1650s embroidery with a swastika in the 17th-century needlework collection at Montacute House

Montacute House (near Yeovil in the south of England), famed for its outstanding collection of Tudor and Stuart portraits, also displays a fantastic collection of seventeenth-century needlework. Among the exhibits is an unexpected embroidery of the 1650s bearing a swastika. The sign is often found in the applied art of other European countries too, and, amusingly, in Germany and Austria. A traditional symbol of luck and hope. Until the 1930s(