Early medieval wall paintings in England are rich in metaphoric references to textiles. However, the 'textility' in their schemes has, in inherited histories, rarely received more than a passing acknowledgement. This paper draws on the understanding of ‘textility’ established by Anna Bücheler in her study of the ‘textile pages’ in early medieval Ottonian manuscripts, to consider how ‘textility’ functions in the context of early medieval England. Specifically, this paper will consider what these paintings may reveal about the position of textiles and their makers in material culture of this period.

This paper will make reference to wall paintings that date from the ninth to the twelfth centuries, including those at St Andrew’s church in Nether Wallop and the so-called ‘Lewes Group’ in Sussex and will engage in cross-media visual analysis to substantiate the small corpus of extant contemporaneous textiles. In so doing, this paper will reveal ‘textility’ as a productive mode of framing material culture in this period and will serve as a counter-narrative to those studies which overlook textiles, references to textiles, and art made immediately before and after the period of the Norman Conquest. This understanding will significantly diversify the art historical narratives of early medieval England and will centre the contributions of English textile-making women, which have been overlooked for too long.