Section I Textiles
Under its widest acceptation, the word “textile” means every kind of stuff, no matter its material, wrought in the loom. Hence, whether the threads be spun from the produce of the animal, vegetable, or the mineral kingdom—whether of sheep’s wool, goats’ hair, camels’ wool, or camels’ hair—whether of flax, hemp, mallow, Spanish broom, the filaments drawn out of the leaves of the yucca—Adam’s needle—and other plants of the lily and asphodel tribes of flowers, the fibrous coating about pods, or cotton; whether of the mineral amianthus, of gold, silver, or of any other metal, it signifies nothing, the webs from such materials are textiles. Unlike to 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.
At the outset of our subject a word or two may be of good use, upon
The Geography of the Raw Materials
Wool
one or other of which we shall always find wrought up in the textiles in this collection. We will then begin with After gleaning out of the writings of the ancients all they have said about the physical geography of the earth, as far as their knowledge of it went, and casting our eyes upon a map of the world as known of old, we shall see at once the materials which man had at hand, in every clime, for making his 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 the animal’s own sinews for thread, be fashioned, after a manner, into the requisites of dress.
Throughout by far the longest length and the widest breadth of the earth, sheep, at an early period, were bred, not so much for food as for raiment. 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, as we learn from Pliny:1 “Oves non ubique tondentur: durat quibusdam in locis vellendi mos.” Got in either method the fleeces were, from the earliest times, spun by women from the distaff. At last so wishful were the growers to improve the coats of their lambs that they clothed them in skins; a process which not only fined the staple of the wool, but kept it clean, and better fitted it for being washed and dyed, as we are told by many ancient writers, such as Horace and the great agricultural authority Varro. In uttering his wish for a sweet peaceful home in his old age, either at Tibur, or on the banks of the pleasant Gelæsus, thus sings the poet:
Dulce pellitis ovibus Gelæsi
Flumen.2
And what were these “oves pellitæ,” or “tectæ” and “molles,” as they were called, in contradistinction to “hirtæ,” we understand from Varro, who says, “oves pellitæ; quæ propter lanæ bonitatem, ut sunt Taren-tinæ et Atticæ, pellibus integuntur, ne lana inquinetur quo minus vel infici rectè possit, vel lavari ac parari.”3
This latter very ancient daily work followed by women of all degrees, spinning from off the distaff, was taught to our Anglo-Saxon sisters among all ranks of life, from the king’s daughter downwards. In his life of Eadward the elder, A.D. 901, Malmesbury writes: “Filias suas ita instituerat ut literis omnes in infantia maxime vacarent, mox etiam colum et acum exercere consuescerent, ut his artibus pudice impubem virginitatem transigerent.”4 The same occupation is even now a female favourite in many countries on the Continent, particularly so all through Italy. Long ago it bestowed the name of spindle-tree on the Euonymus plant, on account of the good spindles which its wood affords, and originated the term “spinster,” yet to be found in our law-books as meaning an unmarried woman even of the gentlest blood, while every now and then from the graves that held the ashes of our sisters of the British and the Anglo-Saxon epochs, are picked up the elaborately ornamented leaden whorls which they fastened at the lower end of their spindles to give them a due weight and steadiness as they twirled them round.
Beginning with the British islands on the west, and going eastward on a line running through the Mediterranean sea, and stretching itself out far into Asia, we find that the peoples who dwelt to the north of such a boundary wrought several of their garments out of sheep’s wool, goats’ hair, and beavers’ fur, while those living to the south, including the inhabitants of North Africa, Arabia, and Persia, besides the above-named animal produce, employed for these purposes, as well as tent-making, the wool and hair which their camels gave them: the Baptist’s garment was of the very coarsest kind.
Of the use of woollen stuff, not woven but plaited, among the older stock of the Britons, a curious instance 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.5
As time crept on, it brought along with it the loom, fashioned though it was after its simplest form, to the far west, and taught its use throughout the British islands. The art of dyeing very soon followed; and so beautiful were the tints which our Britons knew how to give to their wools, that strangers, while they wondered at, were not a little jealous of the splendour of those tones. From the heavy stress laid upon the rule which taught that the official colour in their dress assigned to each of the three ranks into which the bardic order was distinguished, must be of one simple unbroken shade, whether spotless white, symbolic of sun-light and holiness, for the druid or priest—whether sky-blue, emblem of peace, for the bard or poet—or green, the livery of the wood and field, for the Ovydd or teacher of natural history and leech-craft, yet at the same moment we know that party-coloured stuffs were woven here, and after two forms: the postulants asking leave to be admitted into bardism might be recognized by the robe barred with stripes of white, blue, and green, which they had to wear during all the term of their initiation. With regard to the bulk of our people, according to the Greek historian of Rome—Dion Cassius, born A.D. 155—the garments worn by them were made of a texture wrought in a square pattern of several colours; and speaking of our brave-hearted British queen, Boadicea, that same writer tells us that she usually had on, under her cloak, a motley tunic, χιτὼν παμποίκιλος, that is, checkered 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 exactly 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 along with those from Gaul, when he wrote:—“Plurimis vero liciis texere quæ polymita appellant, Alexandria instituit: scutullis dividere, Gallia.” But 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.6
Cotton
The native botanical home of is in the East. India almost everywhere throughout her wide-spread countries, and many kingdoms of old, arrayed, as she still arrays herself, in cotton, which she gathered from a plant of the mallow family, that had its wild growth there; and in this same vegetable produce the lower orders of the people dwelling still further to the east were fain to clothe 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 all over the ancient Scandinavia. Full two thousand five hundred years ago, Herodotus7 thus wrote of it: “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. 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 “cannabis,” its name in Latin, have we taken our own word “canvas,” to mean any texture woven of hempen thread.
Flax
now follows. Who that has ever seen growing a patch of beautiless, sad-looking hemp, and as he wandered a few steps further, came upon a field of flax all in flower, with its gracefully-drooped head, strewing the breeze, as it strayed over it, with its frail, light-blue petals, could at first have thought that both these plants were about to yield such kindred helps for man in his wide variety of wants? Yet so it is. Besides many other countries, all over this our native land flax is to be found growing wild. Though every summer its handsome bloom must have caught the eye of our Celtic British forefathers, they were not aware for ages of the use of this plant for clothing purposes, else had they left behind them some shred of linen in one or other of their many graves; since, 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 arrayed in some small article of linen texture, had they ever worn such. That at length they became acquainted with its usefulness, and learned to prepare and spin it, is certain; and in all likelihood the very name “lin-white thread,” which those Celts gave it in its wrought shape, furnished the Greeks with their word λίνον, and the Latins their linum, for linen. The term “flax,” which we still keep, from the Anglo-Saxon tongue, for the plant itself and its raw material, and the Celtic “linen,” for the same vegetable produce when spun and woven into cloth, are words for things akin in our present language, which, as in many such like instances, show the footprints of those races that, one after another, have trod this land.
To the valley of the Nile must we go if we wish to learn the earliest history of the finest flaxen textiles. Time out of mind were the Egyptians famous as well for the growth of flax, as for the beautiful very fine linen 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 their flax, and anxious about its harvest. It was one of their staple crops, and hence was it that, in punishment of their hard-hearted Pharaoh, the hail plague which, at the bidding of Moses, showered down from heaven, hurt throughout the land the flax just as it was getting ripe.8 Though the Jordan grew flax upon its banks, and all over the land that would soon belong to Abraham’s children, the women there, like Rahab, carefully dried it when pulled, and stacked it for future hackling upon the roofs of their houses;9 still, it was from Egypt, as Solomon hints,10 that the Jews had to draw their fine linen. At a later period, among the woes foretold to Egypt, the prophet Isaiah warns her that they shall be confounded who wrought (there) in combing and weaving fine linen.11
How far the reputation of Egyptian workmanship in the craft of the loom had spread abroad is shown us by the way in which, beside 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,”12 and further on,13 telling of another corslet which Amasis had sent the Lacedæmonians, 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. What is more worthy of admiration in it is that each of the twists, although of fine texture, contains within it 360 threads, all of them clearly visible.14 By these trustworthy evidences we clearly see that in those early times, Egypt was not only widely known for its delicately woven byssus, but it supplied all the neighbouring nations with the finest sort of linens.
From written let us now go to material proofs at hand. 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, even according to our modern requirements of chirurgical fitness, so artistically swathed, have been unwrapped; and always have they been so fine in their texture as to fully verify the praises of old bestowed upon the beauty of the Egyptian loom-work. Moreover, from those who have taken a nearer and, so to say, a trade-like insight into such an article of manufacture, we learn 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 near 100 hanks in the pound, with 140 threads in an inch in the warp and about 64 in the woof.”15 Another piece of linen which the same distinguished traveller obtained at Thebes, has 152 threads in the warp, and 71 in the woof.16
Here starts up a curious question. Though, 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 about tree-wool, while speaking of the corslet of Amasis, quoted just now, took at once the expression of that historian to mean wool, and then skipped to the conclusion that all Egyptian textiles wrought a thousand years before were mixed with cotton. When, however, it be borne in mind that even several hundred years after the Greek historian wrote, the common belief existed that, like cotton, silk also was the growth of a tree, as we are told by Virgil:
Quid nemora Æthiopum, molli canentia lana
Velleraque ut foliis depectant tenuia Seres?17
Soft wool from downy groves the Æthiop weaves,
And Seres comb their silken fleece from leaves—
the εἰρίοισι ἀπὸ ξυλοῦ of Herodotus may be understood to mean silk, just as well as cotton; nay, the rather so, as it seems very likely that, at the time when Amasis lived, silk, in the shape of thread, had found, through traders’ hands, its way to the markets of Egypt, and must have been thought a more fitting thing, from being a new as well as costly material, to grace a royal gift to a religious sanctuary of high repute, than the less precious and more common cotton. While this 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 philosophical, 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. That of cotton they found in its ultimate fibre to be a transparent tube without joints, flattened so that its inward surfaces are in contact along its axis, and also twisted spirally round its axis; that of flax, a transparent tube, jointed like a cane, and not flattened or twisted spirally.18 Examined in the same way, several old samples of byssus or mummy-bandages from Egypt in every one instance were ascertained to be of fine unmixed flaxen linen. Ages before French Flanders had dreamed of weaving fine lawns, ages before one of her industrial cities—Cambray—had so far taken the lead as to be allowed to bestow her own name, in the shape of “cambric,” on the finest kind that modern European ingenuity could produce, Egypt had known how to give to the world even a yet finer sort, and centuries after she had fallen away from her place among the kingdoms of the earth, her enthralled people still kept up their ancient superiority in spinning and weaving their fine, sometimes transparent, byssus, of which a specimen or two may be seen in this collection. 19
Silk
For many reasons the history of is not only curious, but highly interesting. In the early ages, its very existence was quite unknown, and when found out, the knowledge of it stole forth from the far east, and straggled westward very very slowly. For all that lengthened period during which their remarkable civilization lasted, the older Egyptians never once beheld 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. True it is 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, but that in both these passages, the word silk is wrong through the translators misunderstanding the original Hebrew משי (meschi). Of this word, Parkhurst says: “As a noun, משי, according to our translation (is) silk, but not so rendered in any of the ancient versions. Silk would indeed well enough answer the ideal meaning of the Hebrew word, from its being drawn forth from the bowels of the silk-worm, and that to a degree of fineness, so as to form very slender threads. But I meet with no evidence that the Israelites in very early times (and to these Ezekiel refers) had any knowledge of silk, much less of the manner in which it was formed; משי, therefore, I think, means some kind of fine linen or cotton cloth, so denominated from the fineness with which the threads whereof it consisted were drawn out. The Vulgate, by rendering it in the former passage, ‘subtilibus’ fine, as opposed to coarse, has nearly preserved the true idea of the Hebrew.”20 Braunius, too, no mean authority, after bestowing a great deal of study on the matter, gives it as his well-weighed judgment that, throughout the whole Hebrew Bible, no mention whatever can be found of silk, which was a material utterly unknown to the children of Israel.21 Once only is silk spoken of in the New Testament, and then while St. John22 is reckoning it up along with the gold, and silver, and precious stones, and pearls, and fine linen—byssus—and purple which, with many other costly freights merchants were wont to bring in ships to that mighty city which, in the Apostle’s days, ruled over the kings of the earth.
Long after the days of Ezekiel was it that silk, in its raw form only, made up into hanks, first found its way to Egypt, western Asia, and eastern Europe.
To Aristotle do we owe the earliest notice, among the ancients, of the silk-worm, and although his account be incorrect, it has much value, since, along with his description, the celebrated Greek philosopher gives us information about the original importation of raw silk into the western world. Brought from China, through India, till it reached the Indus, 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 overland route, through Persia, to the small but commercial island of Cos (now Koss), lying off the coast of Asia Minor. Pamphile, daughter of Plates, is reported to have first woven it (silk) in Cos.23 Here, by female hands, were wrought those light thin gauzes which became so fashionable among some high dames, but while so often spoken of by the poets of the Augustan period, were stigmatized by some among them, as well as by the heathen moralists of after ages, as anything but seemly for women’s wear. Thus Tibullus says of this sort of clothing:
Illa gerat vestes tenues, quas fœmina Coa
Texuit, auratas disposuitque vias.24
She may thin garments wear, which female Coan hands
Have woven, and in stripes disposed the golden bands.
Years afterwards, thus laments Seneca, the philosopher: “Video sericas vestes, si vestes vocandæ sunt, in quibus nihil est, quo defendi aut corpus aut denique pudor possit.” I behold silken garments, if garments they can be called, which are a protection neither for the body nor for shame.25 And later still, and in the Christian era, an echo to the remarks of Seneca do we hear in the words of Solinus: “Hoc illud est sericum in quo ostentare potius corpora quàm vestire, primò feminis, nunc etiam viris persuasit luxuriæ libido.”26 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.
While looking over some precious early mediæval MS., often do we yet find that its beautifully limned and richly gilt illuminations, to keep them from harm, or being hurt through the rubbings of the next leaf, have fastened beside them a covering of the thinnest gauze, just as we put in sheets of silver paper for that purpose over engravings. The likelihood is that some at least of these may be shreds from some of those thin translucent textiles which found such favour in the fashionable world for so long a time during the classic period. To some at least of our readers, the curious example of such gauzy interleafings in the manuscript of Theodulph, now at Puy en Velay, will occur.
Not only these transparent silken gauzes wrought in Cos, but far more tasty stuffs, and flowered too, from Chinese looms, found their way to Asia Minor and Italy. In telling of the barbarous nations then called the Seres, Dionysius Periegetes writes that they comb the variously coloured flowers of the desert land to make precious figured garments, resembling in colour the flowers of the meadow, and rivalling (in fineness) the work of spiders.27
As may be easily imagined, silken garments were brought, at an early period, to imperial Rome. Such, however, were the high prices asked for them, that few either would or could afford to buy these robes for their wives and daughters; since, 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 fœdaret.” While noticing how womanish Caligula became in his dress, Suetonius remarks his silken attire: “Aliquando sericatus et cycladatus.”28 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 Judæa. Of the emperors who adopted whole silk for their clothing, Heliogabalus was the first, and so fond was he of the material, that, in the event of wishing to hang himself, he had got for the occasion a rope, one strand of which was silk, and the other two dyed with purple and scarlet: “Paraverat sunes, blatta et serico, et cocco intortos, quibus si necesse esset, laqueo vitam finiret.”29
The abnegation of another Roman Emperor, Aurelian, both in respect of himself and his empress, is, however, very remarkable: “Vestem holosericam neque ipse in vestiario suo habuit neque alteri utendam dedit. Et cum ab eo uxor sua peteret, ut unico pallio blatteo serico uteretur, ille respondit absit, ut auro fila pensentur. Libra enim auri tunc libra serici suit.”30 Aurelian 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.
Here it ought to be mentioned that, for some time before this period a very broad distinction had been drawn, even in the sumptuary laws of the empire, between garments made wholly, and partially of silk; in the former, all the web, both woof and warp, is woven of nothing but silk; in the latter, the woof is of cotton or of thread, the warp only of silk. This difference in the texture is thus well set forth by Lampridius, in his life of Alexander Severus, of whom he says: he had few garments of silk—he never wore a tunic woven wholly of silk, and he never gave away cloth made of silk mixed with less valuable stuff. “Vestes sericas ipse raras habuit; holosericas nunquam induit subsericam nunquam donavit.”31
Clothing made wholly or in part out of silk, 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 Justinian pandects, the revised code of laws for the Roman Empire, drawn up and 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; but a remedy was very near at hand. Two Greek monks, while spending many years among the Chinese, had well learned the whole process of rearing the worm. They came home, and brought back with them a goodly number of eggs hidden in their walking-staves, likely made of that hollow tough sort of reed or tall grass, the Arundo Donax; and, carrying them to Constantinople, they presented these eggs to the Emperor, who gladly received them. When hatched, the worms were distributed all over Greece and Asia Minor, and very soon the western world reared its own silk. Not long afterwards, Persia and India also became silk-growing countries. In some places, at least in Greece, the weaving not only of the finer kinds of cloth, but of silk, got at last into the hands of the Jews. Writing of his travels, A.D. 1161, Benjamin of Tudela tells us that the great city of Thebes contained about two thousand Jewish inhabitants. These are the most eminent manufacturers of silk and purple cloth in all Greece.32
Telling us how the fleet of our first Richard coasted the shores of Spain on its voyage to the Holy Land, Hoveden says of Almeria and its silk factory: “Deinde per nobilem civitatem quæ dicitur Almaria ubi fit nobile sericum et delicatum quod dicitur sericum de Almaria.”33 So prized were these fine delicate textiles that they were paid as tribute to princes: “Insula de Maiore reddit ei (regi Arragoniæ) trecentos pannos sericos de Almaria per annum de tributo,” &c.34
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 his monastery of St. Evroul, at Uzey, in Normandy, on coming home, brought with him from Apulia several large pieces of silk, and gave to the Church four of the finest ones, with which four copes were made for the chanters: “De pallis quas ipse de Apulia detulerat quatuor de preciosioris S. Ebrulfo obtulit ex quibus quatuor cappæ cantorum in eadem factæ sunt ecclesia.”35
From a feeling alive in every heart throughout the length and breadth of Christendom that the best of all things ought to be given for the service of its religious rites, the garments of its celebrating priesthood, from the far east to the uttermost west, were, if not always, at least very often wholly of silk—holosericus. To this fact we have pointed for the sake of remembering that were it not so, we had been, at this day, without the power of being able to see through the few but tattered shreds before us, what elegantly designed and gorgeous stuffs the foreign mediæval 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 those splendid vestments and ritual appliances enumerated with such exactness in the old inventories of our venerable cathedrals and parish churches as well as the early wardrobe accompts of our kings, the wills and bequests of our dignified ecclesiastics and nobility, to some of which documents we shall have to refer a little later.
In coming westward among us, all these so much coveted stuffs brought along with them their own 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 quite unknown to trade now-a-day, we should bear in mind that notwithstanding the wide variety of spelling, or rather misspelling, each of these appellations has run through, we reach at last their true derivations, and so happily get to know in what country and by whose hands they were wrought.
As trade grew up, she brought these fine silken textiles 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 embroidery as to be wrought in the loom, we do not exactly know; but from several sides we learn that our countrywomen of all degrees busied themselves in weaving. Among the home occupations of maidens dedicated to God, St. Aldhelm, at the end of the seventh century, seems to number: “Cortinarum sive stragularum textura.”36 In the council at Cloveshoo, under Archbishop Cuthbert, A.D. 747, nuns are exhorted to spend their time in reading or singing psalms rather than weaving and knitting vainglorious garments of many colours: “Magisque legendis libris vel canendis psalmis, quam texendis et plectendis vario colore inanis gloriæ vestibus studeant operam dare.”37 By that curious old English book, the “Ancren Riwle,” written towards the end of the twelfth century, ankresses are forbidden to make purses to gain friends therewith, or blodbendes.38 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.
