THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 SOUTH KENSINGTON MUSEUM ART HANDBOOKS. 
 
 EDITED BY WILLIAM MASKELL. 
 
 NO. 1 -TEXTILE FABRICS.
 
 These Handbooks are reprints of the prefaces or introductions to 
 the large catalogues of the chief divisions of works of art in the 
 Museum at South Kensington; arranged and so far abridged as to 
 bring each into a portable shape. The Lords of the Committee of 
 Council on Education having determined on the publication of 
 them, the editor trusts that they will meet the purpose in- 
 tended; namely, to be useful^ not alone for the collections at South 
 Kensington but for other collections, by enabling the public at 
 a trifling cost to understand something of the history and character 
 of the subjects treated of. 
 
 The authorities referred to by the authors will be found named 
 in the large catalogues ; where are also given detailed descriptions of 
 the very numerous examples in the South Kensington Museum.
 
 TEXTILE FABRICS. 
 
 BY 
 
 THE VERY REV. DANIEL ROCK, D.D. 
 
 WITH NUMEROUS WOODCUTS. 
 
 Published for the Committee of Council on Education 
 
 BY 
 
 CHAPMAN AND HALL, 193, PICCADILLY. 
 1876.
 
 COLN'S INN FIC1.PS.
 
 Art 
 Library 
 
 NK 
 
 LIST OF WOODCUTS. 
 
 Indian woman reeling silk 13 
 
 Ladies in fifteenth century spinning and weaving 34 
 
 Mortuary cloth 44 
 
 Silk damask with imitated Arabic letters "46 
 
 Ladies in fourteenth century carding and spinning 48 
 
 Byzantine Dalmatic . . : . . . . . . . , 11-- 
 
 Sicilian silk damask 
 
 57 
 
 Florentine silk damask .......... 62 
 
 Part of the Syon Cope 84 
 
 Embroidered saddle-cloth 87 
 
 Ancient banner of the city of Stiasburg 91 
 
 Banner of the tapestry workers of Lyons . . . . . . . 97 
 
 Tapestry of the fourteenth century ........ 98 
 
 The weaver, in 1574 100 
 
 Tapestry of the fifteenth century ioz 
 
 State gloves of Louis the thirteenth 1 1 - 
 
 832678
 
 TEXTILES. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 <t 
 
 UNDER its widest acceptation the word " textile " means every 
 kind of stuff, no matter its material, wrought in the loom. 
 "Whether, therefore, the threads are spun from the produce of the 
 animal, vegetable, or mineral kingdom ; whether of sheep's wool, 
 goats' hair, camels' wool, or camels' hair ; whether of flax, hemp, 
 mallow, or the filaments drawn out of the leaves of plants of the 
 lily and asphodel tribes of flowers, or the fibrous coating about 
 pods, or cotton ; whether of gold, silver, or of any other metal ; 
 the webs from all such materials are textiles. Unlike these are 
 other appliances for garment-making in many countries ; and of 
 such materials not the least curious, if not odd to our ideas, 
 is paper, which is so much employed for the purpose by the 
 Japanese. A careful reference to a map of the world will show 
 us the materials which from the earliest ages the inhabitants of 
 the world had at hand, in every clime, for making articles of 
 dress. 
 
 In all the colder regions the well-furred skins of several 
 families of beasts could, by the ready help of a thorn for a 
 needle and of the animal's own sinews for thread, be fashioned 
 after a manner into various kinds of clothing.
 
 2 TEXTILES. 
 
 Sheep, in a primitive period, were bred for raiment perhaps as 
 much as for food. At first, the locks of wool torn away from the 
 animal's back by brambles were gathered : afterwards shearing 
 was thought of and followed in some countries, while in others 
 the wool was not cut off but plucked by the hand away from the 
 living creature. Obtained by either method the fleeces were 
 spun generally by women from the distaff. This very ancient 
 daily work was followed by women among our Anglo-saxon 
 ancestors of all ranks of life, from the king's daughter downwards. 
 Spinning from a distaff is even now common in many countries 
 on the continent, particularly so all through Italy. Long ago 
 the name of spindle-tree was given in England to the Euonymus 
 plant, on account of the good spindles which its wood affords : 
 and the term " spinster" as meaning every unmarried woman even 
 of the gentlest blood is derived from the same occupation. 
 Every now and then from the graves in which women of the 
 British and succeeding epochs were buried, are picked up the 
 elaborately ornamented leaden whorls which were fastened at the 
 lower end of their spindles to give them a due weight and steadi- 
 ness. 
 
 A curious instance of the use of woollen stuff not woven but 
 plaited, among the older stock of the Britons, was very lately 
 brought to light while cutting through an early Celtic grave-hill or 
 barrow in Yorkshire : the dead body had been wrapped, as was 
 shown by the few unrotted shreds still cleaving to its bones, in a 
 woollen shroud of coarse and loose fabric wrought by the plaiting 
 process without a loom. 
 
 As time passed by it brought the loom, fashioned after its 
 simplest form, to the far west, and its use became general 
 throughout the British islands. The art of dyeing soon followed ; 
 and so beautiful were the tints which our Britons knew how 
 to give to their wools that strangers wondered at and were 
 jealous of their splendour. A strict rule limited the colour of the 
 official dress assigned to each of the three ranks into which the
 
 TEXTILES. 3 
 
 bardic order was distinguished to one simple unbroken shade : 
 spotless white, symbolic of sunlight and holiness, for the druid or 
 priest ; sky-blue, emblem of peace, for the bard or poet ; and 
 green, the livery of the wood and field, for the teacher of the sup- 
 posed qualities of herbs and leech-craft. Postulants, again, asking 
 leave to be admitted into either rank were recognized by the robe 
 barred with stripes of white, blue, and green, which they had to 
 wear during the term of their initiation. With regard to the bulk 
 of the people, we learn from Dion Cassius (born A.D. 155) that 
 the garments worn by them were of a texture wrought in a square 
 pattern of several colours ; and, speaking of Boadicea, the same 
 writer tells us that she usually had on, under her cloak, a motley 
 tunic chequered all over with many colours. This garment we 
 are fairly warranted in deeming to have been a native stuff, woven 
 of worsted after a pattern in tints and design like one or other 
 of the present Scotch plaids. Pliny, who seems to have gathered 
 a great deal of his natural history from scraps of hearsay, most 
 likely included these ancient sorts of British textiles with those 
 from Gaul, when he tells us that to weave with a good number of 
 threads, so as to work the cloths called polymita, was first taught 
 in Alexandria ; to divide by checks, in Gaul. 
 
 The native botanical home of cotton is in the east. India 
 almost everywhere throughout her wide-spread countries arrayed, 
 as she still arrays, herself in cotton, gathered from a plant of the 
 mallow family which has its wild growth there ; and in the same 
 vegetable produce the lower orders of people dwelling still further 
 to the east also clothed themselves. 
 
 Hemp, a plant of the nettle tribe and called by botanists 
 " cannabis sativa," was of old well known in the far north of 
 Germany and throughout the ancient Scandinavia. More than 
 two thousand years ago we find it thus spoken of by Herodotus : 
 " Hemp grows in the country of the Scythians, which, except in 
 the thickness and height of the stalk, very much resembles flax ; 
 in the qualities mentioned, however, the hemp is much superior.
 
 4 TEXTILES. 
 
 It grows in a wild state, and is also cultivated. The Thracians 
 make clothing of it very like linen cloth ; nor could any person, 
 without being very well acquainted with the substance, say 
 whether this clothing is made of hemp or flax." From " can- 
 nabis," its name in Latin, we have taken our word " canvas," to 
 mean any texture woven of hempen thread. 
 
 Although flax is to be found growing wild in many parts of 
 Great Britain, it is very doubtful whether for many ages our 
 British forefathers were aware of the use of this plant for clothing 
 purposes : they would otherwise have left behind them some shred 
 of linen in one or other of their many graves. Following, as they 
 did, the usage of being buried in the best of the garments they 
 were accustomed to, or most loved when alive, their bodies 
 would have been found dressed in some small article of linen 
 texture, had they ever worn it. 
 
 We must go to the valley of the Nile if we wish to learn the 
 earliest history of the finest flaxen textiles. Time out of mind the 
 Egyptians were famous as well for the growth of flax as for the 
 beautiful linen which they wove out of it, and which became to 
 them a most profitable, because so widely sought for, article 
 of commerce. Their own word "byssus" for the plant itself 
 became among the Greeks, and afterwards among the Latin 
 nations, the term for linens wrought in Egyptian looms. Long 
 before the oldest book in the world was written, the tillers of the 
 ground all over Egypt had been heedful in sowing flax, and 
 anxious about its harvest. It was one of their staple crops, and 
 hence was it that, in punishment of Pharaoh, the hail plague 
 which at the bidding of Moses fell from heaven destroyed 
 throughout the land the flax just as it was getting ripe. Flax 
 grew also upon the banks of the Jordan, and in Judtea generally ; 
 and the women of the country, like Rahab, carefully dried it 
 when pulled, and stacked it for future hackling upon the roofs of 
 their houses. Nevertheless, it was from Egypt, as Solomon hints, 
 that the Jews had to draw their fine linen. At a later period,
 
 TEXTILES. 5 
 
 among the woes foretold to Egypt, the prophet Isaiah warns her 
 that " they shall be confounded who wrought in combing and 
 weaving fine linen." 
 
 How far the reputation of Egyptian workmanship in the craft 
 of the loom had spread abroad is shown us by the way in which, 
 besides sacred, heathenish antiquity has spoken of it. Herodotus 
 says, " Amasis king of Egypt gave to the Minerva of Lindus a 
 linen corslet well worthy of inspection : " and further on, speaking 
 of another corslet which Amasis had sent the Lacedsemonians, 
 he observes that it was of linen and had a vast number of figures 
 of animals inwoven into its fabric, and was likewise embroidered 
 with gold and tree-wool. This last was especially to be admired 
 because each of the twists, although of fine texture, contained 
 within it 360 threads, all of them clearly visible. 
 
 But we have material as well as written proofs at hand to show 
 the excellence of old Egyptian work in linen. During late years 
 many mummies have been brought to this country from Egypt, and 
 the narrow bandages with which they were found to have been so 
 admirably and, according even to our modern requirements of 
 chirurgical fitness, so artistically swathed have been unwrapped. 
 These bandages are often so fine in their texture as fully to verify 
 the praises of old bestowed upon the beauty of the Egyptian 
 loom-work. We learn from Sir Gardiner Wilkinson that " the finest 
 piece of mummy-cloth, sent to England by Mr. Salt, and now in 
 the British museum, of linen, appears to be made of yarns of 
 nearly 100 hanks in the pound, with 140 threads in an inch in the 
 warp and about 64 in the woof." Another piece of linen, which 
 the same distinguished traveller obtained at Thebes, has 152 
 threads in the warp and 7 1 in the woof. 
 
 Although from all antiquity upwards, till within some few years 
 back, the unbroken belief had been that such mummy-clothing 
 was undoubtedly made of linen woven out of pure unmixed flax, 
 some writers led, or rather misled, by a few stray words in 
 Herodotus (speaking of the corslet of Amasis, quoted just now;
 
 6 TEXTILES, 
 
 took that historian to mean wool, and argued that Egyptian 
 textiles wrought a thousand years before were mixed with cotton. 
 While the question was agitated, specimens of mummy-cloth were 
 submitted to the judgment of several persons in the weaving 
 trade deemed most competent to speak upon the matter. Helped 
 only by the fingers' feel and the naked eye, some among them 
 agreed that such textures were really woven of cotton. This 
 opinion was but shortlived. Other individuals, more philo- 
 sophical, went to work on a better path. In the first place they 
 clearly learned, through the microscope, the exact and never- 
 varying physical structure of both these vegetable substances. 
 They found cotton to be in its fibre a transparent tube without 
 joints, flattened so that its inward surfaces are in contact along 
 its axis and also twisted spirally round its axis ; flax on the con- 
 trary is a transparent tube, jointed like a cane and not flattened 
 or twisted spirally. Examined in the same way, old samples of 
 byssus or mummy-bandages from Egypt in every instance were 
 ascertained to be of fine unmixed flaxen linen.
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 FOR many reasons the history of silk is not only curious but 
 highly interesting. In the earliest ages even its existence was 
 unknown, and when discovered the knowledge of it stole forth 
 from the far east, and straggled westward very slowly. For all 
 that lengthened period during which their remarkable civilization 
 lasted, the older Egyptians probably never saw silk : neither they, 
 nor the Israelites, nor any other of the most ancient kingdoms of 
 the earth, knew of it in any shape, either as a simple twist or 
 as a woven stuff. Not the smallest shred of silk has hitherto 
 been found in the tombs or amid the ruins of the Pharaonic 
 period. 
 
 No where does Holy Writ, old or new, tell anything of silk 
 but in one single place, the Apocalypse xviii. 12. It is true that 
 in the English authorized version we read of " silk " as if spoken 
 of by Ezekiel xvi. 10, 13; and again, in Proverbs xxxi. 22 ; yet 
 there can be no doubt that in both these passages, the word silk 
 is wrong through the translators misunderstanding the original 
 Hebrew. The Hebrew word is not so rendered in any ancient 
 version : and the best Hebraists have decided that silk was not 
 known by the old Israelites. When St. John speaks of it he 
 includes it with the gold, and silver, and precious stones, and 
 pearls, and fine linen and purple which, with many other costly 
 freights, merchants were wont to bring to Rome. 
 
 It was long after the days of Ezekiel that silk in its raw form
 
 8 TEXTILES. 
 
 only, made up into hanks, first found its way to Egypt, western 
 Asia, and eastern Europe. 
 
 We owe to Aristotle the earliest notice of the silk-worm, and 
 although his account be incorrect it has much value, because 
 he gives us information about the original importation of raw silk 
 into the western world. Brought from China through India the 
 silk came by water across the Arabian ocean, up the Red Sea, and 
 thence over the isthmus of Suez (or perhaps rather by the over- 
 land route, through Persia) to the small but commercial island of 
 Cos, lying off the coast of Asia minor. Pamphile, the daughter 
 of Plates, is reported to have first woven silk in Cos. Here, 
 by female hands, were wrought those light thin gauzes which 
 became so fashionable ; these were stigmatized by some of the 
 Latin poets, as well as by heathen moralists, as anything but 
 seemly for women's wear. Tibullus speaks of them ; and Seneca 
 condemns them: "I behold" he says "silken garments, if gar- 
 ments they can be called, which are a protection neither for the 
 body nor for shame." Later still, and in the Christian era, we 
 have an echo to the remarks of Seneca in the words of Solinus : 
 ' This is silk, in which at first women but now even men have 
 been led, by their cravings after luxury, to show rather than to 
 clothe their bodies." 
 
 Looking over very ancient manuscripts we often find between 
 richly gilt illuminations, to keep them from harm or being hurt 
 through the rubbings of the next leaf, a covering of the thinnest 
 gauze, just as we now put sheets of silver paper for that purpose 
 over engravings. It is not impossible that some at least of these 
 may be shreds from the translucent textiles which found favour in 
 the world for so long a time during the classic period. The 
 curious example of such gauzy interleafings in the manuscript of 
 Theodulph, now at Puy en Velay, will occur perhaps to more 
 than one of our readers. 
 
 It may be easily imagined that silken garments were brought, 
 at an early period, to imperial Rome. Not only, however, were
 
 TEXTILES. 9 
 
 the prices asked for them so high that few could afford to buy 
 such robes for their wives and daughters, but, at first, they were 
 looked upon as quite unbecoming for men's wear ; hence, by a 
 law of the Roman senate under Tiberius, it was enacted : " Ne 
 vestis serica vicos fcedaret." While noticing how womanish 
 Caligula became in his dress Suetonius remarks his silken attire : 
 " Aliquando sericatus et cycladatus." An exception was made 
 by some emperors for very great occasions, and both Titus and 
 Vespasian wore dresses of silk when they celebrated at Rome 
 their triumph over Judaea. Heliogabalus was the first emperor 
 who wore whole silk for clothing. Aurelian, on the other hand, 
 neither had himself in his wardrobe a garment wholly silk nor 
 gave one to be worn by another. When his own wife begged him 
 to allow her to have a single mantle of purple silk he replied, 
 " Far be it from us to allow thread to be reckoned worth its weight 
 in gold." For then a pound of gold was the price of a pound of 
 silk. 
 
 Clothing made wholly or in part out of silk, nevertheless, 
 became every year more and more sought for. So remunerative 
 was the trade of weaving the raw material into its various forms, 
 that, by the revised code of laws for the Roman empire published 
 A - D - 533> a monopoly in it was given to the court, and looms 
 worked by women were set up in the imperial palace. Thus 
 Byzantium became and long continued famous for the beauty 
 of its silken stuffs. Still, the raw silk itself had to be brought 
 thither from abroad ; until two Greek monks, who had lived many 
 years among the Chinese, learnt the whole process of rearing the 
 worm. Returning, they brought with them a number of eggs 
 hidden in their walking-staves ; and, carrying them to Constanti- 
 nople, they presented these eggs to the emperor who gladly 
 received them. When hatched the worms were distributed over 
 Greece and Asia minor, and very soon the western world reared 
 its own silk. In some places, at least in Greece, the weaving not 
 only of the finer kinds of cloth but of silk fell into the hands of
 
 io TEXTILES. 
 
 the Jews. Benjamin of Tudela, writing in 1161, tells us that the 
 city of Thebes contained about two thousand Jewish inhabitants. 
 " These are the most eminent manufacturers of silk and purple 
 cloth in all Greece." 
 
 South Italy wrought rich silken stuffs by the end of the 
 eleventh century ; for we are told by our countryman Ordericus 
 Vitalis, who died in the first half of the twelfth century, that 
 Mainerius, the abbot of St. Evroul at Uzey in Normandy, on 
 coming home brought with him from Apulia several large pieces 
 of silk, and gave to his church four of the finest ones, with which 
 four copes were made for the chanters. 
 
 From a feeling alive in the middle ages throughout the length 
 and breadth of Christendom, that the best of all things ought to 
 be given for the service of the Church, the garments of its cele- 
 brating priesthood were, if not always, at least very often wholly 
 of silk; holosericus. Owing to this fact, we are now able to 
 learn from the few but tattered shreds before us what elegantly 
 designed and gorgeous stuffs the foreign mediaeval loom could 
 weave, and what beautiful embroidery our own countrywomen 
 knew so well how to work. These specimens help us also to 
 rightly understand the description of the splendid vestments 
 enumerated with such exactness in the old inventories of our 
 cathedrals and parish churches, as well as in the early wardrobe 
 accompts of our kings, and in the wills and bequests of dignified 
 ecclesiastics and nobility. 
 
 Coming westward among us, these much coveted stuffs brought 
 with them the several names by which they were commonly known 
 throughout the east, whether Greece, Asia minor, or Persia. 
 Hence when we read of samit, ciclatoun, cendal, baudekin, and 
 other such terms unknown to trade now-a-days, we should bear 
 in mind that, notwithstanding the wide variety of spelling which 
 each of these appellations has run through, we arrive at their 
 true derivations, and discover in what country and by whose 
 hands they were wrought.
 
 TEXTILES. ii 
 
 As commerce grew these fine silken textiles were brought to 
 our markets, and articles of dress were made of silk for men's as 
 well as women's wear among the wealthy. At what period the 
 raw material came to be imported here, not so much for embroi- 
 dery as to be wrought in the loom, we do not exactly know ; but 
 from several sides we learn that our countrywomen of all degrees, 
 in very early times, busied themselves in weaving. Among the 
 home occupations of maidens St. Aldhelm, at the end of the 
 seventh century, includes weaving. In the council at Cloveshoo, 
 in 747, nuns are exhorted to spend their time in reading or singing 
 psalms rather than weaving and knitting vainglorious garments of 
 many colours. By that curious old English book the ' Ancren 
 Riwle,' written towards the end of the twelfth century, ankresses 
 are forbidden to make purses or blodbendes '(which were narrow 
 strips to bind round the arm after bleeding), to gain friends there- 
 with. Were it not that the weaving especially of silk was so 
 generally followed in the cloister by English women, it had been 
 useless to have so strongly discountenanced the practice. 
 
 But on silk weaving by our women in small hand-looms a 
 very important witness, especially about several curious specimens 
 in the great collection at South Kensington, is John Garland, 
 born at the beginning of the thirteenth century in London, where 
 many of his namesakes were and are still known. First, a John 
 Garland, in 1170, held a prebend's stall in St. Paul's cathedral. 
 Another was sheriff at a later period. A third, a wealthy draper 
 of London, gave freely towards the building of a church in Somer- 
 setshire. A fourth, who died in 1461, lies buried in St. Sythe's; 
 and, at the present day, no fewer than twenty-two tradesmen of 
 that name, of whom six are merchants of high standing in the 
 city, are mentioned in the London post office directory for the 
 year 1868. We give these instances as some have tried to rob us 
 of John Garland by saying he was not an Englishman, though he 
 has himself told us he was " born in England and brought up in 
 France."
 
 12 TEXTILES. 
 
 In a kind of short dictionary drawn up by that writer and 
 printed at the end of ' Paris sous Philippe le Bel/ edited by M. 
 Geraud, our countryman tells us that, besides the usual homely 
 textiles, costly cloth-of-gold webs were wrought by women j and 
 very likely, among their other productions, were those blodbendes 
 " cingula" the weaving of which had been forbidden to ankresses 
 and nuns. Perhaps, also, some of the narrow gold-wrought 
 ribbons in the South Kensington collection, nos. 1233, 1256, 
 1270, 8569, etc., may have been so employed. 
 
 John Garland's " cingula " may also mean the rich girdles or 
 sashes worn by women round the waist, of which there is one 
 example in the same collection, no. 8571. Of this sort is that 
 fine border, amber coloured silk and diapered, round a vestment 
 found in a grave at Durham ; which is described by Mr. Raine 
 in his book about St. Cuthbert as " a thick lace, one inch and a 
 quarter broad evidently owing its origin, not to the needle, but 
 to the loom." In an after period the same bands are shown on 
 statuary, and in the illuminated manuscripts of the thirteenth 
 century : as instances of the narrow girdle, the effigy of a lady in 
 Romney church, Hants and of Ann of Bohemia in Westminster 
 abbey may be referred to ; both to be found in Hollis's monu- 
 mental effigies of Great Britain ; for the band about the head, 
 the examples in the wood-cuts in Planche's British costumes, 
 p. 116. 
 
 Specimens of such head bands may be seen at South Ken- 
 sington, nos. 8569, 8583, 8584, and 8585. 
 
 They are, no doubt, the old snod of the Anglo-saxon period. 
 For ladies they were wrought of silk and gold ; women of lower 
 degree wore them of simpler stuff. The silken snood, used in 
 our own time by young unmarried women in Scotland, is a truthful 
 witness to the fashion in vogue during Anglo-saxon and later ages 
 in this country. 
 
 The breeding of the worm and the manufacture of its silk 
 spread themselves with steady though slow steps over most of the
 
 TEXTILES. 13 
 
 countries which border on the shores of the Mediterranean ; so 
 that, by the tenth century, those processes had reached from the 
 far east to the uttermost western limits of that sea. Even then, 
 and a long time after, the natural history of the silkworm became 
 known but to a very few. Our countryman Alexander Neckham, 
 abbot of Cirencester A.D. 1213, was probably the first who tried 
 to help others to understand the habits of the insect : his brief 
 explanation may be found in his once popular book ' De natura 
 rerum,' which has been lately reprinted by order of the Master 
 of the Rolls. 
 
 Indian woman reeling silk from a wheel.
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 OF the several raw materials which from the earliest periods have 
 been employed in weaving, though not in such frequency as silk, 
 one is gold : which, when judiciously brought in, adds not a 
 barbaric but artistical richness. 
 
 The earliest written notice which we have about the employ- 
 ment of this precious metal in the loom, or of the way in which 
 it was wrought for such a purpose, is in the Pentateuch. Among 
 the sacred vestments made for Aaron was an ephod of gold, violet, 
 and purple, and scarlet twice dyed, and fine twisted linen, with 
 embroidered work ; and the workman cut also thin plates of gold 
 and drew them small into strips, that they might be twisted with 
 the woof of the aforesaid colours. Instead of " strip," the autho- 
 rised protestant version says " wire ; " the Douay translation 
 reads " thread : " but neither can be right, for both of these 
 English words mean a something round or twisted in the shape 
 given to the gold before being wove, whereas the metal must have 
 been worked in quite flat, as we learn from the text. 
 
