Section I.—TEXTILES.

Underits 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

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 vellendimos.” 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 GelæsiFlumen.[2]

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 theinhabitants 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, bornA.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 agood number of threads, so as to work the cloths called polymita, was first taught in Alexandria; to divide by checks, in Gaul.[6]

[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.

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.

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, Herodotus[7]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.

[7]Herod. book iv. 74.

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 wornsuch. 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 theirlinum, 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]

[8]Exodus ix. 31.

[9]Joshua ii. 6.

[10]Proverbs vii. 16.

[11]Isaiah xix. 9.

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 worthyof 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.

[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.

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]

[15]“Ancient Egypt,” by Sir Gardiner Wilkinson, t. iii. p. 122.

[16]Ib. p. 125.

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 lanaVelleraque ut foliis depectant tenuia Seres?[17]Soft wool from downy groves the Æthiop weaves,And Seres comb their silken fleece from leaves—

Quid nemora Æthiopum, molli canentia lanaVelleraque ut foliis depectant tenuia Seres?[17]

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—

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 thetime 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]

[17]Georg. lib. ii. 120-121.

[18]Thomson in the Philosophical Magazine, 3rd series, t. v. num. 29, Nov. 1834.

[19]No. 152.

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. Notthe 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.Silkwould indeed well enough answer the ideal meaning of the Hebrew word, from its beingdrawn forthfrom 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 ofsilk, much less of the manner in which it was formed; משי, therefore, I think, means some kind offine linenorcotton cloth, so denominated from thefinenesswith which the threads whereof it consisted weredrawn out. The Vulgate, by rendering it in the former passage, ‘subtilibus’fine, as opposed tocoarse, 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. John[22]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.

[20]Hebrew and English Lexicon. London, 1813, p. 415.

[21]De Vestitu Heb. Sac., lib. I. cap. viii. § 8.

[22]Apoc. xviii. 12.

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, andthence 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 CoaTexuit, auratas disposuitque vias.[24]She may thin garments wear, which female Coan handsHave woven, and in stripes disposed the golden bands.

Illa gerat vestes tenues, quas fœmina CoaTexuit, auratas disposuitque vias.[24]

Illa gerat vestes tenues, quas fœmina Coa

Texuit, auratas disposuitque vias.[24]

She may thin garments wear, which female Coan handsHave woven, and in stripes disposed the golden bands.

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.

[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.

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]

[27]Quoted by Yates, Textrinum Antiquorum, p. 181.

[28]Suetonius, c. 52.

[29]Lampridius, c. 26.

[30]Vopiscus, c. 45.

[31]Severus, c. 40.

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 publishedA.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]

[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.

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 preciosiorisS. Ebrulfo obtulit ex quibus quatuor cappæ cantorum in eadem factæ sunt ecclesia.”[35]

[35]Ordericus Vitalis, Ecc. Hist., l. v. p. 584.

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 manycolours: “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.

[36]De Laudibus Virginitatis, Opp. ed. Giles, 15.

[37]Concil. Ecc. Brit. ed. Spelman, i. 256.

[38]P. 421.

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 diedA.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.

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