Those “blodbendes,” or narrow strips for winding round the arm after bleeding, are curiously illustrative of an old national custom for health-sake kept up in the remembrance of some old folks still living, of periodical blood-letting. To his practices upon the heads and chins of people the barber at no remote period, added that of bleeding them; and the old English barber surgeons held a high position among the gilds of London. To show where he lived each member of that brotherhood had hanging out from the walls of his house a long thin pole painted spirally black and white, the white in token of the blodbende or bandage to be winded and kept about the patient’s arm.
But on silk weaving by our women in small hand-looms, a very important witness, especially about several curious specimens in this collection, is John Garland, born at the beginning of the thirteenth century in London, where his namesakes and likely of his stock, were and are known. First, a John Garland, A.D. 1170, held a prebend’s stall in St. Paul’s Cathedral.39 Another, A.D. 1211, was sheriff, at a later period.40 A third, a wealthy draper of London, gave freely towards the building of a church in Somersetshire.41 A fourth, who died A.D. 1461, lies buried in St. Sythe’s;42 and, at the present day, no fewer than twenty-two trades-men of that name, of whom six are merchants of high standing in the city, are mentioned in the London Post Office Directory for this year 1868. We give these instances as some have tried to rob us of John Garland by saying he was not an Englishman, though of himself he had said: “Anglia cui mater fuerat, cui gallia nutrix,” &c.
In a sort of very short dictionary, drawn up by that writer, and printed at the end of “Paris sous Philippe Le Bel,” edited by M. H. Geraud, our countryman says: “Textrices quæ texunt serica texta projiciunt fila aurata officio cavillarum et percuciunt subtemina cum linea (lignea?) spata: de textis vero fiunt cingula et crinalia divitum mulierum et stole sacerdotum.”43 Though short, this passage is curious and valuable. From it we learn that, besides the usual homely textiles, those more costly cloth-of-gold webs were wrought by our women, and very likely, among their other productions—cingula—were those “blodbendes,” the weaving of which had been forbidden to ankresses and nuns; perhaps, too, of those narrow gold-wrought ribbons in this collection, pp. 24, 33, 38, 217, 218, 219, 221, &c., some may have been so employed by our high-born dames on occasion of their being bled, since as late as the sixteenth century some seasons were deemed fit, others quite unfitting for the operation. Hence, in his Richard II. act 1, scene i. Shakespeare makes the king to warn those wrath-kindled gentlemen, Bolingbroke and Norfolk:
Our doctors say this is no month to bleed.
And our most popular books in olden time, one the Shepherd’s Kalendar, speaking about the signs of the zodiack, tell us which of the twelve months are either good, evil, or indifferent for blood-letting.
John Garland’s “cingula” may also mean those rich girdles or sashes worn by our women round the waist, and of which we have one in this collection, No. 8571, p. 218. Of this sort, is that border—amber coloured silk and diapered—round a vestment found in a grave at Durham, and like “a thick lace, one inch and a quarter broad—evidently owing its origin, not to the needle, but to the loom,” &c.44 For the artist wishful to be correct concerning the head-gear of ladies from Anglo-Saxon times till the end of the later Plantagenets, this collection can furnish examples of those bands in those narrow textiles spoken of by our John Garland. For an after-period those bands are shown on the statuary, and amid the limning in illuminated MSS. of the thirteenth century; as instances of the narrow girdle, may be viewed a lady’s effigy, in Romney church, Hants; and that of Ann of Bohemia, in Westminster Abbey; both to be found in Hollis’s Monumental Effigies of Great Britain; for the band about the head, the examples in the wood-cuts in Planchè’s British Costumes, p. 116.
Of such head-bands we have one at number 8569, p. 217, and other three mentioned upon p. 221. They are, no doubt, the old snôd of the Anglo-Saxon period. For high-born dames they were wrought of silk and gold; those of lower degree wore them of simpler stuff. The silken snood, affected to the present hour by young unmarried women in Scotland, is a truthful witness to the fashion in vogue during Anglo-Saxon and later times in this country.
With regard to what John Garland says of stoles so made, there is one here, No. 1233, p. 24, quite entire.
From what has been here brought forward, it will be seen that of silk, whence it came or what was its kind, nothing was truly understood, even by the learned, for many ages. While, then, we smile at Virgil and the other ancients for thinking that silk was a sort of herbaceous fleece growing upon trees, let us not forget that not so many years ago our own Royal Society printed a paper in which it is set forth that the yet-called Barnacle Goose comes from a mussel-like bivalve shell, known as the “Anatifa,” or Barnacle, an origin for the bird still believed in by some of our seafaring folks, and fostered after a manner by well-read people by the scientific nomenclature of the shell and the vernacular epithet for the goose. In the twelfth century, our countryman, Alexander Neckham, foster-brother to our Richard I., wrote of this marvel thus: “Ex lignis abiegnis salo diuturno tempore madefactis originem sumit avis quæ vulgo dicitur bernekke,” &c.45 Such, however, was the Cirencester Augustinian friar’s knowledge of natural history, that, at least four hundred years ere the Royal Society had a being amongst us, he thus spurns the popular belief upon the subject:—
Ligna novas abiegna salo madefacta, jubente
Natura, volucres edere fama refert.
Id viscosus agit humor, quod publica fama
Afserit indignans philosophia negat.46
Of a truth the Record Commission is doing England good service by drawing out of darkness the works of our mediæval writers.
The breeding of the worm and the manufacture of its silk both spread themselves with steady though slow steps over most of those countries which skirt 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 same sea. Even then, and a long time after, the natural history of the silkworm became known but to a very few. Our aforesaid countryman, Alexander Neckham, made Abbot of Cirencester, A.D. 1213, was, it is likely, the first who, while he had learned, tried in his popular work, “De Natura Rerum,” to help others to understand the habits of the insect: “Materiam vestium sericarum contexit vermis qui bombex dicitur. Foliis celsi, quæ vulgo morus dicitur, vescitur, et materiam serici digerit; postquam vero operari cœperit, escam renuit, labori delicioso diligentem operam impendens. Calathi parietes industrius textor circuit, lanam educens crocei coloris quæ nivei candoris efficitur per ablutionem, antequam tinctura artificialis superinduitur. Consummato autem opere nobilis textoris, thecam in opere proprio involutam centonis in modum subintrat jamque similis papilioni, &c.”47
Gold ,
Of those several raw materials that have, from the earliest periods, been employed in weaving, though not in such frequency as silk, one is which, when judiciously brought in, brings with it, not a barbaric, but artistical richness.
The earliest written notice we have about the employment of this precious metal in the loom, or of the way in which it was wrought for such a purpose, we find set forth in the Pentateuch, where Moses tells us that he (Beseleel) made of violet and purple, scarlet and fine linen, the vestments for Aaron to wear when he ministered in the holy places. So he made an ephod of gold, violet, and purple, and scarlet twice dyed, and fine twisted linen, with embroidered work; and he cut thin plates of gold and drew them small into strips, that they might be twisted with the woof of the aforesaid colours.48 Instead of “strip,” the authorized version says, “wire,” another 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.
Cloth of Gold, or Tissue
This brings us to a short notice of The use of gold for weaving, both along with linen or quite by itself, existed, it is likely, among the Egyptians, long before the days of Moses. In either way of its being employed, the precious metal was at 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 first and ancient form. In this fashion, to even now, the Italians love to 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 came to be everywhere sought for with eagerness.
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 thousands of those who came forth from Damascus to the Greek general, Parmenio, many were so clad: “Vestes... auro et purpura insignes induunt.”49 All over India the same fashion was followed in dress. When an Indian king, with his two grown-up sons, came to Alexander, all three were so arrayed: “Vestis erat auro purpuraque distincta, &c.”50 Princes and the high nobility, all over the East, are by Quintus Curtius called, “purpurati.”51 Not only garments but hangings were made of the same costly fabric. When Alexander wished to afford some ambassadors a splendid reception, the golden couches upon which they lay to eat their meat were screened all about with cloths of gold and purple: “Centum aurei lecti modicis intervallis positi erant: lectis circumdederat (rex Alexander) ælæa purpura auroque fulgentia, &c.”52 But these Indian guests themselves were not less gorgeously arrayed in their own national costume, as they came wearing linen (perhaps cotton) garments resplendent with gold and purple: “Lineæ vestes intexto auro purpuraque distinctæ, &c.”53
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 cloth of gold were figured two golden hawks as if pecking at one another with their beaks: “Purpureæ tunicæ medium album intextum erat: pallam auro distinctam aurei accipitres, velut rostris inter se concurrerent, adornabant.”54
From the east this love for cloth of gold reached the southern end of Italy, called Magna Græcia, and thence soon got to Rome; where, even under its early kings and much later under its emperors, garments made of it were worn. Pliny, speaking of this rich textile, says:—Gold may be spun or woven like wool, without any wool being mixed with it. We are informed by Verrius, that Tarquinius Priscus rode in triumph in a tunic of gold; and we have seen Agrippina, the wife of the Emperor Claudius, when he exhibited the spectacle of a naval combat, sitting by him, covered with a robe made entirely of woven gold without any other material.55 In fact, 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: “Di due sepolcri Romani, del secolo di Augusto scoverti tra la via Latina e l’Appia, presso la tomba degli Scipioni.”
Now we get to the Christian epoch. When Pope Paschal, A.D. 821, sought for the body of St. Cecily, who underwent martyrdom A.D. 230, the pontiff found, in the catacombs, the maiden bride whole, and dressed in a garment wrought all of gold, with some of her raiment drenched in blood lying at her feet: “Aureis illud (corpus) vestitum indumentis et linteamina martyris ipsius sanguine plena.”56 In making the foundations for the new St. Peter’s at Rome, they 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.57 Maria Stilicho’s daughter, was wedded to the Emperor Honorius, and died sometime about A.D. 400. When her grave was opened, A.D. 1544, the golden tissues in which her body had been shrouded were taken out and melted, when the yield of precious metal amounted to thirty-six pounds.58 The late Father Marchi found, among the remains of St. Hyacinthus, martyr, several fragments of the same kind of golden web, winding sheets of which were often given by the opulent for wrapping up the dead body of some poor martyred Christian brother, as is shown by the example specified in Boldetti’s “Cimiteri de’ santi martiri di Roma.”59
Childeric, the second and perhaps the most renowned king of the Merovingean dynasty, died and was buried A.D. 485, at Tournai. In the year 1653 his grave was found out, and amid the earth about it so many remains of pure gold strips were turned up, that there is every reason for thinking that the Frankish king was wrapped in a mantle of such golden stuff for his burial.60 That the strips of pure gold out of which the burial cloak of Childeric was woven were not anywise round, but quite flat, we are warranted in thinking, from the fact that, while digging in a Merovingean burial ground at Envermeu, A.D. 1855, the distinguished archæologist l’Abbe Cochet came upon the grave once filled, as it seemed, by a young 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 l’ouvrier, n’étaient ni étirés ni cordés. Ils étaient plats et se composaient tout semplement de petites lanières d’or d’un millimètre de largeur, coupée à même une feuille d’or épaisse de moins d’un dixième de millimètre. La longueur totale de quelques-uns atteignait parfois jusqu’à quinze ou dix-huit centimètres.”61
Our own country can furnish an example of this kind of golden textile. At 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 golden strips, thin, and quite flat, which are figured in M. l’Abbé Cochet’s learned book just quoted.62 Of such a rich texture must have been the vestment covered with precious stones, given to St. Peter’s Church, at Rome, by Charles of France, in the middle of the ninth century: “Carolus rex sancto Apostolo obtulit ex purissimo auro, et gemmis constructam vestem, &c.”63
In the working of such webs and embroidery for use in the Church, a high-born Anglo-Saxon lady, Ælthelswitha, with her waiting maids, spent her life near Ely, where, “aurifrixoriæ et texturis secretius cum puellulis vacabat, quæ de proprio sumptu, albam casulam suis manibus ipsa talis ingenii peritissima fecit,” &c.64
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 Cathedral may be seen, along with several other very precious liturgical appliances, a stole and maniple, which happily, for more reasons than one, bear these inscriptions: “Ælfflaed Fieri Precepit. Pio Episcopo Fridestano.” Queen to Alfred’s son and successor, Edward the elder was our Ælfflaed who got this stole and maniple made for a gift to Fridestan, consecrated bishop of Winchester A.D. 905. With these webs under his eye, Mr. Raine, in his “Saint Cuthbert,”65 writes thus: In the first, 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 frequently 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; and its two component parts are a flattish thread of pure gold, and a thread of scarlet silk, &c.66 Let it be borne in mind that Winchester was then a royal city, and abounded, as it did afterwards, with able needle-women.
The employment, till a late period, of flattened gold in silk textiles is well shown by those fraudulent imitations, and substitution in its stead of gilt parchment, which we have pointed out among the specimens in this collection, as may be seen at Nos. 7095, p. 140; 8590, p. 224; 8601, p. 229; 8639, p. 244, &c.
That these Durham cloth-of-gold stuffs for vestments were home made—we mean wrought in Anglo-Saxondom—is likely, and by our women’s hands, after the way we shall have to speak about further on.
This love for such glittering attire, not only for liturgical use but secular wear, lasted long in England. Such golden webs went here under different names; at first they were called “ciclatoun,” “siglaton,” or “siklatoun,” as the writer’s fancy led him to spell the common Persian word for them at the time throughout the east.
By the old English ritual, plain cloth of gold was allowed, as now, to be taken for white, and worn in the Church’s ceremonials as such, when that colour happened to be named for use by the rubric. Thus in the reign of Richard II., among the vestments at the Chapel of St. George, Windsor Castle, there was “unum vestimentum album bonum de panno adaurato pro principalibus festis B. Mariæ,” &c.67
St. Paul’s, London, had, at the end of the thirteenth century, two amices; one an old one, embroidered with solid gold wire: “Amictus breudatus de auro puro; amictus vetus breudatus cum auro puro.”68
The use of golden stuffs not unlikely woven in England, but assuredly worn by royalty here, is curiously shown by the contrast between the living man clothed in woven gold, and the dead body, and its frightful state at burial, of Henry I., set forth by Roger Hoveden; who thus writes of that king: “vide... quomodo regis potentissimi corpus cujus cervix diademite, auro et gemmis electissimis quasi divino splendore vernaverat... cujus reliqua superficies auro textile tota rutilaverat,” &c.69
Often was this splendid web wrought so thick and strong, that each string, whether it happened to be of hemp or of silk, in the warp, had in it six threads, while the weft was of flat gold shreds. Hence such a texture was called “samit,” a word shortened from its first and old Byzantine name “exsamit,” as we shall have to notice further on. Among several other purchases for the wardrobe of Edward I., in the year 1300, we find this entry: “Pro samitis pannis ad aurum tam in canabo quam in serico,” &c.70 And such was the quantity kept there of this costly cloth, 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 the Lord Robert de Clifford, and another piece at the same price to Thomas de Cammill.71 Not only Asia Minor, but the Island of Cyprus, the City of Lucca, and Moorish Spain, sent us these rich tissues. The cloth of gold from Spain is incidentally spoken of later in the Sherborn bequest, p. lvi. Along with other things left behind him at Haverford castle, by Richard II., 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.”72 How Edward IV. liked cloth-of-gold for his personal wear, may be gathered from his “Wardrobe Accounts,” edited by Nicolas; and the lavish use of this stuff ordered by Richard III. for his own coronation, is recorded in the “Antiquarian Repertory.”73 The robes to be worn by the unfortunate Edward V. at this same function were cloth of gold tissue. “Diverse peces of cloth of gold” were bought by Henry VII., “of Lombardes.”74
A “gowne of cloth-of-gold, furred with pawmpilyon, ayenst Corpus Xpi day,” was brought from London to Richmond, to Elizabeth of York, afterwards Henry VII.’s queen, for her to wear as she walked in the procession on that great festival.75 The affection shown by Henry VIII., and all our nobility, men and women, of the time, for cloth of gold in their garments, was unmistakingly set forth in so many of their likenesses brought together in that very instructive Exhibition of National Portraits in the year, A.D. 1866, in the South Kensington Museum. This stuff seems to have been costly then, for Princess, afterwards Queen Mary, thirteen years before she came to the throne: “payed to Peycocke, of London, for xix yerds iii. qr̃t of clothe of golde at xxxviij.[~s] the yerde, xxxvijli. xs. vjd.”76 And for “a yerde and dr qr̃t of clothe of siluer xls.”77
Tissue
Cloth of gold called As between common silk and satin, there runs a broad difference, at least in look, 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 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, like what is now known as “passing,” and, during the middle ages, went by the term of Cyprus gold; and rich samits woven with it, were called damasks of Cyprus.
The very self-same things get for themselves other denominations as time goes on: such happened to cloths of gold. What the thirteenth century called, first, “ciclatoun,” then “baudekin,” afterward “nak,” people, two hundred years later, chose to name “tissue,” or the bright shimmering golden textile affected so much by our kings and queens in their dress, for the more solemn occasions of stately grandeur, as was just now mentioned. Up to this time, the very thin smooth paper made at first on purpose to be, when this rich stuff lay by, put between its folds to hinder it from fraying or tarnish, yet goes, though its original use is forgotten, by the name of tissue-paper.
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, as well as the exquisite beauty of its embroideries: “Obtulit etiam unum vestimentum integrum cum tribus capis choralibus de panno Tyssewys vulgariter nuncupato in quibus auri pretiosa nobilitas, gemmarum pulchritudo et curiosa manus artificis stuporem quendam inspectantium oculis repræsentant.” 78 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. 79
Among those many rich and costly vestments in Lincoln Cathedral, 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;”80 “a chesable with two tunacles of blew tishew having a precious orphrey of cloth of gold.” 81
To this day, in some countries the official robes of certain dignitaries are wrought of this rich textile. Even now, these Roman princes, and the senator whose place on great festivals when the Pope is present, is about the pontifical throne, are all arrayed in state garments made of cloth of gold.
Silken textures ornamented with designs in copper gilt thread, were brought into market and honestly sold for what they really were: of such inferior wares we find mention in the inventory of vestments at Winchester Cathedral, drawn up by order of Henry VIII. where we read of “twenty-eight copys of white bawdkyne, woven with copper gold.”82 The substitution of gilt parchment for metal will be noticed further on, Section vi.
To imitate cloth of gold, the gilding of silk and fine canvas, like our gilding of wood and other substances, though not often, was sometimes resorted to for splendour’s sake on momentary occasions; such, for instance, as some stately procession, or a solemn burial service. Mr. Raine tells us he got from 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.”83 In the churchyard of Cheam, Surrey, A.D. 1865, was found the skeleton of a priest buried there some time during the fourteenth century; around the waist was a flat girdle made of brown silk that had been gilt, and a shred of it now lies before the writer.
In the “Romaunt of the Rose,” translated by Chaucer, Dame Gladnesse is thus described:—
—in an over gilt samite
Clad she was.84
On a piece of German orphrey-web, in this collection, No. 1373, p. 80, and likely done at Cologne, in the sixteenth century, the gold is put by the gilding process.
In the year 1295, St. Paul’s, London, had: “Casula de panno inaurato super serico,” a chasuble of gilded silk;85 and it was lined with red cloth made at Ailesham,86 or Elesham Priory in Lincolnshire. It had, too, another chasuble, and altar frontals of gilded canvas: “casula de panno inaurato in canabo, lineata carda Indici coloris cum panno consimili de Venetiis ad pendendum ante altare.”87 Venice seems to have been the place where these gilded silks and canvases, like the leather and pretty paper of a later epoch, were wrought.