 The use of gold for weaving, both with linen or by itself, 
 existed almost certainly among the Egyptians long before the 
 days of Moses. The psalmist describing the dress of the king's 
 daughter (that is, Pharaoh's daughter), not only speaks of her 
 being " in raiment of needlework " but that " her clothing is of 
 wrought gold." In order to be woven the precious metal was at
 
 TEXTILES. 15 
 
 first wrought in a flattened, never in a round or wire shape. To 
 this hour the Chinese and the people of India work the gold into 
 their stuffs after the ancient form. In the same fashion, even now, 
 the Italians weave their lama d'oro, or the more glistening toca : 
 those cloths of gold which to all Asiatic and many European 
 eyes do not glare with too much garishness, but shine with a glow 
 that befits the raiment of personages in high station. 
 
 Among the nations of ancient Asia garments made of webs 
 dyed with the costly purple tint, and interwoven with gold, were 
 on all grand occasions worn by kings and princes. So celebrated 
 did the Medes and Persians become in such works of the loom, 
 that cloths of extraordinary beauty got their several names from 
 those peoples, and Medean, Lydian, and Persian textiles were 
 everywhere sought for. 
 
 Writing of the wars carried on in Asia and India by Alexander 
 the great almost four centuries before the birth of Christ, Quintus 
 Curtius often speaks about the purple and gold garments worn by 
 the Persians and more eastern Asiatics. Among the many thou- 
 sands of those who came forth from Damascus to the Greek gene- 
 ral, Parmenio, numbers were so clad : " They wore robes splen- 
 did with gold and purple." All over India the same fashion was 
 followed in dress. When an Indian king with his two sons came 
 to Alexander, the three were so arrayed. Princes and the high 
 nobility, all over the east, are called by Quintus Curtius "pur- 
 purati." Not only garments but hangings were made of the same 
 costly fabric. When Alexander wished to give some ambassadors 
 a splendid reception, the golden couches upon which they lay to 
 eat their meat were screened with cloths of gold and purple ; and 
 the Indian guests themselves were not less gorgeously clothed in 
 their own national costume, as they came wearing linen '(perhaps 
 cotton) garments equally resplendent. 
 
 The dress worn by Darius, as he went forth to do battle, is 
 thus described by the same historian : " the waist part of the 
 royal purple tunic was wove in white, and upon his mantle of
 
 1 6 TEXTILES. 
 
 cloth of gold were figured two golden hawks as if pecking at one 
 another with their beaks." 
 
 From the east this love for cloth of gold reached the southern 
 end of Italy, and thence soon got to Rome ; where, even under 
 its early kings, garments made of it were worn. Pliny, speak- 
 ing of this rich textile, says : " gold may be spun or woven like 
 wool, without any wool being mixed with it." We are told by 
 Verrius that Tarquinius Priscus rode in triumph in a tunic of gold; 
 and Agrippina the wife of the emperor Claudius, when he exhi- 
 bited the spectacle of a naval combat, sat by him covered with a 
 robe made entirely of gold woven without any other material. 
 About the year 1840 the marquis Campagna dug up near Rome 
 two old graves, in one of which had been buried a Roman lady 
 of high birth, inferred from the circumstance that all about her 
 remains were found portions of such fine gold flat thread, once 
 forming the burial garment with which she had been arrayed for 
 her funeral. 
 
 When pope Paschal, A.D. 821, sought for the body of St. Cecily 
 who was martyred in the year 230, the pontiff found the body in 
 the catacombs, whole and dressed in a garment wrought all of 
 gold, with some of her raiment drenched in blood lying at her feet. 
 In making the foundations for the new St. Peter's at Rome the 
 workmen came upon and looked into the marble sarcophagus in 
 which had been buried Probus Anicius, prefect of the Pretorian, 
 and his wife Proba Faltonia, each of whose bodies was wrapped 
 in a winding-sheet woven of pure gold strips. The wife of the 
 emperor Honorius died sometime about the year 400, and when 
 her grave was opened, in 1544, the golden tissues in which her 
 body had been shrouded were taken out and melted, amounting 
 in weight to thirty-six pounds. The late father Marchi also found 
 among the remains of St. Hyacinthus several fragments of the 
 same kind of golden web. 
 
 Childeric, the second king of the Merovingean dynasty, was 
 buried A.D. 482, at Tournai. In the year 1653 his grave was
 
 TEXTILES. 17 
 
 discovered, and amid the earth about it so many remains of pure 
 gold strips were turned up that there is every ground for thinking 
 that the Frankish king was wrapped in a mantle of golden stuff 
 for his burial. We have reason to conclude that the strips of 
 pure gold out of which the burial cloak of Childeric was woven 
 were not round but flat, from the fact that in a Merovingean 
 burial ground at Envermeu the distinguished archaeologist Cochet 
 a few years ago came upon the grave once filled by a lady whose 
 head had been wreathed with a fillet of pure golden web, the 
 tissue of which is thus described : " Ces fils aussi brillants et aussi 
 frais que s'ils sortaient de la main de 1'ouvrier, n'etaient ni etires 
 ni cordes. Us etaient plats et se composaient tout simplement 
 de petites lanieres d'or d'un millimetre de largeur, coupee a meme 
 une feuille d'or epaisse de moins d'un dixieme de millimetre. La 
 longeur totale de quelques-uns atteignait parfois jusqu'a quinze 
 ou dix-huit centimetres." 
 
 Our own country can furnish an example of this kind of golden 
 textile. On Chessel down, in the isle of Wight, when Mr. Hillier 
 was making some researches in an old Anglo-saxon place of 
 burial, the diggers found pieces of gold strips, thin and quite flat, 
 which are figured in M. 1'abbe Cochet's learned book just men- 
 tioned. Of the same rich texture must have been the vestment 
 given to St. Peter's at Rome in the middle of the ninth century, 
 and described in the Liber Pontificalis as made of the purest 
 gold, and covered with precious stones : " Carolus rex sancto 
 Apostolo obtulit ex purissimo auro et gemmis constructam 
 vestem, etc." 
 
 Such a weaving of pure gold was, here in England, followed . 
 certainly as late as the beginning of the tenth century ; very likely . 
 much later. In the chapter library belonging to Durham cathe- 
 dral may be seen a stole and maniple, which bear these inscrip- 
 tions : " yElfflaed fieri precepit. Pio episcopo Fridestano." 
 Fridestan was consecrated bishop of Winchester A. D. 905. With 
 these webs under his eye, Mr. Raine writes thus : " In the first, 
 
 c
 
 IS TEXTILES. 
 
 the ground work of the whole is woven exclusively with thread of 
 gold. I do not mean by thread of gold, the silver-gilt wire fre- 
 quently used in such matters, but real gold thread, if I may so 
 term it, not round, but flat. This is the character of the whole 
 web, with the exception of the figures, the undulating cloud - 
 shaped pedestal upon which they stand, the inscriptions and the 
 foliage ; for all of which, however surprising it may appear, vacant 
 spaces have been left by the loom, and they themselves afterwards 
 inserted with the needle." Further on, in his description of a 
 girdle, the same writer tells us : " Its breadth is exactly seven- 
 eighths of an inch. It has evidently proceeded from the loom - y 
 and its two component parts are a flattish thread of pure gold, 
 and a thread of scarlet silk." Another very remarkable piece, a 
 fragment (probably) of a stole, was also found lately at Durham in 
 the grave of bishop Pudsey, who was buried about the middle of 
 the twelfth century. This was exhibited at the Society of anti- 
 quaries, in the present year, 1875. It is made of rich silk, with a 
 diaper pattern in gold thread. 
 
 This love for such glittering attire, not only for sacred use but 
 secular wear, lasted long in England. The golden webs went 
 under different names ; at first they were called " ciclatoun," " sig- 
 laton," or " siklatoun," as the writer's fancy led him to spell the 
 Persian word common for them at the time throughout the east. 
 
 By the old English ritual plain cloth of gold was allowed, as 
 now, to be used for white when that colour happened to be 
 ordered by the rubric. Thus in the reign of Richard the second, 
 among the vestments at the chapel of St. George, Windsor castle, 
 there was " one good vestment of cloth of gold :" and St. Paul's, 
 London, had at the end of the thirteenth century two amices 
 embroidered with pure gold. 
 
 This splendid web was often wrought so thick and strong 
 that each string, whether it happened to be of hemp or of silk had 
 in the warp six threads, while the weft was of flat gold shreds. 
 Hence such a texture was called " samit," a word shortened from
 
 TEXTILES. 19 
 
 its first and old Byzantine name " exsamit." The quantity of this 
 costly cloth kept in the wardrobe of Edward the first was so great, 
 that the nobles of that king were allowed to buy it out of the 
 royal stores ; for instance, four pieces at thirty shillings each were 
 sold to Robert de Clifford, and another piece at the same price 
 to Thomas de Cammill. Not only Asia minor but the island of 
 Cyprus, the city of Lucca, and Moorish Spain, sent us these rich 
 tissues. With other things left at Haverford castle by Richard 
 the second were twenty-five cloths of gold of divers suits, of 
 which four came from Cyprus, the others from Lucca : " xxv. 
 draps d'or de diverses suytes dount iiii. de Cipres les autres de 
 Lukes." How Edward the fourth liked cloth of gold for his per- 
 sonal wear may be gathered from his wardrobe accounts, edited 
 by Nicolas ; and the lavish use of this stuff ordered by Richard 
 the third for his coronation is recorded in the Antiquarian Re- 
 pertory. 
 
 A " gowne of cloth-of-gold, furred with pawmpilyon, ayenst 
 Corpus Xpi day" was bought for Elizabeth of York, afterwards 
 queen of Henry the seventh, for her to wear as she walked in the 
 procession on that great festival. The affection shown by Henry 
 the eighth and all our nobility, men and women, of the time, for 
 cloth of gold in their garments was unmistakingly set forth in 
 many of the paintings brought together in the very instructive 
 exhibition of national portraits in 1866, in the South Kensington 
 museum. The price of this stuff seems to have been costly ; for 
 princess (afterwards queen) Mary, thirteen years before she came 
 to the throne, "payed to Peycocke, of London, for xix yerds 
 iii. qrt of clothe of golde at xxxviij.s the yerde, xxxvij//. xs. vj*/." 
 And for " a yerde and d r qrt of clothe of siluer xls." 
 
 As between common silk and satin there runs a broad differ- 
 ence in appearance, one being dull, the other smooth and glossy, 
 so there is a great distinction to be made among cloths of gold ; 
 some are, so to say, dead ; others, brilliant and sparkling. When 
 the gold is twisted into its silken filament it takes the deadened 
 
 c 2
 
 20 TEXTILES. 
 
 look ; when the flattened, filmy strip of metal is rolled about it so 
 evenly as to bring its edges close to one another, it seems to be 
 one unbroken wire of gold, sparkling and lustrous. This kind 
 during the middle ages went by the term of Cyprus gold ; and rich 
 samits woven with it were called damasks of Cyprus. 
 
 As time went on cloths of gold had other names. What the 
 thirteenth century called, first, "ciclatoun," then "baudekin," 
 afterward " nak," was called, two hundred years later, "tissue": 
 a bright shimmering golden textile. The very thin smooth paper 
 which still goes by the name of tissue-paper was originally made 
 to be put between the folds of this rich stuff to prevent fraying or 
 tarnish, when laid by. 
 
 The gorgeous and entire set of vestments presented to the 
 altar at St. Alban's abbey, by Margaret, duchess of Clarence, 
 A. D. 1429, and made of the cloth of gold commonly called 
 " tyssewys," must have been as remarkable for the abundance and 
 purity of the gold in its texture, as for the splendour of the 
 precious stones set on it and the exquisite beauty of its em- 
 broideries. The large number of vestments made out of gold 
 tissue, and of crimson, light blue, purple, green, and black, once 
 belonging to York cathedral, are all duly registered in the valuable 
 " Fabric rolls " of that church lately published by the Surtees 
 society. 
 
 Among the many rich and costly vestments in Lincoln cathe- 
 dral, some were made of this sparkling golden tissue contra- 
 distinguished in its inventory from the duller cloth of gold, thus : 
 " Four good copes of blew tishew with orphreys of red cloth of 
 gold, wrought with branches and leaves of velvet ;" " a chesable 
 with two tunacles of blew tishew having a precious orphrey of 
 cloth of gold." 
 
 Silken textures ornamented with designs in copper gilt thread 
 were manufactured and honestly sold for what they really were : 
 of such inferior quality we find mention in the inventory of vest- 
 ments at Winchester cathedral, drawn up by order of Henry the
 
 TEXTILES. 21 
 
 eighth, where we read of " twenty-eight copys of white bawdkyne, 
 woven with copper gold." Another imitation of woof of gold was 
 possibly fraudulent. This, originally perhaps Saracenic, was prac- 
 tised by the Spaniards of the south, and was not easily discovered. 
 The very finest skins were sought out for the purpose, as thin as 
 that now rare kind of vellum called " uterine" by collectors of 
 manuscripts. These were heavily gilt and then cut into very 
 narrow strips, to be used instead of the true golden thread. 
 
 The gilding of fine silk and canvas in imitation of cloth of 
 gold, like our gilding of wood and other substances, was also 
 sometimes resorted to for splendour's sake on temporary occa- 
 sions ; such, for instance, as some stately procession or a solemn 
 burial service. Mr. Raine tells us he found in a grave at Durham, 
 among other textiles, " a robe of thinnish silk ; the ground colour 
 of the whole is amber ; and the ornamental parts were literally 
 covered with leaf gold, of which there remained distinct and very 
 numerous portions." In the churchyard of Cheam, Surrey, in 
 1865, the skeleton of a priest was found who had been buried 
 some time during the fourteenth century ; around the waist was a 
 flat girdle made of brown silk that had been gilt. In the ' Ro- 
 maunt of the rose' translated by Chaucer, dame Gladnesse is 
 thus described : 
 
 in an over gilt samite 
 Clad she was ; 
 
 and on a piece of German orphrey-web, in the South Kensington 
 collection, no. 1373, and probably made at Cologne in the six- 
 teenth century, the gold is laid by the gilding process. 
 
 Silver also, as well as gold, was hammered out into very thin 
 sheets which were cut into narrow long shreds to be woven, 
 unmixed with anything else, into a web for garments. Of this 
 we have a striking illustration in the Acts of the apostles, where 
 St. Luke, speaking of Herod Agrippa, says that he presented him- 
 self to the people arrayed in kingly apparel, who, to flatter him.
 
 22 TEXTILES. 
 
 shouted that his was the voice not of a man but of a god ; and 
 forthwith he was smitten by a loathsome disease which shortly 
 killed him. This royal robe, as Josephus informs us, was a tunic 
 made of silver and wonderful in its texture. 
 
 Intimately connected with the raw materials, and how they 
 were wrought in the loom, is the question about the time when 
 wire drawing was found out. At what period and among what 
 people the art of working up pure gold, or gilded silver, into 
 a long, round, hair-like thread into what may be correctly called 
 "wire" began, is quite unknown. That with their mechanical 
 ingenuity the ancient Egyptians bethought themselves of some 
 method for the purpose is not unlikely. From Sir Gardiner 
 Wilkinson we learn that at Thebes were found objects which ap- 
 peared to be made of gold wire. We may fairly presume that the 
 work upon the corslets of king Amasis, already spoken of as done 
 by the needle in gold, required by its minuteness that the metal 
 should be not flat but in the shape of wire. By delicate manage- 
 ment perhaps of the fingers, the narrow flat strips might have 
 been pinched or doubled up so that the two edges should meet, 
 and then rubbed between two pieces of hard material a golden 
 wire of the required fineness would be produced. In Etruscan and 
 Greek jewellery wire is often to be found ; but in all instances it 
 is so well shaped and so even that it must have been fashioned by 
 some rolling process. The filigree work of the middle ages is 
 often very fine and delicate. Probably the embroidery which we 
 read of in the descriptions of the vestments belonging to our old 
 churches (for instance "An amice embroidered with pure gold") 
 was worked with gold wire. To go back to Anglo-saxon times in 
 this country, such gold wire would seem to have been then well 
 known and employed, since in Peterborough minster there were 
 two golden altar-cloths : " ii. gegylde ];eofad sceatas ;" and there 
 were at Ely cathedral " two girdles of gold wire " in the reign of 
 William Rufus. 
 
 The first use of a wire-drawinc: machine seems to have been
 
 TEXTILES. 23 
 
 about the year 1360, at Nuremberg ; and it was not until two hun- 
 dred years after, in 1560, that the method was brought to England. 
 Two examples of a stuff with pure wire in it may be seen in the 
 South Kensington collection, nos. 8581 and 8228. 
 
 The process of twining long narrow strips of gold, or gilt 
 silver, round a line of silk or flax and thus producing gold thread 
 is much earlier than has been supposed ; and when Attalus's name 
 was bestowed upon a new method of interweaving gold with wool 
 or linen, thence called " Attalic," it was probably because he 
 suggested to the weaver the introduction of the long-known 
 golden thread as a woof into the textiles from his loom. It would 
 seem, from a passage in Claudian, that ladies at an early Christian 
 period used to spin their own gold thread. Writing at the end of 
 the fourth century, the poet thus compliments Proba : 
 
 The joyful mother plies her learned hands, 
 And works all o'er the trabea golden bands, 
 Draws the thin strips to all their length of gold, 
 To make the metal meaner threads enfold. 
 
 The superior quality of some gold thread was known to the 
 mediaeval world under the name of the place where it had been 
 made. Thus we find mention at one time of Cyprus gold thread; 
 " a vestment embroidered with eagles of gold of Cyprus : " later, 
 of Venice gold thread, " for frenge of gold of Venys at vjs. the 
 ounce " and again, " one cope of unwatered camlet laid with 
 strokes of Venis gold." What may have been their difference 
 cannot now be pointed out: perhaps the Cyprian thread was 
 esteemed because its somewhat broad shred of flat gold was 
 wound about the hempen twist beneath it so nicely as to have 
 the smooth unbroken look of gold wire ; while the manufacture of 
 Venice showed everywhere the twisting of common thread.
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 IN earlier times, as at present, silks had various names, dis- 
 tinguishing either their kind of texture, their colour, the design 
 woven on them, the country from which they were brought, or the 
 use for which, on particular occasions, they happened to be 
 especially set apart. 
 
 All these designations are of foreign growth ; some sprang up 
 in the seventh and following centuries at Byzantium ; some are 
 half Greek, half Latin, jumbled together; others, borrowed from 
 the east, are so shortened, so badly and variously spelt, that their 
 Arabic or Persian derivation can be hardly recognized at present. 
 Yet without some slight knowledge of them we hardly under- 
 stand a great deal belonging to trade, and the manners of the 
 times glanced at by old writers ; much less can we see the true 
 meaning of many passages in our mediaeval English poetry. 
 
 Among the terms significative of the kind of web, or mode 
 of getting up some sorts of silk, we have Holosericnm, the texture 
 of which is warp and woof wholly pure silk. From a passage in 
 Lampridius we learn that so early as the reign of Alexander 
 Severus the difference between " vestes holosericse " and " sub- 
 sericse" was strongly marked, and that subscricum implied that 
 the texture was not entirely but in part, probably the woof, 
 of silk. 
 
 Examitum, xamifum, or, as it is called in old English docu- 
 ments, samit, is made up of two Greek words, ef, " six," and /UTOI,
 
 TEXTILES. 25 
 
 " threads ;" the number of the strings in the warp of the texture. 
 It is evident that stuffs woven so thick must have been of the best 
 quality. Hence, to say of any silken tissue that it was "ex- 
 amitum'" or "samit" meant that it was six-threaded, and there- 
 fore costly and splendid. At the end of the thirteenth and be- 
 ginning of the fourteenth centuries " examitum" was much used 
 for vestments in Evesham abbey, as we gather from the chronicle 
 of that house, published lately for the Master of the Rolls. 
 About the same period among the best copes, chasubles, and 
 vestments in St. Paul's, London, many were made of samit. So, 
 again among the nine gorgeous chasubles bequeathed to Durham 
 cathedral by its bishop in 1195, the chief was of red samit 
 superbly embroidered. And, to name no more, we find in the 
 valuable inventory, lately published, of the rich vestments belong- 
 ing to Exeter cathedral in 1277 that the best of its numerous 
 chasubles, dalmatics, and copes, were made of samit. In a later 
 document, A. D. 1327, this precious silk is termed "samicta." 
 
 The poets did not forget to array their knights and ladies in 
 this gay attire. When Sir Lancelot of the lake brought back 
 Gawain to king Arthur : 
 
 Launcelot and the queen were cledde 
 
 In robes of a rich wede, 
 Of samyte white, with silver shredde : 
 
 The other knights everichone, 
 
 In samyte green of heathen land, 
 And their kirtles, ride alone. 
 
 In his 'Romaunt of the rose,' Chaucer describes the dress 
 of Mirth thus : 
 
 Full yong he was, and merry of thought 
 And in samette, with birdes wrought, 
 And with gold beaten full fetously, 
 Mis bodie was clad full richely. 
 
 Many of the beautifully figured damasks in the South Kensing-
 
 26 TEXTILES. 
 
 ton collection are what anciently were known as " samits ; " and 
 if they really be not six-thread, according to the etymology of 
 their name, it is because at a very early period the stuffs so called 
 ceased to be woven of such a thickness. 
 
 The strong silks of the present day with the thick thread called 
 " organzine " for the woof, and a slightly thinner thread known by 
 the technical name of " tram " for the warp, may be taken to 
 represent the old " examits." 
 
 No less remarkable for the lightness of its texture than was 
 the samit on account of the thick substance of its web, and quite 
 as much sought after, was another kind of thin glossy silken stuff 
 " wrought in the orient," and here called first by the Persian name 
 which came with it, ciclatoun, that is, bright and shining ; but 
 afterwards sicklatoun, siglaton, cyclas. Sometimes a woof of golden 
 thread lent it still more glitter ; and it was used both for eccle- 
 siastical vestments and for secular articles of stately dress. In the 
 inventory of St. Paul's cathedral, 1295, there was a cope made of 
 cloth of gold, called ciclatoun : " capa de panno aureo qui vocatur 
 ciclatoun." Among the booty carried off by the English when 
 they sacked the camp of Saladin, 
 
 King Richard took the pavillouns 
 Of sendal, and of cyclatoun. 
 
 In his ' Rime of Sire Thopas/ Chaucer says 
 
 Of Brugges were his hosen broun 
 His robe was of ciclatoun. 
 
 Though so light and thin, this cloak of " ciclatoun " was often 
 embroidered in silk and had golden ornaments sewn on it; we 
 read in the ' Metrical romances ' of a maiden who sat 
 
 In a robe ryght ryall bowne 
 
 Of a red syclatowne 
 Be hur fader syde ; 
 A coronell on hur hedd set, 
 II ur clothys with bestes and byrdes wer bete 
 
 All abowte for pryde.
 
 TEXTILES. 27 
 
 Knights in the field wore over their armour a long sleeveless 
 gown slit up almost to the waist on both sides ; sometimes of 
 <; samit," often of " cendal," oftener still of" ciclatourn : " and the 
 name of the gown itself, shortened from the material, became 
 known as " cyclas." Matthew of Westminster records that when 
 Edward the first knighted his son in Westminster abbey he sent 
 to three hundred sons of the nobility, whom the prince was after- 
 ward to dub knights in the same church, a most splendid gift of 
 attire, fitting for the ceremony; among which were clycases 
 woven with gold. That these garments were very light and thin 
 we gather from the quiet wit of John of Salisbury, who jeers a man 
 affecting to perspire in the depth of winter, though clad in nothing 
 but his fine cyclas. 
 
 Not so costly was a silken stuff known as cendal, cendallus, 
 sandal, sandalin, cendatns, syndon, syndonus, as the way of writing 
 the word altered as time went on. When Sir Guy of Warwick 
 was knighted, 
 
 And with him twenty good gomes 
 Knightes' and barons' sons, 
 Of cloth of Tars and rich cendale 
 Was the dobbing in each deal. 
 
 The Roll of Caerlaverock tells us that among the grand array 
 which joined Edward the first at Carlisle in 1300, there was to be 
 seen many a rich caparison embroidered upon cendal and samit : 
 
 La ot meint riche guarnement 
 Erode sur sendaus e samis : 
 
 and Lacy, earl of Lincoln, leading the first squadron, hoisted his 
 banner made of yellow cendal blazoned with a lion rampant purpre 
 
 Baner out de un cendal safrin, 
 O un lioun rampant purprin. 
 
 When Sir Bevis of Southampton wished to keep himself 
 unknown at a tournament, we thus read of him :
 
 28 TEXTILES. 
 
 Sir Bevis disguised all his weed 
 
 Of black cendal and of rede, 
 
 Flourished with roses of silver bright, etc. 
 
 Of the ten silken albs which Hugh Pudsey left to Durham, 
 two were made of samit and two of cendal, or as the bishop calls 
 it, sandal. Exeter cathedral had a red cope with a green lining 
 of sandal and a cape of sandaline : "Una capa de sandalin." 
 Piers Ploughman speaks thus to the women of his day : 
 
 And ye lovely ladies 
 With youre long fyngres, 
 That ye have silk and sandal 
 To sowe, whan tyme is. 
 Chesibles for chapeleyns, 
 Chirches to honoure, etc. 
 
