To the Western Church, the Eastern Church has always seemed richly exotic, with its glittering mosaics, gilded iconostases and gleaming chandeliers – but it has traditionally reserved lavish decoration for its church interiors rather than its vestments. In 1274, when Pope Gregory X convened the Second Council of Lyons in an attempt to reunite the two Churches, the papal Curia’s extravagant taste in liturgical dress was a sticking point. “The Pope and his representatives wear a mitre [and] a cloak fit for a woman,” sneered one contemporary Greek Orthodox commentator. “And their liturgical clothing is not made of wool, in honour of Christ who was sacrificed as a lamb, but of silken threads of many colours.”

Gregory was himself a flashy liturgical dresser, the owner of a sumptuously embroidered English cope preserved in the museum at Ascoli Piceno. Depicting 16 of his papal predecessors, it is thought to have been a diplomatic gift from Edward I, who went on to shower Gregory’s successor Nicholas IV with further gifts of lavishly embroidered English vestments, despite the Franciscan Pope’s membership of a mendicant order. It was Nicholas who in 1288 donated Gregory’s former cope to the cathedral in his native Ascoli Piceno, perhaps because it had gone out of fashion. Boniface VIII, another beneficiary of Edward’s bounty, went to his grave in gold-embroidered English vestments.  

In the thirteenth century, English embroidery – known as opus anglicanum – was the last word in liturgical luxury. So coveted were the “enviable copes, orphreys and other things” produced by the nuns of England’s convents and then by professional women and men in the embroidery workshops of the City of London that in 1246 the English Benedictine monk Matthew Paris accused Pope Innocent IV of extortion, claiming that he had “sent sealed letters to all the Cistercian abbots in England that they should send him those gold embroideries … as if they were obtainable for nothing”.