Silver ,
As gold, so too 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 fitting for the wear of kings. Of this we have a striking illustration in the “Acts,” where St. Luke, speaking of Herod Agrippa, tells us that he presented himself arrayed in kingly apparel, to the people, who to flatter him, shouted that his was the voice, not of a man, but of a god; and forthwith he was smitten by that loathsome disease—eaten up by worms—which shortly killed him.88 This royal robe, as Josephus informs us, was a tunic all made of silver and wonderful in its texture. Appearing in this dress at break of day in the theatre, the silver, lit up by the rays of the early morning’s sun, gleamed so brightly as to startle the beholders in such a manner that some among them, by way of glozing, shouted out that the king before them was a god.89
Wire-Drawing
Intimately connected with the raw materials, and how they were wrought in the loom, is the question about the time when 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 there was found the appearance of gold wire.90 Of those remarkable pieces of Egyptian handicraft the corslets sent by King Amasis—one to Lindus, the second to Lacædemon—of which we have already spoken (p. xiv.), we may fairly presume that the work upon them done by the needle in gold, required by its minuteness that the precious metal should be not flat, but in the shape of a real wire. By the delicate management of female fingers, the usual narrow flat strips might have been pinched or doubled up, so that the two edges should meet, and then rubbed between men’s harder hands, or better still, between two pieces of smooth highly-polished granite, would produce a golden wire of any required fineness. Belonging to the writer is an Egyptian gold ring, which was taken from off the finger of a mummy by a friend. The hoop is a plain, somewhat thick wire. On each side of its small green-dyed ivory scarabee, to keep it in its place, are wound several rounds of rather fine wire. In Etruscan and Greek jewellery, wire is often to be found; but in all instances it is so well shaped and so even, that no hammer could have hardly wrought it, and it must have been fashioned by some rolling process. All through the mediæval times the filigree work is often very fine and delicate. Likely is it that the embroidery which we thus read of in the descriptions of the vestments belonging whilom to our old churches, for instance: “amictus breudatus cum auro puro”91—was worked with gold wire. To go back to Anglo-Saxon times in this country, such gold wire would seem to have been well known and employed, since in Peterborough minster there were two golden altar-cloths: “ii. gegylde ƿeofad sceatas;”92 and at Ely Cathedral, among its old ritual ornaments, were, in the reign of William Rufus: “Duo cinguli, unus totus de auri filo, alter de pallio cujus pendentia” (the tassels) “sunt bene ornata de auri filo.”93
The first idea of a wire-drawing machine dawned upon a workman’s mind in the year 1360, at Nuremberg; and yet it was not until two hundred years after, A.D. 1560, that the method was brought to England. One sample of a stuff with pure wire in it may be seen, p. 220, No. 8581, in this collection, as well as at No. 8228, p. 150.
Gold Thread
Equally interesting to our present subject is the process of twining long narrow strips of gold, or in its stead gilt silver, round a line of silk or flax, and thus producing Probably its origin, as far as flax and not silk is concerned, as being the underlying substance, 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, it happened so not because that Pargamanean king had been the first to think of twisting gold about a far less costly material, and thus, in fact, making gold thread such as we now have, but through his having suggested to the weaver the long-known golden thread as a woof into the textiles from his loom. From this point of view, we may easily believe what Pliny says: “Aurum intexere in eadem Asia invenit Attalus rex; unde nomen Attalicis.”94 In that same Asia King Attalus invented the method of using a woof of gold; from this circumstance the Attalic cloths got their name.
That, at least for working embroidery, ladies at an early Christian period used to spin their own gold thread, would seem from a passage in Claudian. Writing on the elevation to the consulate of the two brothers Probinus and Olybrius, at the end of the fourth century, the poet thus gracefully compliments their aged mother, Proba, who with her own hands had worked the purple and gold-embroidered robes, the “togæ pictæ,” or “trabeæ,” to be worn by her sons in their office:
Lætatur veneranda parens, et pollice docto
Jam parat auratas trabeas...
Et longum tenues tractus producit in aurum
Filaque concreto cogit squalere metallo.95
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.
A consular figure, arrayed in the purple trabea, profusely embroidered in gold, is shown in “The Church of our Fathers.”96
That, in the thirteenth century our own ladies, like the Roman Proba, themselves used to make the gold thread needed for their own embroidery is certain; and the process which they followed is set forth as one of the items among the other costs for that magnificent frontal wrought A.D. 1271, for the high altar at Westminster Abbey. As that bill itself, to be seen on the Chancellor’s Roll for the year 56 of Henry III., affords so many curious and available particulars about the whole subject in hand, we will give it here at full length for the sake of coming back hereafter to its several parts: “In xij. ulnis de canabo ad frontale magni altaris ecclesiæ (Westmonasterii) et cera ad eundem pannum ceranda, vs. vid. Et in vj marcis auri ad idem frontale, liij marcas. Et in operacione dicti auri, et sessura (scissura?) et filatura ejusdem, iiijl. xiijs. Et in ij libris serici albi et in duobus serici crocei ad idem opus, xxxvs. Et in perlis albis ponderis v marcarum, et dimidiæ ad idem opus lxxli. Et pro grossis perlis ad borduram ejusdem panni, ponderis ij marcarum, xiijli. dimidiam marcam. Et in una libra serici grossi, xs. Et in stipendio quatuor mulierum operancium in predicto panno per iij annos et iij partes unius anni, xxxvili. Et in Dccciijxx vi estmalles ponderis liiis. ad borduram predictam. Et pro lxxvj asmallis grossis ponderis lxvs. ad idem frontale iiijxxli. xvjs. Et pro Dl gernectis positis in predictis borduris, lxvis. Et in castoniis auri ad dictas gernectas imponendas ponderis xijs. vjd., cxijs. vjd. Et in pictura argenti posita subtus predicta asmalla, ij marcas. Et in vj ulnis cardonis de viridi, iijs.”97 As the pound-weight now is widely different from the pound sterling, so then the mark-weight of gold cost nine marks of money. The “operacio auri” of the above document consisted in flattening out, by a broad-faced hammer like one such as our gold-beaters still use, the precious metal into a sheet thin as our thinnest paper. The “scissura” was the cutting of it afterwards into long narrow strips, the winding of which about the filaments of the yellow silk mentioned, is indicated by the word “filatura,” and thus was made the gold thread of that costly frontal fraught with seed-pearls and other some, of a much larger size, and garnets, or rather carbuncles, and enamels, and which took four women three years and three-quarters to work. At the back it was lined with green frieze or baize—“cardo de viridi.”
Such was the superior quality of some gold thread that it was known to the mediæval world under the name of the place wherein it had been made. Thus we find a mention at one time of Cyprus gold thread—“vestimentum embrowdatum cum aquilis de auro de Cipre;”98 later, of Venice gold thread—“for frenge of gold of Venys at vjs. the ounce;”99 “one cope of unwaterd camlet laid with strokes of Venis gold.”100 What may have been their difference cannot now be pointed out: perhaps the Cyprian thread was so much 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 article from Venice showed everywhere the twisting of common thread.
As now, so of old,
Silks Had Various Names given them, meaning either their kind of texture and dressing, their colour and its several tints, the sort of design or pattern 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 of these designations are of foreign growth; some sprang up in the seventh and following centuries at Byzantium, and, not to be found in classic writers, remain unknown to modern Greek scholars; some are half Greek, half Latin, jumbled together; other some, 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 may not understand a great deal belonging to trade, and the manners of the times glanced at by our old writers; much less see the true meaning of many passages in our mediæval English poetry.
Among the terms significative of the kind of web, or mode of getting up some sorts of silk, we have
Holosericum, the whole texture of which, as its Greek-Latin compound means to say, is warp and woof wholly pure silk: in a passage from Lampridius, quoted before, p. xix., we learn that so early as the reign of Alexander Severus, the difference between “vestes holosericæ,” and “subsericæ,” was strongly marked, and from which we learn that Subsericum implied that such a texture was not entirely, but in part—likely its woof—of silk.
Although the warp only happened to be of silk, while the woof was of gold, still the tissue was often called “holosericum;” of the vestments which Beda says101 S. Gregory sent over here to S. Austin, one is mentioned by a mediæval writer as “una casula oloserica purpurei coloris aurea textura”—a chasuble all silk, of a purple colour, woven with gold.102 Examples of “holosericum” and “subsericum” abound in this collection.
Examitum, xamitum, or, as it is called in our old English documents so often, samit, is a word made up of two Greek ones, εξ, “six,” and μίτοι, “threads,” the number of the strings in the warp of the texture. That stuffs woven so thick must have been of the best, is evident. Hence, to say of any silken tissue that it was “examitum,” or “samit,” meant that it was six-threaded, in consequence costly and splendid. At the end of the thirteenth and beginning of the fourteenth centuries, “examitum,” as the writer still names the silk, was much used for vestments in Evesham abbey, as we gather from the “Chronicon” of that house, published lately for the Master of the Rolls.103 About the same period, among the best copes, chasubles, and vestments in St. Paul’s, London, many were made of “sametum;” so Master Radulph de Baldock chose to call it in his visitation of that church as its dean, A.D. 1295.104 As we observed just now, these rich silks, which were in all colours, with a warp so stiff, became richer still from having a woof of golden thread, or, as we should now say, being shot with gold. But years before, “examitum” was shortened into “samet;” for among the nine gorgeous chasubles bequeathed to Durham cathedral by its bishop, Hugh Pudsey, A.D. 1195, there was the “prima de rubea samete nobiliter braudata cum laminis aureis et bizanciis et multis magnis perlis et lapidibus pretiosis.”105 About a hundred years afterwards the employment of it, after its richest form, in our royal wardrobes, has been pointed out just now, p. xxviii., &c.
In that valuable inventory, lately published, of the rich vestments belonging to Exeter cathedral, A.D. 1277, of its numerous chasubles, dalmatics, tunicles, besides its seventy and more copes, the better part were made of this costly tissue here called “samitta;” for example: “casula, tunica, dalmatica de samitta—par (vestimentorum) de rubea samitta cum avibus duo capita habentibus;” “una capa samitta cum leonibus deauratis.”106 In a later document, A.D. 1327, this precious silk is termed “samicta.”107
Our minstrels 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.108
In his “Romaunt of the Rose,” Chaucer describes the dress of Mirthe thus:—
Full yong he was, and merry of thought
And in samette, with birdes wrought,
And with gold beaten full fetously,
His bodie was clad full richely.109
Many of the beautifully figured damasks in this collection are what anciently were known as “samits;” and if they really be not “six-thread,” according to the Greek etymology of their name, it is because, that at a very early period the stuffs so called ceased to be woven of such a thickness.
Those 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 ancient “examits.”
Just as remarkable for the lightness of its texture, as happened to be “samit” on account of the thick substance of its web, yet quite as much sought after, was another kind of thin glossy silken stuff “wrought in the orient” by Paynim hands, and here called first by its Persian name which came with it, ciclatoun, that is, bright and shining; but afterwards sicklatoun, siglaton, cyclas. Often a woof of golden thread lent it more glitter still; and it was used equally for ecclesiastical vestments as for secular articles of stately dress. In the “Inventory of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London,” A.D. 1295, there was a cope made of cloth of gold, called “ciclatoun:”—“capa de panno aureo qui vocatur ciclatoun.”110
Among the booty carried off by the English when they sacked the camp of Saladin, in the Holy Land,
King Richard took the pavillouns
Of sendal, and of cyclatoun.
They were shape of castels;
Of gold and silver the pencels.111
In his “Rime of Sire Thopas,” Chaucer says of the doughty swain,
Of Brugges were his hosen broun
His robe was of ciclatoun.112
Though so light and thin, this cloak of “ciclatoun” was often embroidered in silk, and had sewn on it golden ornaments; for we read of a young maid who sat,
In a robe ryght ryall bowne
Of a red syclatowne
Be hur fader syde;
A coronell on hur hedd set,
Hur clothys with bestes and byrdes wer bete
All abowte for pryde.113
When in the field, over their armour, whether of mail or plate, knights wore a long sleeveless gown slit up almost to the waist on both sides: sometimes of “samit,” often of “cendal,” oftener still of “ciclatourn,” because of its flowing showy texture was this garment made, and from a new and contracted way of calling it, the name of the gown, like the shortened one for its stuff, became known as “cyclas,” nothing akin to the κυκλας—the full round article of dress worn by the women of Greece and Rome. When, A.D. 1306, before setting out to Scotland, Edward I. girded his son, the prince of Wales, with so much pomp, a knight, in Westminster Abbey; to the three hundred sons of the nobility whom the heir to the throne was afterward to dub knights in the same church, the king made a most splendid gift of attire fitting for the ceremony, and among other textiles sent them were these “clycases” wove of gold:—“Purpura, bissus, syndones, cyclades auro textæ,” &c. as we learn from Matthew Westminster, “Flores Historiarum,” p. 454. How very light and thin must have been all such garments, we gather from the quiet wit of John of Salisbury while jeering the man who affected to perspire in the depth of winter, though clad in nothing but his fine “cyclas:”—“dum omnia gelu constricta rigent, tenui sudat in cylade.”114
Not so costly, and even somewhat thinner in texture, was a silken stuff known as cendal, cendallus, sandal, sandalin, cendatus, 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.115
The Roll of Caerlaverock tells us that among the grand array which met and joined Edward I. at Carlisle, A.D. 1300, on his road to invade Scotland, there was to be seen many a rich caparison embroidered upon cendal and samit:—
La ot meint riche guarnement
Brodé sur sendaus e samis.116
And Lacy, Earl of Lincoln, leading the first squadron, hoisted his banner made of yellow cendal blazoned with a lion rampant purpre.117
Baner out de un cendal safrin,
O un lioun rampant purprin.
Most, if not all the other flags were made of the same cendal silk.
When the stalworth knight of Southampton wished to keep himself unknown at a tournament, we thus read of him—
Sir Bevis disguised all his weed
Of black cendal and of rede,
Flourished with roses of silver bright, &c.118
Of the ten beautiful silken albs which Hugh Pudsey left to Durham, two were made of samit, other two of cendal, or as the bishop calls it, sandal: “Quæ dicuntur sandales.”119 Exeter cathedral had a red cope with a green lining of sandal: “Capa rubea cum linura viridi sandalis;”120 and a cape of sandaline: “Una capa de sandalin.”121 Chasubles, too, were, it is likely, for poorer churches, made of cendal or sandel; Piers Ploughman speaks thus to the high dames 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, &c.122
A stronger kind of cendal was wrought and called, in the Latin inventories of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, cendatus afforciatus, and of such there was a cope at St. Paul’s;123 while another cope of cloth of gold was lined with it,124 as also a chasuble of red samit given by Bishop Henry of Sandwich.
Syndonus 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: “Casula de sindone purpurea, linita cendata viridi;125 “capa de syndono Hispanico.”
Taffeta, it is likely, 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 ó lino muy delgada y trasparente.”
As the Knights’ flags:
Ther gonfanens and ther penselles
Wer well wrought off grene sendels;
as their long cyclases which they wore over their armour were of cendal, so too were of cendal, all blazoned with their armorial bearings, the housing of the steeds they strode. Of cendal, also, was the lining of the church’s vestments, and the peaceful citizen’s daily garments. Of his “Doctour of Phisike,” Chaucer tells us:—
In sanguin and in perse he clad was alle
Lined with taffata, and with sendalle.127
For the weaving of cendal, among the Europeans, Sicily was once celebrated, and a good example from others in this collection, is No. 8255, p. 163.
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, it is likely in the south of Spain, earned for this light web as they made it, or sold it, a good name in 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.”128 At first we distinguished this stuff by calling it, from its makers, “saracenicum.” But while Anglicising, we shortened that appellation into the diminutive “sarcenet;” and this word we keep to the present day, 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 of it thus speaks Chaucer, 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 riche of hewe.129
But as Syria herself never grew the more precious kinds of spices, so we do not believe that she was the first to hit upon the happy mechanical expedient of getting up a silken texture so as to take, by the united action at the same moment of strong heat and heavy pressure upon its face, that lustrous metallic shine which we have in satin. No. 702, p. 8, is a good example of late Chinese manufacture, a process which this country is only now beginning to understand and successfully employ.
When satin first appeared in trade, it was all about the shores of the Mediterranean called “aceytuni.” This term slipped through early Italian lips into “zetani;” coming westward this, in its turn, dropped its “i,” and smoothed itself into “satin,” a word for this silk among us English as well as our neighbours in France, while in Italy it now goes by the name of “raso,” and the Spaniards keep up its first designation in their dictionary.
In the earlier inventories of church vestments, no mention can be found of satin; and it is only among the various rich bequests (ed. Oliver) made to his cathedral at Exeter by Bishop Grandison, between A.D. 1327-69 that this fine silk is spoken of; though later, and especially in the royal wardrobe accompts (ed. Nicolas), it is perpetually specified. Hence we may fairly assume that till the beginning of the fourteenth century satin was unknown in England; afterwards it met much favour. Flags were made of it. On board the stately ship in which Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, in the reign of Henry VI., sailed from England to France, there were flying “three penons of satten,” besides “sixteen 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.130 Like other silken textiles, satin seems to have been, in some few instances, interwoven with flat gold thread, so as to make it a tissue: for example, Lincoln had of the gift of one of its bishops, eighteen copes of red tinsel sattin with orphreys of gold.131
Though not often, yet sometimes do we read of a silken stuff called, cadas, carda, carduus, 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 quite apart in reeling, and set aside for other uses; this is cadas which the Promptorium Parvulorum defines, however, as “Bombicinium,” or silk. St. Paul’s, A.D. 1295, had “pannus rubeus diasperatus de Laret lineatus de carda Inda;”132 and Exeter possessed another cloth for the purpose: “Cum carduis viridibus.”133 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
De soi, de cadas e coton.134
One of the Lenten veils at St. Paul’s, in the chapel of St. Faith, was of blue and yellow carde: “velum quadragesimale de carde croceo et indico.”135 The quantity of card purchased for the royal wardrobe, in the twenty-eighth year of Edward I.’s reign, A.D. 1299, is set forth in the Liber Quotidianus, &c.136
Chasubles made in the thirteenth century, and belonging to Hereford Cathedral, were lined with carda: “Unam casulam de rubeo sindone linita de carda crocea—tertiam casulam de serico de India linita de carda viridi,” &c.137
Camoca, camoka, camak, camora (a misspelling), 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 appearance than this camoca rose into great repute; the Church used it for her liturgical vestments, and royalty employed it for dress on grand occasions 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: “Unum vestimentum album de camoca,” &c.... “Album de camoca, cum casula.”138... “Duo quissini rubei de camoca.”139 To his cathedral of Durham, the learned Richard Bury left a beautifully embroidered whole set of vestments, A.D. 1345: “Unum vestimentum de alma camica (sic) subtiliter brudata,” &c.140
Our princes must have arrayed themselves, on grand occasions, in camoca; for thus Herod, in one of the Coventry Misteries—the Adoration of the Magi—is made to boast of himself: “In kyrtyl of cammaka kynge am I cladde.”141 But it was in draping its state-beds that our ancient royalty showed its affection for camoca. To his confessor, Edward the Black Prince bequeaths “a large bed of red camora (sic) with our arms embroidered at each corner,”142 and the prince’s mother leaves to another son of hers, John Holland, “a bed of red camak.”143 Our nobles, too, had the same likings, for Edward Lord Despencer, A.D. 1375, wills to his wife, “my great bed of blue camaka, with griffins, also another bed of camaka, striped with white and black.”144 What may have been the real texture of this stuff, thought so magnificent, we do not positively know, but hazarding a guess, we think it to have been woven of fine camel’s hair and silk, and of Asiatic workmanship.
