Banner of ‘St Martin and the Beggar’

This is perhaps the earliest sizeable fragment of an English painted cloth in existence. Recent research suggests that it might have been the banner of the Worshipful Company of Drapers in London. It was presented to the Society in 1855 by James Wallis Pycroft, an eccentric Fellow who was later expelled by the Society. In the banner, St Martin is depicted as a civilian sharing his cloak with a beggar, an action he is remembered and venerated for in the Western church.