Sometime in 1598, Jane Bostocke, a young Shropshire gentlewoman, finished a long worked-over project, carefully stitching her designs and lettering into a piece of linen with various coloured silks, and decorating the result with small beads and seed pearls. As well as intricate geometric designs, she carefully stitched a dog with a collar and a lead, as well as a rather more exotic chained bear. She included trees and flowers and a small heraldic lion. It is clear that Jane changed her mind on more than one occasion, carefully unpicking a castle on an elephant, a squirrel cracking a nut and a raven.
Jane intricately stitched the letters of the alphabet, too, before recording her name, the date and the birth of her cousin, Alice Lee, on 'the 23 of November being Tuesday in the afternoon 1596'. She may already have begun the work before her cousin's birth, later deciding to present it to her as a gift. Undoubtedly, the work of stitchery must have taken her many hours of careful work – sometimes by the light of the window, sometimes with a candle burning close at hand. The result is the earliest surviving English sampler that is dated, and it now resides in London's Victoria and Albert Museum.
Upper-class Tudor girls, such as those at Sherriff Hutton, and women such as Jane Bostocke spent much of their time at their needlework. A sampler of the kind on which Jane worked was intended for the beginner, allowing girls and young women to perfect different types of stitching. Another surviving Elizabethan example, by a girl who stitched her name as 'Susan Neeadri', contains the queen's arms and initials accompanied by heraldic beasts. This sampler, which is long and narrow, is extremely intricate, its top panel embroidered in red and gold silk and the second panel in black and silver. The remaining bands were worked with cheaper, linen thread.
Lower down the social scale, too, girls were taught embroidery. Thomasine Wolters, an orphan living in Sandwich, Kent, in the 1580s-90s, was boarded out in the house of a Mistress Smythe. There, she was taught to sew; she later purchased her sampler from her old mistress when she left to marry. The Sandwich Board of Orphans, which oversaw Thomasine's modest inheritance and paid for her maintenance, also periodically purchased silk thread for her work. As well as producing beautiful embroidery, Thomasine had been taught to stitch her own gowns and coifs to cover her hair, and to make lace.
Sewing was, after all, a practical skill. Tudor women commonly made and repaired their own clothing, and even high-born women stitched clothes. Henry VIII's first wife, Catherine of Aragon, was skilled at shirt-making. The future Elizabeth I sent her half-brother, Edward VI, a shirt 'of her own working' as a New Year's gift when she was just six years old. Women frequently made vestments and other items for churches, too. Elizabeth's lady-in-waiting, Blanche Parry, gave an altar cloth that she had made to the church of St Faith's in Bacton in Herefordshire in 1589.
There was nothing unusual in seeing Tudor girls and women of all classes sitting with their heads bent, stitching.
— The Lives of Tudor Women (Elizabeth Norton)
