Rosary
14th century England
Card Woven silk cord with horn beads
by Lady Derdriu of Kilmaron

When I began this project, I had no idea of the allegorical significance of the rosary, that well-known length of cord with its many beads used for keeping track of one's prayers. The very word "rosary" has it's own unique implications. There is a 13th century legend that describes how the words of the prayers one said were transformed into roses, forming a chaplet or rose garland for the Virgin Mary.(1) From the beginning, this symbolic creation of a gift to the Virgin became tied to the sets of prayer beads worn and used in the Middle Ages.

I based my design for this project on several sources. Most integral in my inspiration were two fragments of a card woven cord strung with amber beads (see Fig. 1). The fragments were found in an excavation done in London, England. The excavation was known as Baynard's Castle, where two large deposits of textile artifacts were uncovered in a late 13th- to early 14th-century dock infill (see Fig. 2).(2) Several fragments of card weaving were uncovered at the site, including several similar to the ones I chose to examine. The original cords were woven using the tubular card weaving technique, which I used to fabricate the cord used in this project. The fragments still strung with the eight amber beads originally came from a rosary and were woven from silk yarn.(3)

While fragments of this 14th century rosary were useful in understanding the materials and techniques used in creating the original piece, they did not provide much understanding of what the entire rosary looked like intact. Two period pictures proved useful in the solution to this problem. The first is the Arnolfini Wedding Portrait by Jan van Eyck (see Fig. 3). On the back wall of the room pictured in this painting is a concave mirror, and to the left of the mirror is a string of prayer beads hanging on a nail. The presence of these beads in the painting supposedly represents the immaculate nature of the bride.(4) There are twenty-nine beads in all strung on this particular rosary, possibly due to the fact that the couple pictured taking their vows were of the Venetian merchant class. A full rosary of 150 beads was an expensive item in the Middle Ages so many people carried rosaries of 50 beads or less.(5) The second period picture used in analysis was a drawing of a "Paternoster maker" (see Fig. 4). The drawing shows a man in the process of making rosaries. Several of his finished products are suspended on a rod on his workbench in front of him. These rosaries are similar to the one pictured in the Arnolfini Wedding Portrait in that they are simple strings of beads, some with tassels on the ends. This type of rosary is known as the Paternoster cord that became most common in the 12th century.(6) The Paternoster cord was used when saying the "Our Father" devotion which consisted of 150 repetitions of the Our Father prayer. As early as the 13th century, paternoster makers formed guilds according to the materials they used in their craft such as horn and bone, amber or coral.(7) These representations of a medieval rosary illustrate that this may be a common type of prayer beads that could have been owned by any person in the Middle Ages. Closely tied to the devotions they represent, the rosary beads perhaps provided a tactile dimension that aided the medieval soul in prayer.(8)

The process I used in creating this rosary required only a few steps, though the card weaving process was the most complicated and time-consuming portion of the project. As previously mentioned the artifacts I focused on were two fragments of a card woven cord strung with amber beads. The weaver who made the original cord used the tubular card weaving method, using about twelve cards with two of their four holes threaded with silk yarn.(9) I chose to use eight cards also threaded through two of the four holes, and I chose spun silk yarn as my material. I used eight cards rather than twelve so the finished cord would easily pass through the holes in the beads since I did not have a means of making the holes larger. To weave a cord using the tubular technique, one must pass the weft thread though the same side of the weaving with each turn of the cards. (10) While weaving, I pulled the weft thread tightly to form a tube (see Fig. 5). With only two of the four holes threaded on the cards, I had to turn the cards a half turn each time to form the next shed, and my turning sequence was two turns forward and two turns backward. This technique formed a thin cord that looks similar to a lucet cord, though upon examination one can see where the weft threads pull the weaving into a tube. This is also noticeable in some of the cords found in the Baynard's Castle excavation (see Fig. 6).

Once the cord was finished, I simply strung the beads and made a tassel for each end of the cord. I chose to use horn beads that I purchased at Pennsic, as I have no experience with horn carving at this time. There are thirty-three beads on this rosary-there were rosaries mentioned in period prayer books that contained thirty-three meditations.(11) As I am no expert on the rosary devotion, I can only speculate that thirty-three may represent the number of years Christ lived.

Perhaps in the near future I will further investigate the rosary and some of the many devotions connected to it. The full significance of the rosary devotion stretches far beyond the sets of prayer beads that represent it. A better understanding of this allegorical gift to the Virgin may help me in creating similar period rosaries.

Endnotes

1 Winston-Allen, Anne. Stories of the Rose: The Making of the Medieval Rosary in the Middle Ages. (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997) xi-xii.

2 Crowfoot, E., et al. Medieval Finds from Excavations in London: 4. Textiles and Clothing c. 1150 - c. 1450. (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2001) 9.

3 Ibid, 135.

4 Snyder, James. Northern Renaissance Art: Painting, Sculpture, the Graphic Arts from 1350 to 1575. (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall Inc., 1985) 112.

5 "The Medieval Rosary." Online. http://www.pomian.demon.co.uk/rosary.htm Accessed 22 September 2001.

6 "Journaling the Bead." Online. http://www.rosaryworkshop.com/HISTORYjournalingbead.htm. Accessed 22 September 2001.

7 Winston-Allen, 112.

8 Ibid.

9 Crowfoot, 135.

10 Crockett, Candace. Card Weaving. (Loveland: Interweave Press, 1991) 110.

11 Winston-Allen, 25.

Bibliography

Crockett, Candace. Card Weaving. Loveland: Interweave Press, 1991.

Crowfoot, E., F. Pritchard and K. Staniland. Medieval Finds from Excavations in London: 4. Textiles and Clothing c. 1150 - c. 1450. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2001.

Snyder, James. Northern Renaissance Art: Painting, Sculpture, The Graphic Arts From 1350 to 1575. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall Inc., 1985.

Winston-Allen, Anne. Stories of the Rose: The Making of the Rosary in the Middle Ages. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997.

"Journaling the Bead." Online. http://www.rosaryworkshop.com/HISTORYjournalingBead.htm. Accessed 22 September 2001.

"The Medieval Rosary." Online. http://www.pomian.demon.co.uk/rosary.htm. Accessed 22 September 2001.