From this mixed web pass we now to another, one even more precious, that is the Cloth of Tars, which we presume to have, in a manner, been the forerunner of the now so celebrated cashmere, and along with silk made of the downy wool of a family of goats reared in several parts of Asia, but especially in Tibet, as we shall try to show a little further on.
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. The oldest piece we remember to have ever seen was in the beautiful crimson cope embroidered by English hands in the fourteenth century, now kept at the college of Mount St. Mary, Chesterfield, and exhibited here in the ever memorable year ’62.
Our belief is, that to central Asia—perhaps China,—we are indebted for velvet as well as satin, and we think the earliest places in Europe to weave it was, first the south of Spain, and then Lucca.
In the earlier of those oldest inventories we have of church vestments, that of Exeter Cathedral, A.D. 1277, velvet is not spoken of; but in St. Paul’s, London, A.D. 1295, there is some notice of velvet,145 along with its kindred web, “fustian,” for chasubles.146 At Exeter, in the year 1327, velvet—and it was crimson—is for the first time there mentioned, but as in two pieces not made up, of which some yards had been then sold for vestment-making.147 From the middle of the fourteenth century, velvet—mostly crimson—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 had: “Una casula alba de fustian.”148 But in an English sermon preached at the beginning of this thirteenth century, great blame is found with the priest who had his chasuble made of middling fustian: “þe meshakele of medeme fustian.”149 As then wove, fustian, about which we have to say more, 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 Bergavenny bequeaths A.D. 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, &c.”150 That this stuff may have hinted to the Italians the way of weaving silk in the same manner, and so of producing velvet, is not unlikely. Had the Egyptian Arabs been the first to push forward their own discovery of working cotton into fustian, and changing cotton for silk, and so brought forth velvet, it is probable some one would have told us; as it is, we yield the merit to Asia—may be China. Other nations took up this manufacture, 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; and, at last, that difficult and most beautiful of all manners of diapering, or 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 all over Italy and in Spain and 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 standers;”151 and besides, “a greene cushion of raised velvet,”152 possessed “a cope of purshed velvet (redd)”153 “purshed” meaning the velvet raised in a net-work pattern.
Diaper was a silken fabric, held everywhere in high estimation during many hundred years, both abroad and here in England. This we know from documents beginning with the eleventh century. What was its distinctive characteristic, and whence it drew its name, we have not been hitherto told, with anything like certainty. Several eminent men have discussed these points, but while hazarding his own conjecture, each of these writers has differed from the others. Till a better may be found, we submit our own solution.
The silk weavers of Asia had, of old, found out the way so to gear their looms, and dress their silk, or their threads of gold, that with a warp and woof, both precisely of the same tone of colour they could give to the web an elegant design, each part of which being managed in the weaving, as either to hide or to catch the light and shine, looked to be separated from or stand well up above the seeming dusky ground below it: at times the design was dulled, and the ground made glossy. To indicate such a one-coloured, yet patterned silk, the Byzantine Greeks of the early middle ages bethought themselves of the term διασπρον, diaspron, a word of their own coinage, and drawn from the old Greek verb, διασπαω, I separate, but meant by them to signify “what distinguishes or separates itself from things about it,” as every pattern must do on a one-coloured silk. Along with this textile, the Latins took the name for it from the Greeks, and called it “diasper,” which we English have moulded into “diaper.” In the year 1066, the Empress Agnes gave to Monte Cassino a diaper-chasuble of cloth of gold, “optulit planetam diasperam totam undique auro contextam.”154
How a golden web may be so wrought is exemplified, amid several other specimens in this collection, by the one under No. 1270, p. 38, done most likely by an English hand. At York Minster, in the year 1862, was opened a tomb, very likely that of some archbishop; and there was found, along with other textiles in silk, a few shreds of what had been a chasuble made of cloth of gold diapered all over with little crosses, as we ourselves beheld. It would seem, indeed, that cloth of gold was at most times diapered with a pattern, at least in Chaucer’s days, since he thus points to it on the housing of his king’s horse:—
— — trapped in stele,
Covered with cloth of gold diapred wele.155
Our oldest Church inventories make frequent mention of such diapered silks for vestments. In 1277, Exeter Cathedral had: “una (capa) de alba diapra cum noviluniis,”156—a cope of white diaper with half moons. It was the gift of Bishop Bartholomew, A.D. 1161. Bishop Brewer, A.D. 1224, bestowed upon the Church a small pall of red diaper: “parva palla de rubea diapra;” along with a chasuble, dalmatic and tunicle of white diaper: “casula, &c. de alba diapra.”157 Among its vast collection of liturgical garments, A.D. 1295, old St. Paul’s had a large number made of diaper, which was almost always white. Sometimes the pattern of the diapering is noticed; for instance, a chasuble of white diaper, with coupled parrots in places, among branches: “casula de albo diaspro cum citaciis combinatis per loca in ramusculis.”158 Again: “tunica et dalmatica de albo diaspro cum citacis viridibus in ramunculis,”159 where we see the white diaper having the parrots done in green. Probably the most remarkable and elaborate specimen of diaper-weaving on record, is the one that Edmund, Earl of Cornwall gave, made up in “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 trees, are woven in gold thread: “Capa Domini Edmundi Comitis Cornubiæ de quodam diaspero Antioch coloris, tegulata cum arboribus et avibus diasperatis quarum capita, pectora et pedes, et flores in medio arborum sunt de aurifilo contextæ.160
By degrees the word “diaper” became widened in its meaning. 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. Thus, to soothe his daughter’s sorrows, the King of Hungary promises her 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.161
Nay, 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, &c.162
Even now, our fine table linen we call “diaper,” because it is figured with flowers and fruits. Sometimes, with us, silks diapered were called “sygury:” una capa de sateyn sygury, cum ymagine B. M. V. in capucio.163
In their etymology of diaper, modern writers try to draw the word from Yprès, or d’Ypriès, because that town in Belgium was once celebrated, not for silken stuffs, but for linen. Between the city and the name of “diaper” a kinship even of the very furthest sort cannot be fairly set up. From the citations out of the Chronicle of Monte Cassino we learn, that at the beginning of the eleventh century, the term in use there for a certain silken textile, brought thither from the east, was “diasperon.” We find, too, how that great monastery was in continual communication with Constantinople, whither she was in the habit of sending her monks to buy art-works of price, and bring back with them workmen, for the purpose of embellishing her Church and its altars. Getting from South Italy to England, and our own records, we discover this same Greece-born phrase, diaspron, diasper, given to precious silks used as vestments during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in London and Exeter. By the latter end of the fourteenth century—Chaucer’s time—the terms “diasper,” and “diasperatus,” among us, had slidden into “diaper,” “diaperatus,” Englished, “diapered.” Now, in this same fourteenth century, do we, for the first time, meet a mention of Yprès; and not alone, but along with Ghent, as famous for linen, if by that word we understand cloth; and even then our own Bath seems to have stood above those Belgian cities in their textiles. Among Chaucer’s pilgrims—
A good wif was ther of beside Bathe
Of cloth making she hadde swiche an haunt
She passed hem of Ipres and of Gaunt.164
Neither in this, nor any other subsequent notice of Yprès weaving, is there anything which can be twisted into a warrant for thinking the distinctive mark to have been the first employment of pattern on its webs, or even its peculiar superiority in such a style of work. The important fact which we have just now verified that several ages had gone by between the period when, in Greece, in South Italy, and England, the common name for a certain kind of precious silk was “diaspron,” “diasper,” “diaper,” and the day when, for the first time, Yprès, not alone, but in company with other neighbouring cities, started up into notice for its linens, quite overthrows the etymology thought of now-a-days for the word “diaper,” and hastens us to the conclusion that this almost ante-mediæval term came to us from Greece, and not from Flanders.
Of the several oldest pieces in this collection, there are not a few which those good men who wrote out the valuable inventories of Exeter and St. Paul’s, London, would have jotted down as “diasper,” or “diaper.” The shreds of creamy, white silk, number 1239, p. 26, fully illustrate the meaning of this term, and will repay minute inspection.
More ancient still are other terms which we are about to notice, such as “chrysoclavus,” “stauracin,” “polystaurium,” “gammadion,” or “gammadiæ,” “de quadruplo,” “de octoplo,” and “de fundato.” First, textiles of silk and gold are, over and over again, enumerated as then commonly known under such names, in the so-called Anastasius Bibliothecarius, Liber Pontificalis seu de Gestis Romanorum Pontificum, the good edition of which, in three volumes, edited by Vignolius, ought to be in the hands of every student of early Christian art-work, and in particular of textiles and embroidery.
The Chrysoclavus or golden nail-head, was a remnant, which lingered a long time among the ornaments embroidered on ecclesiastical 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 dignitaries, as we learn from Horace, while laughing at the silly official whom he saw at Fondi—
Insani ridentes præmia scribæ,
Prætextam et latum clavum.165
In the Court of Byzantium this device of dignity was elevated, from being purple on white, into gold upon purple. Hence came it that all rich purple silks, woven or embroidered, with the “clavus” done in gold, became known from their pattern as gold nail-headed, or chrysoclavus, a half Greek half Latin word, employed as often as an adjective as a substantive; and silken textiles of Tyrian dye, sprinkled all over with large round spots, were once in great demand. Shortly after, A.D. 795, Pope Leo, 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. To the altar of St. Paul’s the pontiff sent “vestem super altare albam chrysoclavam;”166 but to another “vestem chrysoclavam ex blattin Byzanteo.”167 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 σταυρος, the Greek for “cross,” was a silken stuff figured with small plain crosses, and therefore from their number sometimes further distinguished by the word signifying that meaning in Greek,
Polystauron. Of such a textile St. Leo gave presents to churches, as we learn from Anastasius, lib. Pont. ii. 265.
How much silken textiles figured with the cross were in request for church adornment we learn from Fortunatus, who, about the year 565, thus describes the hangings of an oratory in a church at Tours—
Pallia nam meruit, sunt quæ cruce textile pulchra,
Serica qua niveis sunt agnava blattea telis,
Et textis crucibus magnificatur opus.168
Very often the crosses woven on these fabrics were of the simplest shape; oftener were they designed after an elaborate type with a symbolic meaning about it that afforded an especial name to the stuffs upon which they were figured, the first of which that claims our notice is denominated
Gammadion, or Gammadiæ, a word applied as often to the pattern upon silks as the figures wrought upon gold and silver for use in churches, we so repeatedly come upon in the “Liber Pontificalis.”
In the Greek alphabet the capital letter of gamma takes the shape of an exact right angle thus, Γ. Being so, many writers have beheld 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 with it of this letter Γ. Four of these gammas put so
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fall into the shape of the so-called Greek cross; and in this form it was woven upon the textiles denominated “stauracinæ;” or patterned with a cross. Being one of the four same-shaped elements of the cross’s figure, the part was significant of the whole. Being, too, the emblem of our corner-stone—our Lord, the gamma, or Γ, was shown at one edge of the tunic on most of the apostles in ancient mosaics; wherein sometimes we find, in place of the gamma, our present capital Η for the aspirate, with which for their symbolic purpose the early Christians chose to utter, if not, write the sacred name. This Η is, however, only another combination of the four gammas in the cross. Whatsoever, therefore, whether of silver or of silk, was found to be marked in these or other ways of putting the gammas together, or with only a single one, such articles were called “gammadion,” or “gammadiæ;” but as often the so-formed cross was designated as “gammaed,” or “gammadia.” St. Leo gave to the Church of S. Susanna, at Rome, an altar-frontal, upon which there were four of such crosses made of purple silk speckled with gold spots; “vestem de blatthin habentem... tabulas chrysoclavas iiii cum gemmis ornatas, atque gammadias in ipsa veste chrysoclavas iiii.”169
Ancient ingenuity for throwing its favourite gamma into other combinations, and thus bringing forth other pretty but graceful patterns to be wrought on all sorts of ecclesiastical appliances, did not stop here. In the “Liber Pontificalis” of Anastasius, we meet not unfrequently with such passages as these: “Cortinas miræ magnitudinis de palliis stauracin seu quadrapolis;”170 “vela... ex palliis quadrapolis seu stauracin;”171 “vela de octapolo.”172 The explanation of these two terms, “de quadrapolo,” “de octapolo,” has hitherto baffled all commentators of the text through their forgetfulness of comparing together the things themselves and the written description of them. In these texts there is evidently meant a strong contrast between a something amounting 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, then the fact would have been announced by words constructed like “examitus,” p. xxxvii. As the contrast is not in the texture, it must then be searched for in the pattern of these two stuffs. Sure enough, there we find it, as “de quadrapolis” and “stauracin” were, as we see above, interchangeable terms; the first, like the second sort of textile, was figured with crosses.
Given at the end of Du Cange’s “Glossary” is an engraving of a work of Greek art, plate IX. Here St. John Chrysostom 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 a marked difference in the way in which the crosses are put is discernible. As a metropolitan St. John wears the saccos upon which the crosses are arranged thus
St. Nicholas, and St. Basil have chasubles which, though worked all over with crosses, made, as on St. John’s saccos, with gammas, are surrounded with other gammas joined so as to edge in the crosses, thus
As four gammas only are necessary to form all the crosses upon St. John’s vestment, therein we behold the textile called by Anastasius, “Stauracin de quadruplo,” or the stuff figured with a cross of four (gammas); while as eight of these Greek letters are required for the pattern on the chasubles, we have in them an example of the other “stauracin de octaplo,” or “octapulo,” a fabric with a pattern composed of eight gammas. But of all the shapes fashioned out of the repetition of the one same element, the Greek letter Γ, by far the most ancient, universal, and mystic, is that curious one particularized by many as the
Gammadion, or Filfot, a name by which, at one time in England, it was generally known. Several pieces in this collection exhibit on them some modification of it, as Nos. 1261, p. 34; 1325, p. 60; 7052, p. 127; 8279A, p. 174; 8305, p. 185; 8635, p. 242; 8652, p. 249. Its figure is made out of the usual four gammas, so that they should fall together thus 卍: of its high antiquity and symbolism, we speak further on, section VII.
Silks figured with a cross, some made with four, some with eight Greek gammas, remained in Eastern Church use all through the middle ages, as we may gather from several monuments of that period. Besides a good many other books, Gori’s fine one, “Thesaurus Veterum Diptychorum” affords us several instances.173 The name also remained to such textiles as we know from the Greek canonist Balsamon, who, writing about the end of the twelfth century on episcopal garments, calls the tunic, στιχάριον διὰ γαμμάτων or (with a pattern) of gammas—gammadion. How to this day the cross made by four gammas is woven on Greek vestments, may be observed in the plates we have given in “Hierurgia.”174 Two late specimens of “stauracin” are in this collection under Nos. 7039, p. 123; 7048, p. 126; and 8250A, p. 161.
Of silks patterned with the Greek cross or “stauracin,” there are several examples in this collection; and though not of the remotest period, are interesting; the one No. 8234, p. 154, wrought in Sicily as it is probable 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 a valuable sample of Byzantine stauracin “colours purple and crimson; the only prominent ornament a cross—often repeated, even upon the small portion which remains.”175 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 at high mass, at the altar, vested as a deacon, the day he was crowned emperor in that church by Pope Leo III. 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 Boisserée in his “Kaiser Dalmatika in der St. Peterskirche;” but far better by Dr. Bock in his splendid work on the Coronation Robes of the German emperors.
Silks, from the pattern woven on them called de fundato, are frequently spoken of by Anastasius. From the texts themselves of that writer, and passages in other authors of his time, it would seem that the silks themselves were dyed of the richest purple, and figured with gold in the pattern of netting. As one of the meanings for the substantive “funda” is a fisherman’s net, rich textiles so figured in gold, were denominated from such a pattern “de fundato” or netted. To St. Peter’s Church at Rome the pontiff, Leo III. gave “cortinam majorem Alexandrinam holosericam habentem in medio adjunctum fundatum, et in circuitu ornatum de fundato;”176 and for the Church of St. Paul’s, Leo provided “vela holoserica majora sigillata habentia periclysin et crucem tam de blattin seu de fundato.”177 From Fortunatus we gather that those costly purple-dyed silks called “blatta,” were always interwoven with gold:—
Serica purpureis sternuntur vellera velis,
Inlita blatta toris, aurumque intermicat ostro.178
This net-pattern lingered long, and, no doubt, we find it, under a new name, “laqueatus”—meshed—as identified upon a cope made of baudekin, at St. Paul’s, London, A.D. 1295: “Capa de baudekino cum pineis (fir-apples) in campis laqueatis.”179 Modifications of this very old pattern may be seen in this catalogue (pp. 35, 36, 154).
The Latin term “de fundato,” for this net-pattern, so unusual, has for many been quite a puzzle. Here, too, art-works are our best help to properly understand the meaning of the word. The person of Constantine the Great, given by Gori,180 as well as that of a much later personage, shown us by Du Cange, at the end of his “Glossarium,”181 shows the front of the imperial tunic, which was purple, to have been figured in gold with a netting-pattern, marked with pearls. Gori, moreover, presents us with a bishop whose chasuble is of the same design.182 Further still, Paciaudi, in his “De Cultu S. Johannis Baptistæ,”183 furnishes a better illustration, if possible, by an engraving of a diptych first published by him. Here St. Jacobus, or James, is arrayed in chasuble and pall of netting-patterned silk; and of the same-figured stuff is much of the trimming or ornamentation on the robes of the B. V. Mary, but on those more especially worn by the archangels, St. Michael and Gabriel. In the diapered pattern on some of the cloth of gold found lately in the grave of some archbishop of York, buried there about the end of the thirteenth century, is the same netting discernible.
Striped or barred silks—stragulatæ—got their especial name for such a simple pattern, and at one time were in much request. Frequent mention is made of them in the Exeter Inventories, of which the one taken, A.D. 1277, specifies, “Due palle de baudekyno—una stragulata;”184 and A.D. 1327, the same cathedral had, “Unum filatorium de serico bonum stragulatum cum serico diversi coloris,”185 a veil or scarf for the sub-deacon, made of silk striped in different colours. The illuminations on the MS. among the Harley collection at the British Museum, of the deposition of Richard II. published by the Society of Antiquaries, afford us instances of this textile. The young nobleman to the right sitting on the ground at the archbishop’s sermon, is entirely, hood and all, arrayed in this striped silk,186 and at the altar, where Northumberland is swearing on the Eucharist, the priest who is saying mass, wears a chasuble of the same stuff.187 Old St. Paul’s had copes like it: “Capæ factæ de uno panno serico veteri pro parte albi coloris, pro parte viridi;”188 besides which, it had offertory-veils of the same pattern, one of them with its stripes paly red and green:—“Unum offertorium stragulatum, de rubeo et viridi;” and two others with their stripes bendy-wise: “Duo offertoria bendata de opere Saraceno.”189 York Cathedral also had two red palls paled with green and light blue: “Duæ pallæ rubiæ palyd cum viridi et blodio,”190 so admirably edited for the Surtees Society, by Rev. Jas. Raine, jun. Under this kind of patterned silks must be put one the name for which has hitherto not been explained by our English antiquaries.
At the end of the twelfth century there was brought to England, from Greece, a sort of precious silk named there Imperial.
