All the finest linen certainly came then from Egypt, and was much finer than any that is now made. That we call cambric, was woven there many centuries before it was made in Cambray.[178]
Through the Phœnicians the fine linen came to Rome, as appears from the following notice of embroidery on linen by Flavius Vopiscus, in his “Life of the Emperor Carinus:” “Why should I mention the linen cloths brought from Tyre and Sidon, which are so thin as to be transparent, which glow with purple, or are prized on account of their laborious embroideries?”[179]
The history of a fine embroidered linen curtain for a Roman house might have been this:—Grown in Egypt; carried to Nomenticum (Artois), and there woven; taken to India to be embroidered, and thence as merchandise to Rome.
While flax was making its way northward, the Celts must also have taken it across Europe from their resting-place, after emigrating from the East. The word linen—lin-white—is a Celtic epithet, whereas flax is an Anglo-Saxon word.[180]
The Atrebates wove linen in Artois, 1800 years ago. Jerome speaks of their “indumenta,” or shirts of fine linen; and the great weavers of to-day are still the Flemish descendants of the Atrebates. Their Celtic descent is witnessed in the Irish by their superiority in the crafts of the loom.
The fine laces of Venice, France, and Belgium are all of linen, i.e. flaxen thread. Clearness and strength in these delicate fabrics cannot be obtained with cotton, which, especially when it is washed, swells and fluffs, and never has the radiant appearance and purity of flax.
Embroidery is always a natural accompaniment of fine linen. Those that are still preserved to us from early and Middle-Age times are nearly all on linen, if not on silk. The woollen fragments are very few and imperfect. They have been invariably “fretted” by the moth.
White needle embroidery is mostly worked in linen-thread, though cotton-thread has been used a great deal, and is very fit for the purpose.
4. COTTON.
Cotton was native to India,[181] as flax was to Egypt. It not only was grown, woven, and printed there from the remotest antiquity, but was cultivated nowhere else. The Egyptians do not appear to have grown it till the fourteenth century A.D., though they had long imported it as raw material, and as plain and printed webs.[182] It was called tree-wool.