 A stronger kind of cendal was wrought and called, in the Latin 
 inventories of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, " cendatus 
 afforciatus : " there was a cope of this material at St. Paul's, and 
 another cope of cloth of gold was lined with it. 
 
 Syndomts or Sindonis, as it would seem, was a bettermost sort 
 of cendal. St. Paul's had a chasuble as well as a cope of this 
 fabric. 
 
 Taffeta, if not a thinner, was a less costly silken stuff than 
 cendal ; which word, to this day, is used in the Spanish language, 
 and is defined to be a thin transparent textile of silk or linen : 
 " Tela de seda 6 lino muy delgada y trasparente." Taffeta and 
 cendal were used for linings in mediaeval England. Chaucer says 
 of his " doctour of phisike," 
 
 In sanguin and in perse he clad was alle 
 Lined with taffeta and with sendalle. 
 
 Sarcenet during the fifteenth century took by degrees the place 
 of cendal, at least here in England. 
 
 By some improvement in their weaving of cendal, the Saracens 
 in the south of Spain earned for this light web a good name in
 
 TEXTILES. 29 
 
 our markets, and it became much sought for here. Among other 
 places, York cathedral had several sets of curtains for its high 
 altar, " de sarcynet." At first this stuff was called from its makers 
 " saracenicum." But, in Anglicising, the name was shortened 
 into " sarcenet ; " a word which we use now for the thin silk 
 which of old was known among us as "cendal." 
 
 Satin, though far from being so common as other silken 
 textures, was not unknown to England in the middle ages ; and 
 Chaucer speaks of it in his ' Man of lawes tale : ' 
 
 In Surrie whilom dwelt a compagnie 
 Of chapmen rich, and therto sad and trewe, 
 That wide were senten hir spicerie, 
 Clothes of gold, and satins rich of hewe. 
 
 When satin first appeared in trade it was called round the 
 shores of the Mediterranean "aceytuni." The term slipped 
 through early Italian lips into " zetani ; " coming westward this 
 name, in its turn, dropped its "i," and smoothed itself into "satin." 
 So, also, it is called in France ; while in Italy it now goes by the 
 name of " raso," and the Spaniards keep up its first designation. 
 
 In the earlier inventories of church vestments no mention can 
 be found of satin ; but this fine silk is spoken of among the various 
 rich bequests made to his cathedral at Exeter by bishop Grandison, 
 about 1340; though later, and especially in the royal wardrobe 
 accompts, it is very commonly specified. Hence we may fairly 
 assume that till the fourteenth century satin was unknown in 
 England ; afterwards it met with much favour. Flags were made 
 of it. On board the stately ship in which Beauchamp earl of 
 Warwick, in the reign of Henry the sixth, sailed from England to 
 France, there were flying " three penons of satten," besides " six- 
 teen standards of worsted entailed with a bear and a chain," and 
 a great streamer of forty yards in length and eight yards in breadth, 
 with a great bear and griffin holding a ragged staff poudred full of 
 ragged staffs. Like other silken textiles, satin seems to have 
 been in some instances interwoven with flat gold thread : for
 
 3 
 
 TEXTILES. 
 
 example, Lincoln had of the gift of one of its bishops eighteen 
 copes of red tinsel sattin with orphreys of gold. 
 
 Though not often, yet sometimes we read of a silken stuft 
 called cadas, carda, cardmis, and used for inferior purposes. The 
 outside silk on the cocoon is of a poor quality compared with the 
 inner filaments, from which it is kept apart in reeling, and set 
 aside for other uses. We find mention of such cloths as belonging 
 to the cathedrals of Exeter and St. Paul's in the thirteenth cen- 
 tury. More frequently, instead of being spun, it served as wadding 
 in dress : on the barons at the siege of Caerlaverock might be 
 seen many a rich gambeson garnished with silk, cadas, and 
 cotton : 
 
 Meint riche gamboison guarni 
 
 DC soi, de cadas e coton. 
 
 The quantity of card purchased for the royal wardrobe, in the 
 year 1299, is set forth in the Liber quotidianus. 
 
 Camoca, camoka, camak, as the name is differently written, was 
 a textile of which in England we hear nothing before the latter 
 end of the fourteenth century. No sooner did it make its appear- 
 ance than this camoca rose into great repute ; the Church used it 
 for her vestments, and royalty employed it for dress as well as in 
 adorning palaces, especially in draping beds of state. In the year 
 1385, besides some smaller articles, the royal chapel in Windsor 
 castle had a whole set of vestments and other ornaments for the 
 altar, of white camoca ; and our princes must have arrayed them- 
 selves, on grand occasions, in the same material ; for Herod, in 
 one of the Coventry mysteries the adoration of the Magi is 
 made to boast of himself : " In kyrtyl of cammaka kynge am I 
 cladde." But it was in draping its state-beds that our ancient 
 royalty showed its affection for camoca. Edward the Black 
 Prince bequeaths to his confessor " a large bed of red camoca 
 with our arms embroidered at each corner," and the prince's 
 mother leaves to another of her sons " a bed of red camak." 
 Edward lord Despencer, in 1375, wills to his wife "my great
 
 TEXTILES. 31 
 
 bed of blue camaka, with griffins, also another bed of camaka, 
 striped with white and black." What may have been the real 
 texture of this stuff, thought so magnificent, we do not positively 
 know, but it was probably woven of fine camels' hair and silk, 
 and of Asiatic workmanship. 
 
 From this mixed web we pass to another more precious, the 
 Cloth of Tars ; which we presume to have been the forerunner of 
 the now celebrated cashmere, and together with silk made of the 
 downy wool of goats reared in several parts of Asia, but especially 
 in Tibet. 
 
 Velvet is a silken textile, the history of which has still to be 
 written. Of the country whence it first came, or the people who 
 were the earliest to hit upon the happy way of weaving it, we 
 know nothing. A very old piece was in the beautiful crimson 
 cope embroidered by English hands in the fourteenth century, 
 now kept at the college of Mount St. Mary, Chesterfield. 
 
 We are probably indebted to central Asia, or perhaps China, 
 for velvet as well as satin ; and among the earliest places in 
 Europe where it was manufactured, were perhaps first the south of 
 Spain, and then Lucca. 
 
 In the earliest of the inventories which we have of church 
 vestments, that of Exeter cathedral, 1277, velvet is not spoken of; 
 but in St. Paul's, London, A.D. 1295, there is some notice of 
 velvet with its kindred web " fustian," for chasubles. Velvet is 
 for the first time mentioned at Exeter in 1327, but as in two 
 pieces not made up, of which some yards had been then sold for 
 vestment-making. From the middle of the fourteenth century 
 velvet is of common occurrence. 
 
 The name itself of velvet, " velluto," seems to point out Italy 
 as the market through which we got it from the east, for the word 
 in Italian indicates something which is hairy or shaggy, like an 
 animal's skin. 
 
 Fustian was known at the end of the thirteenth century. St. 
 Paul's cathedral at that date had " a white chasuble of fustian."
 
 32 TEXTILES. 
 
 In an English sermon preached at the beginning of the same 
 century great blame is found with the priest who had his chasuble 
 made of middling fustian : " J?e meshakele of medeme fustian." 
 As then wove, fustian had a short nap on it, and one of the 
 domestic uses to which during the middle ages it had been put 
 was for bed clothes, as thick undersheets. Lady Bargavenny 
 bequeaths, in 1434, "A bed of gold of swans, two pair sheets of 
 raynes (fine linen, made at Rheims), a pair of fustians, six pair of 
 other sheets, etc." It is not unlikely that this stuff may have 
 hinted to the Italians the way of weaving silk in the same manner, 
 and so of producing velvet. Other nations took up the manufac- 
 ture, and the weaving of velvet was wonderfully improved. It 
 became diapered and, upon a ground of silk or of gold, the 
 pattern came out in a bold manner, with a raised pile. At last, 
 the most beautiful of all manners of diapering, namely, making 
 the pattern to show itself in a double pile, one pile higher than 
 the other and of the same tint, now, as formerly, known as velvet 
 upon velvet, was brought to its highest perfection ; and velvets in 
 this fine style were wrought in greatest excellence in Italy, in 
 Spain and in Flanders. Our old inventories often specify these 
 differences in the making of the web. York cathedral had " four 
 copes of crimson velvet plaine, with orphreys of clothe of goulde, 
 for slanders ; " " agreene cushion of raised velvet ; " and " a cope 
 of purshed velvet (redd) : " " purshed " means that the velvet was 
 raised in a network pattern. 
 
 Diaper was a silken fabric, held everywhere in high estimation 
 during many hundred years, both abroad and in England. We 
 know this from documents beginning with the eleventh century : 
 but the origin of the name is uncertain. Possibly, in order to 
 indicate a one-coloured yet patterned silk, which diaper is, the 
 Byzantine Greeks of the early middle ages invented the term 
 StasTrpov, diaspron, from Siasrrao), I separate, to signify "what 
 distinguishes or separates itself from things about it," as every 
 pattern does on a one-coloured silk. With this textile the Latins
 
 TEXTILES. 33 
 
 took the name for it from the Greeks and called it "diasper," 
 which in English has been moulded into " diaper." In the year 
 1066 the empress Agnes gave to Monte Cassino a diaper-chasuble 
 of cloth of gold, " planetam diasperam." This early mention of 
 the name seems to be a conclusive argument against those writers 
 who derive it from Ypres, in Flanders ; a town celebrated for linen 
 manufactures at a somewhat later period : yet even then, accord- 
 ing to Chaucer, rivalled by workwomen in England. He tells us 
 of the "good wif of Bathe " that 
 
 Of cloth-making she hadde swiche an haunt 
 She passed hem of Ipres and of Gaunt. 
 
 In the South Kensington collection, no. 1270 shows how these 
 cloths were wrought ; and it would seem that cloth of gold was 
 often diapered with a pattern, at least in the time of Chaucer, who 
 describes it on the housing of a king's horse : 
 
 trapped in stele, 
 
 Covered with cloth of gold diapred wele. 
 
 Church inventories make frequent mention of such diapered 
 silks for vestments. Exeter cathedral had a cope of white diaper 
 with half moons, the gift of bishop Bartholomew, in 1161. Some- 
 times the pattern of the diapering is noticed ; for instance, at St 
 Paul's, " a chasuble of white diaper, with coupled parrots in places, 
 among branches." Probably the most elaborate specimen of 
 diaper-weaving on record is that which Edmund, earl of Cornwall, 
 gave to the same cathedral ; " a cope of a certain diaper of Antioch 
 colour covered with trees and diapered birds, of which the heads, 
 breasts and feet, as well as the flowers on the tress, were woven 
 in gold thread." 
 
 By degrees the word " diaper " became widened in its mean- 
 ing. Not only all sorts of textile, whether of silk, of linen, or of 
 worsted, but the walls of a room were said to be diapered when 
 the self-same ornament was repeated and sprinkled well over it 
 
 D
 
 34 
 
 TEXTILES. 
 
 Thus, in ' the squire of low degree/ the king of Hungary promises 
 his daughter a chair or carriage, that 
 
 Shal be coverd wyth velvette reede 
 And clothes of fyne golde al about your heede, 
 With damaske whyte and azure blewe 
 Well dyaperd with lylles newe. 
 
 The bow for arrows held by Sweet-looking is, in Chaucer's 
 ' Romaunt of the rose,' described as 
 
 painted well, and thwitten 
 And over all diapred and written, etc. 
 
 So now, we call our fine table linen "diaper" because it is 
 figured with flowers and fruits. Sometimes silks diapered were 
 called "fygury : " as the cope mentioned in the York fabric rolls, 
 " una capa de sateyn fygury." 
 
 Ladies spinning and weaving ; from a manuscript of the fifteenth century.
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 * 
 
 THERE are some very ancient names, distinguishing different 
 textiles, which require notice : such as " chrysoclavus," " stau- 
 raccin," " polystaurium," " gammadion" or " gamrnadiae," " de 
 quadruple," " de octoplo," and " de fundato/' Textiles of silk and 
 gold are, over and over again, enumerated as then commonly 
 known under such names, in the ' Liber pontificalis seu de gestis 
 Romanorum pontificum : ' a book of great value for every student 
 of early Christian art-work, and in particular of textiles and em- 
 broidery. 
 
 The Chrysoclavus, or golden nail-head, was a remnant which 
 lingered a long time among the ornaments embroidered on eccle- 
 siastical vestments and robes for royal wear of that once so 
 coveted "latus clavus," or broad nail ; head-like purple round 
 patch worn upon the outward garment of the old Roman digni- 
 taries. In the court of Byzantium this mark of dignity was 
 elevated, from being purple on white, into gold upon purple. 
 Hence it came that all rich purple silks, woven or embroidered 
 with the " clavus" in gold, were known from their pattern as gold 
 nail-headed, or chrysoclavus ; and silken textiles of Tyrian dye, 
 sprinkled all over with large round spots, were once in great 
 demand. Pope Leo in 795, among his several other gifts to the 
 churches at Rome, bestowed a great number of altar frontals 
 made of this purple and gold fabric, as we are told by Anastasius 
 
 D 2
 
 36 TEXTILES. 
 
 in the Liber pontificalis. Sometimes these " clavi " were made so 
 large that upon their golden ground an event in the life of a saint 
 or the saint's head was embroidered, and then the whole piece 
 was called " sigillata," or sealed. 
 
 Stauracin or " stauracinus," taking its name from oravpos 
 the Greek for " cross," was a silken stuff figured with small plain 
 crosses, and therefore from their number sometimes further dis- 
 tinguished by the word signifying that meaning in Greek, Poly- 
 
 The crosses woven on the various fabrics were sometimes of 
 the simplest shape ; oftener they were designed after an elaborate 
 type with a symbolic meaning about it that afforded an especial 
 name to the stuffs upon which they were figured. 
 
 This name Gamma'dion, or Gammadice, was a word applied as 
 often to the pattern upon silks as to the figures wrought upon 
 gold and silver. 
 
 In the Greek alphabet the capital letter gamma takes the 
 shape of an exact right angle thus, F. Being so, many writers 
 have seen in it an emblem of our Lord as our corner-stone. 
 Following this idea artists at a very early period struck out a way 
 of forming the cross after several shapes by various combinations 
 
 _! 1_ 
 with it of this letter F. Four of these gammas put so fall 
 
 ~~i r 
 
 into the shape of the so-called Greek cross ; and in this form it 
 was woven upon the textiles denominated stauracince ; or pat- 
 terned with a cross. Being one of the four same-shaped elements 
 of the cross's figure, the part was significant of the whole : and as 
 an emblem of the corner-stone, our Lord, the gamma or F, was 
 frequently shown at one edge of the tunic worn by the apostles 
 in ancient mosaics ; wherein sometimes we find, in place of the 
 single gamma, the figure H ; another combination of the four 
 gammas in the cross. Whatsoever, therefore, whether of metal 
 or of silk, was found to be marked in this or any other way of
 
 TEXTILES 37 
 
 putting the- gammas together, or with only a single one, was 
 called " gammadion," or " gammadiae." 
 
 : Ancient ingenuity for throwing its favourite gamma into other 
 combinations, and thus bringing out pretty and graceful patterns to 
 be wrought on all sorts of work for ecclesiastical use, did not stqp 
 here. In the Liber pontificalis of Anastasius we meet not unfre- 
 quently with accounts of vestments, etc. " de stauracin seu quadra- 
 polis"; or " de quadrapolo"; or "de octapolo." The author here 
 evidently means to imply a distinction between a something amount- 
 ing to four, and to eight, in or upon these textiles. It cannot be to 
 say that one fabric was woven with four, the other with eight 
 threads ; had that been so meant, the fact would probably then have 
 been explained by a word constructed like " examitus," p. 24. As 
 the contrast is not in the texture it must be in the pattern of the 
 stuffs ; tha,t is, in the number of the crosses : and we further 
 see why " stauracin " and " de quadrapolis " are interchangeable 
 terms. 
 
 At the end of Du Cange's glossary is an engraving of a 
 work of Greek art ; plate IX. Here St. John Ghrysostom stands 
 between St. Nicholas and St. Basil. All three are arrayed in their 
 liturgical garments, which being figured with crosses are of the 
 textile called of old " stauracin ; " but there is a marked difference 
 in the way in which the crosses are inserted. The crosses are 
 
 + + 
 
 arranged upon the vestment of St. John thus ; ^-^ 
 
 + + 
 
 St. Nicholas and St. Basil have chasubles which are not only worked 
 all over with crosses made with gammas, but are surrounded with 
 
 r + n rn 
 I_LJ Lj_i 
 
 other gammas joined so as to edge in the crosses, thus ; 
 
 -I- ' -4-" 
 LJ LJ 
 
 As four gammas only are necessary to form all the crosses
 
 38 TEXTILES. 
 
 upon St. John's vestment, we there see the textile called " stau- 
 racin de quadruplo," or the stuff figured with a cross of four 
 (gammas) ; while as eight of these letters are -required for the 
 pattern on the others, we have in them an example of the " stau- 
 racin de octapolo," or " octapulo," a fabric with a pattern com- 
 posed of eight gammas. 
 
 A far more ancient and universal shape fashioned out of the 
 repetition of the same letter T, is that known as Gammadion ; or, 
 as commonly called at one time in England, the Filfot. Several 
 pieces in the South Kensington collection exhibit on them some 
 modification of it : for example, nos. 1261, 1325, 7052, 8zgA, 
 8305, 8635, an d 8652. Its figure is made out of the usual four 
 
 gammas, so that they should fall together thus T ! 
 
 Of silks patterned with the plain Greek cross or " stauracin" 
 there are also several examples in the same collection ; and though 
 not of the remotest period are interesting. No. 8234, perhaps 
 wrought in Sicily by the Greeks brought as prisoners from the Morea 
 in the twelfth century, is not without some value. In the chapter 
 library at Durham may be seen (as we learn from Mr. Raine) an 
 example of Byzantine stauracin " colours purple and crimson ; the 
 only prominent ornament a cross often repeated, even upon the 
 small portion which remains." Those who have seen in St. 
 Peter's sacristy at Rome that beautiful light-blue dalmatic said to 
 have been worn by Charlemagne when he sang the gospel, vested 
 as a deacon, on the day he was crowned emperor, will remember 
 how plentifully it is sprinkled with crosses between its exquisite 
 embroideries, so as to make the vestment a real " stauracin." It 
 has been well given by Sulpiz Boisseree in his ' Kaiser dalmatika 
 in der St. Peterskirche ;' but far better by Dr. Bock in his splen- 
 did work on the coronation robes of the German emperors. 
 
 Silks called de fundato, from the pattern woven on them, are 
 frequently spoken of by Anastasius. From the text of that writer, 
 and from passages in other authors of his time, it would seem
 
 TEXTILES. 39 
 
 that the silks themselves were dyed of the richest purple and 
 figured with gold in the pattern of netting. As one of the mean- 
 ings for the word " funda" is a fisherman's net, rich textiles so 
 figured in gold were denominated " de fundato " or netted. We 
 gather also from Fortunatus that the costly purple-dyed silks 
 called " blatta" were always interwoven with gold. This net- 
 pattern lingered long and, no doubt, we find it under a new name 
 " laqueatus" meshed upon a cope belonging to the church of St. 
 Paul's, London, 1295 : where an inventory, printed by Dugdale, 
 includes a cope of baudekin with fir-cones " in campis laqueatis.'' 
 Modifications of this very old pattern may be seen at South 
 Kensington, nos. 1264, 1266, and 8234. In the diapered pattern 
 on some of the cloth of gold found lately in the grave of an arch- 
 bishop, buried at York about the end of the thirteenth century, 
 the same netting is discernible. 
 
 Stragulatcz, striped or barred silks, were at one time in much 
 request. Frequent mention is made of them in the Exeter in- 
 ventories \ for example, in 1277, there were two palls of baudekin, 
 one " stragulata." The illuminations in the manuscript in the 
 Harley collection at the British museum of the deposition of 
 Richard the second affords us instances of this textile. The 
 young man to the right sitting on the ground at the archbishop's 
 sermon is entirely, hood and all, arrayed in this striped silk j and 
 at the altar, where Northumberland is swearing on the eucharist, 
 the priest who is saying mass wears a chasuble of the same stuff. 
 Old St. Paul's had an offertory-veil of the same pattern ; " stragu- 
 latum" with the stripes red and green. 
 
 At the end of the twelfth century there was brought to Eng- 
 land, from Greece, a sort of precious silk named there Imperial. 
 
 Ralph, dean of St Paul's cathedral, tells us that William de 
 Magna Villa, on coming home from his pilgrimage to the holy 
 land about 1178, made presents to several churches of cloths 
 which at Constantinople were called " Imperial." We are told by 
 Roger Wendover, and after him by Matthew Paris, that the
 
 40 TEXTILES. 
 
 apparition of king John was dressed in royal robes made of the 
 stuff they call imperial. In the inventory of St. Paul's, drawn up 
 in 1295, four tunicles (vestments for subdeacons and lower 
 ministers at the altar) are mentioned as made of this imperial. 
 No colour is specified, except in the one instance of the silk being 
 marbled ; and the patterns are noticed as of red and green, with 
 lions woven in gold. It seems not to have been thought good 
 enough for the more important vestments, such as chasubles and 
 copes. Probably the name was not derived from its colour (sup- 
 posed royal purple) nor its costliness, but for quite another 
 reason : woven at a workshop kept up by the Byzantine emperors, 
 like the Gobelins is to-day in Paris, and bearing about it some 
 small though noticeable mark, it took the designation of " Im- 
 perial." We know it was partly wrought with gold ; but that its 
 tint was always some shade of the imperial purple is a gratuitous 
 assumption. In France this textile was in use as late as the 
 second half of the fifteenth century, but looked upon as old. At 
 York somewhat later, in the early part of the sixteenth, one of its 
 deans bestowed on that cathedral " two (blue) copes of clothe 
 imperialle." 
 
 Baudekin was a costly stuff much employed and often spoken 
 of in our literature during many years of the mediaeval period. 
 
 Ciclatoun, as we have already remarked, was the usual term 
 during centuries throughout western Europe by which the showy 
 golden textiles were called. When, however, Bagdad or Baldak 
 held for no short length of time the lead all over Asia in weaving 
 fine silks, and in especial golden stuffs shot as now in different 
 colours, tinted cloths of gold became known, and more particu- 
 larly among the English, as " baldakin," " baudekin," or " baud- 
 kyn," or silks from Baldak. At last the earlier term " ciclatoun " 
 dropped out of use. Remembering this the reader will more 
 readily understand several otherwise puzzling passages in our old 
 writers, as well as in the inventories of royal furniture and church 
 vestments.
 
 TEXTILES. 41 
 
 Kings and the nobility affected much this rich stuff for the 
 garments worn on high occasions. When Henry the third 
 knighted William of Valence, in 1247, he had on a robe of cloth 
 of gold made of baudekin; "facta de pretiosissimo baldekino." 
 In the year 1259 the master of Sherborn hospital in the north 
 bequeathed to that house a cope made of the like stuff : " de 
 panno ad aurum scilicet baudekin." Vestments of this material 
 are frequently mentioned in the old church inventories. 
 
 These Bagdad or Baldak silks, with a weft of gold, known 
 among us as " baudekins" were often woven very large in size, and 
 applied here in England to especial ritual purposes. As a thanks- 
 offering after a safe return home from a journey they were 
 brought and given to the altar ; at the solemn burial of our kings 
 and queens and other great people, the mourners, when offertory 
 time came, went to the hearse and threw a baudekin of costly 
 texture over the coffin. We may learn the ceremonial from the 
 descriptions of many of our mediaeval funerals. At the obsequies- 
 of Henry the seventh in Westminster abbey : " Twoe herauds 
 came to the duke of Buck, and to the carles, and conveyed them 
 into the revestrie where they did receive certen palles which 
 everie of them did bringe solemly betwene theire hands and com- 
 minge in order one before another as they were in degree unto 
 the said herse, thay kissed theire said palles and delivered them 
 unto the said heraudes which laide them uppon the kyngs corps, 
 in this manner : the palle which was first offered by the duke 
 of Buck, was laid on length on the said corps, and the residewe 
 were laid acrosse, as thick as they might lie." In the same 
 church at the burial of Anne of Cleves in 1557, a like 
 ceremonial of carrying cloth-of-gold palls to the hearse was- 
 followed. So also the religious guilds, or other companies, in the 
 middle ages kept palls to be thrown over the bodies of all brothers 
 or sisters at their burial, however lowly may have been their rank. 
 
