244 The Wilton Carpet Industry. 
after their introduction into the West, carpets continued to be chiefly 
employed as table cloths, coverings for couches, chairs, and other 
articles of furniture, and as costly offerings to be Jaid before Church 
altars. As late as 1596 we read of Richard Bellasio, of Morton, 
Durham, bequeathing to his nephew “his best Turkey carpet for 
his long table”; and the use of carpets in this century is known 
only in rare instances. Checked mattings were in use during the 
fifteenth century, for in Lydgate’s Life of St. Edmund we find a 
sketch of the room in which the saint is supposed to have been born, 
the floor of which is shown to have been covered with checked 
matting, while a fringed hearthrug is laid before the fireplace. 
About that time, too, carpets of interlaced strips of leather, made 
in the fashion of our present list hearthrugs, seem to have beensin 
vogue, and examples of these are preserved in some of our museums. 
The use of these carpets, however, was the exception rather than 
the rule with the wealthy. Thomas a Beckett was chidden for his 
luxury in having his presence chambers strewn with clean straw or 
hay; the daily re-covering of the floors of Hampton Court Palace 
with rushes in the time of Wolsey was considered gross extravagance, 
and it was not until the reign of Elizabeth that we hear of even 
queens using a carpet for a floor-covering. 
It is not to the East, however, that we owe the introduction of the 
manufacture into England. France, which took the lead of all the 
northern nations of Europe in art and science, possessed tapestry 
factories as early as the year 400 A.D. The fabric woven appears 
to have been a kind of rude embroidery done in gold and silver, 
chiefly used for hangings and altar-cloths. The work was entirely 
made with the needle, and in spite of the introduction of a loom in 
the year 900, this mode of working continued for some four hundred 
years later. In the twelfth century, under the reign of Philip 
Augustus, the most ancient tapestry makers in France, called 
Sarazinois, formed themselves into an important corporation in Paris 
for producing embroidery, the fabric being a bluish velvet lined with 
vermillion, on which was worked the fleur-de-lis. The rapid spread 
of the fashion for using tapestry for house decoration led to the 
establishment of manufactories in the chief cities in the West of 
