[161] Squire of Low Degree, ed. Ritson.
[162] “Romaunt of the Rose,” l. 900.
[163] Fabric Rolls of York Cathedral, p. 230.
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]
[164] The Prologue, 447.
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.