 The word " baudekin" itself became at last enlarged in its 
 meaning. So warm, so mellow, so fast were the tones of crimson
 
 42 TEXTILES, 
 
 which the dyers of Bagdad knew how to give their silks that, 
 without a thread of gold in them, the mere glowing tints of the 
 plain crimson silken webs won for themselves the name of baude- 
 Tcins. Furthermore, when they quite ceased to be partly woven 
 in gold and from their consequent lower price and cheapness 
 came into use for cloths of estate over royal thrones, the canopy 
 hung over the high altar of a church acquired and yet keeps 
 the appellation (at least in Italy) of " baldachino." 
 
 How very full in size, how costly in materials and embroidery, 
 must have sometimes been the cloth of estate spread overhead 
 and behind the throne of our kings, may be gathered from the 
 privy purse expenses of Henry the seventh; wherein this item 
 occurs : " To Antony Corsse for a cloth of an estate conteyning 
 47^ yerds, 11 the yerd, 522 IO.T." Canopies of this kind are 
 ^till occasionally to be seen in the throne-room of some of the 
 Roman palaces, whose owners have the old feudal right to the 
 cloth of estate. 
 
 The custom itself is thus noticed by Chaucer : 
 
 Yet nere and nere forth in I gan me dress 
 
 Into an hall of noble apparaile, 
 
 With arras spred, and cloth of gold I gesse, 
 
 And other silke of easier availe : 
 
 Under the cloth of their estate sauns faile 
 
 The king and quene there sat as I heheld. 
 
 This same rich golden stuff had a third and even better 
 known name, to be found all through our early literature as Cloth 
 jfPall. 
 
 The state cloak (in Latin pallium, in Anglo-saxon paell), 
 worn alike by men as well as women, was always made of the 
 most gorgeous stuff that could be found. From a very early 
 period in the mediaeval ages golden webs shot in silk with one 01 
 other of the various colours, occasionally blue but oftener crim- 
 son, were sought for through so many years, and everywhere, that 
 -at last each sort of cloth of gold had given to it the name of
 
 TEXTILES. 43 
 
 " pall," no matter the immediate purpose to which it might have 
 to be applied or after what fashion. Vestments for sacred use 
 and garments for knights and ladies were equally made of it. 
 The word is common enough in the church inventories. 
 
 As to worldly use, the king's daughter in the ' Squire of low 
 degree ' had 
 
 Mantell of ryche clegre 
 
 Purple palle and armyne fre : 
 
 and in the poem of Sir Isumbras 
 
 The rich queen in hall was set ; 
 Knights her served, at hand and feet 
 In rich robes of pall 
 
 For ceremonial receptions our kings used to order that every 
 house should be " curtained " along the streets which the pro- 
 cession would have to take through London, " incortinaretur." 
 How this was done we learn from Chaucer in the ' Knight's 
 
 tale'; 
 
 By ordinance, thurghout the cite large 
 Hanged with cloth of gold, and not with sarge ; 
 
 as well as from the ' Life of Alexander :' 
 
 Al theo city was by-hong 
 
 Of riche baudekyns and pellis (palls) among. 
 
 Hence, when Elizabeth, queen of Henry the seventh, " proceeded 
 from the towre throwge the citie of London (for her coronation) 
 to Westminster, al the strets ther wich she shulde passe by, were 
 clenly dressed and besene with clothes of tappestreye and arras. 
 And some strets, as Cheepe, hangged with rich clothes of gold, 
 velvetts, and silks, etc." Machyn in his diary tells us that as 
 late as 1555 " Bow chyrche in London was hangyd with cloth of 
 gold and with ryche hares (arras)." 
 
 Both in England and abroad, it was customary in the middle 
 ages to provide richly decorated palls with which to cover the 
 biers of dead people : more especially the members of various 
 guilds. Some of these are still existing ; one, belonging to the
 
 Mortuary Cloth from the church of Folleville (Somme), now in the museum at Amiens.
 
 TEXTILES. 45 
 
 London fishmongers' company ; another, of the fifteenth century, 
 is in the museum at Amiens. 
 
 A celebrated Mohammedan writer, Ebn-Khaldoun, who died 
 about the middle of the fifteenth century, while speaking of 
 that spot in an Arab palace, the " Tiraz," so designated from 
 the name itself of the rich silken stuffs therein woven, tells us 
 that one of the privileges of the Saracenic kings was to have 
 the name of the prince himself, or the special ensign chosen 
 by his house, woven into the stuffs intended for his personal 
 wear, whether wrought of silk, brocade, or even coarser kind of 
 silk. While gearing his loom the workman contrived that the 
 letters of the title should come out either in threads of gold, 
 or in silk of another colour from that of the ground. The 
 royal apparel thus bore about it its own especial marks, and 
 distinguished not only the sovereign but those personages 
 around him who were allowed by their official rank in his 
 court to wear it ; or those again upon whom he had bestowed 
 rich garments as especial tokens of the imperial favour, like 
 the modern pelisse of honour. Before the time of Mahomet 
 the eastern princes used to have woven upon the stuffs wrought 
 for their personal use, or as gifts to others, their own especial 
 likeness, or at times the peculiar ensign of their royalty. But 
 afterwards the custom was changed and names were substituted, 
 to which words were added foreboding good or certain formulas 
 of praise. Wherever the Moslem ruled the practice was intro- 
 duced; and thus, whether in Asia, in Egypt, or other parts of 
 Africa, or in Moorish Spain, the silken garments for royalty 
 and its favourites showed woven in them the prince's name, 
 or his chosen text. The robes wrought in Egypt for the far- 
 famed Saladin, and worn by him as caliph, bore very con- 
 spicuously upon them the name of that conqueror. 
 
 In the old lists of church ornaments frequent mention is 
 found of vestments inscribed with words in real or pretended 
 Arabic ; and when St. Paul's inventory more than once speaks
 
 46 TEXTILES. 
 
 of silken stuffs " de opere Saraceno " it is not improbable that 
 some at least of those textiles were so called from having 
 Arabic characters woven on them. Such, too, were the letters 
 on the red pall figured with elephants and a bird, belonging in 
 the fourteenth century to the cathedral at Exeter. Somewhat 
 later, our trade with the south of Spain led us to call such 
 words on woven stuffs Moorish : thus, Joane lady Bergavenny 
 bequeaths (1434) a " hullyng (hangings for a hall) of black 
 red and green, with morys letters, etc." 
 
 Silk damask (Sicilian) with imitated Arabic letters.
 
 TEXTILES. 47 
 
 The weaving of letters in textiles is neither a Moorish nor 
 Saracenic invention; ages before, the ancient Parthians used to 
 do so, as we learn from Pliny : " Parthi literas vestibus intexunt." 
 A curious illustration of the frequent use of silken stuffs bearing 
 letters, borrowed from some real or supposed oriental alphabet, 
 is the custom which many of the illuminators had of figuring on 
 frontals and altar canopies, evidently intended to represent silk, 
 meaningless words ; and the artists of Italy up to the middle 
 of the sixteenth century did the same on the hems of the 
 garments worn by great personages, in their paintings. 
 
 The eagle, single and double-headed, may frequently be 
 found in the patterns of old silks. In all ages certain birds of 
 prey have been looked upon by heathens as ominous for good 
 or evil. Upon the standard which was carried at the head of 
 the Danish invaders of Northumbria was figured the raven, the 
 bird of Odin. This banner had been worked by the daughters 
 of Regnar Lodbrok, in one noontide's while; and it is re- 
 corded by Asser that if victory was to follow, the raven would 
 seem to stand erect and as if about to soar before the warriors ; 
 but if a defeat was impending, the raven hung his head and 
 drooped his wings. Another and a more important flag, that 
 which Harold fought under at Hastings, is described by 
 Malmesbury as having been embroidered in gold with the figure 
 of a man in the act of fighting, and studded with precious 
 stones, woven sumptuously. 
 
 In still earlier ages the eagle, known for its daring and its 
 lofty flight, was held in high repute ; as the emblem of power 
 and victory it is to be seen flying in triumph over the head 
 of some Assyrian conqueror, as may be witnessed in Layard's 
 work on Nineveh. Homer calls it the bird of Jove. Quintus 
 Curtius says that a golden eagle was carved upon the yoke of 
 the war chariot of king Darius, as if outstretching his wings. 
 The Romans bore the bird upon their standards ; the Byzantine 
 emperors kept it as their device ; and, following the ancient
 
 4 8 
 
 TEXTILES. 
 
 traditions of the east and heedless of their law that forbids the 
 making of images, the Saracens, especially when they ruled in 
 Egypt, had the eagle figured on several things about them, some- 
 times single at others double-headed, which latter was the 
 shape adopted by the emperors of Germany as their blazon ; in 
 which form it is borne to this day by several reigning houses. 
 It is not strange, therefore, that eagles of both fashions are so 
 often to be observed woven upon ancient and eastern textiles. 
 
 As early as 1277 Exeter cathedral reckoned among her 
 vestments several so decorated ; for instance, a cope of bau- 
 dekin figured with small two-headed eagles : and Richard king 
 of Germany, brother of Henry the third of England, gave to 
 the same church a cope of black baudekin with eagles in gold 
 iigured on it. These are recorded in the inventories printed by 
 Dr. Oliver; and many like instances might be noticed in other 
 lists. 
 
 Ladies carding and spinning; from MSS. of the fourteenth century, in the British 
 museum.
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 HITHERTO no attempt has been made to distribute olden silken 
 textiles into various schools ; but the numerous specimens in the 
 admirable collection at South Kensington enable us to separate 
 them into several groups Chinese, Persian, Byzantine, Indian, 
 Syrian, Saracenic, Moresco-Spanish, Sicilian, Italian, Flemish, 
 British, and French. We shall now especially refer to that 
 collection. 
 
 The Chinese examples are not many : but, whether plain or 
 figured, they are beautiful in their own way. From all that we 
 know of the people, we are led to believe that their style two 
 thousand years ago is the same still ; so that the web wrought by 
 them this year or three hundred years ago, like no. 1 368, would differ 
 hardly in a line from their far earlier textiles ; of which Dionysius 
 Periegetes wrote that " the Seres make precious figured garments, 
 resembling in colour the flowers of the field, and rivalling in fine- 
 ness the work of spiders." In these stuffs, warp and woof are of 
 silk and both of the best kinds. 
 
 Persian textiles, as we see them at South Kensington, must 
 also have been for many centuries very much the same in design 
 and character. Sometimes the design is made up of various kinds 
 of beasts and birds, real or imaginary, with the sporting cheetah 
 spotted among them ; and the " homa " or tree of life conspi- 
 cuously set above all. In such cases we may conclude that the
 
 50 TEXTILES. 
 
 web was wrought by Persians, and generally the textile will be 
 found in all its parts to be of the richest materials. 
 
 No. 8233, may be referred to as an illustration of the Persian 
 
 type. 
 /A 
 
 A school of design sprung up among the Byzantine Greeks, 
 from the time when in the sixth century they began to weave 
 home-grown silk, which retained not a little of the beauty, breadth, 
 and flowing outline of ancient art. Together with this, a strong 
 feeling of Christianity showed itself as well in many of the 
 subjects which they took out of holy writ as in the smaller 
 elements of ornamentation. Figures, whether of the human form 
 i^r of beasts, are given in a much larger and bolder size than on 
 any other ancient stuffs. Though there are not many known 
 specimens from the old looms of Constantinople there is one, 
 no. 7036, showing Samson wrestling with a lion, which may serve 
 as a type. In the year 1295 St. Paul's cathedral would seem to 
 have possessed several vestments made of Byzantine silk. A 
 very splendid dalmatic of Byzantine silk, probably of the twelfth 
 century, is preserved in the treasury of St. Peter's at Rome. The 
 colour is dark blue, and the embroidery in gold and colours. 
 
 The specimens at South Kensington from the Byzantine and 
 later Greek loom are not to be taken as by any means first-rate 
 examples of its general production. They are poor both in 
 material and, when figured, in design. There are, however, many 
 pieces: nos. 1241, 1246, 1257, 1266, etc. 
 
 Indian ancient silks and textiles have their own distinctive 
 marks. 
 
 From Marco Polo, who wandered much over the far east some 
 time during the thirteenth century, we learn that the weaving in 
 India was done by women who wrought in silk and gold, after a 
 noble manner, beasts and birds upon their webs : " Le loro 
 donne lavorano tutte cose a seta e ad oro e a uccelli e a bestie 
 nobilmente e lavorano di cortine ed altre cose molto ricamente." 
 
 Several of the South Kensington mediaeval specimens from
 
 Byzantine Dalmatic : preserved at Rome. 
 
 E 2
 
 52 TEXTILES. 
 
 Tartary and India show well the truthfulness of the great Venetian 
 traveller, while speaking about the textiles which he saw in those 
 countries. The dark purple piece of silk figured in gold with birds 
 and beasts of the thirteenth century, no. 7086, is good; but 
 better still is the shred of blue damask, no. 7087, with its birds, 
 its animals, and flowers wrought in gold and different coloured 
 silks. India, also, has ever been famous for its cloud-like 
 transparent muslins, which since Marco Polo's days have kept 
 that oriental name, through being better woven at Mosul than 
 elsewhere. 
 
 The Syrian school is well represented at South Kensington by 
 several fine pieces. 
 
 The whole sea-board of that part of Asia-minor, as well as far 
 inland, was inhabited by a mixture of Jews, Christians, and 
 Saracens ; and all were workers in silk. The reputation of the 
 neighbouring Persia had of old stood high for the beauty and 
 durability of her silken textiles, which caused them to be sought for 
 by the European traders. Persia's outlet to the west for her goods 
 lay through the great commercial ports on the coast of Syria. 
 Persia was accustomed to set her own peculiar seal upon her 
 figured webs, by mingling in her designs the mystic " homa : " 
 and, naturally, this part of the pattern became in the eyes of 
 Europeans, at first, a sort of assurance that those goods had been 
 made in Persian looms. By one of the tricks of imitation fol- 
 lowed in that day, as well as now, the Syrian designers threw the 
 " homa " into their patterns. Borrowed perhaps originally from 
 Hebrew tradition, this symbol of " the tree of life " had in it 
 nothing objectionable either to the Christian, the Jew, or the 
 Moslem : all three, therefore, took it and made it a leading 
 portion of design in the patterns of their silks ; and hence it is 
 that we meet with it so often. Though at the beginning, it may be, 
 done with a fraudulent intention of palming on the world Syrian 
 for Persian silks, the Syrians usually put also into their fabrics a 
 something which declared the real workmanship. Mixed with the
 
 TEXTILES. 53 
 
 " homa," the " cheetah," and other elements of Persian patterns, 
 the discordant two-handled vase or the badly-imitated Arabic 
 sentence betrays the textile to be not Persian but Syrian. No. 
 8359 exemplifies this. Furthermore, probably in ignorance about 
 Persia's superstitious use of the "homa" in her old religious 
 services, the Christian weavers of Syria put the sign of the cross 
 by the side of the " tree of life : " as we find upon the piece of 
 silk, no. 7094. Another remarkable specimen of the Syrian loom 
 is no. 7034, whereon the Nineveh lions come forth conspicuously. 
 As good examples of well-wrought " diaspron " or diaper, 
 no. 8233 and no. 7052 may be mentioned. 
 
 Saracenic weaving, as shown by the design upon the web, is 
 exemplified in several specimens at South Kensington. 
 
 However much against what looks like a heedlessness of the 
 teaching of the Koran, it is certain that the Saracens, those of the 
 upper classes in particular, felt no difficulty in wearing robes upon 
 which animals and the likenesses of created things were woven ; 
 with the strictest of their princes a double-headed eagle, possibly 
 borrowed from the crusaders, was a royal heraldic device. Stuffs 
 figured with birds and beasts, with trees and flowers, were not the 
 less on that account of Saracenic workmanship, and meant for 
 Moslem wear. What, however, may be chiefly looked for upon 
 Saracenic textures is a pattern consisting of longitudinal stripes 
 of blue, red, green, and other colour ; some of them charged with 
 animals, small in form ; some written, in large Arabic letters, with 
 a word or sentence. 
 
 Moresco-Spanish or Saracenic textiles wrought in Spain, though 
 partaking of the striped pattern and bearing words in real or 
 imitated Arabic, had some distinctions of their own. The designs 
 shown upon these stuffs are almost always drawn out of strap- 
 work, reticulations, or some combination of geometrical lines, 
 amid which are occasionally to be found different forms of conven- 
 tional flowers. Sometimes, but very rarely, the crescent moon is 
 figured as in the curious piece, no. 8639. The colours of these
 
 54 TEXTILES. 
 
 silks are usually .either a fine crimson or ; a deep blue with almost 
 always a fine toned yellow as a ground. But one remarkable 
 feature, in these Moresco-Spanish textiles is the presence of the 
 ingenious imitation (before spoken of) of gold; for which shreds 
 of gilded parchment cut up into narrow flat strips are substituted 
 and woven with the silk. This, when fresh, must have looked 
 very bright, and have given the web all the appearance of the 
 favourite stuffs called here in England " tissues." The fraud, as 
 already 'explained, if fraud it were, is not easily discovered 
 without a magnifying glass. A guide may be found in the 
 blackness of the gold. Nos. 7095, 8590, and 639, are 
 examples of this gilded vellum. 
 
 The Sicilian school strongly marked wide differences between 
 itself and all the others which had lived before ; and the history 
 of its loom is as interesting as it is varied. 
 
 The first to teach the natives of Sicily how to rear the silkworm 
 and spin its silk were, as it would seem, the Mahomedans, who 
 coming over from Africa brought with them, besides the art of 
 weaving, silken textiles, a knowledge of the fauna of that vast 
 continent its giraffes, its antelopes, its gazelles, its lions, its 
 elephants. These invaders told them also of the parrots of India 
 and the hunting sort of leopard, the cheetahs ; and when the 
 stuff was wrought for European wear both beast and bird were 
 imaged upon the web, and at the same time a word in Arabic was 
 woven in, Like all other Saracens, those in Sicily loved to mingle 
 gold in their tissues ; and, to spare the silk, cotton thread was 
 not unfrequentty worked up in the warp. When, therefore, we 
 meet with beasts taken from the fauna of Africa, such, especially, 
 as the giraffe a.nd the several classes of the antelope family, with 
 perhaps also an Arabic motto, and part of the pattern wrought in 
 gold, as well as cotton in the warp, we may fairly take the specimen 
 as a piece of Sicily's work in its first period of weaving silk. 
 
 The second epoch was when in the twelfth century Roger, 
 king of Sicily, took Corinth, Thebes, and Athens; from each of
 
 TEXTILES. $5 
 
 which cities he led away captives all the men and women he could 
 find who knew how to weave silks, and carried them to Palermo. 
 These Grecian new comers brought fresh designs which were 
 adopted sometimes wholly, at others but in part and mixed up 
 with the older Saracenic style. In this' second period of the 
 island's loom we discover what traces the Byzantine school im- 
 pressed upon Sicilian silks, and helped so much to alter the type 
 of their first designs. On one silk, the pattern is a grotesque 
 mask amid the graceful twinings of luxuriant foliage, such as might 
 have been then found upon many a fragment of old Greek sculpture; 
 this may be seen on no. 8241 ; on another, a sovereign on horse- 
 back wearing the royal crown and carrying a hawk upon his 
 wrist, as in no. 8589 ; on a third, no. 8234, is~ the Greek cross, 
 with a pattern much like the old netted or " de fundato " kind 
 which has been described, p. 38. 
 
 But Sicily's third is quite her own peculiar style. At the end 
 of the thirteenth and beginning of the fourteenth century she 
 struck into an untried path. Without throwing aside the old 
 elements employed by the Mahomedans Sicily put with them the 
 emblem of Christianity, the cross, in various forms, on some 
 occasions with the letter V. four times repeated. 
 
 From the east to the uttermost western borders of the 
 Mediterranean the weavers of every country had been in the 
 habit of figuring upon their silks those beasts and birds they saw 
 around them : the Tartar, the Indian, arid the Persian gave us the 
 parrot and the cheetah ; the Africans, the giraffe and the gazelle ; 
 the people of each continent, the lions, the elephants, the eagles, 
 and the other birds common to both. From the sculpture of the 
 Greeks and Romans the Sicilians could have easily copied the 
 fabled griffin and the centaur ; but it was left for their own wild 
 imaginings to figure such an odd compound in one being as the 
 animals-half elephant, half griffin which we see in no. 1288.' 
 Their daring flights of fancy in coupling the difficult with the 
 beautiful are curious; in one piece large eagles are perched in
 
 56 TEXTILES. 
 
 pairs with a radiating sun between them, and beneath are dogs, 
 in pairs, running with heads turned back ; in another, running 
 harts have caught one of their hind legs in a cord tied to their 
 collar, and an eagle swoops down upon them; and the same 
 animal, in another place on the same piece, has switched its tail 
 into the last link of a chain fastened to its neck; on a third 
 sample are harts, the letter M floriated, winged lions, crosses 
 floriated, crosses sprouting out on two sides vi'\\h fleurs-de-lis, and 
 four-legged monsters, some like winged lions, some biting their 
 tails. Hardly elsewhere to be found are certain elements pecu- 
 liar to the patterns upon silks from mediaeval Sicily; such, for 
 instance, as harts, and demi-dogs with very large wings, both 
 animals having remarkably long manes streaming far behind them ; 
 or harts lodged under green trees in a park with paling about it. 
 The hawk, the eagle, double and single headed, or the parrot, 
 may be found on stuffs all over the east ; not so, however, the 
 swan, which was a favourite with Sicilians and may be seen often 
 drawn with much gracefulness. 
 
 The Sicilians showed their strong affection for certain plants 
 and flowers. On a great many of the silks in the South Kensing- 
 ton collection from Palermitan looms we see figured upon a 
 tawny coloured grounding beautifully drawn foliage in green ; 
 sometimes vine leaves, sometimes what looks like parsley, so 
 curled, crispy, and serrated are its leaves. Another peculiarity 
 is the introduction of the letter U, repeated so as to mark the 
 feathering upon the tails of birds ; or to fall into the shape of an 
 O; as in nos. 8591, 8599. 
 
 Whether it was that the crusaders made Sicily so often the 
 halting spot on their way to the holy land, or that knights 
 crowded there for other purposes, and thus dazzled the eyes of the 
 islanders with the bravery of their armorial bearings, it is certain 
 that the Sicilians were particularly given to introduce many 
 heraldic charges wyverns, eagles, lions rampant, and griffins 
 into their designs. The occasions in which such elements of
 
 Silk damask Sicilian : fourteenth- century.
 
 58 TEXTILES. 
 
 blazoning come in are so numerous that one of the features 
 belonging to the Sicilian loom in its third period is that, bating 
 tinctures, it is decidedly heraldic. 
 
 All this beauty and happiness of invention, set forth by bold, 
 free, spirited drawing, were bestowed too often upon stuffs of a 
 very poor inferior quality, in which the gold if not actually base 
 was always scanty, and a good deal of cotton was wrought up with 
 the silk. 
 
 Till within a few years past the royal manufactory at Sta. 
 Leucia, near Naples, produced silks of remarkable richness ; and 
 the piece, no. 721, does credit to its loom, as it wove in the seven- 
 teenth century. Northern Italy was not idle; and the looms 
 which she set up in several of her great cities, in Lucca, Florence, 
 Genoa, Venice, and Milan, earned for themselves a good repute 
 and a wide trade for their gold and silver tissues, their velvets, 
 and their figured silken textiles. Yet, in the same way as each 
 of these free states had its own accent and provincialisms in 
 speech, so also had it a something often thrown into its designs 
 and style of drawing which told of the place and province whence 
 the textiles came. 
 
 Lucca at an early period made herself known in Europe for 
 her textiles ; but her workmen, like those of Sicily, seem to have 
 thought themselves bound to follow the style brought by the 
 Saracens of figuring parrots and peacocks, gazelles, and even 
 cheetahs, as we see in the specimens no. 8258 and no. 8616. 
 But with these eastern animals she mixed up emblems of her own, 
 such as angels clothed in white. She soon dropped what was 
 oriental from her patterns which she began to draw in a larger, 
 bolder manner, and showing an inclination for light blue as a 
 colour. 
 
