The piece of German napery, no. 8317 (of the beginning of the fifteenth century), will be to those curious about household linen an acceptable specimen.
If in some old inventory of church vestments we find an entry mentioning a chasuble made of cloth of Cologne, we should understand it to mean not a certain broad textile woven there, but merely a vestment composed of several pieces of this kind of web sewed together; like the frontal made of pieces of woven Venice orphreys, no. 8976.
CHAPTER VII.
The countries whence silks came to England are numerous; we find early notices of Antioch, Tarsus, Alexandria, Damascus, Byzantium, Cyprus, Trip or Tripoli, and Bagdad, and later of Venice, Genoa, and Lucca. To fix the localities of others would be but guess work.
At the beginning of the fourteenth century a silk called “Acca” is occasionally mentioned: and, from the description, it must have been a cloth of gold shot with coloured silk, figured with animals: William de Clinton, earl of Huntingdon, gave to St. Alban’s monastery a whole vestment of cloth of gold shot with sky-blue and called cloth of Acca. It would look as if this stuff took its name from having been brought to us through the port of Acre: and Macri, in his valuable Hierolexicon, says that the name of the ancient Ptolemais in Syria was so written.
What in one age and at a particular place happened to be well made and therefore was eagerly sought for, at a later period and in another place was better wrought and at a lower price. Time, indeed, changed the name of the market, but did not alter in any great degree either the quality of the material or the style of the design wrought upon it. Throughout the kingdom of the Byzantine Greeks the loom had to change its gearing very little. The Saracenic loom, whether in Asia, Africa, or Spain, was always Arabic, though Persia could not forget her old traditions about the “hom” or tree of life, and cheetahs, and birds of various sorts. With regard to the whole of Asia, its many peoples from the earliest ages knew how not only to weave cloth of gold but to figure it with birds and beasts. In later times, Marco Polo in the thirteenth century found exactly the same kinds of textile known in the days of Darius still everywhere, from the shores of the Mediterranean to the far east. What he says of Bagdad he repeats in fewer words about many other cities. In finding their way to England these fabrics received, if not in all at least in most instances, the names of the seaports in the Mediterranean where they had been shipped.
For beautifully wrought and figured silk, one of the few terms that still outlive the mediæval period is Damask.
China, no doubt, was the first country to ornament its silken webs with a pattern. India, Persia, and Syria, then Byzantine Greece, followed, but at long intervals between, in China’s footsteps. Stuffs so figured brought with them to the west the name “diaspron” or diaper, bestowed upon them at Constantinople. But about the twelfth century the city of Damascus, even then long celebrated for its looms, so far outstripped all other places for beauty of design that her silken textiles were in demand everywhere; and thus, as often happens, traders fastened the name of Damascen or Damask upon every silken fabric richly wrought and curiously designed, no matter whether it came or not from Damascus. At last, samit, having long been the epithet betokening all that was rich and good in silk, was forgotten, and diaper, from being the very word significant of pattern, became a secondary term descriptive of merely a part in the elaborate design on damask.
Baudekin, that sort of costly cloth of gold spoken of so much during so many years in English literature, took (as was said before) its famous name from Bagdad. Many specimens of baudekin in the South Kensington collection furnish proofs of the ancient weavers’ dexterity in their management of the loom, and especially of the artists’ taste in setting out their intricate and beautiful designs. An identification between very many samples there brought together of ancient textiles in silk and the descriptions of similar stuffs given us in those valuable records, our old church inventories, might be carried on if necessary to a very lengthened extent.