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.
[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.
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.