 As in other places abroad so at Lucca cloths of gold and of 
 silver were often wrought, and the Lucchese cloths of this costly 
 sort were in much request in England during the fourteenth cen- 
 tury. 'In all likelihood they were not of the deadene~d""but the
 
 TEXTILES. 59 
 
 sparkling kind, afterwards especially known as " tissue." Exeter 
 cathedral, in 1327, had a cope of silver tissue, or cloth of Lucca : 
 "de panno de Luk," At a later date, belonging to the same 
 church, were two fine chasubles one purple, the other red of the 
 same glittering stuff: "de.purpyll panno/' York cathedral pos- 
 sessed many copes of tissue shot with every colour required by 
 its ritual, and among them were "'a reade cope of clothe of tishewe 
 with orphry of pearl, a cope with- orphrey, a cope of raised clothe 
 of goulde," making a distinction between tissue and- the ordinary 
 cloth of .gold. In the wardrobe accounts of Edward the second 
 the golden tissue, or" Lucca cloth, is several times mentioned. 
 Whether the ceremony happened to be sad or gay this glittering 
 web was used ; palls made of Lucca cloth were, at masses for the 
 dead, strewed over the -corpse; at marriages; the care-cloth was 
 made of the same stuff : thus when Richard de Arundell and 
 Isabella, Hugh le Despenser's daughter, had been wedded at the 
 door of the royal chapel, the veil held spread out over their heads 
 as they knelt inside the chancel during the nuptial mass was of 
 Lucca cloth. T . . : .:"" 
 
 About the, same time velvet became known, and came into use 
 both for vestments .and for personal wear \ and Lucca probably 
 was among the first places in Europe to weave it. The specimens 
 at South Kensington of this fine textile from Lucchese looms, 
 though few in comparison with those from Genoa, still have a 
 certain historical value for the English workman :,<no. 1357, with 
 its olive green plain silken ground and trailed all over- with 
 flowers and leaves in a somewhat deeper tone, and the earlier 
 example, no. 8322, with its ovals and feathering stopped with 
 graceful cusps and artichokes, afford us good instances of what 
 Lucca could produce in the way of artistic velvets. 
 
 Genoa, though in mediaeval times not so conspicuous as she 
 afterwards became for her textile industry, encouraged over her 
 narrow territory the weaving of silken webs. Of "these the earliest 
 mention we have found is in the inventory of vestments belonging
 
 6o TEXTILES. 
 
 to St. Paul's cathedral, London, in 1295 : besides a cope of Genoa 
 cloth that church had, of the same manufacture, a hanging pat- 
 terned with wheels and two-headed birds. Though this first 
 description be scant, we may reasonably gather that the Genoese 
 cloths must have resembled the textiles wrought at Lucca. Genoa 
 still keeps up her old reputation for beautiful velvets. 
 
 In the collection at South Kensington there are examples of 
 every kind of Genoese velvets; some with a smooth unbroken 
 surface, some elaborately patterned and showing, together with 
 wonderful skill in the weaving, much beauty of design. Some 
 are raised or cut, the design being worked in a pile standing well 
 up by itself out of a flat ground of silk, either of the same or 
 of another colour, and not unfrequently wrought in gold. No. 
 7795 is an example of a very costly kind; in which the ground is 
 velvet, and again of velvet is the pattern itself but raised one pile 
 higher than the other, so as to show its form and shape distinctly. 
 No. 8323 shows how the design was worked in various coloured 
 velvet. This last was a favourite in England and called motley ; 
 in his will, 1415, printed in Rymer's Fcedera, Henry lord Scrope 
 bequeathed two vestments, one, motley velvet rubeo de auro ; the 
 other, motley velvet nigro, rubeo et viridi, etc. 
 
 Venice does not seem to have been at any time, like Sicily and 
 Lucca, smitten with the taste of imitating in her looms the patterns 
 which she saw abroad upon textile fabrics, but appears to have 
 borrowed from the orientals only one kind of weaving cloth of 
 gold : the yellow chasuble at Exeter cathedral in 1327, figured 
 with beasts, is the only instance we know where she wove animals 
 upon silks. Venice, however, set up for herself a new branch of 
 textiles, arid wrought for church use square webs of a crimson 
 ground on which were figured, in gold or on yellow silk, subjects 
 taken from the Scriptures or the persons of saints and angels. 
 These square pieces were employed, sewed together, as frontals to 
 altars, but when longwise more generally as orphreys to chasubles, 
 copes, and other vestments.
 
 TEXTILES. 6 1 
 
 There is a remarkable similarity between the drawing of the 
 figures upon old Venetian silks and the woodcuts in books pub- 
 lished at Venice in the early part of the sixteenth century ; such 
 as the fine pontifical by Giunta, or the " Rosario " by Varisco. 
 We find in both the same style and manner ; the same broad fold 
 and fall of drapery ; the same plumpness and outline of the human 
 face and figure. So near is the likeness in design that we may 
 almost believe that the artists who supplied the blocks for the 
 printers sketched also the drawings for the looms. 
 
 By the fifteenth century Venice knew how to produce good 
 damasks in silk and gold : if we had nothing more than the 
 specimen, no. 1311, where St. Mary of Egypt is so well represented, 
 it would be quite enough for her to claim for herself such a dis- 
 tinction. Nor can there be much doubt that Venice wrought in 
 velvet ; and if those rich stuffs were made there, sometimes raised, 
 sometimes pile upon pile, in which her painters loved to dress the 
 personages, men especially, in their pictures, then Venetian velvets 
 were certainly beautiful. Of this any one may satisfy himself by 
 one visit to our National gallery. There, in the " Adoration of 
 the magi " painted by Paulo Veronese, the second of the wise men 
 is clad in a robe of crimson velvet, cut or raised after a design in 
 keeping with the style of the period. 
 
 No insignificant article of Venetian textile workmanship were 
 her laces wrought in every variety ; in gold, in silk, in thread. 
 The portrait of a Doge usually shows him clothed in his dress of 
 state. His wide mantle, with large golden buttons, is made of 
 some rich dull silver cloth; and on his head is the Phrygian- 
 shaped ducal cap bound round with broad gold lace diapered, as 
 we see in the bust portrait of Loredano, painted by John Bellini, 
 in the National gallery. Not only was the gold in the thread 
 particularly good but the lace itself in great favour at the English 
 court at one time ; bought, not by yard measure but by weight, 
 " a pounde and a half of gold of Venys " was employed " aboute 
 the making of a lace and botons for the king's mantell of the
 
 62 
 
 TEXTILES. 
 
 garter." This was for Henry the seventh. " Frenge of Venys 
 gold" appears twice in the wardrobe accounts of Edward the 
 fourth. Laces in worsted or in linen thread wrought by the 
 bobbin- at Venice, but more especially her point laces or such as 
 were done with the rteedle, always had, as they still have, a great 
 reputation. 
 
 Venetian linens, for fine towelling and napery in general, were 
 in favourite use in France during a part of the fifteenth century: 
 In the ' Dues de Bourgogne' by Laborde, more than once we 
 meet with such an entry as " une piece de nappes, ouvraige de 
 Venise." 
 
 Florence, about the middle of the fourteenth century, obtained 
 
 Silk damask Florentine : fifteenth century.
 
 TEXTILES. 63 
 
 a place in the foremost rank amid the weavers of northern Italy. 
 Specimens of her earliest handicraft are rare ; there are two at 
 South Kensington. One of these, no. 8563, shows the excellence 
 of her work in secular silks. Other pieces witness to the delicacy 
 of her design at a later time, the sixteenth century. The orphrey j 
 webs of Florence are equally conspicuous for drawing and skill in' 
 weaving, and in beauty come up to those made at Venice, far 
 surpassing anything of the kind ever wrought at Cologne. 
 
 But it was of her velvets that Florence was warrantably proud. 
 Henry the seventh bequeathed " to God and St. Peter, and to the 
 abbot and prior and convent of our monastery of Westminster, the 
 whole suit of vestments made at Florence in Italy." We may yet 
 see how gorgeous this textile was in one of these Westminster 
 abbey copes still in existence, preserved at Stonyhurst college. 
 The golden ground is trailed all over with leaf-bearing boughs of 
 a bold type, in raised or cut ruby-toned velvet of a rich soft pile, 
 which is freckled with gold thread sprouting up like loops. 
 Though not so rich in material nor so splendid in pattern, there 
 are at South Kensington, nos. 7792 and 7799, two specimens of 
 Florentine cut crimson velvet on a golden ground, like the royal 
 vestments in their kind and having the same peculiarity, the little 
 gold thread loop shooting out of the velvet pile. These pieces are 
 a full century later than the cope at Stonyhurst. 
 
 That peculiar sort of ornamentation the little loop of gold 
 thread standing well up and in single spots upon some velvets,, 
 seems at times to have been replaced, perhaps with the needle, by 
 small dots of solid metal, gold or silver gilt, upon the pile : of the 
 gift of one of its bishops, John Grandisson, Exeter cathedral had 
 a crimson velvet cope, the purple velvet orphrey of which was so- 
 wrought : " purpyll velvette worked with pynsheds " of pure gold. 
 
 Milan, though now-a-days she stands in such high repute for 
 the richness and beauty of her silks of all sorts, was not, we believe, 
 at any period during mediaeval times as famous for her velvets, her 
 brocades, or cloths of gold, as for her armour, so strong and trust-
 
 64 TEXTILES. 
 
 worthy for the field, so exquisitely demascened for courtly service. 
 Still, in the sixteenth century, she earned a name for rich cut 
 velvets as may be seen in the specimen, no. 698 ; for her silken 
 net-work, no. 8336, which may have led the way to weaving silk 
 stockings ; and for her laces of the open tinsel kind once in great 
 vogue for both sacred and secular use, as in no. 8331. 
 
 England, from her earliest period, had textile fabrics varying in 
 design and material ; the colours in the woollen garments worn by 
 each of the three several classes into which the Bardic order was 
 divided, and of the chequered pattern in Boadicea's cloak, have 
 been already mentioned. It would seem from John Garland, 
 whose witness is referred to above, p. 12, that the lighter and more 
 tasteful webs wrought here came from women's hands; and the 
 loom, one of which must have been in almost every English nun- 
 nery and homestead, was of the simplest make. 
 
 In ancient times the Egyptians wove in an upright loom, and 
 beginning at top so as to weave downwards sat at their work. 
 In Palestine also the weaver had an upright loom, but, beginning 
 at bottom and working upwards, was obliged to stand. During 
 the mediaeval period the loom in England was horizontal, as is 
 shown by that figured in the Bedford book of Hours (preserved in 
 the British museum), fol. 32 ; at which the blessed Virgin is seated 
 weaving curtains for the temple. 
 
 There are several examples at South Kensington of the work 
 of English women, showing the excellence of their handicraft as 
 well as elegance in design during the thirteenth century. Nos. 
 1233, 1256, and 1270 may be referred to. But for specimens of 
 the commoner sorts of silken textiles and of wider breadth, which 
 began to be woven in this country under Edward the third, it would 
 be hazardous to direct the reader. Recent examples, velvets 
 among the rest, may be found in the Brooke collection. To some 
 students the piece of old English printed chintz, no. 1622, will 
 not be without an interest. 
 
 For the finer sort of linen napery Eylisham or Ailesham in
 
 TEXTILES. 65 
 
 Lincolnshire was famous during the fourteenth century. Exeter 
 cathedral, in 1327, had a hand towel of " Ailesham cloth." 
 
 Our coarser native textiles in wool or in thread, or in both 
 woven together, formed a stuff called "burel." St. Paul's in 
 1295 had a light blue chasuble, and Exeter cathedral in 1277 a 
 long pall of this texture. Burel and, in short, all the coarser 
 kinds of work were wrought by men : sometimes in monasteries. 
 The old Benedictine rule obliged the monks to give a certain 
 number of hours every week-day to hand-work, either at home or 
 in the field. 
 
 The weaving in this country of woollen cloth, as a staple 
 branch of trade, is very old. Of the monks at Bath abbey we are 
 told by a late writer, " that the shuttle and the loom employed 
 their attention (about the middle of the fourteenth century), and 
 under their active auspices the weaving of woollen cloth (which 
 made its appearance in England about the year 1330, and received 
 the sanction of an act of parliament in 1337) was introduced, 
 established, and brought to such perfection at Bath as rendered 
 the city one of the most considerable in the west of England for 
 this manufacture." Worcester cloth was so good that, by a chapter 
 of the Benedictine order held in 1422 at Westminster abbey, it 
 was forbidden to be worn by the monks and declared smart enough 
 for military men. Norwich also wove stuffs that were in demand 
 for costly household furniture ; and Sir John Cobham, in 1394, 
 bequeathed " a bed of Norwich stuff embroidered with butterflies." 
 In one of the chapels at Durham priory there were four blue 
 cushions of Norwich work. Worsted, a town in Norfolk, by a 
 new method of its own for the carding of the wool with combs of 
 iron well heated, and then twisting the thread harder than usual in 
 the spinning, enabled our weavers to produce a woollen stuff of a 
 peculiar quality, to which the name itself of worsted was imme- 
 diately given. To such a high repute did the new web grow that 
 church vestments and domestic furniture of the choicest sorts were 
 made out of it. Exeter cathedral among its chasubles had several 
 
 F
 
 66 TEXTILES. 
 
 " de nigro worsted " in cloth of gold. Vestments made of worsted, 
 variously spelt "worsett" and "woryst," are enumerated in the 
 fabric rolls of York minster. Elizabeth de Bohun, in 1356, be- 
 queathed to her daughter the countess of Arundel " a bed of red 
 worsted embroidered ; " and Joane lady Bergavenny leaves to John 
 of Ormond " a bed of cloth of gold with lebardes, with those 
 cushions and tapettes of my best red worsted." 
 
 Irish cloth, white and red, in the reign of king John was much 
 used in England; and in the household expenses of Swinford, 
 bishop of Hereford in 1290, an item occurs of Irish cloth for 
 lining. 
 
 English weavers knew also how to work artificially designed 
 and well-figured webs. In the wardrobe accounts of Edward the 
 second is this item : " to a mercer of London for a green hanging 
 of wool wove with figures of kings and earls upon it, for the king's 
 service in his hall on solemn feasts at London." Such " salles," 
 as they were called in France, and "hullings" or rather "ballings'' 
 the name they went under here, were much valued abroad and in 
 common use at home. Under the head of " Salles d'Angleterre " 
 among the articles of costly furniture belonging to Charles the fifth 
 of France, in 1364, one set of hangings is thus entered: "une 
 salle d'Angleterre vermeille brodee d'azur, et est la bordeure a 
 vignettes et le dedens de lyons, d'aigles et de lyepars." Here in 
 England, Richard earl of Arundel in 1392 willed to his dear wife 
 " the hangings of the hall which was lately made in London, of 
 blue tapestry with red roses with the arms of my sons," etc. ; and 
 lady Bergavenny, after bequeathing her bullying of black, red, and 
 green to one friend, left to another her best stained " hall." 
 
 Flemish textiles, at least of the less ambitious kinds such as 
 napery and woollens, were much esteemed centuries ago ; and our 
 countryman Matthew of Westminster says of Flanders that, made 
 from the material which we sent her, the wool, she sent us back 
 precious garments. So important was the supply of wool to the 
 Flemings in the fourteenth century that the check given to it by
 
 TEXTILES. 67 
 
 the wars between England and France at that time led to a special 
 treaty between Edward the third and the burghers of the Flemish 
 communes under the guidance of James van Artevelde. 
 
 Though industrious everywhere within her limits, some of the 
 towns of Flanders stood foremost for certain kinds of stuff, and 
 Bruges became in the latter end of the fifteenth century conspicuous 
 for its silken textiles. The satins of Bruges were used in England 
 for church garments. Haconbie church, in 1566, had "one white 
 vestmente of bridges satten repte in peces and a clothe made 
 thereof to hange before our pulpitt;" and in 1520 York cathedral 
 had " a vestment of balkyn (baudekin) with a crosse of green satten 
 in bryges." Her damasks silks were equally in demand; and 
 the specimens at South Kensington .will interest the student. 
 Nos. 8318 and 8332 show the ability of the Bruges loom; 
 while the favourite pattern with the pomegranate in it betrays 
 the likings of the Spaniards, at that time the rulers of the country, 
 for this token of their renowned Isabella. No. 8319 is another 
 sample of Flemish weaving, rich in its gold and full of beauty in 
 design. 
 
 In her velvets Flanders had no need to fear a comparison 
 with anything of the kind that Italy ever threw off from her 
 looms, whether at Venice, Florence, or Genoa. Not to name 
 others one example, with its cloth of gold ground and its pattern 
 in a dark blue deep-piled velvet, is not surpassed in gorgeousness 
 even by that splendid stuff from Florence of which the Stony- 
 hurst cope, just spoken of, was made. 
 
 Block-printed linen toward the end of the fourteenth century 
 was another production of Flanders. Though existing examples 
 to the eyes of many may look poor or mean, yet to men like 
 the cotton-printers of Lancashire they will have a strong attrac- 
 tion ; and to the. scholar they will be deeply interesting as sug- 
 gestive of the art of printing. Such specimens are rare, but it is 
 likely that England can show in the chapter library at Durham 
 the earliest sample of the kind as yet known ; a fine sheet wrapped
 
 68 TEXTILES. 
 
 about the body of some old bishop found in a grave opened by 
 Mr. Raine in 1827, within the cathedral. Several pieces of 
 ancient silks and English embroidery were found at the same 
 time. 
 
 What Bruges was in silks and velvets, Ypres, in the sixteenth 
 century, became for linen ; and for many years Flemish linens 
 were in favourite use throughout England. Hardly a church 
 of any size, scarcely a gentleman's house in this country, but used 
 a quantity of towels and other napery that was made in Flanders, 
 especially at Ypres. 
 
 French silks, now in such extensive use, were not much cared 
 for until the end of the sixteenth century in France itself, and 
 seldom heard of abroad. The reader, then, must not be as- 
 tonished at finding so few examples of the French loom in any 
 collection of ancient silken textiles. 
 
 In France, as in England, women in mediaeval days, old and 
 young, rich and poor, while filling up their leisure hours in-doors 
 used to work on a small loom, weaving narrow webs, often of 
 gold and diapered with coloured silks. At South Kensington, 
 nos. 1250, 7062, and 7064 are examples of such French wrought 
 stuffs belonging to the thirteenth century. In damasks, the 
 earliest French productions are of the sixteenth century; and 
 no. 8352 is a favourable example of what this manufacture then 
 was in France ; everything later is of the type so well known to 
 everybody. In several of her textiles a leaning towards classicism 
 in design is discernible. 
 
 Like Flanders, France knew how to weave fine linen which 
 here in England was much employed for ecclesiastical as well 
 as household purposes. Three new cloths of Rains (Rennes 
 in Brittany) were, in 1327, in use for the high altar in Exeter 
 cathedral, and many altar cloths of Paris linen. In the poem of 
 the ' Squire of low degree' the lady is told 
 
 Your blankettes shal be of fustyane, 
 Your shetes shal be of cloths of rayne ;
 
 TEXTILES. 69 
 
 and, in 1434, l a( ty Bergavenny devises in her will "two pair 
 sheets of Raynes, a pair of fustians," etc. 
 
 Cologne, the queen of the Rhine, became famous during the 
 whole of the fifteenth and part of the sixteenth century for a 
 certain kind of ecclesiastical textile which, from the very general 
 use to which it has been applied, we may call " orphrey web." 
 The productions of Cologne, however, are every way far below 
 in beauty the similar works of Italy. Italian orphrey-webs are 
 generally worked in gold or yellow silk upon a crimson ground of 
 silk. Florentine are often distinguished from the Venetian by 
 the introduction of white for the faces ; those of Cologne vary 
 from both by introducing blue, while the material is almost always 
 poor and the weaving coarse. In England this orphrey web was 
 in church use and called, as we learn from the York " wills and 
 testaments," " rebayn de Colayn." 
 
 The piece of German napery, no. 8317 (of the beginning of 
 the fifteenth century), will be to those curious about household 
 linen an acceptable specimen. 
 
 If in some old inventory of church vestments we find an entry 
 mentioning a chasuble made of cloth of Cologne, we should 
 understand it to mean not a certain broad textile woven there, but 
 merely a vestment composed of several pieces of this kind of web 
 sewed together ; like the frontal made of pieces of woven Venice 
 orphreys, no. 8976.
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE countries whence silks came to England are numerous ; we 
 find early notices of Antioch, Tarsus, Alexandria, Damascus, 
 Byzantium, Cyprus, Trip or Tripoli, and Bagdad, and later of 
 Venice, Genoa, and Lucca. To fix the localities of others would 
 be but guess work. 
 
 At the beginning of the fourteenth century a silk called 
 " Acca " is occasionally mentioned : and, from the description, 
 it must have been a cloth of gold shot with coloured silk, figured 
 with animals : William de Clinton, earl of Huntingdon, gave to St. 
 Alban's monastery a whole vestment of cloth of gold shot with 
 sky-blue and called cloth of Acca. It would look as if this stuff 
 took its name from having been brought to us through the port of 
 Acre : and Macri, in his valuable Hierolexicon, says that the 
 name of the ancient Ptolemais in Syria was so written. 
 
 What in one age and at a particular place happened to be 
 well made and therefore was eagerly sought for, at a later period 
 and in another place was better wrought and at a lower price. 
 Time, indeed, changed the name of the market, but did not alter 
 in any great degree either the quality of the material or the style 
 of the design wrought upon it. Throughout the kingdom of the 
 Byzantine Greeks the loom had to change its gearing very little. 
 The Saracenic loom, whether in Asia, Africa, or Spain, was 
 always Arabic, though Persia could not forget her old traditions 
 about the "horn" or tree of life, and cheetahs, and birds of
 
 TEXTILES. 71 
 
 various sorts. With regard to the whole of Asia, its many 
 peoples from the earliest ages knew how not only to weave cloth 
 of gold but. to figure it with birds and beasts. In later times, 
 Marco Polo in the thirteenth century found exactly the same 
 kinds of textile known in the days of Darius still everywhere, 
 from the shores of the Mediterranean to the far east. What he 
 says of Bagdad he repeats in fewer words about many other 
 cities. In finding their way to England these fabrics received, if 
 not in all at least in most instances, the names of the seaports in 
 the Mediterranean where they had been shipped. 
 
 For beautifully wrought and figured silk, one of the few terms 
 that still outlive the mediaeval period is Damask. 
 
 China, no doubt, was the first country to ornament its silken 
 webs with a pattern. India, Persia, and Syria, then Byzantine 
 Greece, followed, but at long intervals between, in China's foot- 
 steps. Stuffs so figured brought with them to the west the name 
 "diaspron" or diaper, bestowed upon them at Constantinople. 
 But about the twelfth century the city of Damascus, even then 
 long celebrated for its looms, so far outstripped all other places 
 for beauty of design that her silken textiles were in demand every- 
 where; and thus, as often happens, traders fastened the name 
 of Damascen or Damask upon every silken fabric richly wrought 
 and curiously designed, no matter whether it came or not from 
 Damascus. At last, samit, having long been the epithet be- 
 tokening all that was rich and good in silk, was forgotten, and 
 diaper, from being the very word significant of pattern, became 
 a secondary term descriptive of merely a part in the elaborate 
 design on damask. 
 
 Baudekin, that sort of costly cloth of gold spoken of so much 
 during so many years in English literature, took (as was said 
 before) its famous name from Bagdad. Many specimens of bau- 
 dekin in the South Kensington collection furnish proofs of the 
 ancient weavers' dexterity in their management of the loom, and 
 especially of the artists' taste in setting out their intricate and
 
 72 TEXTILES. 
 
 beautiful designs. An identification between very many samples 
 there brought together of ancient textiles in silk and the descrip- 
 tions of similar stuffs given us in those valuable records, our old 
 church inventories, might be carried on if necessary to a very 
 lengthened extent. 
 
 Dorneck was the name given to an inferior kind of damask 
 wrought of silk, wool, linen thread and gold, in Flanders. This 
 was manufactured towards the end of the fifteenth century mostly 
 at Tournay ; which city in Flemish was often called Dorneck a 
 word variously spelt as Darnec, Darnak, Darnick, and sometimes 
 even Darness. 
 
 The guild of the blessed Virgin at Boston had a care cloth of 
 " silke dornex " and church furniture. The " care cloth " was a 
 sort of canopy held over the bride and bridegroom as they knelt 
 for the nuptial blessing, according to the Salisbury rite, at the 
 marriage mass. At Exeter dorneck was used in chasubles for 
 orphreys. A specimen of dorneck may be seen, no. 7058. It is 
 several times mentioned in the York fabric rolls. 
 
 Buckram, so called from Bokkara where it was originally 
 made, in the middle ages was much esteemed for being costly and 
 very fine ; and consequently fit for use in church vestments and for 
 secular personal wear. "Panus Tartaricus" or Tartary cloth is 
 often spoken of. John Grandison, bishop of Exeter in 1327, 
 gave to his cathedral flags of white and red buckram ; and among 
 the five very rich veils for covering the moveable lectern in that 
 church three were lined with blue " bokeram." As late as the 
 beginning of the sixteenth century this stuff was held good enough 
 for lining to a black velvet gown for a queen, Elizabeth of York. 
 The coarse thick fabric which now goes by the name is very 
 different from the older production known as " bokeram." 
 
