If you have ever been on a tour around a famous old castle or stately home, you can bet somewhere there are wall hangings or tapestries on the walls that would act like blankets keeping those huge rooms warm and were beautiful pieces of hand-crafted art. Castles and large stone buildings were drafty cold places that were hard to keep warm, and in those days, insulation was unheard of, so tapestries were hung up to help keep the warm in. The importance of tapestries was that they could be rolled up easily for transporting from one location to another for display (and warmth) and their ease of transport gained them greater acceptance over large paintings, as these were more difficult to move from one place to another.

Large tapestries added some colour to a room too and provided both entertainment and food for thought through their dramatic depiction of stories from the Bible, mythology and the classics, or their revealing portrayal of fashionable life. A large tapestry, 4.5m high by around 7.5m wide, woven in wool alone, would have taken five weavers around eight months to weave, and if finer materials were used, it would have taken much longer. Obviously not something you could knock up in a few days.

The most famous tapestry in the world is the Bayeux Tapestry, a unique artefact created in the 11th century, and shows the story of the conquest of England by William, Duke of Normandy in 1066, told in a 70 meters long embroidery.


Wallpaper forerunners

I suppose the first wall designs were those painted directly onto stone caves for early man in Stone Age times years ago. We don’t know why they started painting wildebeest or whatever, but scientists think it was not aesthetically driven and the reasons were more ritualistic.

In the Middle Ages, people would hang gilded leather on the wall. This was called Cuir de Cordoue (meaning ‘from Córdoba’). Its purpose wasn't just to decorate the room but to provide insulation in the same way as tapestries did. Paper wallcovering was actually a cheaper substitute for fancy tapestries and Cuir de Cordoue were reserved for the wealthy upper class.


Painted wallpaper

Wallpapers were not printed in the beginning but were painted by hand, and featured scenes similar to those depicted on tapestries. Large sheets of paper were sometimes hung loosely on the walls, in the style of tapestries, sometimes pasted to walls instead of being framed and hung, and the largest of prints, which came in several sheets, were probably mainly intended to be pasted to walls.

Credits: Unsplash;

The era of printing brought advances in block-printing technology and heralded the widespread use of wallpaper. Images taken from tapestries and other expensive fabrics were copied onto blocks of paper for poorer households, and the Chinese have the honour of inventing wallpaper; they are said to have pasted rice papers onto walls as far back as the Qin dynasty. Smoother linen fibres later replaced rice, so that painting and printing on paper became easier.


French Connection

The first guild for ‘dominotiers’ – makers of wallpaper – was created in France in 1599. With the invention of the first machine for printing wallpaper in 1785, the French came to dominate the industry, and often featured flowers, swans, birds, beasts or cornucopia overflowing with fruits, and were often hung in panels framed by gilt edges.

But such a luxury did not escape notice in the UK, and in 1712 a tax on wallpaper had been introduced under Queen Anne and remained in force for 124 years. Forging wallpaper stamps (or anything else) was by 1806 among the long list of offences punishable by death.

However, a killer was lurking among the swans, birds, beasts and fruit - a company called Morris & Co used large quantities of arsenic in their dyes – particularly for the greens in wallpaper, and in the 1860s when a number of child deaths were attributed to wallpaper, William Morris refused to accept they had been poisoned, but eventually, he bowed to public pressure and began to produce wallpaper that was advertised as ‘arsenic-free’.

Author

Marilyn writes regularly for The Portugal News, and has lived in the Algarve for some years. A dog-lover, she has lived in Ireland, UK, Bermuda and the Isle of Man. 

Marilyn Sheridan