The painted cloth is anomalous. We can be certain tat painted cloths were once common, for they are recorded frequently in early documents-wills, inventories and account books-where in the sixteenth century they are valued at sixpence to a shilling a yard. By then they had become widespread all over Europe, in England probably almost universal in houses in the southern half of the country at the yeoman/merchant level and above. But textiles are always fragile, and cloths from the outset ephemeral, and today survivals are excessively rare. Many must have been destroyed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when 'improving' and modernizing old houses, especially after the introduction of wallpapers. They can be descried in the backgrounds of late sixteenth-and early seventeenth-century paintings and engravings, in some cases imitating more expensive forms such as tapestry and other woven textiles, but few survive in anything like their original condition or context. Generally, only fragments are known in one or two provincial museums and old houses and even these are often in poor condition; torn, stained, abraded, faded. As Elsie Matley Moore, one of the foremost authorities, has written, few of us have ever seen a painted cloth. As a result, caught in a hiatrus between art and textile history, very little is known about them.