 Burdalisaunder, Bordalisaunder, Bourde de Elisandre, with 
 other varieties in spelling, is a term often to be met with in old 
 wills and church inventories. In the year 1327 Exeter had a 
 chasuble of Bourde de Elisandre of divers colours : and from the
 
 TEXTILES. 73 
 
 Yorkshire wills we find that sometimes it was wide enough for 
 half a piece to form the adornment of a high altar. 
 
 " Bord " in Arabic means a striped cloth ; and we know, both 
 from travellers and the importation of the textile itself, that many 
 tribes in north and eastern Africa weave stuffs for personal wear 
 of a pattern consisting of white and black longitudinal stripes. 
 St. Augustin, living in north Africa near the modern Algiers, 
 speaks of a stuff for clothing called "burda" in the end of the 
 fourth and beginning of the fifth century. It is not impossible 
 that the curtains for the tabernacle as well as the girdles for Aaron 
 and his sons, of fine linen and violet and purple and scarlet twice 
 dyed, were wrought with this very pattern, so that in the " burd 
 Alisaunder " we behold the oldest known design for any textile. 
 This stuff in the middle ages was a silken web in different coloured 
 stripes, and specimens also may be found at South Kensington. 
 Though made in many places round the Mediterranean this silk 
 took its name, at least in England, from Alexandria. 
 
 Fustian, of which we still have two forms in velveteen and 
 corduroy, was originally wove at Fustat on the Nile, with a warp 
 of linen thread and a woof of thick cotton, so twilled and cut that 
 it showed on one side a thick but low pile ; and the web thus 
 managed took its name of Fustian from that Egyptian city. At 
 what period it was invented we do not rightly know, but we are 
 well aware it must have been brought very early to this country ; 
 for our countryman St. Stephen Harding, when a Cistercian 
 abbot and an old man about the year 1114, forbade chasubles in 
 his church to be made of anything but fustian or plain linen. 
 The austerity of his rule reached even the ornaments of the 
 church. From such a prohibition we are not to draw as a con- 
 clusion that fustian was at the time a mean material ; quite the 
 contrary, although not splendid it was a seemly textile. Years 
 afterwards, in the fourteenth century, Chaucer tells us of his 
 knight : 
 
 Of fustian he \vered a gepon.
 
 74 TEXTILES. 
 
 In the fifteenth century Naples had a repute for weaving 
 fustians ; and our English churchwardens, not being learned in 
 geography or spelling, made some odd mistakes in their ac- 
 counts about this as about some other continental stuffs : " Fus- 
 chan in appules" for fustian from Naples is droll; yet droller 
 still is " mustyrd devells," for a cloth made in France at a town 
 called Mustrevilliers. 
 
 Muslin, as it is now throughout the world so from the earliest 
 antiquity, has been everywhere in Asia in favourite use both as an 
 article of dress and as furniture. Its cloud-like thinness and its 
 lightness were not the only charms belonging to this stuff : it was 
 esteemed equally as much for the taste with which stripes of gold 
 had been woven in its warp. As we learn from the travels of 
 Marco Polo, the further all wayfarers in Asia wandered among 
 eastern nations the higher they found the point of excellence 
 which had been reached in weaving silk and gold into splendid 
 fabrics. The silkworm lived and thrived there and the cotton 
 plant also was in its home, its birth-place, in those regions. 
 
 Like many cities of central Asia, Mosul had earned for itself a 
 reputation of old for the beauty of its gold-wrought silken textiles. 
 Cotton grew all around in plenty ; the inhabitants, especially the 
 women, were gifted with such quick feeling of finger that they 
 could spin thread from this cotton of more than hair-like fineness. 
 Cotton with them took the place of silk in the loom ; and gold 
 was not forgotten in the weaving. Their work, not only because 
 it was so much cheaper but from its own peculiar beauty and 
 comeliness, won for itself a high place in common estimation : and 
 the name of the town where it was wrought in such perfection was 
 given to it as its distinctive name. Hence, whether wove with or 
 without gold, we call this cotton web muslin, from the Asiatic city 
 of Mosul. 
 
 Cloth of Areste is another term for woven stuffs, to be found 
 in our old English deeds and inventories. The first time we 
 meet it is in an order given, 1 244, by Henry the third for finding
 
 TEXTILES. 75 
 
 two cloths of Areste with which two copes were to be made for 
 royal chapels. Again it comes a few years later at St. Paul's, 
 which cathedral A.D. 1295 had, besides a dalmatic and tunicle 
 of this silk " white silk of Areste diapered," as many as thirty and 
 more hangings of the same texture. 
 
 From the description of these pieces we gather that this so- 
 called cloth of Areste must have been both beautiful and rich, 
 being for the most part cloth of gold figured elaborately ; some 
 with lions and double-headed eagles, others, for example, with the 
 death and burial of our Lord. 
 
 We are not disposed to agree with the suggestion that this 
 cloth was a kind of arras. Arras had not won for itself a reputa- 
 tion for its tapestry before the fourteenth century. Tapestry 
 itself is too thick and heavy for use in vestments ; yet this cloth of 
 Areste was light enough for tunicles, and when worn out was 
 sometimes condemned at St. Paul's to be put aside for lining 
 other ritual garments. Among the three meanings for the me- 
 diaeval "Aresta" one is any kind of covering. It seems, there- 
 fore, probable that these cloths of Areste took their name not 
 from the place where they had been woven, but from the use to 
 which they were generally put; namely, for hangings about 
 churches. Moreover, tapestry or Arras work, being thick and 
 heavy, could never have been employed for such light use as that 
 of apparels nor would it have been diapered like silk, yet we find 
 " Areste " to have been so fashioned and so used. 
 
 Silks also were distinguished through their colours and shades 
 of colours : and the men who drew up the mediaeval inventories 
 seem to have been gifted with a keen eye for varieties of shades 
 and tints. For instance, a chasuble at St. Paul's is set down, late 
 in the thirteenth century, as made of samit dyed in a purple 
 somewhat bordering on a blood-red tone. Tarsus colour is often 
 mentioned : and it was, probably, some shade of purple. The 
 people of Tarsus no doubt got from their murex, a shell-fish of the 
 class mollusca and purpurifera family to be found on their coast,
 
 76 TEXTILES. 
 
 their dyeing matter; and when we remember what changes are 
 wrought in the animal itself by the food it eats, and what strong 
 effects are made by slight variations in climate, even atmosphere, 
 upon materials for colouring in the moment of application, we 
 may easily understand how the difference arose between the two 
 tints of purple. 
 
 " Cloth of Tarsus " itself was of a rare and costly kind, of fine 
 goats' hair and silk. The tint was some shade of royal purple. 
 Chaucer tells us that 
 
 The great Emetrius, the king of Inde, 
 Upon a stede bay, trapped in stele, 
 Covered with cloth of gold diapred wele, 
 Came riding like the god of armes Mars. 
 His cote armure was of a cloth of Tars, 
 Couched with perles, etc. 
 
 Other cities besides Tarsus gave their names to various shades 
 of purple ; according as they were dyed at Antioch, Alexandria, 
 or Naples. Each place had a particular shade which distin- 
 guished it from the others. It is not now possible to ascertain 
 what were the exact distinctions of tint. Sky-blue was a colour 
 everywhere in church use for certain festivals throughout England. 
 In the early inventories the name for that tint is "Indicus," 
 " Indus," reminding us of our present indigo. In later lists it is 
 called " Blodius," not sanguinary but blue. Murrey, or a reddish 
 brown, is also often specified. 
 
 Silks woven of two colours, so that one of them showed itself 
 unmixed and quite distinct on one side, and the second appeared 
 equally clear on the other a thing sometimes now looked upon 
 as a wonder in modern weaving might occasionally be met with 
 here at the mediceval period : Exeter cathedral had, in 1327, a silk 
 cloth "of red colour inside and yellow outside." At York, in 
 1543, there was "a vestment of changeable silke," "besides one 
 of changeable taftety for Good Friday." 
 
 Marble silk had a weft of several colours so woven as to make
 
 TEXTILES. 77 
 
 the whole web look like marble, stained with a variety of tints. 
 There were many such vestments in old St. Paul's. During full 
 three centuries this marble silk found great favour among us ; for 
 Henry Machyn, in his curious diary, tells us how " the old qwyne 
 of Schottes rod thrught London," and how " then cam the lord 
 tresorer with a C. gret horsse and ther cotes of marbull," etc., to 
 meet her the 6th of November, 1551;
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 WE must now speak of embroidery. The art of working with the 
 needle flowers, fruits, human and animal forms, or any fanciful 
 design, upon webs woven of silk, linen, cotton, wool, hemp, be- 
 sides other kinds of stuff, is of the highest antiquity. 
 
 Those patterns, after so many fashions, which we see figured 
 upon the garments worn by men and women on Egyptian and 
 Assyrian monuments, but especially on the burned-clay vases 
 made and painted by the Greeks in their earliest as well as 
 in later times, or which we read about in the writings of that 
 people, were not wrought in the loom, but worked by the needle. 
 
 The old Egyptian loom and that of the Jews must have been 
 like it was, as we know from paintings, of the simplest shape, 
 and seems to have been able to do little more diversified in 
 design than straight lines in different colours ; and at best nothing 
 higher in execution than checker-work : beyond this, all was put 
 in by hand with the needle. In Paris, at the Louvre, are several 
 pieces of early Egyptian webs coloured, drawings of which have 
 been published by Sir Gardner Wilkinson in his work 'The 
 Egyptians in the time of the Pharaohs.' There are two pieces 
 wrought up and down with needlework ; the second piece of blue 
 is figured all over in white embroidery with a pattern of netting, 
 the meshes of which shut in irregular cubic shapes, and in the 
 lines of the reticulation the mystic "fylfot" is seen. Sir J. G. 
 Wilkinson says of them : " They are mostly cotton, and, though
 
 TEXTILES. 79 
 
 their date is uncertain, they suffice to show that the manufacture 
 was Egyptian ; and the many dresses painted on the monuments 
 of the eighteenth dynasty show that the most varied patterns 
 were used by the Egyptians more than 3000 years ago, as they 
 were at a later period by the Babylonians, who became noted for 
 their needlework." 
 
 It is clear from the book of Exodus that the Israelites from 
 very early times, having learnt the art in Egypt, embroidered 'their 
 garments ; although the word " embroidery " which- occurs so 
 frequently in every English version probably sometimes means 
 merely weaving in stripes, and not work with the needle. The 
 embroidering also of the sails of vessels was not uncommon in the 
 east ; boats used in sacred festivals on the Nile were so decorated ; 
 and the prophet Ezekiel says to the people of Tyre, " Fine linen 
 with broidered work from Egypt, was that which thou spreadest 
 forth to be thy sail." The reader will here also remember Shaks- 
 peare's description of the barge of Cleopatra j 
 
 The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne 
 
 Burned on the water : 
 
 Purple the sails, and so perfumed, that 
 
 The winds were love-sick with them ; she did lie 
 
 In her pavilion, cloth of gold, of tissue, etc. 
 
 Pliny says that the Phrygians invented embroidery, and that 
 garments so ornamented were called Phrygionic. Of such a fashion 
 were " the art-wrought vests of splendid purple tint " brought 
 forth by Dido, and the cloak given by Andromache to Ascanius. 
 Hence, an embroiderer was called in Latin " Phrygio," and 
 needlework " Phrygium " or " Phrygian" work. When the design, 
 as often happened, was wrought in solid gold wire or golden 
 thread, the embroidery so worked was named " auriphrygium." 
 From this term comes the old English word " orphrey." 
 
 While Phrygia in general, Babylon in particular (as Pliny also 
 tells us) became celebrated for the beauty of its embroideries. 
 All who have seen the sculptures in the British museum brought
 
 8o TEXTILES. 
 
 from Nineveh, and described and figured by Layard, must have 
 remarked how lavishly the Assyrians adorned their robes with the 
 needlework for which one of their greatest cities was so famous. 
 Up to the first century of our era the reputation which Babylon 
 had won for her textiles and needlework still lived. We know 
 from Josephus, who had often been to worship at Jerusalem, that 
 the veils of the Temple were Babylonian ; and of the outer one 
 that writer says: "there was a veil of equal largeness with the 
 door. It was a Babylonian curtain, embroidered with blue and 
 fine linen, and scarlet and purple, and of a texture that was 
 wonderful." 
 
 What the Jews did for the Temple we may be sure was done 
 by Christians for the Church. The faithful, however, went even 
 further, and wore garments figured all over with sacred subjects 
 in embroidery. We learn this from a stirring sermon preached by 
 St. Asterius, bishop of Amasia in Pontus, in the fourth century. 
 Taking for his text " a certain rich man who was clothed in 
 purple and fine linen" he upbraids the world for its follies in dress, 
 and complains that some people went about arrayed like painted 
 walls, with beasts and flowers all over them ; while others, pre- 
 tending a more serious tone of thought, dressed in clothes de- 
 picting the doings and wonders of our Lord. "Strive," St. 
 Asterius exhorts them, " to follow in your lives the teachings of 
 the Gospel, rather than have the miracles of our Redeemer em- 
 broidered upon your outward dress." To have had so many 
 subjects shown upon one garment it is clear that each must have 
 been done very small, and wrought in outline ; a style which is 
 being brought back, with great effect, into modern ecclesiastical 
 use. 
 
 The discriminating accuracy with which our old writers noted 
 the several kinds of textile gifts bestowed upon a church is as 
 instructive as praiseworthy. Ingulph did not think it enough to 
 say that abbot Egelric had given many hangings to the church at 
 Croyland, the great number of which were silken, but he explains
 
 TEXTILES. Si 
 
 also that some were ornamented with birds wrought in gold and 
 sewed on ; in fact, of cut-work ; others with those birds woven 
 into the stuff; others quite plain. We find the same care taken 
 in old inventories. 
 
 By the latter end of the thirteenth century embroidery ob- 
 tained for its several styles and various sorts of ornamentation a 
 distinguishing and technical nomenclature. One of the earliest 
 documents in which we meet with this set of terms is the in- 
 ventory drawn up, in 1295, of the vestments belonging to St. 
 Paul's cathedral, printed by Dugdale : herein, the " opus plu- 
 marium," the " opus pectineum," the " opus pulvinarium," " con- 
 sutum de serico," " de serico consuto," may be severally found. 
 
 " Opus plumarium " was the then usual term for what is now 
 commonly called embroidery; and was given to needlework 01 
 this kind because the stitches were laid down longwise and not 
 across : that is, so put together that they seemed to overlap one 
 another like the feathers in the plumage of a bird. This style 
 was aptly called "feather-stitch" work, in contradistinction to 
 that done in cross and tent stitch, or the " cushion-style." 
 
 The " opus pulvinarium," or " cushion-style," was like the 
 modern so-called Berlin work. As now, so then it was done in 
 the same stitching with pretty much the same materials and 
 generally, if not always, put to the same purpose ; for cushions, to 
 sit or to kneel upon in church or to uphold the mass-book at the 
 altar; hence its name of "cushion-style." In working it silken 
 thread is known to have been often used. Among other speci- 
 mens, and in silk, there is a beautiful cushion of a date corre- 
 sponding to the London inventory at South Kensington, no. 
 1324. Being well adapted for working heraldry this stitch has 
 been used from an early period for the purpose ; and emblazoned 
 orphreys, like the narrow hem on the Syon cope, were wrought 
 in it. 
 
 The " opus pectineum " was a kind of woven work imitative 
 of embroidery, and employed to supply it. John Garland, in his 
 
 G
 
 82 TEXTILES. 
 
 dictionary, explains that it was made by means of a comb, or 
 some comb-like instrument : and from this the work itself re- 
 ceived the distinctive appellation of " pectineum," or comb- 
 wrought. Before John Garland left England for France, to teach 
 a school there, he must have often seen his countrywomen at 
 such an occupation ; and the amice given by Katherine Lovell to 
 St. Paul's, '' de opere pectineo," may perhaps have been the 
 work of her own hands. 
 
 Women in the middle ages were so ready at the needle that 
 they could make their embroidery look as if it had been done in 
 the loom, really woven. A shred of crimson cendal figured in 
 gold and silver thread with a knight on horseback, armed as of 
 the latter time of Edward the first, was shown to us some time 
 ago. At first sight the mounted warrior seemed to have been 
 not hand-worked but woven ; so flat, so even was every thread. 
 Looking at it however through a glass and turning it about, we 
 found it to have been embroidered by the finger in such a way that 
 the stitches laid down upon the surface were carried through into 
 the canvas lining at the back of the thin silk. In this same 
 manner all the design, both before and behind, upon the fine 
 English-wrought chasuble at South Kensington, no. 673, was 
 probably worked. 
 
 At the latter end of the thirteenth century our countrywomen 
 invented a new way of embroidery. Without giving up altogether 
 the old " opus plumarium" or feather-stitch, they mixed it with a 
 new style, both of needlework and mechanism. So beautiful was 
 the novel method deemed abroad that it won for itself the com- 
 plimentary appellation of " opus Anglicum," or English work. 
 In what its peculiarity consisted has long been a question and a 
 puzzle among foreign archaeological writers ; and a living one of 
 eminence, M. Voisin, noticing a cope of English work given to 
 the church of Tournai, says : " II serait curieux de savoir quelle 
 broderie ou quel tissu on designait sous le nom de opus An- 
 glicum"
 
 TEXTILES. 83 
 
 But if we examine that very fine piece of English needlework , 
 the Syon cope, at South Kensington, no. 9182, we find that the 
 first stitches for the human face were begun in the centre of the 
 cheek, and worked in circular lines ; falling (after the further side 
 had been made) into straight lines, which were so carried on 
 through the rest of the fleshes ; in some instances, also, through 
 the draperies. But this was done in a sort of chain-stitch, and a 
 newly practised mechanical appliance was brought into use. 
 After the whole figure had thus been wrought with this kind 
 cf chain-stitch in circles and straight lines, then with a little thin 
 iron rod ending in a small bulb or smooth knob slightly heated, 
 those middle spots in the faces that had been worked in circular 
 lines were pressed down ; and the deep wide dimples in the throat, 
 especially of aged persons. By the hollows thus lastingly sunk 
 a play of light and shadow is brought out, which at a short dis- 
 tance lends to the portion so treated the appearance of low relief. 
 Chain-stitch, then, worked in circular lines and relief given to 
 parts by hollows sunk into the faces and other portions of the 
 persons, constitute the elements of the " opus Anglicum," or 
 embroidery after the English manner. How the chain-stitch was 
 worked into circles for the faces, and straight lines for the rest ot 
 the figures, is well shown by a woodcut, after a portion of the 
 Steeple Aston embroideries, given in the archaeological journal, 
 vol iv. p. 285. 
 
 Although not merely the faces and the extremities but the 
 dresses also of the persons figured were generally wrought in 
 chain-stitch, and afterwards treated as we have just described, 
 another practice was to work the draperies in feather-stitch, which 
 was also employed for the grounding, and diapered after a simple, 
 zigzag design ; as we find in the Syon cope. 
 
 How highly English embroideries were at one period ap- 
 preciated by foreigners may be gathered from the especial notice 
 taken of them abroad ; as we may find in continental documents. 
 Matilda, queen of William the conqueror, carried away from the
 
 TEXTILES 
 
 Part of the orphrey ol' the Syon cope. 
 
 abbey of Abingdon its richest vestments, and would not be put 
 off with inferior ones. In his will A. D. 1360 cardinal Talairand, 
 bishop of Albano, speaks of the English embroideries on a
 
 TEXTILES. 85 
 
 costly set of white vestments. A bishop of Tournai, in 1343, 
 bequeathed to that cathedral an old English cope, as well 
 as a beautiful corporal " of English work." Among the 
 copes reserved for prelates' use in the chapel of Charles duke 
 of Bourgogne, brother-in-law to John duke of Bedford, there was 
 one of English work .very elaborately fraught with many figures, 
 as appears from this description of it : " une chappe de brodeure 
 d'or, fa9on d'Engleterre, a plusieurs histoires de N.D. et anges et 
 autres ymages, estans en laceures escriptes, garnie d'un orfroir 
 d'icelle fa9on fait a apostres, desquelles les manteulx sont tous 
 couves de perles, et leur diadesmes pourphiler de perles, estans 
 en maniere de tabernacles, faits de deux arbres, dont les tiges sont 
 touts couvertes de perles, et a la dite chappe y a une bille des 
 dites armes, garnie de perles comme la dessus dicte." 
 
 While so coveted abroad, our English embroidery was highly 
 prized and well paid for at home. We find in the Issue Rolls 
 that Henry the third had a chasuble embroidered by Mabilia of 
 Bury St. Edmund's ; and that Edward the second paid a hundred 
 marks to Rose the wife of John de Bureford, a citizen and mercer 
 of London, for a choir-cope of her embroidering, and which was 
 to be sent to the Pope as an offering from the queen. 
 
 English embroidery afterwards lost its first high reputation. 
 Through those years wasted with the wars of the Roses the work 
 of the English needle was very poor, very coarse, and, so to say, 
 ragged; as, for instance, the chasuble at South Kensington, 
 110. 4045. Nothing of the celebrated chain-stitch with dimpled 
 faces in the figures can be found about it : every part is worked in 
 the feather-stitch, slovenly put down. During the early part of 
 the seventeenth century our embroiderers again struck out a new 
 style, which consisted in throwing up the figures a good height 
 above the grounding. Of this raised v/ork there is a fine specimen 
 in the fourth of the copes preserved in the chapter liLrary at 
 Durham. It is said to have been wrought for and given by 
 Charles the first to that cathedral. This red silk vestment is well
 
 85 TEXTILES. 
 
 sprinKled with bodiless cherubic heads crowned with rays and" 
 borne up by wings ; while upon the hood is David, holding in one 
 hand the head of Goliah ; the whole done in highly raised em- 
 broidery. Bibles of the large folio size, covered in rich silk or 
 satin and embroidered with the royal arms done in bold raised- 
 work, are still to be found in our libraries. More than one of 
 these volumes is said to have been a gift from the king to a fore- 
 father of the present owner. 
 
 This style of raised embroidery remained in use for many years. 
 Not, only large Bibles but smaller volumes, especially prayer- 
 books, had bindings enriched with it. Generally such examples 
 are attributed, and in most cases wrongly, to the so-called nuns of 
 Little Gidding. The same kind of work is sometimes found on 
 the broad frames of old looking-glasses : setting forth perhaps, as 
 in the specimen no. 892, the story of Ahasuerus and Esther, or 
 a passage in some courtship carried on after the manners of 
 Arcadia. 
 
 Few people at the present day have a just idea of the labour,, 
 the money, and the length of time often bestowed of old upon 
 embroideries, which had been sketched as well as wrought by the 
 hands of men, each in his own craft the ablest and most cunning 
 of his time. In behalf of England plenty of evidence has been 
 produced already : as a proof of the same labour elsewhere a 
 remarkable passage may be quoted, given, in his life of Antonio 
 Pollaiuolo, by Vasari : " For San Giovanni in Florence there were 
 made certain very rich vestments after the design of this master, 
 all of gold-wove velvet with pile upon pile (di broccato riccio- 
 sopra riccio), each woven of. one entire piece and without seam, 
 embroidered with the most subtile mastery of that art by Paolo da 
 Verona, a man most eminent of his calling, and of incomparable 
 ingenuity. This work took twenty-six years for its completion, 
 being wholly in close stitch (questi ricami fatti con punto serrato) ; 
 but the excellent method of which is now all but lost, the custom 
 being in these days to make the stitches much wider (il puntcg-
 
 TEXTILES. 87 
 
 giare piu largo), whereby the work is rendered less durable and 
 much less pleasing to the eye." These vestments may yet be seen 
 framed and glazed in presses around the sacristy of San Giovanni. 
 Antonio died in 1498. The magnificent cope before referred to, 
 now at Stonyhurst, is of one seamless piece of gorgeous gold tissue 
 figured with bold wide-spreading foliage in crimson velvet, pile 
 upon pile, and dotted with small gold spots ; probably it came 
 from the same loom that threw off these famous San Giovanni 
 vestments. 
 
 Embroidered Saddle-cloth of the sixteenth century.
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE old English " opus consutum " or cut-work, called in French 
 "applique," is a term of rather wide meaning, as it takes in several 
 sorts of decorative accompaniments to needlework. 
 
 When anything flower, fruit, or figure is wrought by itself 
 upon a separate piece of silk or canvas and afterwards sewed on 
 to the vestment for church use, or article for domestic purpose, it 
 comes to be known as cut-work. This kind of work was employed 
 for dresses and vestments ; but we find it most commonly on bed- 
 curtains, hangings for rooms and halls, and other items in house- 
 hold furniture. 
 
