Was the emperours pavyloun';...
'Kyng Richard took the pavylouns
Off sendels and off sykelatouns';
Rich. Coer de Lion (Weber, ii. 90 and 201).
'There was mony gonfanoun
Of gold, sendel, and siclatoun';
Kyng Alisaunder (Weber, i. 85).
Richardson's Pers. and Arab. Dict. (ed. Johnson, 1829), p. 837, gives: 'Pers. saqlatūn, scarlet cloth (whence Arab. siqlāt, a fine painted or figured cloth)'; and the derivation is probably (as given in the New E. Dict.) from the very Pers. word which has given us the word scarlet; so that it was originally named from its colour. It was afterwards applied to various kinds of costly materials, which were sometimes embroidered with gold. See Ciclaton in Godefroy, and in the New E. Dict.; and Scarlet in my Etym. Dictionary.
The matter has been much confused by a mistaken notion of Spenser's. Not observing that Sir Thopas is here described in his robes of peace, not in those of war (as in a later stanza), he followed Thynne's spelling, viz. chekelatoun, and imagined this to mean 'that kind of guilded leather with which they [the Irish] use to embroder theyr Irish jackes'; View of the State of Ireland, in Globe edition, p. 639, col. 2. And this notion he carried out still more boldly in the lines—
'But in a jacket, quilted richly rare