Ralph, dean of St. Paul’s cathedral, London, tells us, that William de Magna Villa, on coming home from his pilgrimage to the Holy Land, made presents to several churches, A.D. 1178, of cloths which at Constantinople were called imperial: “Pannos quos Constantinopolis civitas vocat Imperiales, &c.”191 Relating the story of John’s apparition, A.D. 1226, Roger Wendover, and after him Matt. Paris, tells us that the King stood forth dressed in royal robes made of the stuff they call Imperial: “Astitit rex in vestibus regalibus de panno scilicet quem imperialem appellant.”192 In the Inventory of St. Paul’s, London, drawn up A.D. 1295, four tunicles, vestments for subdeacons and lower ministers about 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 wove in gold.193 It seems not to have been thought good enough for the more important vestments, such as chasubles and copes. Were it not spoken of thus by Wendover and Paris, as well as by a dean of St. Paul’s, and mentioned once as used in a few liturgical garments for that cathedral, we had never heard a word about such a textile anywhere in England. Our belief is that it got its name neither from its colour—supposed royal purple—nor its costliness, but through quite another reason: woven at a workshop kept up by the Byzantine emperors, just like the Gobelins is to-day in Paris by the French, and bearing about it some small, though noticeable mark, it took the designation of “Imperial.” That it was partly wrought with gold, we know; but that its tint was always some shade of the imperial purple—hence its appellation—is a purely gratuitous assumption. Moreover, as Saracenic princes in general had wrought in their own palaces, at the tiraz there, those silks wanted by themselves, their friends, and officers, and caused them to be marked with some adopted word or sentence; so, too, the rulers of Byzantium followed, it is likely the same usage, and put some royal device or word, or name in Greek upon theirs, and hence such textiles took the name of Imperial. In France, this textile was in use as late as the second half of the fifteenth century, but looked upon as old. Here, at York, as late as the early part of the sixteenth, one of its deans bestowed on that cathedral “two (blue) copes of clothe imperialle.” 194
Baudekin
Was a costly stuff much employed and often spoken of in our literature during many years of the mediæval period.
Ciclatoun, as we have elsewhere remarked, was the usual term during centuries throughout Western Europe, by which those showy golden textiles were called. When, however, Bagdad, or Baldak, standing where once stood the Babylon of old, took and held for no short length of time the lead all over Asia in weaving, every kind of fine silks and in especial golden stuffs shot, as now, in different colours, cloths of gold so tinted became every where known more particularly among us English as “baldakin,” “baudekin,” or “baudkyn,” or silks from Baldak. At last the earlier term “ciclatoun” dropped quite out of use. With this before him the reader will hereafter more readily understand several otherwise puzzling passages in many of our old writers in poetry and prose, as well as in the inventories of royal furniture and church vestments.
Our kings and our nobility affected much this rich stuff for the garments worn by them on high occasions. When, A.D. 1247, girding in Westminster Abbey William de Valence his uterine brother, a knight, our Henry III. had on a robe of baudekin, or cloth-of-gold, likely shot with crimson silk: “Dominus Rex veste deaurata facta de preciosissimo Baldekino et coronula aurea, quæ vulgariter garlanda dicitur redimitus, sedens gloriose in solio regio, fratrem suum uterinum, baltheo militari gaudenter insignivit.”195 In the year 1259 the master of Sherborn Hospital in the north, bequeathed to that house a cope made of cloth-of-gold, or “baudekin:”—“Capam de panno ad aurum scilicet Baudekin cum vestimento plenario de panno Yspaniæ ad aurum.”196
But these Bagdad or Baldak silks, with a weft of gold known among us as “baudekins” were often wove 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 all the solemn burials of our kings and queens, and other great ones, each of the many mourners, when offertory time came, went to the illuminated hearse,—one is figured in the “Church of Our Fathers,”197—and strewed a baudekin of costly texture over the coffin. Artists or others who wish to know the ceremonial for that occasion, will find it set forth in the descriptions of many of our mediæval funerals. At the obsequies of Henry VII. in Westminster Abbey:—“Twoe herauds came to the Duke of Buck. and to the Earles and conveyed them into the Revestrie where they did receive certen Palles which everie of them did bringe solemply betwene theire hands and comminge 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.”198 In the same church at the burial of Anne of Cleves, A.D. 1557, a like ceremonial of carrying cloth-of-gold palls to the hearse was followed.199
Among the many rich textiles belonging to St. Paul’s, London, A.D. 1295, are mentioned: “Baudekynus purpureus cum columpnis et arcubus et hominibus equitantibus infra, de funere comitissæ Britanniæ. Item baudekynus purpureus cum columpnis et arcubus et Sampson fortis infra arcus, de dono Domini Henrici Regis. Duo baudekyni rubei cum sagittarijs infra rotas, de dono E. regis et reginæ venientium de Wallia, Unus Baudekynus rubei campi cum griffonibus, pro anima Alianoræ reginæ junioris,”200 &c. At times these rich stuffs were cut up into chasubles: “Casula de baudekyno de opere Saracenico,”201 as was the cloth-of-gold dress worn by one of our princesses at her betrothal: “Unam vestimentum rubeum de panno adaurato diversis avibus poudratum, in quo domina principessa fuit desponsata.”202 The word “baudekin” itself became at last narrowed in its meaning. So warm, so mellow, so fast were all the tones of crimson which the dyers of Bagdad knew how to give their silks, that without a thread of gold in them, the mere glowing tints of those plain crimson silken webs from Bagdad won for themselves the name of baudekins. Furthermore, when they quite ceased to be partly woven in gold, and from their consequent lower price and cheapness got into use for cloths of estate over royal thrones, on common occasions, the shortened form of such a regal emblem, the canopy hung over the high altar of a church, acquired, and yet keeps its 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 comes: “To Antony Corsse for a cloth of an estate conteyning 47½ yerds, £11 the yerd, £522 10s.”203
About the feudal right, still kept up in Rome, to a cloth of estate, among the continental nobility, we have spoken, p. 107 of this catalogue, where a fragment of such a hanging is described.
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 beheld.204
This same rich golden stuff asks for our notice under a third and even better known name, to be found all through our early literature as
Cloth of Pall
The cloak (in Latin pallium, in Anglo-Saxon paell) of state for regal ceremonies and high occasions, 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 mediæval ages, golden webs shot in silk with one or other of the various colours—occasionally blue, oftener crimson—were sought out, as may be easily imagined, for the purpose, through so many years, and everywhere, that at last each sort of cloth of gold had given to it the name of “pall,” no matter the immediate purpose to which it might have to be applied, and after so many fashions. Vestments for church use and garments for knights and ladies were made of it. Old St. Paul’s had chasubles and copes of cloth of pall: “Casula de pal, capa chori de pal, &c.”205
In worldly use, if the king’s daughter was to have a
Mantell of ryche degre
Purple palle and armyne fre.206
So 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.207
For state receptions, our kings used to send out an order that the houses should be “curtained” all along the streets which the procession would have to take through London, “incortinaretur.”208 How this was done we learn from Chaucer in the “Knight’s Tale,”209
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.210
Hence, when Elizabeth, our Henry VII.’s queen, “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 riche clothes of gold, velvetts, and silks, &c.211 “As late as A.D. 1555, at Bow chyrche in London was hangyd with cloth of gold and with ryche hares (arras).”212
Those same feelings which quickened our doughty knights and high-born ladies to go and overspread the bier of each dead noble friend, with costly baudekins or cloths of gold, so the church whispered and she whispers us still to do, in due degree, the same to the coffin in which the poor man is being carried to the grave beneath a mantle of silk and velvet. The brother or the sister belonging to any of our old London gilds had over them, however lowly they might have been in life, one or other of those splendid hearse-cloths which we saw in this museum, among the loans, in the ever memorable year 1862.
This silken textile interwove with gold, first known as “ciclatoun,” on account of its glitter, then as “baudekin,” from the city where it was best made, came at last to be called by the name of “pall.” Whether employed on jubilant occasions, for a joyful betrothal, or a stately coronation, or for a sorrowing funeral, it mattered not, it got the common term of “cloth of pall,” which we yet keep up in that velvet covering for a coffin, a burial pall.
Lettered Silks are of no uncommon occurrence, and some examples may be seen in this collection.
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 of the attributes of all Saracenic kings and sultans, and which became a particular usage for ruling dynasties, one was to have woven the name of the actual prince, or that special ensign chosen by his house, into the stuffs intended for their 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 emblematic of the sultan’s wardrobe, and so became the distinguishing ensigne of the prince himself, as well as for those personages around him, who were allowed, by their official rank in his court, to wear them, and those again upon whom he had condescended to bestow such garments as especial tokens of the imperial favour, like the modern pelisse of honour. Before the period of their having embraced Islamism the Kings of Persia used to have woven upon the stuffs wrought for their personal use, or as gifts to others, their own especial effigies or likeness, or at times the peculiar ensign of their royalty. On becoming Mussulmans, the rulers of that kingdom changed the custom, and instead of portraiture substituted their names, to which they added words sounding to their ears as foreboding good, or certain formulas of praise and benediction.213 Wherever the Moslem ruled, there did he set up the same practice; and thus, whether in Asia, in Egypt, or other parts of Africa, or in Moorish Spain, the silken garments for royalty and its favoured ones, showed woven in them the prince’s name, or at least his chosen badge. The silken garments wrought in Egypt for the far-famed Saladin, and worn by him as its Kalif, bore very conspicuously upon them the name of that conqueror.
In our old lists of church ornaments, frequent mention is found of vestments inscribed, like pieces here, with words in real or pretended Arabic; and when St. Paul’s inventory more than once speaks of silken stuffs, “de opere Saraceno,” we lean to the belief that, though not all, 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 to Exeter: “Palla rubea cum quibusdam literis et elephantis et quadam avi in superiori parte.” 214 Later, our trade with the South of Spain and the Moors there, led us to call such words on woven stuffs Moorish, as we find in old documents, thus Joane Lady Bergavenny bequeaths (A.D. 1434) a “hullyng (hangings for a hall) of black, red, and green, with morys letters, &c.”215
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 silken stuffs so frequently bearing letters, borrowed in general from some real or supposed oriental alphabet, is the custom which many of the illuminators had of figuring very often on frontals and altar canopies, made of 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. On the inscribed textiles here, the real or pretended Arabic sentence is written twice on the same line, once forwards, once backwards.
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. Of this our own country affords us a mournful example. Upon the standard which was carried at the head of the Danish masters of Northumbria was figured the raven, the bird of Odin. This banner had been woven and worked by the daughters of Regnar Lodbrok, in one noontide’s while; and those heathens believed 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; as we are told by Asser: “Pagani acceperunt illud vexillum quod Reafan nominant: dicunt enim quod tres sorores Hungari et Habbæ filiæ videlicet Lodebrochi illud vexillum texuerunt et totum paraverunt illud uno meridiano tempore: dicunt etiam quod, in omni bello ubi præcederet idem signum, si victoriam adepturi essent, appereret in medio signi quasi corvus vivens volitans: sin vero vincendi in futuro fuissent, penderet directe nihil movens.”216 Another and a more important flag, that which Harold and his Anglo-Saxons fought under and lost 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, all done in sumptuous art:
“Quod (vexillum) erat in hominis pugnantis figura auro et lapidibus arte sumptuosa intextum.”217
Still farther down in past ages, known for its daring and its lofty flight, the eagle was held in high repute; throughout all the East, where it became the emblem of lordly power and victory, often 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.218 Homer calls it the bird of Jove. Upon the yoke in the war chariot of the Persian king Darius sat perched an eagle as if outstretching his wings wrought all in gold: “Auream aquilam pinnas extendenti similem.”219 The sight of this bird in the air while a battle raged was, by the heathen looked upon as an omen boding victory to those on whose side it hovered. At the battle of Granicus those about Alexander saw or thought they saw fluttering just above his head, quite heedless of the din, an eagle, to which Aristander called the attention of the Macedonians as an unmistakable earnest of success: “Qui circa Alexandrum erant, vidisse se crediderunt, paululum super caput regis placide volantem aquilam non gemitu morientium territam Aristander... militibus in pugnam intentis avem monstrabat, haud dubium victoriæ auspicium.”220 The Romans bore it on their standards; the Byzantine emperors kept it as their own device, and following the ancient 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, sometimes single at others double-headed, which latter was the shape adopted by the emperors of Germany as their blazon; and in this form it is borne to this day by several reigning houses. No wonder then that eagles of both fashions are so often to be observed woven upon ancient and eastern textiles.
Very likely, as yet left to show itself upon the walls of the citadel at Cairo, and those curious old glass lamps hung up there and elsewhere in the mosques, the double-headed eagle with wings displayed, which we find on royal Saracenic silks, was borrowed by the Paynim from the Crusaders, as it would seem, and selected for its ensign by the government of Egypt in the thirteenth century, which will easily account for the presence of that heraldic bird upon so many specimens from Saracenic looms, to be found in this collection. The “tiraz,” in fact, was for silk like the royal manufactory of Dresden and Sèvres china, or Gobelin’s looms for tapestry, and as the courts of France for its mark or ensign fixed upon the two LLs interlaced, and the house of Saxony the two swords placed saltire wise, so at least for Saladin and Egypt, in the middle ages the double-headed eagle with its wings outstretched, was the especial badge or ensign. In the same manner the sacred “horm,” or tree of life, between the two rampant lions or cheetahs may be the mark of Persia.
As early as A.D. 1277 Exeter Cathedral reckoned among her vestments several such; for instance, a cope of baudekin figured with small two-headed eagles: “Capa baudekyn cum parvis aquilis, ij capita habentibus;”221 and our Henry III.’s brother, Richard the king of Germany, gave to the same church a cope of black baudekin, with eagles in gold figured on it: “Una capa de baudek, nigra cum aquilis deauratis.”222 Many other instances might be noticed all through England.
As in architecture, sculpture, and painting, ancient and modern, so
In Woven Stuffs There Are Styles Nicely Defined, and Epochs Easily Discernible
Hitherto no attempt has been anywhere made to distribute olden silken textiles into various schools, and as the present is the first and only collection which has in any country been thrown open as yet to the public, the occasion seems a fitting one to warrant such an endeavour of classification.
With no other than the specimens here before us, we think we see them fall into these several groups—Chinese, Persian, Byzantine, Oriental or Indian, Syrian, Saracenic, Moresco-Spanish, Sicilian, Italian, Flemish, British, and French.
Chinese examples here are very few; but what they are, whether plain or figured, they are beautiful in their own way. From all that we know of the people, we are led to believe their own way two thousand years ago is precisely theirs still, so that the web wrought by them this year or two hundred years ago, like No. 1368, p. 75, would not differ hardly in a line from their textiles two thousand years gone by, when Dionysius Periegetes wrote that, the “Seres make precious figured garments, resembling in colour the flowers of the field, and rivalling in fineness the work of spiders.” In the stuffs, warp and woof are of silk, and both of the best kinds.
Persian textiles, even as we see them in this collection, must have been for many centuries just as they were ever figured, and may be, even now, described by the words of Quintus Curtius, with some little allowance for those influences exercised upon the mind of the weaver by his peculiar religious belief, which would not let the lowliest workman forget the “homa,” or tree of life. When Marco Polo travelled through those parts, in the thirteenth century, and our countryman, Sir John Mandeville, a hundred years later, the old love for hunting wild beasts still lived, and the princes of the country were as fond as ever of training the cheetah, a kind of small lion or leopard, for the chase, as we have noticed, p. 178.
When the design is made up of various kinds of beasts and birds, real or imaginary, with the sporting cheetah nicely spotted among them; and the “homa” conspicuously set forth above all; sure may we be that the web was wrought by Persians, and on most occasions the textile will be found in all its parts to be woven from the richest materials.
As an illustration of the Persian type of style, No. 8233, p. 154, may be taken as a specimen.
For trade purposes, and to make the textile pass in the European market as from Persia, the manner of its loom was often copied by the Jewish and the Christian weavers in Syria, as we shall have to notice just now.
The Byzantine Greeks, for their textiles from the time when in the sixth century they began to weave home-grown silk, made for themselves a school of design which kept up in their drawing not a little of the beauty, breadth, and flowing outline which had outlived among them the days of heathenish art. Along with this a strong feeling of their 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 or of beasts, are given in a much larger and bolder size than on any other ancient stuffs. Though there be very few known specimens from the old looms of Constantinople, the one here, No. 7036, p. 122, showing Samson wrestling with a lion, may serve as a type. In the year 1295 old St. Paul’s Cathedral, here in London, would seem to have possessed several splendid vestments made of Byzantine silk, as we note in the samples to be named infra under the head of Damask.
The way in which those Greeks gave a pattern to the stuff intended more especially for liturgical purposes is pointed out while speaking about “Stauracin” and the “Gammadion,” a form of the cross with which they powdered their silks; p. lii.
The world-wide fame of the Byzantine purple tint is attested by our Gerald Barry, whose words we quote further on. As a sample of the Byzantine loom in “diaspron,” or diapering, we would refer to No. 1239, p. 26.
The specimens here from the Byzantine, and later Greek loom, are not to be taken as by any means appropriate samples of its general production. They are poor in both respects—material and, when figured, design—as may be seen at pp. 27, 28, 33, 36, 123, 124, 126, 219, &c.
Oriental 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 there 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.”223
Out of the several specimens here from Tartary and India, during our mediæval period, we pick one or two which show well the meaning of those words uttered by that great Venetian traveller, while speaking about the textiles he saw in those countries. The dark purple piece of silk, figured in gold with birds and beasts, of the thirteenth century, No. 7086, p. 137, is good; but better still for our purpose is the shred, No. 7087, p. 138, of blue damask, with its birds, its animals, and flowers wrought in gold, and different coloured silks.
What India is, it has ever been, famous for its cloud-like transparent muslins, which since Marco Polo’s days have kept till now even that oriental name, through being better than elsewhere woven at Mosul.
The Syrian school is well represented here 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 each of these people 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 made 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. Setting, like Persia used to do, as it were, her own peculiar seal upon her figured webs, by mingling in her designs the mystic “homa,” to the European mind this part of the pattern became, at first, a sort of assurance that those goods had been thrown off by Persian looms. By one of those tricks of imitation followed then, as well as now, the Syrian designers for the loom threw this “homa” into their patterns. This symbol of “the tree of life,” had no doubt been a borrow by Zoroaster from Holy Writ.224 Neither to the Christian’s eye, nor to the Jew’s, nor Moslem’s, was there in it anything objectionable; all three, therefore, took it and made it a leading portion of design in the patterns of their silks; and hence is it that we meet it so often. Though done with perhaps a fraudulent intention of palming on the world Syrian for real Persian silks, those Syrians usually put into their own designs a something which spoke of their peculiar selves and their workmanship. Though there be seen the “homa,” the “cheetah,” and other elements of Persian patterns, still the discordant two-handled vase, the badly imitated Arabic sentence, betray the textile to be not Persian, but Syrian. No. 8359, p. 213, will readily exemplify our meaning. Furthermore, perhaps quite innocent of any knowledge about Persia’s first belief, and her use of the “homa” in her old religious services, the Christian weavers of Syria, along with the Zorasterian symbol, put the sign of the cross by the side of that “tree of life,” as we find upon the piece of silk, No. 7094, p. 140. Another remarkable specimen of the Syrian loom is No. 7034, p. 122, whereon the Nineveh lions come forth so conspicuously. As a good example of well-wrought “diaspron” or diaper, No. 8233, p. 154, may be mentioned, along with No. 7052, p. 127.
Saracenic weaving, as shown by the design upon the web, is exemplified in several specimens before us.
However much against what looks like a heedlessness of the Koran’s teachings, certain it is that the Saracens, those of the upper classes in particular, felt no difficulty in wearing robes upon which animals and the likenesses of other created things were woven; with the strictest of their princes, a double-headed eagle was a royal heraldic device, as we have shown, p. lxiii. Stuffs, then, figured with birds and beasts, with trees and flowers, were not the less of Saracenic workmanship, and meant for Moslem wear. What, however, may be looked for upon real 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, other some written, in large Arabic letters, with a word or sentence, often a proverb, often a good wish or some wise saw.
As examples we would point to No. 8288, p. 178, and 7051, p. 127. For a fair specimen of diapering, No. 7050, p. 127, while No. 8639, p. 243, presents us with a design having in it, besides the crescent moon, a proof that architectural forms were not forgotten by the weaver-draughtsman, in his sketches for the loom.