 Of cut-work in embroidery those pieces of splendid Rhenish 
 needlework with the blazonment of Cleves, sewed upon a ground 
 of crimson silk, nos. 1194-5, at South Kensington, and the 
 chasuble of crimson double-pile velvet, no. 78, are good 
 examples. In the last, the niches in which the saints stand are 
 loom-wrought, but those personages themselves are exquisitely 
 worked on separate pieces of fine canvas and afterwards let into 
 the unwoven spaces left open for them. A Florentine piece of 
 cut-work, no. 5788, is alike remarkable for its great beauty and 
 the skill shown in bringing together both weaving and embroidery. 
 Much of the architectural accessories is loom-wrought, while the 
 extremities of the evangelists are all done by the needle ; but the 
 head, neck, and long beard are worked by themselves upon very 
 fine linen, and afterwards put together in such a way that the full 
 white beard overlaps the tunic.
 
 TEXTILES. 89 
 
 Other methods gave a quicker help in this cut-work. For the 
 sake of expedition all the figures were sometimes at once shaped 
 out of woven silk, satin, velvet, linen, or woollen cloth as wanted, 
 and sewed upon the grounding of the article : the features of the 
 face and the contours of the body were then wrought by the needle 
 in very narrow lines done in brown silk thread. At times, even 
 this much of embroidery was set aside for the painting brush, and 
 instances are to be found in which the spaces left uncovered by 
 the loom for the heads and extremities of the human figures are 
 filled in with the brush. Sometimes, again, the cut-work done in 
 these ways is framed, as it were, with an edging, either in plain or 
 gilt leather, hempen, or silken cord, like the leadings of a stained 
 glass window. Perhaps in no collection open anywhere to public 
 view can a piece of cut-work be found so full of teaching about 
 the process of this easy way of execution as no. 1370 at South 
 Kensington : and we earnestly recommend the attention of our 
 readers to that example. 
 
 For the invention of cut-work, or "di commesso " as Vasari 
 calls it, that writer tells us we are indebted to one of his 
 Florentine countrymen : " It was by Sandro Botticelli that the 
 method of preparing banners and standards in what is called cut- 
 work was invented; and this he did that the colours might not 
 sink through, showing the tint of the cloth on each side. The 
 baldachino of Orsanmichele is by this master, and is so 
 treated, etc." But Vasari is not correct : the piece just 
 spoken of, no. 1370, was made half a century before Botticelli 
 was born. 
 
 There are other accessories in mediaeval embroidery which 
 ought not to be overlooked. 
 
 In some few instances, gold and silver gilt star-like flowers are 
 to be found sewed upon the silks or amid the embroidery from 
 Venice and other provinces in Italy, and from southern Germany. 
 Some fragments of silk damask, no. 8612, are curious examples of 
 Italian taste. These at one time have been thickly strewed with
 
 So TEXTILES. 
 
 trefoils cut out of gilt metal but very thin, and not sewed but glued 
 on to the silk : many of the leaves have fallen off, and those 
 remaining turned black. Precious stones also, coral, and seed 
 pearls were sewed upon textiles ; and, not uncommonly, small 
 coloured beads and bugles of glass. Belonging to St. Paul's, in 
 1295, among many other amices there was one having glass stones 
 upon it, both large and small. 
 
 Another form of glass fastened by heat to gold and copper, 
 enamel, was extensively employed as an adornment upon textiles. 
 The gorgeous " chesable of red cloth of gold with orphreys before 
 and behind set with pearls, blue, white, and red, with plates ot 
 gold enamelled, wanting fifteen plates, etc.," described in 
 Dugdale's Monasticon, and given by John of Gaunt's duchess 
 to Lincoln cathedral, shows how this rich ornamentation was 
 applied to garments, especially for church use, in very large 
 quantities. 
 
 In England the old custom was to sew a great deal of gold- 
 smith's work, for enrichment, upon articles meant for personal 
 wear. When our first Edward's grave in Westminster abbey was 
 opened in 1774 there was seen upon the body, besides other 
 silken robes, a stole-like band of rich white tissue about the neck 
 and crossed upon the breast : it was studded with gilt quatrefoil* 
 in filigree work and embroidered with pearls. From the knees 
 downwards the body was wrapped in a pall of cloth of gold. 
 Henry the third gave a frontal to the high altar in Westminster 
 abbey upon which, besides carbuncles in golden settings and 
 several large pieces of enamel, were as many as 866 smaller ones : 
 perhaps the " esmaux de plique " of 'the French. 
 
 In the Norman-French silken stuffs thus ornamented were said 
 to be " batuz," that is, beaten with hammered-up gold. The 
 Treasury calendars, edited by Palgrave, tell us that Richard the 
 second gave to the chapel in the castle of Haverford " ii rydell 
 batuz ; " two altar-curtains beaten (probably with ornaments in 
 gilt silver ; like an amice so described which belonged to St. Paul's).
 
 TEXTILES. 91 
 
 For the secular employment of this same sort of decoration we 
 have several curious examples. Ladies' dresses were so adorned, 
 as we may see in these verses : 
 
 A coronell on hur hedd sett, 
 
 Hur clothys wyth bestes and byrdes wer bete, 
 
 All abowte for pryde. 
 
 King John in 1215 sent an order (extant in the Close rolls) 
 to Reginald de Cornhull and William Cook to have made for him, 
 
 Ancient banner of the city of Strasburg : see next page.
 
 Cj2 TEXTILES. 
 
 besides five tunics, five banners with his arms upon them, 
 well beaten in gold : " bene auro batuatas." A very remarkable 
 example attributed to the fourteenth century " the banner of 
 Strasbourg" was preserved there until very lately, when it 
 was unhappily destroyed in the bombardment of that city in 
 1870. 
 
 Dugdale (in his Baronage) gives the original bill for fitting out 
 one of the ships in which Beauchamp earl of Warwick, during the 
 reign of Henry the sixth, went over to France. Among other items 
 are these : " Four hundred pencils (long narrow strips of silk, used 
 as flags) beat with the raggedstaff in silver ; the other pavys (one 
 of two shields probably of wood, and fastened outside the ship at 
 its bows) painted with black, and a raggedstaff beat with silver 
 occupying all the field ; one coat for my lord's body, beat with 
 fine gold; two coats for heralds, beat with demi gold; a great 
 streamer for a ship of forty yeards in length and eight yeards in 
 breadth, with a great bear and griffin holding a raggedstaff poudred 
 full of raggedstaffs ; three penons (small flags) of satten ; sixteen 
 standards of worsted entailed with the bear and a chain." The 
 quatrefoils on the robe of Edward the first, the silver lions on the 
 Glastonbury cope, the beasts and birds on the lady's gown, the 
 bear and griffin and raggedstaff belonging to the Beauchamp's 
 blazoning, and all similar enrichments put upon silken stuffs, were 
 cut out of very thin plates of gold or silver, so as to hang upon 
 them lightly, and were hammered up to show in low relief the 
 fashion of the flower and the lineaments of the beast or bird meant 
 to be represented. Such a style of ornamentation in gold or silver, 
 stitched on silken stuffs, was far more common once than is now 
 thought. It had also a technical description : in speaking of it 
 people would either write or say, " silk beaten with gold or silver ; " 
 as, for example, Barbara Mason used the term when in 1538 she 
 bequeathed to a church " a vestment of grene sylke betyn with 
 goold." 
 
 Spangles, when they happened to be used, were not like those
 
 TEXTILES. 93 
 
 now employed but fashioned after another and artistic shape, and 
 put on in a different manner. A fragment still exists from the 
 chasuble belonging to the set of vestments wrought, it is said, by 
 Isabella of Spain and her maids of honour ; and used the first time 
 high mass was sung in Granada, after it had been taken by the 
 Spaniards from the Moors. Upon this are flowers, well thrown up 
 in relief, done in spangles on a crimson velvet ground. The 
 spangles some in gold, some in silver are, though small, of 
 several sizes; all are voided; that is, hollow in the middle; 
 with the circumference not flat but convex, and are sewed on 
 like tiles, one overlapping the other, producing a rich and 
 pleasing effect. Our present spangles, in the flat shape, are quite 
 modern. 
 
 Another kind of embroidery for garments was in gold, worked 
 sometimes by itself, sometimes with coloured silk thread laid down 
 alternately beside it ; so as to lend a tinge of green, crimson, pink, 
 or blue to the imagined tissue of the robe, as if it were made of a 
 golden stuff shot with another tint. 
 
 This gold " passing " was sewn on. The workwomen taking 
 thin silk, while fastening the passing, dotted it all over in small 
 stitches set exactly in a way that showed the same pattern. With 
 no other appliance they were thus enabled to lend to their draperies 
 the appearance of having been not wrought by the needle but 
 actually cut out of a piece of textile ; for which they have been 
 sometimes mistaken. 
 
 Anciently, also, in England another mode of embroidering 
 articles, either for church use or for household furniture, was by 
 darning or working the subject upon linen netting. This was 
 called net-work, filatorium, as we learn from the Exeter inventory, 
 where we read that its cathedral possessed in 1327 three pieces of 
 it for use at the altar : one in particular for throwing over the desk. 
 These thread embroideries were chiefly wrought during the four- 
 teenth century; but as early as 1295 St. Paul's had a cushion of 
 the kind.
 
 94 TEXTILES. 
 
 Crochet, knitting done with linen thread, and the thick 
 kinds of lace wrought (chiefly in Flanders) upon the cushion 
 with bobbins, were much employed under the name of nun's 
 
 Embroidered hangings of a bed ; from a MS. of the fifteenth 
 century, in the British museum. 
 
 lace from the sixteenth century and upwards, for bordering 
 altar-cloths, albs, and every sort of towel required fjr church 
 purposes.
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 TAPESTRY is neither real weaving nor true embroidery, but in a 
 manner unites in its working those two processes into one. 
 Though wrought in a loom and upon a warp stretched out along 
 its frame, it has no woof thrown across those threads with a shuttle 
 or any like appliance but its weft is done with many short threads, 
 all variously coloured and put in by a needle. It is not embroid- 
 ery, though so very like it, for tapestry is not worked upon what 
 is really a web, having both warp and woof, but upon a series of 
 closely set fine strings. 
 
 From the way in which tapestry is spoken of in Holy Writ 
 we may be sure that the art is very old ; and if it did not take 
 its first rise in Egypt, we are led by the same authority to conclude 
 that it soon became successfully cultivated by the people of that 
 land. The woman in the book of Proverbs says : " I have woven 
 my bed with cords. I have covered it with painted tapestry, 
 brought from Egypt." We find, therefore, not only that it was 
 employed as an article of household furniture among the Israelites, 
 but that the Egyptians were the makers. 
 
 From Egypt through western Asia the art of tapestry-making 
 found its way to Europe, and after many ages at last to England. 
 Among the other manual labours followed in religious houses 
 this handicraft was one ; and monks became some of the best 
 workmen. The altars and the walls of their churches were hung 
 with tapestry. Matthew Paris tells us that among other ornaments
 
 9 6 TEXTILES. 
 
 which, in the reign of Henry the first, abbot Geoffrey had made 
 for his church of St. Alban's were three reredoses ; the first a large 
 one wrought with the finding of the body of St. Alban ; the other 
 two figured with the parables of the man who fell among thieves, 
 and of the prodigal son. While in London in the year 1316 Simon 
 abbot of Ramsey bought looms, staves, shuttles, and a slay: "pro 
 weblomes emptis xx s . Et pro staves ad easdem vj d . Item pro 
 iiij shittles pro eodem opere ij 3 vj d . Item in j. slay pro textoribus 
 viij a ." Collier, in his history, quotes a letter from Giffard, one of 
 the commissioners for the suppression of the smaller houses, written 
 to Cromwell ; in which he says, speaking of the monastery of 
 Wolstrope in Lincolnshire : " Not one religious person there but 
 that he can and doth use either imbrothering, writing books with 
 very fair hand, making their own garments, carving, painting, or 
 graving, etc." 
 
 We may collect from Chaucer that working tapestry was not 
 an uncommon trade; among his pilgrims he mentions in the 
 prologue, 
 
 An haberdasher and a carpenter, 
 A webbe, a dyer, and a tapisser. 
 
 Pieces of English-made tapestry still remain. That fine though 
 greatly damaged specimen at St. Mary's hall, Coventry, represent- 
 ing the marriage of Henry the sixth, is one ; a second is the curious 
 reredos for an altar, belonging to the vintner's company ; this last 
 is figured with St. Martin on horseback cutting his cloak in two 
 that he might give one half to a poor man, and with St. Dunstan 
 singing mass. A third piece, of large size and in good preserva- 
 tion, is in private possession, and hangs upon the wall in a house 
 in Cornwall. It is one of four pieces, of which two have been 
 lost, representing the marriage of Henry the seventh and Elizabeth 
 of York; and was probably made about the year 1490. 
 
 The art of weaving tapestry was successfully followed in many 
 parts of France and throughout. ancient Flanders; where secular
 
 TEXTILES. 
 
 97 
 
 trade-guilds were formed for its especial manufacture in many of 
 the towns. Several of these places won for themselves an especial 
 
 Banner of the tapestry workers of Lyons. 
 
 fame ; but so far, at last, did Arras outrun them all that arras-work 
 came to be the common word, both here and on the continent, to 
 mean all sorts of tapestry, whether wrought in England or abroad. 
 Thus the fine hangings for the choir of Canterbury cathedral, 
 now at Aix-en-Provence, though probably made at home by his 
 own monks and given to that church by prior Goldston in 1595, 
 are spoken of as arras-work : " de arysse subtiliter intextos." 
 
 Arras is but one among other terms by which, during the middle 
 ages, tapestry was called. Its earliest name was Saracenic work ; 
 " opus Saracenicum ; " and, at first, tapestry was wrought as in the 
 east, in a low or horizontal loom. The artisans of France and 
 Flanders were the first to introduce the upright or vertical frame, 
 afterwards known abroad as " de haute lisss," in contradistinction 
 to the low or horizontal frame called " de basse lisse." Workmen 
 who kept to the unimproved loom were known, in the trade, as 
 Saracens, for retaining the method of their paynim teachers ; and 
 their work, Saracenic. In the year 1339 John de Croisettes, a 
 'Saracen-tapestry worker living at Arras, sells to the duke of
 
 9 8 
 
 TEXTILES. 
 
 Touraine a piece of gold Saracenic tapestry figured with the story 
 of Charlemagne : " Jean de Croisettes, tapissier Sarrazinois demeu- 
 rant a Arras, vend au due de Touraine un tapis sarrazinois a or de 
 1'histoire de Charlemaine." The high frame, however, soon super- 
 seded the low one ; and among the pieces of tapestry belonging 
 to Philippe duke of Bourgogne and Brabant many are especially 
 entered as of the high frame ; one of which is thus described : 
 "ung grant tapiz de haulte lice, sauz or, de 1'istoire du due 
 Guillaume de Normandie comment il conquist Engleterre." A 
 very fine example is still to be seen in the collection at the Louvre, 
 representing the history of St. Martin. 
 
 The legend of St. Martin. From a piece of tapestry of the fourteenth century 
 in the Louvre.
 
 TEXTILES. 99 
 
 With the upright, as with the flat frame, the workman had to 
 grope in the dark a great deal upon his path. In both, he was 
 obliged to put in the threads on the back or wrong side of the 
 piece, following his sketch as best he could behind the strings or 
 warp. As the face was downward in the flat frame it was much 
 less easy to observe and correct a fault. In the upright frame he 
 might go in front, and with his own work in open view on one 
 hand and the original design full before him on the other, he 
 could mend as he went on, step by step, the smallest mistake, 
 were it but a single thread. Put side by side, when finished, the 
 pieces from the upright frame were in beauty and perfection far 
 beyond those from the flat one. We can scarcely particularize 
 the details in which that superiority consisted, for not one single 
 flat sample is to be identified as certain from evidence within Our 
 reach. It is possible that at South Kensington the specimens 
 nos. 1296 and 1465 are "Saracenic;" that is, wrought in the low 
 flat loom, or " de basse lisse ; " but all the rest are of the 
 " de haute lisse," worked in the upright frame. The " weaver" is 
 among the trades engraved in the curious volume printed at 
 Frankfort in 1574, de mechanicis artibus, with plates by Amman. 
 
 When the illuminators of manuscripts began to put in golden 
 shadings all over their painting the tapestry-workers did the 
 same. Such a manner cannot be relied on as a criterion whereby 
 to judge of the exact place where any specimen of tapestry had 
 been wrought, or to tell its precise age. To work figures on a 
 golden ground and to shade garments, buildings, and landscapes 
 with gold, are two different things. Upon several pieces at South 
 Kensington gold thread has been very plentifully used, but the 
 metal is of so debased a quality that it has become almost black. 
 
 The use of tapestry for church decoration and household 
 furniture, both in England and abroad, .was for a long period 
 very great. Many large pieces, mostly of a scriptural character, 
 were provided by cardinal Wolsey for his palace at Hampton 
 court. In the next generation, a very famous set was made in 
 
 H 2
 
 TEXTILES. 
 
 The Weaver; from the engraving by J. Amman. 
 
 Flanders, which for many years decorated the walls of the House 
 of Lords : it represented the defeat of the Spanish Armada. This 
 magnificent memorial was destroyed in the fire of 1834. One 
 fragment only is known to exist. This piece was cut out to make 
 way for a gallery at the time of the trial of queen Caroline, and 
 was secreted by a German servant of the Lord Chamberlain. 
 The relic was bought some years after for ^20 and presented to 
 the corporation of Plymouth, who still possess it. 
 
 The most beautiful series now in the world is in the Vatican at 
 Rome, and maybe judged of by looking at a few of the original car- 
 toons (at present in the S. K. museum). Duke Cosimo tried to set 
 up tapestry work at Florence but did not succeed. Later, Rome 
 produced some good things ; among others, the fine copy of Da 
 Vinci's Last Supper still hung up on Maunday Thursday. Eng-
 
 TEXTILES. 10 1 
 
 land made several attempts to re-introduce the manufacture : first 
 at Mortlake, then afterwards in London, at Soho. Works from 
 these two establishments may be met with. At Northumberland 
 house there was a room hung with large pieces of tapestry wrought 
 at Soho, and for that mansion, in the year 1758. The designs 
 were by Francesco Zuccherelli and consisted of landscapes com- 
 posed of hills crowned here and there with the standing ruins of 
 temples or strewed with broken columns, among which groups 
 of country folks are wandering and amusing themselves. Mort- 
 lake and Soho were failures. Not so the Gobelins at Paris, as 
 every one well knows. 
 
 In many English houses, especially in the country, good 
 samples of late Flemish tapestry may be found. Close to Lon- 
 don, Holland house is adorned with some curious specimens, par- 
 ticularly in the raised style. An earlier example (engraved on the 
 next page) of the fifteenth century, representing the marriage of 
 Louis XII. and Anne of Brittany is in a foreign collection. 
 
 Imitated tapestry existed here long ago under the name or 
 "stayned cloth," and the workers of it were embodied into a 
 London guild. At the beginning of the sixteenth century Exeter 
 cathedral had several pieces of old painted or " stayned" cloth : 
 " i front stayned cum crucifixo, Maria et Johanne, Petro et Paulo ; 
 viij panni linei stayned, etc." The great use at that time of such 
 articles in household furniture may be witnessed in the will, 1503, 
 of Katherine lady Hastings who bequeaths, besides several other 
 such pieces, " an old hangin of counterfeit arres of Knollys, which 
 now hangeth in the hall and all such hangyings of old bawdekyn, 
 or lynen paynted as now hang in the chappell." We may also 
 remember that Falstaff speaks of it as an illustration easily under- 
 stood ; he says that his troops are " as ragged as Lazarus in the 
 painted cloth." 
 
 Carpets are akin to tapestry, and though the use of them may 
 perhaps be not so ancient yet is very old. Here, again, we must 
 look to the people of Asia for the finest as well as the earliest
 
 TEX12LES. 
 
 Marriage of Louis XII. and Anne of Brittany. 
 
 examples of this textile. Mediaeval specimens are rare anywhere, 
 and we are glad to recommend attention to two pieces of that 
 period fortunately in the collection at South Kensington, no. 8649, 
 01 the fourteenth century, and no. 8357, of the sixteenth, both of 
 Spanish make. 
 
 The chambers of our royal palaces and the chancels of our 
 parish churches used to be strewed with rushes. When however 
 they could afford it the authorities of our cathedrals, even in very
 
 TEXTILES. 103 
 
 early times, spread the sanctuary with carpets ; and at last old 
 tapestry came to be so employed, as now in Italy. Among such 
 coverings for the floor before the altar Exeter had a large piece of 
 Arras cloth figured with the life of the duke of Burgundy, the gift 
 of one of its bishops, Edmund Lacy, in 1420 ; besides two large 
 carpets, one bestowed by bishop Nevill in 1456, the other, of a 
 chequered pattern, by lady Elizabeth Courtney : " carpet et 
 panni coram altari sternendi ; i pannus de Arys de historia ducis 
 Burgundie ; i larga carpeta, etc." In an earlier inventory we find 
 that among the " bancaria" or bench-coverings in the choir of the 
 same cathedral, one was a large piece of English-made tapestry 
 with a fretted pattern. It is very probable that as the work of the 
 Record Commission goes on, and our ancient historians are 
 printed, evidence may be found that the looms at work in all our 
 great monasteries among other webs wrought carpets. From 
 existing testimony we believe that such must have been the prac- 
 tice at Croyland, where abbot Egelric (the second of the name) 
 gave to that church, before the year 992, " two large foot-cloths 
 [so carpets were then called] woven with lions to be laid out 
 before the high altar on great festivals, and two shorter ones 
 trailed all over with flowers, for the feast days of the apostles." 
 The quantity of carpeting in our palaces may be seen by the way 
 in which Leland tells us that " my lady the queen's rooms " were 
 strewed with them " when she took her chamber. "
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 THE value of such a collection of textile fabrics as that at South 
 Kensington can scarcely be overrated. Without such aid it is 
 not possible for the painter or the historian to bring before his 
 own mind, much less bring before another's, a true representation 
 of ancient ceremonies and pageants. Whether his subject be a, 
 coronation or a royal marriage, a queen's " taking her chamber," 
 a progress, or a funeral, he cannot correctly set forth the splen- 
 dour or the details of the occasion, unless he can refer to existing 
 examples of the cloths of gold, the figured velvets, the rich em- 
 broidery, or the splendid silks, which used to be worn of old. Take 
 for example nos. 1310 and 8624. Upon these are figured stags 
 with tall branching horns, couchant, chained, upturning their 
 antlered heads to sunbeams darting down upon them amid a 
 shower of rain ; and beneath the stags are eagles. This Sicilian 
 textile, woven about the end of the fourteenth century, brings to 
 one's mind the bronze recumbent figure of a king in Westminster 
 abbey. It is that of Richard the second ; made for him before his 
 downfall, and by two coppersmiths of London, Nicholas Broker 
 and Godfrey Prest. This effigy, once finely gilt, is as remarkable 
 for its beautiful workmanship as for the elaborate manner in which 
 the cloak and kirtle worn by the king are diapered all over with a 
 pattern, copied from the silken stuff out of which those garments 
 must have been cut for his personal wear while living. The
 
 TEXTILES. 105 
 
 pattern consists of a sprig of the planta genesta, the humble- 
 broom plant the haughty Plantagenet's device along with a 
 couchant hart chained and gazing straight forwards, and above it 
 a cloud with rays darting up from behind. These were Richard's 
 favourite cognizances : the one from his grandfather Edward the 
 third ; the other from his mother Joan of Kent. It is very pro- 
 bable that the king's dress was of the same kind of silk Sicilian 
 textile as the examples just referred to : and that those very 
 examples are portions of pieces wrought, perhaps at Palermo, for 
 the court of Richard. They are of the same date and they show 
 his devices ; the chained hart and the sunbeams issuing from a 
 cloud. 
 
 The seemlines>s, not to say comfort, of private life was im- 
 proved by the use of textiles. Let the historian contrast the 
 custom even in a royal palace, during the middle ages, with that 
 now followed in every tradesman's home. Then straw and rushes 
 were strewed in houses upon the floor in every room ; and Wen- 
 dover, in his life of St. Thomas, speaks of the king's courtiers 
 platting knots with the litter, and flinging them with a gibe at a 
 man who had been slighted by the prince. Not quite a hundred 
 years later when Eleanor of Castile came to London for her 
 marriage with our first Edward she found her lodgings furnished, 
 under the directions of the Spanish courtiers who had arrived 
 before her, with hangings and curtains of silk around the walls, 
 and carpets spread upon the ground. This offended some of the 
 people ; more of them, as Matthew Paris records, laughed at the 
 thought that such costly things were laid down to be walked 
 upon. 
 
 Take, again, the famous Syon cope. Not only is it full of 
 interest to writers upon liturgies and rituals but of even more to 
 the herald and genealogist. Covered as its orphreys are with 
 armorial bearings, this cope carries with it evidences as important 
 and as valuable as any contemporary roll of arms ; and no in- 
 quirer into the pedigrees of the ancient families of the Percies or
 
 106 TEXTILES. 
 
 Ferrers, of Cliffords or Botelers, and of many others, can afford to 
 neglect it. 
 
