Ladies spinning and weaving; from a manuscript of the fifteenth century.
CHAPTER V.
There are some very ancient names, distinguishing different textiles, which require notice: such as “chrysoclavus,” “stauraccin,” “polystaurium,” “gammadion” or “gammadiæ,” “de quadruplo,” “de octoplo,” and “de fundato.” Textiles of silk and gold are, over and over again, enumerated as then commonly known under such names, in the ‘Liber pontificalis seu de gestis Romanorum pontificum:’ a book of great value for every student of early Christian art-work, and in particular of textiles and embroidery.
The Chrysoclavus, or golden nail-head, was a remnant which lingered a long time among the ornaments embroidered on ecclesiastical vestments and robes for royal wear of that once so coveted “latus clavus,” or broad nail-head-like purple round patch worn upon the outward garment of the old Roman dignitaries. In the court of Byzantium this mark of dignity was elevated, from being purple on white, into gold upon purple. Hence it came that all rich purple silks, woven or embroidered with the “clavus” in gold, were known from their pattern as gold nail-headed, or chrysoclavus; and silken textiles of Tyrian dye, sprinkled all over with large round spots, were once in great demand. Pope Leo in 795, among his several other gifts to the churches at Rome, bestowed a great number of altar frontals made of this purple and gold fabric, as we are told by Anastasius in the Liber pontificalis. Sometimes these “clavi” were made so large that upon their golden ground an event in the life of a saint or the saint’s head was embroidered, and then the whole piece was called “sigillata,” or sealed.
Stauracin or “stauracinus,” taking its name from σταυρὸς the Greek for “cross,” was a silken stuff figured with small plain crosses, and therefore from their number sometimes farther distinguished by the word signifying that meaning in Greek, Polystauron.
The crosses woven on the various fabrics were sometimes of the simplest shape; oftener they were designed after an elaborate type with a symbolic meaning about it that afforded an especial name to the stuffs upon which they were figured.
This name Gammadion, or Gammadiæ, was a word applied as often to the pattern upon silks as to the figures wrought upon gold and silver.
In the Greek alphabet the capital letter gamma takes the shape of an exact right angle thus, Γ. Being so, many writers have seen in it an emblem of our Lord as our corner-stone. Following this idea artists at a very early period struck out a way of forming the cross after several shapes by various combinations with it of this letter Γ. Four of these gammas put so;
