In earlier times, as at present, silks had various names, distinguishing either their kind of texture, their colour, the design woven on them, the country from which they were brought, or the use for which, on particular occasions, they happened to be especially set apart.
All these designations are of foreign growth; some sprang up in the seventh and following centuries at Byzantium; some are half Greek, half Latin, jumbled together; others, borrowed from the east, are so shortened, so badly and variously spelt, that their Arabic or Persian derivation can be hardly recognized at present. Yet without some slight knowledge of them we hardly understand a great deal belonging to trade, and the manners of the times glanced at by old writers; much less can we see the true meaning of many passages in our mediæval English poetry.
Among the terms significative of the kind of web, or mode of getting up some sorts of silk, we have Holosericum, the texture of which is warp and woof wholly pure silk. From a passage in Lampridius we learn that so early as the reign of Alexander Severus the difference between “vestes holosericæ” and “subsericæ” was strongly marked, and that subsericum implied that the texture was not entirely but in part, probably the woof, of silk.
Examitum, xamitum, or, as it is called in old English documents, samit, is made up of two Greek words, ἑξ, “six,” and μίτοι, “threads;” the number of the strings in the warp of the texture. It is evident that stuffs woven so thick must have been of the best quality. Hence, to say of any silken tissue that it was “examitum” or “samit” meant that it was six-threaded, and therefore costly and splendid. At the end of the thirteenth and beginning of the fourteenth centuries “examitum” was much used for vestments in Evesham abbey, as we gather from the chronicle of that house, published lately for the Master of the Rolls. About the same period among the best copes, chasubles, and vestments in St. Paul’s, London, many were made of samit. So, again among the nine gorgeous chasubles bequeathed to Durham cathedral by its bishop in 1195, the chief was of red samit superbly embroidered. And, to name no more, we find in the valuable inventory, lately published, of the rich vestments belonging to Exeter cathedral in 1277 that the best of its numerous chasubles, dalmatics, and copes, were made of samit. In a later document, A. D. 1327, this precious silk is termed “samicta.”
The poets did not forget to array their knights and ladies in this gay attire. When Sir Lancelot of the lake brought back Gawain to king Arthur:
Launcelot and the queen were cledde
In robes of a rich wede,
Of samyte white, with silver shredde:
* * * * *
The other knights everichone,
In samyte green of heathen land,
And their kirtles, ride alone.
In his ‘Romaunt of the rose,’ Chaucer describes the dress of Mirth thus:
Full yong he was, and merry of thought
And in samette, with birdes wrought,
And with gold beaten full fetously,
His bodie was clad full richely.