 We have several records of evidence in courts of law taken 
 from heraldic embroideries upon robes and vestments. In the 
 famous controversy between the houses of Scrope and Grosvenor, 
 in the fourteenth century, inquiries were made and proofs were 
 -offered on both sides as to the right of bearing upon their shields 
 the bend or upon a field azure. Witnesses produced at West- 
 minster corporas cases, copes, and albs embroidered with the arms 
 of Scrope. Chaucer was one of the witnesses ; and said he had 
 seen those arms on banners and vestments and commonly called 
 the arms of Scrope. Again ; the fact that in her wardrobe was 
 found a vestment embroidered with the royal arms was brought 
 forward to prove the charge of treason against the old countess of 
 Salisbury, the mother of cardinal Pole ; and for which crime she 
 was condemned. 
 
 Collections of ancient textiles are of still greater use to stu- 
 dents of ecclesiastical history and church rituals than even to the 
 secular historian. It is probable that the greater number of the 
 specimens which now exist formed originally portions of sacred 
 vestments and furniture for altars. Formerly so common, frag- 
 ments even of such cloths and robes have become of very great 
 rarity, especially in England; where for the last two or three 
 centuries the use of the numerous old church-vestments and deco- 
 rations has entirely ceased. 
 
 Again, for example: the three cases nqs. 5958, 8329, and 
 8327 are of the kind known as the " capsella cum serico decenter 
 ornata " of the mediaeval writers ; small cases or boxes decently 
 iitted up with silk ; or the " capsula corporalium," the box in 
 which were kept the corporals or square pieces of fine linen, 
 required for service during holy week. The name as well as the 
 use of this appliance is very old, and both are spoken of in the 
 -very ancient 'Ordines Romani' edited by Mabillon. One of 
 these, in the rubric for Good Friday, speaks of the Host as
 
 TEXTILES. 107 
 
 having been kept in the corporal's case or box : " in capsula cor- 
 porialium." In England, such small wooden boxes covered with 
 silks and velvets richly embroidered were once employed for the 
 same purpose : and several are mentioned in the Exeter inven- 
 tories. 
 
 The two pyx-cloths, nos. 8342 and 8691, have an especial 
 interest for the student of mediaeval liturgy. There was a custom 
 during the middle ages in England, as well as in France and 
 several other countries on the continent, of keeping the Eucharist 
 hung up over the high altar beneath a canopy, within a pyx of 
 gold, silver, ivory, or enamel, mantled with a fine linen cloth or 
 veil. This veil for the pyx was sometimes embroidered with 
 golden thread and coloured silks. Such an one is mentioned in 
 the records .of the Exchequer, edited by Palgrave : among the 
 valuables belonging to Richard the second in Haverford castle 
 and sent by the sheriff of Hereford to the exchequer, at the 
 beginning of the reign of Henry the fourth, were " i coupe d'or 
 pour le Corps Ihu Cryst. i towayll ove (avec) i longe parure de 
 mesure la suyte." 
 
 Several names were given to this fine linen covering. In the 
 inventory of things taken from Dr. Caius, and in the college of his 
 own founding at Cambridge, are " corporas clothes, with the pix 
 and ' sindon ' and canopie." This variety in nomenclature doubt- 
 less has led some writers to state that before Mary queen of Scots 
 laid her head upon the block she had a " corporal," strictly so 
 called, bound over her eyes : as it is given in one of our histories 
 of England, " a handkerchief in which the Eucharist had formerly 
 been enclosed." But this bandage must have been the veil for a 
 pyx. As Mary wrought much with her needle, and specimens of 
 her work yet remain at Chatsworth and at Greystock, this piece 
 may have been embroidered by her own hand and perhaps also 
 had been once used. 
 
 One of these old English pyx or Corpus Christi cloths, was 
 found a few years ago at the bottom of a chest in Hessett church,
 
 loS TEXTILES. 
 
 Suffolk. As it is a remarkable specimen of the ingenious handi- 
 craft of our mediaeval countrywomen it deserves description. To 
 make this pyx-cloth a piece of thick linen, about two feet square, 
 was chosen, and being marked off into small equal widths on all 
 its four edges, the threads at every other space were, both in the 
 warp and woof, pulled out. The checquers or squares so pro- 
 duced were then drawn in by threads tied on the under side, 
 having the shape of stars, so well and delicately worked that, till 
 it had been narrowly looked into, the piece was thought to be 
 guipure lace. An old alb, no. 8710, and an amice, 8307, having 
 the apparels yet remaining upon both, are well worth attention on 
 account of somewhat similar curious ornamental needlework in 
 an intricate manner. In the middle ages in England it was not 
 unusual to suspend upon pastoral staffs, just below, the crook, 
 a piece of fine linen. We see them represented on effigies and in 
 illuminations ; but existing examples are of the utmost rarity. 
 Two are at South Kensington : nos. 8279 A, and 8662. 
 
 There are also there several specimens of the christening 
 cloaks, anciently in use. These were not only conspicuous in 
 royal christenings but, varying in costliness according to the 
 parent's rank, were handed down in inventories and wills. At the 
 christening of Arthur prince of Wales, eldest son of Henry the 
 eighth, " my lady Cecill, the queen's eldest sister, bare the prince 
 wrapped in a mantell of cremesyn clothe of golde furred with 
 ermyn," etc. Shakespeare makes the shepherd, in the Winter's 
 tale, cry out, " Here's a sight for thee ; look thee, a bearing cloth 
 for a squire's child ! " A well-to-do tradesman, whose will is 
 printed among the Bury wills, bequeathed in 1648 to his daughter 
 Rose his " beareing cloath. such . . . linnen as is belonginge 
 to infants at their tyme of baptisme." 
 
 Small square pieces of embroidered linen are sometimes found 
 in country houses in some old chest, of which the original use is 
 said not to be now known. But in most cases these were made 
 for children's quilts ; and very often have the emblems of the
 
 TEXTILES. 109 
 
 evangelists figured at the corners : reminding us of tne nursery 
 rhyme, once common both in England and abroad 
 
 " Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, 
 Bless the bed that I lie on." 
 
 The quilts also for grown people were ornamented in the same 
 Avay. At Durham, in 1446, in the dormitory of the priory was a 
 quilt " cum iiij or evangelistis in corneriis." 
 
 Very few examples now exist of the ceremonial shoe anciently 
 worn by bishops. These were of velvet, or damask, or strong 
 linen embroidered. One is preserved at South Kensington, no. 
 1290 : another, once worn by Waynflete bishop of Winchester, is 
 still at Magdalen college, Oxford. We learn from the York wills 
 that these shoes were a part of the episcopal vestments : bishop 
 Pudsey left his mitre, staff, and sandals, "et csetera episcopalia," 
 to Durham cathedral in 1195. Later the name of "sabatines" 
 was given them ; and archbishop Bowet's inventory mentions two 
 pairs : " pro j pare de sabbatones, brouddird et couch' cum 
 perelP ; pro j pare de sabbatones de albo panno auri." 
 
 Collections of textile fabrics are of the highest value to the 
 artist. There is none, anywhere, so rich or complete as that at 
 South Kensington ; and before it was purchased for public use, 
 painters were glad to refer to any scanty collection in private 
 hands, or to old pictures or illuminated manuscripts, or en^ 
 gravings. 
 
 But, now, artists may see pieces of the actual stuffs represented 
 in the pictures, say, of the national Gallery. For example : in 
 Orcagna's coronation of the blessed Virgin the blue silk diapered 
 in gold, with flowers and birds, hung as a back ground ; our 
 Lord's white tunic diapered in gold with foliage ; the mantle of 
 His mother made of the same stuff; St. Stephen's dalmatic of 
 green samit, diapered with golden foliage, are Sicilian in design 
 and copied from the rich silks which came, in the middle of the 
 fourteenth century, from the looms of Palermo. While standing
 
 no TEXTILES. 
 
 before Jacopo di Casentino's St. John our eye is drawn to the 
 orphrey on that evangelist's chasuble embroidered, after the 
 Tuscan style, with barbed quatrefoils, shutting in the busts of 
 apostles. Isotta da Ramini, in her portrait by Pietro della Fran- 
 cesca, wears a gown made of velvet and gold like the cut velvets 
 at South Kensington. 
 
 So, again, instead of copying patterns taken from the rich 
 cloth of gold worn by St. Laurence in Francia's picture, or from 
 the mantle of the doge in that by Cappaccio, or from the foot- 
 cloths on the steps in the pictures by Melozzo da Forli, he may 
 find for his authorities in the same collection existing specimens of 
 contemporary and similar fabrics. 
 
 Not merely artists of a higher class but decorators also may 
 be equally benefited by the patterns and examples preserved of 
 old wall-hangings and tapestry. From early times up to the 
 middle of the sixteenth century our cathedrals and parish 
 churches, our castles and manorial houses, in short the dwellings 
 of the wealthy everywhere, used to be ornamented with wall- 
 painting done not in " fresco " but in " secco ; " that is, distemper. 
 Upon high festivals the walls of the churches were overspread 
 with tapestry and needle-work ; so, too, those in the halls of 
 palaces, for some solemn ceremonial. 
 
 Warton, in his history of English poetry, gives a passage from 
 Bradshaw's life of St. Werburgh written late in the sixteenth 
 century, from which a few lines are well worth quotation. He is 
 describing how a large hall was arrayed for a great feast : 
 
 All herbes and flowers, fragraunt, fayre and swete 
 Were strawed in halles, and layd under theyr fete. 
 Clothes of gold and arras were hanged in the hall 
 Depaynted with pyctures and hystoryes manyfolde, 
 Well wroughte and craftely. 
 
 The story of Adam, Noe, and his shyppe ; the twelve sones of 
 Jacob ; the ten plagues of Egypt, and
 
 TEXTILES. in 
 
 Duke Josue was joyned after them in pycture, 
 * * * * # 
 
 Theyr noble actes and tryumphes marcyall 
 Freshly were browdred in these clothes royall 
 
 ***** 
 
 But over the hye desse in pryncypall place 
 Where the sayd thre kynges sat crowned all 
 The best hallynge hanged as reason was, 
 Whereon were wrought the ix orders angelicall, 
 Dyvyded in thre ierarchyses, not cessing to call, 
 Sancliis, Sanctus, Sa?ictus, blessed be the Trynite, 
 Domiiuis Deus Salaoth, thre persons in one deyte. 
 
 Specimens of tapestry of the later mediaeval period may not 
 uncommonly be found : but not so pieces of room hangings, 
 " hallings," such as those at South Kensington, nos. 1370, 1297, 
 and 1465. Similar examples are, we believe, unknown. 
 
 We will add a few words only on one other, and that not 
 a trivial, part of ancient dress ; namely, gloves. Formerly 
 these were much more ornamented than now ; and, when 
 meant for ladies' wear, sometimes perfume was bestowed upon 
 them. Among .the new year's day presents to queen Mary, 
 before she came to the throne, was " a payr of gloves embrawret 
 with gold." A year afterwards "x payr of Spanyneshe gloves 
 from a duches in Spayne" came to her ; and but a month before, 
 Mrs. Whellers had sent to her highness " a pair of swete gloves." 
 Shakespeare, true to the manners of his day, after making Au- 
 tolycus chant the praises of his 
 
 Lawn as white as driven snow ; 
 Cyprus, black as e'er was crow ; 
 Gloves, as sweet as damask roses ; 
 
 puts this into the mouth of the shepherdess : " Come, you pro- 
 mised me a tawdry lace, and a pair of sweet gloves." We may 
 find a pair of such gloves in the South Kensington collection, no. 
 4665. 
 
 It may be proper to add, in conclusion, that the greater part
 
 TEXTILES. 
 
 State gloves formerly belonging to Louis XIII. 
 
 of the very valuable and extensive collection of mediaeval textile 
 fabrics at South Kensington was collected by Dr. Bock, a canon 
 of Aix la Chapelle; and purchased from him about the year 
 1864.
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Acca, silks 
 
 Amasis, his linen corslet 
 
 Anne of Cleves, her pall of cloth 
 
 of gold 
 Areste, cloth of 
 
 not Arras . 
 Aristotle first mentions silk 
 A rras, a name for tapestry 
 Aurelian, refuses his wife a silk 
 
 robe .... 
 
 Babylon, embroideries . 
 Baldachino, from baudekin 
 Banner of Strasburg . 
 
 at Lyons 
 
 Bath, famous for weaving . 
 Baudekin, a costly stuff . 
 
 origin of name . 
 " Batuz,'' its meaning 
 Block-printed linens 
 Blodbendes 
 Blodius, blue colour . 
 Boadicea, her cloak . 
 Bordalisaunder, explained . 
 British bards, distinction of drt 
 Bruges, her looms famous 
 Buckram, why so called . 
 Byzantine textiles 
 
 ,, not good examples at 
 South Kensington . 
 
 Cadas, or carduus, a silken stuff 
 
 PAGE 
 
 7 
 
 1 
 
 Camoca, or camak, how used . 
 
 3 
 
 5 
 
 Canvas, origin of name 
 
 4 
 
 h 
 
 Care-cloth, explained 
 
 72 
 
 4 1 
 
 Carpets . 
 
 101 
 
 74 
 
 Cecily, Saint, her robe 
 
 16 
 
 75 
 
 Cendal explained 
 
 2 7 
 
 . 8 
 
 Chasubles of stauracin 
 
 37 
 
 97 
 
 not to be made of fus- 
 
 
 k 
 
 tian 
 
 73 
 
 9 
 
 Childeric, his burial garment 
 
 16 
 
 
 Chinese textiles 
 
 49 
 
 
 patterned silks 
 
 
 79 
 
 Chrysoclavus explained 
 
 35 
 
 . 42 
 
 Ciclatoun .... 
 
 18 
 
 . 92 
 
 Cingula, explained . 
 
 12 
 
 97 
 65 
 
 Cloaks for christenings 
 Cloth of gold, two kinds . 
 
 1 08 
 
 '9 
 
 . 40 
 
 " stayned " . f 
 
 101 
 
 . 40 
 
 Cloths of estate 
 
 42 
 
 . 90 
 
 * . - 
 
 Copper used to imitate gold 
 
 
 7 
 
 thread .... 
 
 21 
 
 . ii 
 
 Cotton, native home 
 
 ^ 
 
 76 
 
 " Colayn " ribbon 
 
 6 9 
 
 3 
 72 
 
 Cologne orphrey webs 
 Colours of silks, mediaeval 
 
 6 9 
 
 75 
 
 s 3 
 
 Corporal, said to be used by 
 
 
 . 67 
 
 Mary of Scotland . 
 
 107 
 
 . 72 
 
 Crochet, or " nun's lace " . 
 
 94 
 
 o 
 t 
 
 Cyclas, a splendid garment 
 
 
 . 50 
 
 Dalmatic of Charlemagne at 
 
 
 
 Rome 
 
 38 
 
 ff 30 
 
 Byzantine 
 I 
 
 50
 
 TEXTILES. 
 
 p 
 
 Darius, his dress described 
 
 AGE 
 15 
 
 i 
 Gilding, used for textiles . 
 
 > f ; K 
 21 
 
 Damasks, French 
 
 68 
 
 Gloves, embroidered 
 
 I 1 I 
 
 why so named . 
 
 7i 
 
 Gold, used in weaving 
 
 15 
 
 " De fundato," a pattern on silk . 
 
 38 
 
 cloths made of gold alone 1 6, 
 
 '7 
 
 Diaper, a silk .... 
 
 32 
 
 see " copper " . 
 
 
 possible origin of name . 
 
 32 
 
 Greek monks, first bring silk- 
 
 
 the meaning extended . 
 
 33 
 
 worms .... 
 
 9 
 
 Dorneck, explained . 
 
 72 
 
 
 
 Durham cathedral, vestments 25, 
 
 28 
 
 Haconbie church vestments 
 
 67 
 
 
 
 Hebrew word used improperly for 
 
 
 Eastern princes, insignia on their 
 
 
 silk . . . . . 
 
 7 
 
 robes 
 
 
 embroidery 
 
 
 Eagle and other birds, woven 
 
 45 
 
 Heliogabalus, first wore whole- 
 
 79 
 
 on standards . 
 
 A" 
 
 silk 
 
 
 Edward the first, his gift of 
 
 4/ 
 
 Hemp, native home . 
 
 
 "cyclases" .... 
 
 27 
 
 Heraldic charges on Sicilian silk 
 
 56 
 
 Episcopal shoes 
 
 109 
 
 Herod, his dress of woven silver 
 
 2; 
 
 Egyptian work of the loom 
 
 5 
 
 Holosericum, explained 
 
 24 
 
 silver and gold wire . 
 
 22 
 
 Honorius, his wife's robe . 
 
 16 
 
 loom . . 
 
 79 
 
 Hullings, i.e. hangings . 46, 
 
 66 
 
 Embroidery .... 
 
 79 
 
 
 
 covering ancient 
 
 
 Imperial, a rich silk . 
 
 39 
 
 dresses 
 
 80 
 
 meaning of the name 
 
 40 
 
 raised on book covers 
 
 86 
 
 Indian, ancient splendour of dress 
 
 15 
 
 involved great labour 
 
 86 
 
 textiles 
 
 
 English textiles 
 
 64 
 
 Italy, northern, mediaeval silks . 
 
 is 
 
 Exeter cathedral, vestments, 2*,, 
 
 
 Irish cloth, in King John's time 
 
 66 
 
 28, 29, 31, 33, 46, 48, 58, 
 
 
 
 
 63, 65. 73 
 
 
 King Henry the third orders cloth 
 
 
 Eyiesham, famous for linen 
 
 64 
 
 of Areste .... 
 
 74 
 
 
 
 Edward the second orders 
 
 
 " Filatorium," its meaning 
 
 93 
 
 English embroidery 
 
 85 
 
 Filfot, explained 
 
 38 
 
 Richard the second, gifts to 
 
 
 Flax, grows wild in Britain 
 
 4 
 
 Haverford castle . 
 
 90 
 
 earliest history . 
 
 4 
 
 
 
 Flemish textiles . . 
 
 66 
 
 Lama d'oro of Italy . 
 
 15 
 
 Florence, her silks and velvets . 
 
 63 
 
 Letters woven on textiles, an 
 
 
 specimens at South 
 
 
 ancient practice 
 
 47 
 
 Kensington . 
 
 63 
 
 Liber pontificalis, a valuable book 
 
 35 
 
 cut-work . 
 
 88 
 
 Lincoln cathedral, vestments 
 
 23 
 
 French silks .... 
 
 68 
 
 Looms, upright and horizontal . 
 
 64 
 
 Frontal, at Westminster . 
 
 90 
 
 Lucca, her silks 
 
 58 
 
 Fustian, known in 13th century 
 
 3* 
 
 cloths of gold 
 
 58 
 
 ,, originally from Egypt . 
 
 73 
 
 specimens at South Ken- 
 
 
 ,, woven at Naples . 
 
 74 
 
 sington 
 
 59 
 
 Fygury, silks so called 
 
 34 
 
 
 
 
 
 " Marble " silk 
 
 76 
 
 Gammadion, explained 
 
 36 
 
 Milan, her textiles . 
 
 63 
 
 Garland, an Englishman . 
 Gems, etc., sewn on textiles 
 
 1 1 
 
 89 
 
 Moresco-Spanish textiles . 
 Mortuary palls 
 
 53 
 
 43 
 
 Genoa, her silks 
 
 59 
 
 Mummy cloths 
 
 5 
 
 specimens at South Ken- 
 
 
 unmixed linen . 
 
 6 
 
 sington . 
 
 60 
 
 Muslin, long used in the east 
 
 74
 
 TEXTILES. 
 
 F 
 
 AGE 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Muslin, origin of name 
 
 74 
 
 Silk, its use at first condemned 
 
 
 
 for garments at Rome . 8 
 
 Neckham, first describes the silk- 
 
 
 Silver, woven into webs . .21 
 
 worm 
 
 "3 
 
 Skins, employed for clothing . i 
 
 " Network " on linen 
 
 93 
 
 Snood, of the Anglo-saxons . 1 2 
 
 Nuns, anciently, exhorted not to 
 
 
 Spangles, how anciently used . 92 
 
 weave coloured robes 
 
 1 1 
 
 Spindle tree .... 2 
 
 ,, English, employed in weav- 
 
 
 Spinning, ancient daily work of 
 
 ing . 
 
 64 
 
 women .... 2 
 
 
 
 Stauracin, origin of na,me. . 36 
 
 " Opus" plumarium 
 
 81 
 
 Stragulatae, explained . .39 
 
 pectineum 
 
 81 
 
 Street hangings . . -43 
 
 ,, Anglicum . 
 
 82 
 
 Subsericum, explained .. . 25 
 
 consutum . 
 
 88 
 
 Syndon, explained . . .28 
 
 good example 
 at South Kensington 
 
 89 
 
 Syon Cope, peculiar work . . 83 
 " its historical value . io<; 
 
 Organ/ine, explained 
 
 26 
 
 Syrian textiles . . .52 
 
 Palls, of rich stuffs . 
 
 4i 
 
 Taffeta, explained . '. .28 
 
 cloth of . . 
 
 A2 
 
 Tapestry o ^ 
 
 Paul's (St.) cathedral, vestments 
 
 T" 6 
 
 ,, Egyptian and Jewish . 95 
 
 25. 39. 45 5> 6o 6 5. 
 
 75 
 
 English at Coventry and 
 
 Paper, employed by Japanese for 
 
 
 in Cornwall . . 96 
 
 clothing .... 
 
 i 
 
 two kinds of frame . 97 
 
 " Passing " for embroidery 
 
 93 
 
 of the Spanish armada 100 
 
 Persian textiles 
 
 49 
 
 " imitated . . . 101 
 
 " Phrygian " work . 
 
 79 
 
 Tars, cloth of, probably cashmere 3 1 
 
 Plaited woollen stuff among the 
 
 
 it ... 76 
 
 Britons .... 
 
 2 
 
 Textile, meaning of the term . i 
 
 Polystauron, why so called 
 
 36 
 
 " the value of collec- 
 
 Pyx cloths, at South Kensington 
 
 107 
 
 tions . . 104, &c. 
 
 curious example 
 
 108 
 
 Tiraz, of an Arab palace . . 45 
 
 
 
 Tissue 20 
 
 Queen Matilda takes the Abing- 
 
 
 Translucent silk, used in MSS. . 8 
 
 don vestments . . 
 
 83 
 
 Thread, gold, varieties of quality 23 
 
 Quilts for children . 
 
 1 08 
 
 Tram, explained . . .27 
 
 Rayns (Rennes) cloths 
 
 68 
 
 U, the etter, used in Italian silks 56 
 
 Rhenish cut-work . 
 
 88 
 
 
 
 
 Velvet, its history obscure . 3 1 
 
 Samit . 1O, 
 
 J 9 
 
 ,, vestments, first mentioned 
 
 ,, explained . . . 
 
 2 4 
 
 in England . -31 
 
 Sandal, explained 
 
 27 
 
 ,, origin of the name . 3 r 
 
 of bishops . 
 
 109 
 
 varieties of weaving . 32 
 
 Saracenic textiles . 46, 58, 
 
 99 
 
 a peculiar ornament . 63 
 
 Sarcenet, explained . 
 
 28 
 
 of Flanders . . .67 
 
 Satin, not unknown in middleages 
 
 29 
 
 Venetian textiles . . .60 
 
 early names . 
 
 29 
 
 characteristics . .6?. 
 
 Sicilian textiles 
 
 54 
 
 ), linens . . .62 
 
 three styles 
 
 54 
 
 
 Silk 
 
 8 
 
 Warwick, earl, his banners of 
 
 unknown in ancient Egypt 
 
 8 
 
 satin 29 
 
 in South Italy, nth century 
 
 10 
 
 ,, and dresses . 92
 
 ri6 
 
 TEXTILES. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Westminster copes, preserved at 
 Stonyhurst . . . -63 
 
 Wire, gold and silver, for weav- 
 ing 2; 
 
 machine for drawing first 
 
 used .... 23 
 
 Worcester, famous for cloths . 65 
 
 Worms, (silkworms) first brought 
 to Europe .... 9 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Worsted, in Norfolk, anew me- 
 thod of carding wool there . 65 
 Ypres, not origin of name of 
 diaper . . . -33 
 
 ,, linens . . . .68 
 York cathedral vestments . 67, 72 
 Princess Elizabeth of, her 
 
 velvet gown . . 7 z
 
 SOUTH KENSINGTON MUSEUM 
 ART HANDBOOKS. 
 
 EDITED BY WILLIAM MASKELL. 
 
 1. TEXTILE FABRICS. By the Very Rev. DANIEL 
 
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 3. ANCIENT AND MODERN FURNITURE AND 
 
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 With numerous Woodcuts. 
 
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