For a well-dressed bishop, all you need is gloves
The gloves that William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, wore at the coronation of Henry VIII in 1509 and at his marriage to Catherine of Aragon may be the pair kept at New College, Oxford. They are of red silk, patterned at the wrists and banded on the fingers with gold thread. On the back of each hand is the monogram IHS, standing for the name of Jesus, within a circle of flame.
These gloves are knitted, with very fine stitches of eight to a centimetre, made with needles a millimetre in diameter, of bone or Toledo steel. It has been speculated that knitted gloves were easier to put on to a bishop’s hands at his consecration than kid gloves, though practicality is seldom a liturgical hallmark.
There was also a notion that knitted seamlessness (like the robe of Christ, the Church itself and the bishop’s ideal unity with the Church) had its ritual significance. I confess I had no idea of the importance of bishops’ gloves in the high Middle Ages, taking them for a detail of dress rather than reinforcement of ritual.
The gloves’ importance related fundamentally to the anointing of the hands at the ordination of a priest and then of a priest as a bishop. Holy oil reflected the most sacred task of the hands, which was to effect the consecration of bread and wine in the Mass, to become the body and blood of Christ. In the prayers at that action, as the priest takes the bread to be consecrated, he says aloud that Jesus “took bread in his holy and venerable hands”.
Prayers at the making of a bishop speak of God endowing human beings with jointed hands and of the cleanness of the New Man. They manage to connect the kid skins donned by Jacob (to obtain the blessing of his father Isaac) with the ungloved hands of the priest offering the sacrifice of the Mass and receiving the blessings of grace. At Mass, bishops wore gloves up to the Offertory, and put them on again to bless the people at the end.
The hugely influential 13th-century liturgical writer William Durandus, ever delighting in figurative meanings, says that the bishop should cover his hands immediately after putting on his dalmatic (worn beneath his chasuble), so that his left hand does not know what his right hand is doing, as the Gospel enjoins (Matthew, 6:3).
Bishops’ gloves have a medallion on the back. Frequent symbols were the Saviour, the Virgin, the Lamb of God and the hand of God, representing his omnipotence. By the end of the Middle Ages these were often simplified to the IHS or a cross. For Durandus, the golden circle on a glove reflects the commandment of Matthew 5:16: “Let your light shine before men.” White gloves denote purity, so that the hands and their good works will be clean and free from all stain.
A marvellous project called Holy Hands, under Angharad Thomas and Lesley O’connell Edwards, has been making an inventory of historical episcopal gloves. They have tracked down 79 pairs, one right glove, 11 left gloves, and five fragments. Thirteen items are from before the 16th century.
Ms O’connell Edwards has studied the written record of their history. She has found that not all those who wrote about them in the past were well up on knitting. Some gloves identified as knitted have been identified as created by a different single-needle looping technique.
Knitters of gloves would have to have been expert, especially when creating the sections using two or more colours. An experiment for the Holy Hands project of a partial reconstruction of a gauntlet, by one person using silk, suggested 27 hours’ work to knit the full glove.