Later, in our chapter on Tapestry, we shall have occasion to speak about another sort of Saracenic work or tapestry, of the kind called abroad, from the position of its frame, of the basse lisse.
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 or another of geometrical lines, amid which are occasionally to be found different forms of conventional flowers. Specimens are to be seen here at pp. 51, 55, 121, 124, 125, 186, 240, &c. Sometimes, but very rarely, the crescent moon is figured as in the curious piece, No. 8639, p. 243. The colours of these 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, when gold is brought in, of an ingenious though fraudulent imitation of the precious metal, 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 those favourite stuffs called here in England “tissues,” of which we have already spoken, p. xxiii.
We are not aware that this trick has ever been found out before, and it was only by the use of a highly magnifying glass that we penetrated the secret. Our suspicion was awakened by so often observing that the gold had become quite black. Examples of this gilt vellum may be seen here, at Nos. 7095, p. 140; 8590, p. 224; 8639, p. 244; &c.
When the Christian Spanish weavers lived beyond Saracenic control, they filled their designs with beasts, birds, and flowers; but even then the old Spanish fine tone of crimson is rather striking in their webs, as is evidenced in the beautiful piece of diaper, No. 1336, p. 64.
Spanish velvets—and they were mostly wrought in Andalusia—are remarkably fine and conspicuous both for their deep soft pile, and their glowing ruby tones; but when woven after the manner of velvet upon velvet, are very precious: a good specimen of rich texture, and mellow colouring is furnished by the chasuble at No. 1375, p. 81.
The Sicilian school strongly marked the 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 the use of cotton for their garments, and how to rear the silkworm and spin its silk, were, as it would seem, the Mahomedans, who, in coming over from Africa, brought along 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 Mussulmans told them, too, of the parrots of India and the hunting sort of lion,—the cheetahs, that were found in Asia; and when the stuff had to be wrought for European wear, imaged both beast and bird upon the web, at the same time that they wove a word in Arabic, of greeting to be read among the flowers. Like all other Saracens, those in Sicily loved to mingle gold in their tissues; and, to spare the silk, cotton thread was not unfrequently worked up in the warp. When, therefore, we meet with beasts taken from the fauna of Africa, such, especially, as the giraffe, and the several classes of the antelope family—in particular the gazelle—with, somewhere about, an Arabic motto—and part of the pattern wrought in gold, which, at first poor and thin, is now become black, 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, all so Saracenic to the eye. Even when that Moslem nation had been driven out by the Normans, if many of its people did not stay as workmen in silk at Palermo, yet they left their teachings in weaving and design behind them, and their practices were, years afterwards, still followed.
Now we reach Sicily’s second epoch.
While at war with the Byzantines, in the twelfth century, Roger, King of Sicily, took Corinth, Thebes, and Athens, from each of 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. To the Norman tiraz there, 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, for silks wrought under the Normano-Sicilian dynasty. In this second period of the island’s loom we discover what traces the Byzantine school had impressed upon Sicilian silks, and helped so much to alter the type of their design. On one silk, a grotesque mask amid the graceful twinings of luxuriant foliage, such as might have been then found by them upon many a fragment of old Greek sculpture, was the pattern, as we witness, at No. 8241, p. 158; on another, a sovereign on horseback wearing the royal crown, and carrying as he rides a hawk upon his wrist—token both of the love for lordly sports at the period, and the feudalism all over Italy and Christendom, shown in the piece, No. 8589, p. 223; on a third, No. 8234, p. 154, is the Greek cross, along with a pattern much like the old netted or “de fundato” kind which we have described, p. liii.
But Sicily’s third is quite her own peculiar style. At the end of the thirteenth and beginning of the fourteenth century, she struck out of herself into quite an unknown path for design. Without throwing aside the old elements employed till then especially, all over the east, and among the rest, by the Mahomedans, Sicily put along with them the emblem of Christianity, the cross, in various forms, on some occasions with the letter V. four times repeated, and so placed together as to fall into the shape of this symbol, like what we find at No. 1245, p. 28; in other instances the cross is floriated, as at No. 1293, p. 47.
From the far 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, and the Persian gave us the parrot and the cheetah; the men of Africa 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 poetry and sculpture of the Greeks and Romans could the Sicilians have easily learned about the fabled griffin and the centaur; but it was left for their own wild imaginings to figure as they have, such an odd compound in one being as the animal—half elephant, half griffin—which we see in No. 1288, p. 45. Their daring flights of fancy in coupling the difficult with the beautiful, are curious; in one place, No. 1302, p. 50, large eagles are perched in pairs with a radiating sun between them, and beneath dogs, in pairs, running with heads turned back, &c.; in another, No. 1304, p. 51, 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, No. 8588, p. 222, we behold figured, harts, the letter M floriated, winged lions, crosses floriated, crosses sprouting out on two sides with fleurs-de-lis, four-legged monsters, some like winged lions, some biting their tails. Exeter Cathedral had a cloth of gold purple cope, figured with “draconibus volantibus ac tenentibus caudas proprias in ore,”225 doves in pairs upholding a cross, &c. Hardly elsewhere to be found are certain elements peculiar to the patterns upon silks from mediæval Sicily; such, for instance, as harts, and demi-dogs with very large wings, both animals having remarkably long manes streaming far behind them, No. 1279, p. 41; harts again, but lodged beneath green trees, in a park with paling about it, as in No. 1283, p. 43, and No. 8710, p. 269; that oft-recurring sun shedding its beams with eagles pecking at them, or gazing undazzled at the luminary, pp. 48, 50, 137, but sometimes stags, as at pp. 54, 239, carrying their well attired heads upturned to a large pencil of those sunbeams as they dart down upon them amid a shower of rain-drops. Of birds, the hawk, the eagle, double and single headed, the parrot, may be found on stuffs all over the east; not so, however, with the swan, yet this majestic creature was a favourite with Sicilians, and may be seen here often drawn with great gracefulness, as at Nos. 1277, p. 41; 1299, p. 49; 8264, p. 166; 8610, p. 232, &c.
The Sicilians showed their strong affection for certain plants and flowers. On a great many of the silks in this collection, from Palermitan looms, we see figured upon a tawny-coloured grounding, beautifully drawn foliage in green; which, on a nearer inspection, bears the likeness of parsley, so curled, crispy and serrated are its leaves. Besides their cherished parsley along with the vine-leaf for foliage, they had their especial favourite among flowers; and it is the centaurea cyanus, our corn blue-bottle, shown among others in No. 1283, &c. p. 43, No. 1291, p. 47, No. 1308, p. 53.
Another peculiarity of theirs is the introduction of the letter U, repeated so as at times to mark the feathering upon the tails of birds; at others, to fall into the shape of an O, as we pointed out at pp. 40, 225, 227, 228.
Whether it was that, like our own Richard I., crusaders in after times often made Sicily 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, figured on their cyclases and pennons, their flags and shields, certain is it that these Sicilians were particularly given to introduce a deal of heraldic charges—wyverns, eagles, lions rampant, and griffins—into their designs; and the very numerous occasions in which such elements of blazoning come in, are very noticeable, so that one of the features belonging to the Sicilian loom in its third period, is that, bating tinctures, it is so decidedly heraldic.
Not the last among the peculiarities of the third period in the Sicilian school is the use, for many of its stuffs, of two certain colours—murrey, for the ground, and a bright green for the pattern. When the fawn-coloured ground is gracefully sprinkled with parsley leaves, and nicely trailed with branches of the vine, and shows beasts and birds disporting themselves between the boughs of lively joyous green; the effect is cheerful, as may be witnessed in those specimens No. 8594, p. 226, No. 8602, p. 229, No. 8607, p. 231, Nos. 8609, 8610, p. 232, all of which so admirably exemplify the style.
All their beauty and happiness of invention, set forth by bold, free, spirited drawing, were bestowed, if not thrown away, 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 sure to be found wrought up along with the silk.
Though Palermo was, without doubt, the great workshop for weaving Sicilian silks, that trade used to be carried on not only in other cities of the island, but reached towns like Reggio and other such in Magna Græcia, northward up to Naples. We think that, as far as the two Sicilies are concerned, the growth of the cotton plant always went along with the rearing of the silkworm. Of the main-land loom we would specify No. 8256, p. 163, No. 8634, p. 242, No. 8638, p. 243.
Till within a few years the royal manufactory at Sta. Leucia, near Naples, produced silks of remarkable richness; and the piece, likely from that city itself, No. 721, p. 13, does credit to its loom, as it wove in the seventeenth 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 apart for themselves a good repute in some particulars, and a wide trade for their gold and silver tissues, their velvets, and their figured silken textiles. Yet, like as each of these free states had its own accent and provincialisms in speech, so too 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 draughtsmen, like those of Sicily, seem to have thought themselves bound to follow the style hitherto in use, brought by the Saracens, of figuring parrots and peacocks, gazelles, and even cheetahs, as we behold in the specimens here No. 8258, p. 163, and No. 8616, p. 234. But, at the same time, along with these eastern animals, she mixed up emblems of her own, such as angels clothed in white, like in the example the last mentioned. She soon dropped what was oriental from her patterns, which she began to draw in a larger, bolder manner, as we observe, under No. 8637, p. 243, No. 8640, p. 244, 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, here in England, during the fourteenth century, in particular request. In all likelihood they were, both of them, not of the deadened but sparkling kind, afterwards especially known as “tissue.” Exeter Cathedral, A.D. 1327, had a cope of silver tissue, or cloth of Lucca:—“una capa alba de panno de Luk.”226 At a later date, belonging to the same church, were two fine chasubles—one purple, the other red—of the same glittering stuff, “casula de purpyll panno,” &c.,227 where we find it specified that not only was the textile of gold, but of that especial sort called tissue. York cathedral was particularly furnished with a great 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,”228 making a distinction between tissue and the ordinary cloth of gold. But at the court of our Edward II. its favour would seem to have been the highest. In the Wardrobe Accounts of that king, we see the golden tissue, or Lucca cloth, several times mentioned. Whether the ceremony happened to be sad or gay, this glistening 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, for the blessing, was of Lucca cloth.229 Richard II.’s fondness for this cloth of gold was lately noticed, p. xxx.
Just about Edward II.’s time was it that velvet became known, and got into use amongst our churchmen for vestments, and our nobles for personal wear, and the likelihood is that Lucca was among the first places in Europe to weave it. The specimens here of this fine textile from Lucchese looms, though in comparison with those from Genoa, they be few and mostly after one manner—the raised or cut—still have now a certain historical value for the English workman: No. 1357, p. 72, 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, p. 192, 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 far off mediæval times not so conspicuous as she afterwards became for her textile industry, still must have from a remote period, encouraged within her walls, and over her narrow territory, the weaving of silken webs. Of these the earliest mention we anywhere find, is to be seen in the inventory of those costly vestments once belonging to our own St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, in the year 1295: besides a cope of Genoa cloth, that church had, from the same place, a hanging patterned with wheels and two-headed birds.230 Though this first description be scant, we read in it quite enough to gather that these Genoese cloths must have entirely resembled the textiles wrought at Lucca, but, in particular, in Sicily. Perhaps they had been carried by trade from Palermo to the north-west shores of Italy, whence they were brought in the same way to England, so that they may be deemed to have reached us not so much from the looms themselves of Genoa, as those of some other place, but through her then great port.
Of Genoa’s own weaving of beautiful velvets there can be no doubt, a reputation she keeps to the present day as far as plain velvet is concerned.
In this collection we have samples in every kind of Genoese velvets, from those with a smooth unbroken surface to the elaborately patterned ones—art-wrought velvets in fact—showing, together with wonderful skill in the weaving, much beauty of design. Among the plain velvets in which we have nothing but great softness and depth of pile, along with clear bright luminous tones of colour, No. 540, p. 3, is a very fair specimen for its delicious richness of pile; and No. 8334, p. 199, not merely for this property, but as well for its lightsome mellow deep tint of crimson.
Getting to what may be truly called art-velvets, we come to several specimens here. Some are raised or cut, the design being done in a pile standing well up by itself from out of a flat ground of silk, sometimes of the same, sometimes of another colour, and not unfrequently wrought in gold, as at pp. 18, 90, 107, 110, 263. Then we have at No. 7795, p. 145, an example of that precious kind—velvet upon velvet—in which the ground is velvet, and again of velvet is the pattern itself, but raised one pile higher and well above the other, so as to show its form and shape distinctly. Last of all we here find samples, as in No. 8323, p. 192, how the design was done in various coloured velvet. Such was a favourite in England, and called motley; in his will, A.D. 1415, Henry Lord Scrope bequeathed two vestments, one, motley velvet rubeo de auro; the other, motley velvet nigro, rubeo et viridi, &c.231
Venice does not seem to have been at any time, like Sicily and Lucca, smitten with the taste of imitating in her looms at home 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, A.D. 1327, figured with beasts, cum bestiis crocei coloris,232 is the solitary instance we know, upon which she wove, like the east, animals upon silks. She, however, set up for herself a new branch of textiles, and wrought for church use certain square webs of a crimson ground on which she figured, in gold, or on yellow silk, subjects taken from the New Testament, or the persons of saints and angels. These square pieces were as they yet are, employed, when sewed together in squares as frontals to altars, but when longwise much more generally as orphreys to chasubles, copes and other vestments. Of such stuffs must have been those large orphreys upon a dalmatic and tunicle, at St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, A.D. 1295. 233
Though not of so early a date as the thirteenth century, there are in this collection specimens of this Venetian web belonging to the sixteenth, which are very fine, No. 5900, p. 112, represents the resurrection of our Lord; so does No. 8976, p. 271, while No. 8978, p. 272, presents us with the coronation of the Virgin, and No. 8976, the Virgin and the Child, as also No. 1335, p. 71. Far below in worth are the same kind of webs wrought at Cologne, as will be noticed just now.
Any one that has ever looked upon the woodcuts done at Venice in the sixteenth century, such as illustrate, for instance, the Roman Pontifical, published by Giunta, the “Rosario della G. V. Maria,” by Varisco, and other such religious books from the Venetian press, will, at a glance, find on the webs before us from that state, the self-same style and manner in drawing, the same broad, nay, majestic fold and fall of drapery, and in the human form the same plumpness, and not unfrequently with the facial line almost straight; and there, but more especially about the hands and feet, a somewhat naturalistic shape; so near is the likeness in design that one is led to think that the men who cut the blocks for the printers also worked for the weavers of Venice, and sketched out the drawings for their looms.
By the fifteenth century Venice knew how to produce good damasks in silk and gold, and of an historiated kind: if we had nothing more than the specimen, No. 1311, p. 54, where St. Mary of Egypt is so well represented, it would be quite enough for her to claim for herself such a distinction. That like her neighbours, Venice wrought in velvet, there can be little or no doubt, and if she it was who made those deep piled stuffs, sometimes raised, sometimes pile upon pile, in which her painters loved to dress the personages, men especially, in their pictures, then, of a truth, Venetian velvets were 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, A.D. 1573, the second of the wise men is clad in a robe all made of crimson velvet, cut or raised after a design quite in keeping with the style of the period.
No insignificant article of Venetian textile workmanship was her laces wrought in every variety—in gold, in silk, in thread. The portrait of a Doge usually shows us that dignitary clothed in his dress of state. His wide mantle, having such large golden buttons, is made of some rich dull silver cloth; and upon his head is that curiously Phrygian-shaped ducal cap bound round with broad gold lace diapered after some nice pattern, as we see in the bust portrait of Doge Loredano, painted by John Bellini, and now in our National Gallery. Not only was the gold in the thread particularly good, but the lace itself in great favour at our court during one time, where it used to be bought, not by yard measure, but by weight; a pounde and a half of gold of Venys was employed “aboutes the making of a lace and botons for the king’s mantell of the garter.” 234 “Frenge of Venys gold,” appears twice, pp. 136, 163, in the wardrobe accounts of Edward IV.
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 needle, always had, as indeed they still have, a great reputation: sewed to table-covers, two specimens are found in this collection, described at p. 141.
Venetian linens, for fine towelling and napery in general, at one time were in favourite use in France during a part of the fifteenth century. In the “Ducs de Bourgogne,” by Le Comte de Laborde,235 more than once we meet with such an entry, as “une pièce de nappes, ouvraige de Venise,” &c.
Florence, always so industrious and art-loving, got for its loom, about the middle of the fourteenth century, a place in the foremost rank amid the weavers of northern Italy. Specimens of her earliest handicraft are yet few—only two—here; but one sample of the able way in which she knew how to diaper, well shows her ability: No. 8563, p. 215, woven in the fifteenth century, will prove this with reference to her secular silks. The pieces described at pp. 202, 264, witness the boldness of her design during the sixteenth century. In her webs, expressly woven for church-use, is it that she displays her great taste in design, and wonderful power—at least for that time, the fourteenth century—in gearing the loom: the violet silk damask, No. 1265, p. 36, and another like piece, No. 7072, p. 133, figured with angels swinging thuribles, or bearing crowns of thorns in the hands, or holding a cross, will warrant our remarks. The style of doing the face and hands in white of those otherwise yellow angels, is a peculiarity of the Tuscan loom.
The orphrey-webs of Florence are equally conspicuous for drawing and skill in weaving as her vestment textiles, and in beauty come up to those done at Venice, and far surpass anything of the kind ever wrought at Cologne; specimens of this sort of Florentine work may be seen at Nos. 4059, p. 89; 7080, p. 136; 7674, p. 142; 7791, p. 143; 197, p. 291. Along with these may be classed the hood of a cope, described at No. 8692, p. 260, as well as the apparels to the dalmatic and tunicle, p. 143, where the cherubic heads have white faces.
But it was of her velvets that Florence might be so warrantably proud. Our Henry VII. in his will, “Testamenta Vetusta,”236 bequeathed “to God and St. Peter, and to the abbot and prior and convent of our monastery of Westminster, the whole suit of vestments to be made at Florence in Italy.” Gorgeous and artistically designed was this textile, as we may yet see in one of these Westminster Abbey copes still in existence, and belonging to 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 nothing so rich in material, nor so beauteous in pattern, there are here, pp. 144, 145, two specimens of Florentine cut, crimson velvet on a golden ground, quite like in sort to the royal vestments, and having too that strong peculiarity upon them—the little gold thread loop shooting out of the velvet pile. Though a full century later than the splendid cope at Stonyhurst, and the two pieces Nos. 7792, 7799, these illustrate the peculiar style of Tuscan velvets.
Among the truly prince-like gifts of vestments to Lincoln Cathedral, by John of Gaunt and his duchess, are many made of the richest crimson velvet of both sorts, that is, plain, and cut or raised to a pattern upon a ground of gold, as for instance:—two red copes, of the which one is red velvet set with white harts lying in colours, full of these letters S. S., with pendents silver and gilt, the harts having crowns upon their necks with chains silver and gilt; and the other cope is of crimson velvet of precious cloth of gold, with images in the orphrey, &c. 237
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 to which was so wrought:—De purpyll velvete operata cum pynsheds de puro auro.238
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 mediæval times, as famous for her velvets, her brocades, or cloths of gold, as for her well wrought admirably fashioned armour, so strong and trustworthy for the field—so furbished and exquisitely damascened for courtly service. Still, in the sixteenth century she earned a name for her rich cut velvets, as we may see in the specimen, No. 698, p. 7; her silken net-work, No. 8336, p. 200, which may have led the way to weaving silk stockings; and her laces of the open tinsel kind once in such vogue for liturgical, as well as secular attire, as we have in No. 8331, p. 197.
Britain, from her earliest period, had textile fabrics varying in design and material; of the colours in the woollen garments worn by each of the three several classes into which our Bardic order was apportioned. Of the checkered pattern in Boadicea’s cloak we have spoken just now, p. xii.
