Meint riche gamboison guarni
De soi, de cadas e coton.
The quantity of card purchased for the royal wardrobe, in the year 1299, is set forth in the Liber quotidianus.
Camoca, camoka, camak, as the name is differently written, was a textile of which in England we hear nothing before the latter end of the fourteenth century. No sooner did it make its appearance than this camoca rose into great repute; the Church used it for her vestments, and royalty employed it for dress as well as in adorning palaces, especially in draping beds of state. In the year 1385, besides some smaller articles, the royal chapel in Windsor castle had a whole set of vestments and other ornaments for the altar, of white camoca; and our princes must have arrayed themselves, on grand occasions, in the same material; for Herod, in one of the Coventry mysteries—the adoration of the Magi—is made to boast of himself: “In kyrtyl of cammaka kynge am I cladde.” But it was in draping its state-beds that our ancient royalty showed its affection for camoca. Edward the Black Prince bequeaths to his confessor “a large bed of red camoca with our arms embroidered at each corner,” and the prince’s mother leaves to another of her sons “a bed of red camak.” Edward lord Despencer, in 1375, wills to his wife “my great bed of blue camaka, with griffins, also another bed of camaka, striped with white and black.” What may have been the real texture of this stuff, thought so magnificent, we do not positively know, but it was probably woven of fine camels’ hair and silk, and of Asiatic workmanship.
From this mixed web we pass to another more precious, the Cloth of Tars; which we presume to have been the forerunner of the now celebrated cashmere, and together with silk made of the downy wool of goats reared in several parts of Asia, but especially in Tibet.
Velvet is a silken textile, the history of which has still to be written. Of the country whence it first came, or the people who were the earliest to hit upon the happy way of weaving it, we know nothing. A very old piece was in the beautiful crimson cope embroidered by English hands in the fourteenth century, now kept at the college of Mount St. Mary, Chesterfield.
We are probably indebted to central Asia, or perhaps China, for velvet as well as satin; and among the earliest places in Europe where it was manufactured, were perhaps first the south of Spain, and then Lucca.
In the earliest of the inventories which we have of church vestments, that of Exeter cathedral, 1277, velvet is not spoken of; but in St. Paul’s, London, A. D. 1295, there is some notice of velvet with its kindred web “fustian,” for chasubles. Velvet is for the first time mentioned at Exeter in 1327, but as in two pieces not made up, of which some yards had been then sold for vestment-making. From the middle of the fourteenth century velvet is of common occurrence.
The name itself of velvet, “velluto,” seems to point out Italy as the market through which we got it from the east, for the word in Italian indicates something which is hairy or shaggy, like an animal’s skin.
Fustian was known at the end of the thirteenth century. St. Paul’s cathedral at that date had “a white chasuble of fustian.” In an English sermon preached at the beginning of the same century great blame is found with the priest who had his chasuble made of middling fustian: “þe meshakele of medeme fustian.” As then wove, fustian had a short nap on it, and one of the domestic uses to which during the middle ages it had been put was for bed clothes, as thick undersheets. Lady Bargavenny bequeaths, in 1434, “A bed of gold of swans, two pair sheets of raynes (fine linen, made at Rheims), a pair of fustians, six pair of other sheets, etc.” It is not unlikely that this stuff may have hinted to the Italians the way of weaving silk in the same manner, and so of producing velvet. Other nations took up the manufacture, and the weaving of velvet was wonderfully improved. It became diapered and, upon a ground of silk or of gold, the pattern came out in a bold manner, with a raised pile. At last, the most beautiful of all manners of diapering, namely, making the pattern to show itself in a double pile, one pile higher than the other and of the same tint, now, as formerly, known as velvet upon velvet, was brought to its highest perfection; and velvets in this fine style were wrought in greatest excellence in Italy, in Spain and in Flanders. Our old inventories often specify these differences in the making of the web. York cathedral had “four copes of crimson velvet plaine, with orphreys of clothe of goulde, for standers;” “a greene cushion of raised velvet;” and “a cope of purshed velvet (redd):” “purshed” means that the velvet was raised in a network pattern.
Diaper was a silken fabric, held everywhere in high estimation during many hundred years, both abroad and in England. We know this from documents beginning with the eleventh century: but the origin of the name is uncertain. Possibly, in order to indicate a one-coloured yet patterned silk, which diaper is, the Byzantine Greeks of the early middle ages invented the term διαςπρὸν, diaspron, from διαςπαω, I separate, to signify “what distinguishes or separates itself from things about it,” as every pattern does on a one-coloured silk. With this textile the Latins took the name for it from the Greeks and called it “diasper,” which in English has been moulded into “diaper.” In the year 1066 the empress Agnes gave to Monte Cassino a diaper-chasuble of cloth of gold, “planetam diasperam.” This early mention of the name seems to be a conclusive argument against those writers who derive it from Yprès, in Flanders; a town celebrated for linen manufactures at a somewhat later period: yet even then, according to Chaucer, rivalled by workwomen in England. He tells us of the “good wif of Bathe” that