal wear while living. The pattern consists of a sprig of the planta genesta, the humble broom plant--the haughty Plantagenet’s device--along with a couchant hart chained and gazing straight forwards, and above it a cloud with rays darting up from behind. These were Richard’s favourite cognizances: the one from his grandfather Edward the third; the other from his mother Joan of Kent. It is very probable that the king’s dress was of the same kind of silk Sicilian textile as the examples just referred to: and that those very examples are portions of pieces wrought, perhaps at Palermo, for the court of Richard. They are of the same date and they show his devices; the chained hart and the sunbeams issuing from a cloud.