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]).
[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.
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.
[180] T. iii. p. xx.
[181] T. viii. plate 5.
[182] Ib. p. 84.