Of the beauty and wide repute of English needlework, we shall have to speak when, a little further on, we reach the subject of embroidery.
From John Garland’s words, which we gave at p. xxii, it would seem that all 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 nunnery and homestead, was of the simplest make.
In olden times, the Egyptians wove in an upright loom, and beginning at top so as to weave downwards, sat at their work. In Palestine the weaver had an upright loom too, but beginning at bottom and working upwards, was obliged to stand. During the mediæval period the loom, here at least, was horizontal, as is shown by the one figured in that gorgeously illuminated Bedford Book of Hours, fol. 32, at which the Blessed Virgin Mary is seated weaving curtains for the temple.
As samples of one of the several kinds of work wrought by our nuns and mynchens, as well as English ladies, we refer to Nos. 1233, p. 24, 1256, p. 33, 1270, p. 38, demonstrating the ability of their handicraft as well as elegance in design during the thirteenth century. For specimens of the commoner sorts of silken textiles and of wider breadth, which began to be woven in this country under Edward III., it would be as hard as hazardous to direct the reader. Very recent examples of all sorts—velvets among the rest—may be found in the Brooke collection. To some students the piece of Old English printed chintz, No. 1622, p. 84, will not be without an interest.
For the finer sort of linen napery, Eylisham or Ailesham in Lincolnshire was famous during the fourteenth century. Exeter cathedral, A.D. 1327, had “unum manutergium de Eylisham”—a hand towel of Ailesham cloth.239
Our coarser native textiles in wool, in thread or in both, woven together, forming a stuff called “burel,” made of which St. Paul’s London, A.D. 1295, had a light blue chasuble;240 and Exeter cathedral, A.D. 1277, a long pall;241 all sorts, in fine, of heavier work, were wrought in our monasteries for men. By their rule the Benedictine monks, and all their offsets, were bound to give a certain number of hours every week-day to hand work, either at home or in the field. 242
Weeping over the wars and strife in England during the year 1265 and the woes of the people, our Matthew of Westminster sums up, among our losses, the fall in our trade of woollen stuffs, with which we used to supply the world. O Anglia olim gloriosa... licet maris angustata littoribus... tibi tamen per orbem benedixerunt omnium latera nationum de tuis ovium velleribus calefacta.243
The weaving in this country of woollen cloth, as a staple branch of trade, is older than some are willing to believe. Of the monks at Bath abbey we are told by a late writer, “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 this city one of the most considerable in the west of England for this manufacture.”244 Worcester cloth, which was of a fine quality, was so good, that by a chapter of the Benedictine Order, held A.D. 1422, at Westminster Abbey, it was forbidden to be worn by the monks, and declared smart enough for military men.245 Norwich, too, wove stuffs that were in demand for costly household furniture, for, A.D. 1394, Sir John Cobham bequeathed to his friends “a bed of Norwich stuff embroidered with butterflies.”246 In one of the chapels at Durham Priory there were four blue cushions of Norwich work.247 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 fine peculiar quality, to which the name itself of worsted was immediately given. Unto such a high repute did the new web grow that liturgical raiment and domestic furniture of the choicest sorts were made out of it; Exeter cathedral, among its chasubles, had several “de nigro worsted” in cloth of gold. Elizabeth de Bohun, A.D. 1356, bequeathed to her daughter the Countess of Arundel “a bed of red worsted embroidered;”248 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,”249 &c. Of the sixteen standards of worsted entailed with the bear and a chain which floated aloft in the ship of Beauchamp Earl of Warwick, we have spoken before (p. xliii.) In the “Fabric Rolls of York Minster” vestments made of worsted—there variously spelt “worsett,”250 and “woryst”251—are enumerated.
Irish cloth, white and red, in the reign of John, A.D. 1213, was much used in England; and in the household expenses of Swinford, bishop of Hereford, A.D. 1290, an item occurs of Irish cloth for lining. 252
But our weavers knew how to throw off from their looms, artistically designed and well-figured webs; in the “Wardrobe Accounts” of our Edward II. we read 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.”253 Such “salles,” as they were called in France, and “hullings,” or rather “hallings,” 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 V. of France, A.D. 1364, who began his reign some forty years after our Edward II.’s death, one set of such hangings is thus put down: “une salle d’Angleterre vermeille brodée d’azur, et est la bordeure à vignettes et le dedens de lyons, d’aigles et de lyepars,” quoted from the MS. No. 8356, in the Imperial Library, Paris, by Michel;254 while here in England, Richard Earl of Arundel, A.D. 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,”255 &c.; and Lady Bergavenny, after bequeathing her hullying of black, red, and green, to one friend, to another left her best stained hall.256
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 from the material—perhaps wool—which we sent her, she sent us back those precious garments she wove.257
Though industrious everywhere within her limits, some of her towns stood foremost for certain kinds of stuff, and Bruges became in the latter end of the fifteenth century conspicuous for its silken textiles. Here in England, the satins of Bruges were in great use for church garments; in Haconbie church, A.D. 1566, was “one white vestmente of Bridges satten repte in peces and a clothe made thereof to hange before our pulpitt;”258 and, A.D. 1520, York cathedral had “a vestment of balkyn (baudekin) with a crosse of green satten in bryges.”259
Her damask silks were equally in demand; and the specimens here will interest the reader. Nos. 8318, p. 190, 8332, p. 197, show the ability of the Bruges loom, while the then 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 beloved Isabella’s reconquered Granada. No. 8319, p. 191, 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, as the samples we have here under Nos. 8673, p. 254, 8674, p. 255, 8704, p. 264, will prove. Nay, this last specimen, 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 yet to be seen in one of the copes for Westminster Abbey given it by Henry VII.
Block-printed linen was, toward the end of the fourteenth century, another production of Flanders, of which pieces may be seen at Nos. 7022, p. 118, 7027, p. 120, 8303, p. 184, 8615, p. 234. Though to the eyes of many, these may look so poor, so mean; to men like the cotton-printers of Lancashire and other places they will have a strong attraction; to the scholar they will be deeply interesting as suggestive 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, in a fine sheet wrapped about the body of some old bishop discovered, along with several pieces of ancient silks, and still more ancient English embroidery, in a grave opened by Mr. Raine, A.D. 1827, within that grand northern cathedral.
What Bruges was in silks and velvets Yprès, in the sixteenth century, became for linen, and for many years Flemish linens had been 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 Yprès.260 Of this textile instances may be seen at pp. 34, 73, 75, 124, 203, 205, 255, 263.
French silks, now in such extensive use, were until the end of the sixteenth century not much cared for in France itself, and seldom heard of abroad. The reader, then, must not be astonished at finding so few examples of the French loom, in a collection of ancient silken textiles.
France, as England, used of old to behold her women, old and young, rich and poor, while filling up their leisure hours in-doors, at work on a small loom, and weaving certain narrow webs, often of gold, and diapered with coloured silks, as we mentioned before (p. xxii.) Of such French wrought stuffs belonging to the thirteenth century, some samples are described at pp. 29, 130, 131.
In damasks, her earliest productions are of the sixteenth century, and are described at pp. 13, 205, 206; and the last is a favourable example of what the loom then was in France; everything later is of that type so well known to everybody. In several of her textiles a leaning towards classicism in design is discernible.
Though so few, her cloths of gold, pp. 9, 15, are good, more especially the fine one at p. 104.
Her velvets, too, pp. 14, 89, 106, are satisfactory.
Satins from France are not many here.
The curious and elaborately ornamented gloves, p. 105, which got into fashion, especially for ladies, at the end of the sixteenth century, will be a welcome object for such as are curious in the history of women’s dress, in France and England.
Quilting, too, on coverlets, shown at pp. 13, 104, displays the taste of our neighbours in such stitchery, so much in use among them and ourselves from the sixteenth century.
Like Flanders, France knew how to weave fine linen, which here in England was much in use for ecclesiastical as well as household purposes. Three new cloths of Rains (Rennes in Brittany) were, A.D. 1327, in use for the high altar in Exeter cathedral,261 and many altar-cloths of Paris linen. In the poem of the “Squier of Low Degree,” the lady is told
Your blankettes shal be of fustyane,
Your shetes shal be of cloths of rayne;
and, A.D. 1434, Joane Lady Bergavenny devises in her will, “two pair sheets of Raynes, a pair of fustians,” &c.262 For her Easter “Sepulchre” Exeter had a pair of this Rennes sheeting; “par linthiaminum de Raynys pro sepulchro.”263
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 have named “orphrey web.” Since by far the greater part of this collection, as it now exists, had been made in Germany, beginning with Cologne, it is, as might be expected, well supplied with specimens of a sort of stuff, if not peculiar, at least abounding in that country. Those same liturgical ornaments which Venice and Florence wove with such artistic taste for Italian church use, Cologne succeeded in doing for Germany. Her productions, however, are every way far below in beauty Italy’s like works. The Italian orphrey-webs are generally done in gold or yellow silk, upon a crimson ground of silk. Florence’s are often distinguished from those of Venice by the introduction of white for the faces; Cologne’s vary from both by introducing blue, while the material is almost always very poor, and the weaving coarse.
The earliest specimen here of this Cologne orphrey-web is No. 8279, p. 174; but it is far surpassed by many others, such as are, for instance, to be found at pp. 61, 62, 63, 64, 69, 80, 82, 116, 117, 118, 119, 174, 175, 252, 253. Among these some have noticeable peculiarities; No. 1329, p. 61, a good specimen, has the persons of the saints so woven that the heads, hands, and emblems are wrought with the needle; the same, too, in Nos. 7023, p. 118, and 8667, p. 252; in No. 1373, though the golden ground looks very fresh and brilliant, the gilding process, as on wood, has been employed. Here in England this orphrey web was in church use and called “rebayn de Colayn.”264
The piece of German napery at No. 8317, p. 190, of the beginning of the fifteenth century will be to those curious about household linen, an acceptable specimen.
If by hazard while reading some old inventory of church vestments the reader should stumble upon some entry mentioning a chasuble made of cloth of Cologne, let him 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, just as was the frontal made out of pieces of woven Venice orphreys at No. 8976, p. 271.
The countries whence silks came to us are numerous; with confidence, however, we may say, that till the middle of the fifteenth century, when we began to weave some of them for ourselves, the whole geography of silken textiles lay within the basin of the Mediterranean to the west, and the continent of Asia to the east.
Though mention is often made of tissues coming from various places, those cities are always to be found upon the map we have just marked out. Among those spoken of Antioch, Tarsus, Alexandria, Damascus, Byzantium, Cyprus, Trip or Tripoli, and Bagdad, are easily recognized, as well as the later centres of trade and manufacture, Venice, Genoa and Lucca. To fix the localities of a few others would be but guess-work.
At the beginning of the fourteenth century is mentioned occasionally a silk called “Acca,” and, from the description of it, 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; “unum vestimentum... de panno quem Accam dicimus; cujus campus est aerius. In reliquis vero partibus resultat auri fulgor.”265 To some it would look as if this stuff took its name from having been brought to us through the port of Acre. We lean towards this belief on finding, on the authority of Macri, in his valuable Hierolexicon, Venice, 1735, pp. 5, 542, that so used to be written the name of the ancient Ptolemais in Syria.
What in one age, and at a particular place, happened to be so well made, and hence became so eagerly sought for, at a later period, and in another place, got to be much 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. All over 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 olden Zoroasterian traditions about the “hom” or tree of life separating lions, and having all about lion-hunting cheetahs, and birds of various sorts.
With regard to the whole of Asia, we learn that its many peoples, from the earliest times, knew how not only to weave cloth of gold, but figure it too with birds and beasts. Almost two thousand years afterwards, Marco Polo, in the thirteenth century, found exactly the very same kinds of textile known in the days of Darius still everywhere, from the shores of the Mediterranean to far Cathay, in demand and woven. What he says of Bagdad, he repeats in fewer words about many other cities.266
In finding their way to England these fabrics had given them not so often the names of the places where they had been wrought, but, 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, of the few terms that still outlive the mediæval period, one 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 footsteps. Stuffs so figured brought with them to the west the name “diaspron” or diaper, bestowed upon them at Constantinople. But about the twelfth century, so very far did the city of Damascus, even then long celebrated for its looms, outstrip all other places for beauty of design, that her silken textiles were eagerly sought for everywhere, 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. After having been for ages the epithet betokening all that was rich and good in silk, “Samit” had to be 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 we said before, its famous name from Bagdad.
Many are the specimens in this collection furnishing proofs of the ancient weavers’ dexterity in their management of the loom, but especially of the artists’ taste in setting out so many of their intricate and beautiful designs.
What to some will be happily curious is that we have this very day before our eyes pieces, in all likelihood, from the self-same web which furnished the material, centuries ago, for vestments and ornaments used of old in the cathedrals of England. Let any one turn to p. 122, and, after looking at number 7036, compare that silk with this item in the inventory of St. Paul’s, London, A.D. 1225: “Item, Baudekynus rubeus cum Sampsone constringente ora leonum,” &c.267 See also number 8589, and number 8235.
An identification between very many samples, brought together here, of ancient textiles in silk, and the descriptions of such stuffs afforded 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. 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 gild of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Boston had a care cloth of silke dornex and church furniture.268 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 it was used in chasubles for orphreys.269 A specimen of Dornex may be seen, No. 7058, p. 129. See also York Fabric Rolls, pp. 291, 297, 298, 300, 305.
Buckram, a cotton textile, has a history and a reputation somewhat varied.
In our oldest inventories mention is often made of a “panus Tartaricus” or Tartary cloth, which was, if not always, at least often purple. Asia, especially in its eastern borders, became famous for the fine textiles it wove out of cotton, and dyed in every colour. Cities got for themselves a reputation for some especial excellence in their looms, and as Mosul had the name of Muslin from that place given to the fine and delicate cotton webs it wrought, so the term of buckram for another sort of cotton textile came from the city of Bokhara in Tartary where this cloth was made. All along the middle ages buckram was much esteemed for being costly and very fine, and consequently fit for use in church vestments, and for secular personal wear. John Grandison, consecrated bishop of Exeter, A.D. 1327, gave to his cathedral flags of white and red buckram;270 and among the five very rich veils for covering the moveable lectern in that church, three were lined with blue “bokeram.”271 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.272 The coarse thick fabric which now goes by the name was anything but the olden 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.273 It was wide enough for half a piece to form the adornment of a high altar.274
The difficulty of understanding what this textile was will vanish when we remember that in Arabic “bord” to this day 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 too, 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. Burdalisaunder was a silken web in different coloured stripes, and specimens of this, at one time known as “stragulata” may be found here at pp. 21, 27, 33, 56, 57, 161, 225, 226, &c. Though made in so many places round the Mediterranean, this silk took its name, at least in England, from Alexandria, because it was to be had in that Egyptian city, always celebrated for its silks, either better made or at a much lower price than elsewhere.
In all likelihood 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 “stragulata” or “burd Aliscaunder” we behold the oldest known design for any textile.
Fustian, of which two of its forms we still have in velveteen and corduroy, was originally wove at Fustat, on the Nile, with a warp of linen thread and a woof of thick cotton, which was so twilled and cut that it showed on one side a thick but low pile; and the web so 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 to this country before the Normans coming hither, for our Anglo-Saxon countryman, St. Stephen Harding, when a Cistercian abbot and an old man, circ. A.D. 1114, forbade chasubles in his church to be made of anything but fustian or plain linen: “neque casulas nisi de fustaneo vel lino sine pallio aureo vel argenteo,” &c.275 The austerity of his rule reached even the ornament of the church. From such a prohibition we are not to draw as a conclusion that fustian was at the time a mean material; quite the contrary, it was a seemly textile. Years afterwards, in the fourteenth century, Chaucer tells us of his knight:—
Of fustian he wered a gepon.276
Fustian, so near akin to velvet, is more especially noticed along with what is said upon that fine textile.
In the fifteenth century Naples had a repute for weaving fustians, but our English churchwardens, not being learned in geography, made some laughable bad spelling of this, like some other continental stuffs: “Fuschan 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, its lightness, were, as they still are to some Asiatics, not the only charms belonging to this stuff: it was esteemed equally as much for the taste in 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 its eastern nations, the higher they found the point of excellence which had been reached by those people in weaving silk and gold into splendid fabrics. If the silkworm lived, nay, thrived there, the cotton plant was in its home, its birth-place, in those regions. Where stood Nineveh Mosul stands now.
Like many cities of Middle 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, being gifted with such quick feeling of finger, could spin thread from this cotton of more than hair-like fineness. Cotton then took with them, on many occasions, the place of silk in the loom; but gold was not forgotten in the texture. This new fabric, 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. At once, and by the world’s accord, on it was bestowed as its distinctive name, the name of the place where it was wrought in such perfection. Hence, whether wove with or without gold, we call to this day this cotton web Muslin, from the Asiatic city of Mosul.
Cloth of Areste is another of those terms for woven stuffs which students of textiles had never heard of were it not to be found in our old English deeds and inventories. The first time we meet it is in an order given, A.D. 1244, by Henry III. for finding two of these cloths of Areste with which two copes had to be made for royal chapels: “Duos pannos del Areste ad duas capas faciendas,” &c.277 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—“de serico albo diasperato de Arest,”278—as many as thirty and more hangings of this same texture.279
From the description of these pieces we gather that this so-called cloth of Areste must have been as beautiful as it was 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—“campus aureus cum leonibus et aquilis bicapitibus de aurifilo contextis—campus rubeus cum historia Passionis Domini et sepulturæ ejusdem.” These designs speak of the looms at work in the middle ages on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, and we are much strengthened in this thought by beholding how the death and burial of our Lord, like the sample here, number 8278, p. 170-1, are shown on a crimson ground, as we shall have to instance further on under Symbolism, § VII.
That this sort of stuff, wove of silk and gold, was of any kind of Arras, or made in that town, to our seeming is a very unhappy guess. Arras had not won for itself a reputation 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—“ad armaturam faciendam.”280 The term “Areste” has little or nothing in it common to the word “Arras,” as written either in French, or under its Latin appellation “Atrebatum.”
Among the three meanings for the mediæval “Aresta,” one is, any kind of covering. To us, then, it seems as if these cloths of Areste took their name not from the place whereat they had been wove, but from the use to which, if not always, for the most part, we put them—that of hangings about our churches, since in the St. Paul’s inventory they are usually spoken of as such—“culcitræ pendules, panni penduli.”281 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 it to have been so fashioned and so used—“maniculariis apparatis quodam panno rubeo diasperato de Laret, &c.”282
For not a few it would be hard to understand some at least among those epithets meant in by-gone days to tell how
Silks Were Distinguished Through Their Colours and Shades of Colour
To the inventories of vestments and church-stuffs of all sorts must we go to gather the information which we want about the textiles in use in this country at any particular period during by-gone days. The men who had, in the thirteenth century, the drawing up of such lists, seem to have been gifted with a keen eye for the varieties of shade and tints in the colour of silks then before them. For instance, a chasuble at St. Paul’s, London, A.D. 1295, is set down thus:—“De sameto purpureo aliquantulum sanguineo”—that is, made of samit (a thick silk) dyed in a purple somewhat bordering on a blood-red tone. Such language is unmistakable; not so, however, many other terms at the time in common use, and though well understood then, are now not so intelligible. We are told in the same inventory283 several times of a “pannus Tarsicus,” a Tarsus cloth, and of a “pannus Tarsici coloris,” a Tarsus coloured cloth. What may have been the distinctive qualities of the stuffs woven at Tarsus, what the peculiar beauty in that tint to which that once so celebrated city had given its own name, we cannot say. We think, however, those Tarsus textiles were partly of silk, partly of fine goats’ hair, and for this reason Varro tells284—“Tondentur (capræ) quod magnis villis sunt, in magna parte Phrygiæ; unde Cilicia, et cætera ejus generis ferri solent. Sed, quod primum ea tonsura in Cilicia sit instituta, nomen id Cilicas adjecisse dicunt.” Goats are shorn in a great part of Phrygia, because there they have long shaggy hair. Cilicia (the Latin for hair cloths) and other things of the same sort, are usually brought from that country. For the reason that in Cilicia such a shearing of goats arose, they say that the name of Cilician was given to such stuffs woven of goats’ hair. As Tarsus is, so always was it, the head city in all that part of Asia Minor known of old as Phrygia. Hence then we think that—
Cloth of Tarsus, of Tars, &c., was woven of fine goats’ hair and silk. But this web was in several colours, and always looked upon as very costly.
