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]
[203] Excerpta Historica, p. 121.
[204] Poems, ed. Nicolas, t. vi. p. 134.