This paper arose out of another project on Mrs A. G. I. Christie and English Medieval Embroidery: it began as a paragraph and ended as an appendix as long as the original paper. My editor for that paper and my friend and colleague for over 30 years on several textile projects, Gale R. Owen-Crocker, encouraged me to pursue the topic as of interest in its own right, and for this, and for her interest in the medieval terminology for clothing and textiles, expressed especially through the “Lexis of Cloth and Clothing”, I am delighted to offer it to her on the occasion of this festschrift.

In one brief section of her magnum opus on English medieval embroidery (based on a lifetime's work but published in 1938), Christie included some Medieval Latin terms believed to refer to techniques of embroidery: opus pulvinarium, opus plumarium, opus consutum, opus pectineum, and opus saracenum, as set out in Table 2.1. I have included in the table a further term, opus phrygionum, important to the discussion of embroidery to her predecessors and contemporaries, although not found in Christie's cited source, an inventory of St Paul's Cathedral dating to 1295, published in 1818 but based on a seventeenth-century publication, supplemented by manuscript sources by the original editor. She seems to have been unaware of any other medieval sources, including two other inventories from St Paul's, published in 1887; these, while published too late for some nineteenth-century writers on embroidery such as Lady Marian Alford (1817–88), whose work is discussed below, also seem to have been ignored by other textile historians of the late nineteenth and certainly the first half of the twentieth centuries. These too included lists of vestments and mention of technique, and together they are a unique resource, as they cover the same collection at three points in its medieval history. While Christie's work has proved authoritative for continued acceptance, or at least repetition of these terms in the context of medieval embroidery, their meaning (except for opus consutum) has not been much discussed in recent times, and never with reference to the whole medieval period in England, including the pre-Conquest period. This is at first sight all the more surprising in that Christie herself acknowledged pre-Conquest embroidery, though only in the early tenth-century embroideries from the tomb of St Cuthbert in Durham.