The Tarsus colour itself was, as we take it, some shade of purple differing from, and perhaps to some eyes more beautiful than, the Tyrian dye. 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, their dyeing matter; and when it is borne in mind 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 moments of application, we may easily understand how the difference arose between the two tints of purple.
We are strengthened in our conjecture that not only was the cloth of Tarsus of a rare and costly kind, but its tint some shade of royal purple, from the fact that while noticing the robes worn on a grand public occasion by a king, Chaucer thus sketches the prince:—
The gret 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, &c.285
Sky-blue was a liturgical colour everywhere in use for certain festivals throughout England, as we have shown in another place.286 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 often specified; and a good specimen of the tint is given us, No. 709, p. 9. Old St. Paul’s, London, had several pieces of baudekin of this colour: “baudekynus murretus cum griffonibus datus pro anima. Alphonsi filii regis E.”287
Going far down, and much below the middle ages, Purple, in all its tones, and tints, and shades, was spoken of and looked upon as allowable to be worn in garments only to worshipful, ennobled, or royal personages. Whether it glowed with the brightness it seemed to have stolen from the rose, or wore its darkest tone it could borrow from the violet, whether it put on any one of those hundred shades to be found between those two extremes, it mattered not; it was gazed at with an admiring, a respectful eye. Eagerly sought out, and bought at high price, were those textiles that showed this colour, and had been dyed at Tyre, Antioch, Tarsus, Alexandria, Byzantium, or Naples. All these places were at one time or another, in days of old, famous for their looms, no less than their ability in the dyeing, especially of purple, among the nations living on the shores of the Mediterranean; and each of them had in its own tone a shade which distinguished it from that of all the others. What the tint of purple was which established this difference we cannot at this distance of time, and with our means of knowing, justly say. Of this, however, we are perfectly aware, that silks of purple usually bore their specific name from those above-named cities, as we perceive while reading the old inventories of our churches and cathedrals. Moreover, our native writers let us know that, if not always from Greece, it was through that country that purple textiles were brought to England. Besides speaking of a conversation held about, beside other things, the produce of Greece in purple silks—“Græcorum purpuris, et pannis holosericis”—Gerald Barry gives us to understand that in his days not only were our churches sumptuously hung with costly palls and purple silks, but that these textiles were the work of Grecian looms—“rex (Willielmus Rufus) ecclesiam quandam (in nova foresta) intraret quam adeo pulchram et decentius ornatam auletis historicis, et pretiosis Græcorum palliis, pannis holosericis et purpureis undique vestitam,” &c.288
Silks woven of two colours, so that one of them showed itself unmixed and quite distinct on one side, and the second appeared equally clean on the other—a thing sometimes now looked upon as a wonder in modern weaving—might occasionally be met with here at the mediæval period: Exeter Cathedral had, A.D. 1327:—“Unus pannus sericus curtus rubei coloris interius et crocei coloris exterius.”289
Shot, or, as they were then called, changeable silks, were fashionable in England during the sixteenth century, for when the King’s (Edward VI.) Lord of Misrule rode forth with great pageantry, among other personages there came “afor xx. of ys consell on horsbake in gownes of chanabulle lynyd with blue taffata and capes of the sam, like sage (men); then cam my lord with a gowne of gold furyd,” &c.290 At York Cathedral, A.D. 1543, there was “a vestment of changeable silke,”291 “besides one of changeable taffety for Good Friday.” 292
Marble silk had a weft of several colours so put together and woven as to make the whole web look like marble, stained with a variety of tints; hence it got its name. In the year 1295 St. Paul’s had “paruram de serico marmoreo”293—an apparel of marble silk; “tunica de quodam panno marmoreo spisso”[7]—a tunicle of a certain thick marble cloth; “tunica de diaspro marmoreo spisso”294—a tunicle of thick diaper marble; “casula marmorei coloris”295—a chasuble of marble colour. During full three centuries this marble silk found great favour among us since H. Machyn, in his very valuable and curious Diary tells his readers 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,”[9] &c., to meet her the 6th of November, A.D. 1551.296
Notes
1 Lib. viii. c. 47.
2 Lyric. c. vi. vi.
3 De Re Rustica, ii. 2.
4 Gesta Regum Anglorum, t. 1. lib. ii. p. 198, ed. Hardy.
5 Journal of the Archæological Institute, t. XXII. p. 254.
6 Plin. lib. viii.
7 Herod. book iv. 74.
8 Exodus ix. 31.
9 Joshua ii. 6.
10 Proverbs vii. 16.
11 Isaiah xix. 9.
12 Herodotus, b. ii. c. 182, Rawlinson’s Translation, t. ii. p. 275.
13 Ib. b. iii. c. 47.
14 Herodotus, t. ii. pp. 442-43.
15 “Ancient Egypt,” by Sir Gardiner Wilkinson, t. iii. p. 122.
16 Ib. p. 125.
17 Georg. lib. ii. 120-121.
18 Thomson in the Philosophical Magazine, 3rd series, t. v. num. 29, Nov. 1834.
19 No. 152.
20 Hebrew and English Lexicon. London, 1813, p. 415.
21 De Vestitu Heb. Sac., lib. I. cap. viii. § 8.
22 Apoc. xviii. 12.
23 Hist. Anim. V. c. 19, p. 850, ed. Duval.
24 Tibullus, l. ii. 6.
25 De Beneficiis, l. vii. c.
26 Solinus, c. 1.
27 Quoted by Yates, Textrinum Antiquorum, p. 181.
28 Suetonius, c. 52.
29 Lampridius, c. 26.
30 Vopiscus, c. 45.
31 Severus, c. 40.
32 Early Travels in Palestine, ed. T. Wright, p. 71.
33 Rog. Hoveden, Ann. ed. Savile, Rer. Ang. Script., p. 382.
34 Ib. p. 382, b.
35 Ordericus Vitalis, Ecc. Hist., l. v. p. 584.
36 De Laudibus Virginitatis, Opp. ed. Giles, 15.
37 Concil. Ecc. Brit. ed. Spelman, i. 256.
38 P. 421.
39 Dugdale’s St. Paul’s, p. 264.
40 Liber de Antiq. Legibus, pp. 3, 223.
41 Leland’s Itinerary, t. 7, p. 99.
42 Stowe’s Survey, B. iii. p. 31.
43 Ib. 607.
44 Raine’s St. Cuthbert, p. 196.
45 De Natura Rerum, p. 99, published under the direction of the Master of the Rolls.
46 Ib. p. 304.
47 Ed. T. Wright, p. 272.
48 Exodus xxxix. 1, 2, 3.
49 Q. Curtii Rufi, lib. iii. cap. xiii. 34, p. 26, ed Foss.
50 Ib. lib. ix. cap. i. p. 217.
51 Ib. lib. iii. cap. ii. p. 4, cap. viii. p. 16.
52 Ib. lib. ix. cap. vii. p. 233.
53 Ib. cap. vii. p. 233.
54 Ib. lib. iii. cap. iii. p. 7.
55 Book XXXIII. c. 19. Dr. Bostock’s Translation.
56 Liber Pontificalis, t. ii. p. 332, ed. Vignolio, Romæ, 1752; Hierurgia, 2nd ed. p. 275.
57 Batelli, de Sarco. Marm. Probi Anicii et Probæ Faltoniæ in Temp. Vatic. Romæ. 1705.
58 Cancellieri, De Secretariis Basil. Vatic. ii. 1000.
59 T. II. p. 22.
60 Cochet, Le Tombeau de Childeric Ier, p. 174.
61 Cochet, Le Tombeau de Childeric Ier p. 175.
62 Ib. p. 176.
63 Liber Pontificalis, l. iii., p. 201, ed. Vignolia.
64 Liber Eliensis, ed. Stewart, p. 208.
65 P. 202.
66 Mr. Raine, St. Cuthbert, p. 209.
67 Dugdale’s Mon. Angl. t. viii., p. 1363.
68 Dugdale, p. 318.
69 Annalium, &c., p. 276, ed. Savile.
70 Liber Quotidianus Garderobæ, p. 354.
71 Ib., p. 6.
72 Ancient Kalendars, &c., ed. Palgrave, t. iii., 358.
73 I. p. 43, &c.
74 Excerpta Historica, p. 90.
75 Privy Purse Expenses of Elizabeth of York, p. 33, ed. Nicolas.
76 Privy Purse Expenses of Princess Mary, ed. Madden, p. 87.
77 Ib. p. 86.
78 Mon. Anglic. II. 222.
79 Pp. 229, &c.
80 Monasticon Anglicanum, ed. Dugdale, t. viii. p. 1282.
81 Ib.
82 Ib. t. i. p. 202, new ed.
83 Saint Cuthbert, by J. Raine, p. 194.
84 Poems, ed. Nicolas, t. iv. p. 27.
85 Dugdale’s St. Paul’s, p. 335.
86 Ib.
87 Ib.
88 Acts. c. xii. vv. 21-23.
89 Ant. l. xix. 8.
90 Ancient Egyptians, iii. 130.
91 Church of our Fathers, i. 469.
92 Mon. Anglic. t. i. p. 382.
93 Hist. Elien. lib. ii., c. 139, p. 283, ed. Steuart.
94 Lib. viii. c. 47.
95 In Probini et Olybrii Consulatum, 177-182.
96 T. ii. p. 131.
97 Rot. Cancel. 56 Henrici III. Compot. Will. de Glouc.
98 Mon. Anglic. ii. 7.
99 Wardrobe Accounts of King Edward IV. p. 117, ed. N. H. Nicolas.
100 Mon. Anglic. ii. 167.
101 Hist. Ecc. lib. i. c. 29.
102 Bedæ Hist., ed. Smith, p. 691.
103 Pp. 282-88.
104 Dugdale’s St. Paul’s, new ed. pp. 316, &c.
105 Wills and Inventories, part i. p. 3, published by the Surtees Society.
106 Lives of the Bishops of Exeter, and a History of the Cathedral, by Oliver, pp. 297, 298.
107 Ibid. 313.
108 Ellis’s Metrical Romances, i. 360.
109 Poems, ed. Nicolas, t. iv. p. 26.
110 Dugdale’s St. Paul’s, new ed. p. 318.
111 Ellis’s Metrical Romances, t. ii. p. 253.
112 Poems, ed. Nicolas, t. iii. p. 83.
113 Ancient English Met. Rom., ed. Ritson, t. iii. pp. 8, 9.
114 Polycraticus, lib. VIII. c. xii.
115 Ellis’s Met. Rom. i. 15.
116 Roll of Caerlaverock, ed. Wright, p. 1.
117 Ibid. p. 2.
118 Ellis’s Met. Rom. ii. 156.
119 Wills and Inventories, p. 3.
120 Oliver, p. 299.
121 Ib. p. 315.
122 The Vision, Passus Sextus, t. i. p. 117, ed. Wright.
123 P. 317.
124 P. 318.
125 P. 323.
127 Prologue, Poems, ed. Nicolas, ii. 14.
128 Fabric Rolls, &c. p. 227.
129 Poems, ii. 137.
130 Baronage of England, Dugdale, i. 246.
131 Mon. Anglic. viii. 1282.
132 P. 335.
133 Ed. Oliver, p. 317.
134 Roll. p. 30.
135 St. Paul’s ed. Dugdale, p. 336.
136 P. 354.
137 Roll of the Household Expenses of Swinford, Bishop of Hereford, t. ii. p. xxxvi. ed. Web. for the Camden Society.
138 Mon. Anglic. ed. Dugdale, new edition, p. viii. 1363, a.
139 Ib. p. 1366, a.
140 Wills and Inventories, t. i. p. 25, published by the Surtees Society.
141 Ed. Halliwell, p. 163.
142 Nicolas’s Testamenta Vetusta, t. i. p. 12.
143 Ib. p. 14.
144 Ib. p. 99.
145 P. 318.
146 P. 323.
147 Ed. Oliver, p. 317.
148 Ed. Dugdale, p. 323.
149 Reliquiæ Antiquæ, i. 129.
150 Test. Vet. i. 227.
151 Fabric Rolls, p. 309.
152 Ib. p. 311.
153 Ib. p. 310.
154 Chron. S. Monast. Cassin. Lib. iii. cap. 73, p. 450, ed. Muratori.
155 Knight’s Tale, l. 2159-60.
156 P. 297.
157 P. 298.
158 St. Paul’s, ed. Dugdale, p. 323.
159 Ib. p. 322.
160 Ib. p. 318.
161 Squire of Low Degree, ed. Ritson.
162 “Romaunt of the Rose,” l. 900.
163 Fabric Rolls of York Cathedral, p. 230.
164 The Prologue, 447.
165 Serm. lib. i. satir. v.
166 Lib. Pon. ii. 257.
167 Ibid. 258.
168 Poematum, Liber II. iv.
169 Lib. Pontif. ii. 243.
170 Ib. ii. 196.
171 Ib. ii. 198.
172 Ib. ii. 209.
173 T. iii. p. 84.
174 Pp. 445, 448, second edition.
175 Raine’s St. Cuthbert, p. 196.
176 Lib. Pontif. ii. 282.
177 Ibid. 240.
178 De Vita S. Martini lib. ii.
179 Dugdale’s St. Paul’s, p. 318.
180 T. iii. p. xx.
181 T. viii. plate 5.
182 Ib. p. 84.
183 P. 389.
184 Ed. Oliver, p. 298.
185 Ib. p. 312.
186 Plate v. p. 53.
187 Plate xii. p. 141.
188 Dugdale’s St. Paul’s, p. 318.
189 Ib.
190 York Fabric Rolls, p. 230.
191 Hist. Anglic. Script. X. t. i. p. 602, ed. Twysden.
192 Rog. de Wendover, Chronica, t. iv. p. 127, ed. Coxe.
193 P. 322.
194 Fabric Rolls, p. 310.
195 Matt. Paris, p. 249.
196 Wills, &c. of the Northern Counties of England, Surtees Society, p. 6.
197 Tom. ii. p. 501.
198 Lelandi Collectanea, t. iv. p. 308.
199 Excerpta Historica, p. 312.
200 Dugdale’s St. Paul’s, pp. 328-9.
201 Ibid. p. 331.
202 Inventory of the Chapel, Windsor Castle, Mon. Ang. viii. 1363.
203 Excerpta Historica, p. 121.
204 Poems, ed. Nicolas, t. vi. p. 134.
205 Hist. ed. Dugdale, p. 336.
206 The Squire of Low Degree.
207 Ellis’s Metrical Romances, t. iii. p. 167.
208 Matt. Paris, p. 661.
209 V. 2569-70.
210 Warton’s Hist. of English Poetry, t. ii. p. 8.
211 Leland’s Collectanea, t. iv. p. 220.
212 Machyn’s Diary, p. 102.
213 Silvestre De Sacy, Chrestomathie Arabe, t. ii. p. 287.
214 Oliver, p. 298.
215 Test. Vet. i. p. 228.
216 Asserius, De Rebus Gestis Ælfredi, ed. Wise, p. 33.
217 Will. Malmes. Gesta Regum Anglorum, t. ii. p. 415, ed. Duffus Hardy.
218 Plates, 18, 20, 22.
219 Quintus Curtius, Lib. III. cap. iii. p. 7.
220 Ibid. Lib. IV. cap. xv. p. 72.
221 Oliver, p. 299.
222 Ibid.
223 I Viaggi di Marco Polo, ed. A. Bartoli, Firenze, 1865, p. 345.
224 Genesis ii. 9.
225 Oliver, p. 345.
226 Oliver, p. 315.
227 P. 344.
228 York Fabric Rolls, p. 308.
229 Archæologia, t. xxvi. pp. 337, 344.
230 Hist. of St. Paul’s, ed. Dugdale, pp. 318, 329.
231 Rymer’s Fœdera, t. 9, p. 274.
232 Oliver, p. 313.
233 Ed. Dugdale, p. 321.
234 Privy Purse Expenses of Elizabeth of York, p. 8.
235 T. ii. Preuves, p. 107.
236 Ed. Nicolas, t. i. p. 33.
237 Mon. Anglic. viii. 1281.
238 Oliver, p. 345.
239 Oliver, p. 314.
240 Dugdale’s St. Paul’s, p. 323.
241 Oliver, p. 298.
242 Reg. S. Ben. c. xlviii. De Opere Manuum quotidiano, p. 129; c. lvii. De Artificibus Monasterii, p. 131; ed. Brockie, t. i. “Lena” is the mediæval Latin for a bed coverlet.
243 Flores Histor. p. 396. Frankfort, A.D. 1601.
244 Monasticon Anglicanum, t. ii. p. 259.
245 Benedict. in Anglia, ed. Reyner, App. p. 165.
246 Testamenta Vetusta, ed. Nicolas, t. i. p. 136.
247 Hist. Dunelm. Scriptores Tres. Append. p. cclxxxvi.
248 Testamenta Vetusta, i. 61.
249 Ibid. p. 227.
250 Pp. 301, 305.
251 P. 302.
252 Ed. Web. for the Camden Society, p. 193, t. i.
253 Archæologia, t. xxvi. p. 344.
254 Tom. i. p. 49.
255 Test. Vetust. t. i. p. 130.
256 Ibid. pp. 228, 229.
257 Hist. p. 396, Frankfort, A.D. 1601.
258 Church Furniture, ed. Peacock, p. 94.
259 Fabric Rolls, p. 302.
260 Oliver’s Exeter, p. 356.
261 Oliver, p. 314.
262 Test. Vet. i. 227.
263 Oliver, p. 340.
264 Testamenta Eborac, iii. 13.
265 Mon. Anglic. ii. 221.
266 I Viaggi di Marco Polo, ed. A. Bartoli, Firenze, 1863.
267 Dugdale’s St. Paul’s, p. 328.
268 Peacock, p. 204.
269 Oliver, pp. 359, 365.
270 Ib. p. 319.
271 Ib. p. 329.
272 Her Privy Purse Expenses, ed. Nicolas, p. 22, &c.
273 Oliver, p. 312.
274 Yorkshire Wills. Part i. p. 174.
275 Mon. Anglic. ed. Dugdale, v. 225.
276 The Prologue, Poems, ed. Nicolas, ii. 3.
277 Excerpta Historica, p. 404.
278 St. Paul’s Cathedral, ed. Dugdale, p. 322.
279 Ibid. p. 329.
280 St. Paul’s Cathedral, ed. Dugdale, p. 329.
281 Ibid. p. 329.
282 Ibid. p. 335.
283 Pp. 322, 323.
284 De Re Rustica, lii. cap. xi.
285 Knightes Tale, Poems, ed. Nicolas, ii. 64-5.
286 Church of our Fathers, t. ii. p. 259.
287 St. Paul’s, ed. Dugdale, p. 328, &c.
288 Giraldus Cambrensis, De Instructione Principum, pp. 168-173.
289 Oliver, p. 316.
290 Diary of Henry Machyn, ed. Nichols for the Camden Society, p. 13.
291 Fabric Rolls, p. 301.
292 Ibid. p. 311.
293 Ibid. p. 320.
294 Ibid. p. 322.
295 Ibid. p. 323.
296 Pp. 11, 12.