Section I.—TEXTILES. (continued 3)

Buckram, a cotton textile, has a history and a reputation somewhat varied.

In our oldest inventories mention is often made of a “panus Tartaricus” or Tartary cloth, which was, if not always, at least often purple. Asia, especially in its eastern borders, became famous for the fine textiles it wove out of cotton, and dyed in every colour. Cities got for themselves a reputation for some especial excellence in their looms, and as Mosul had the name of Muslin from that place given to the fine and delicate cotton webs it wrought, so the term of buckram for another sort of cotton textile came from the city of Bokhara in Tartary where this cloth was made. All along the middle ages buckram was much esteemed for being costly and very fine, and consequently fit for use in church vestments, and for secular personal wear. John Grandison, consecrated bishop of Exeter, A.D. 1327, gave to his cathedral flags of white and red buckram;[270] and among the five very rich veils for covering the moveable lectern in that church, three were lined with blue “bokeram.”[271] As late as the beginning of the sixteenth century this stuff was held good enough for lining to a black velvet gown for a queen, Elizabeth of York.[272] The coarse thick fabric which now goes by the name was anything but the olden production known as “bokeram.”

Burdalisaunder, Bordalisaunder, Bourde de Elisandre, with other varieties in spelling, is a term often to be met with in old wills and church inventories. In the year 1327 Exeter had a chasuble of Bourde de Elisandre of divers colours.[273] It was wide enough for half a piece to form the adornment of a high altar.[274]

The difficulty of understanding what this textile was will vanish when we remember that in Arabic “bord” to this day means a striped cloth; and we know, both from travellers and the importation of the textile itself, that many tribes in North and Eastern Africa weave stuffs for personal wear of a pattern consisting of white and black longitudinal stripes. St. Augustin too, living in North Africa near the modern Algiers, speaks of a stuff for clothing called “burda,” in the end of the fourth and beginning of the fifth century. Burdalisaunder was a silken web in different coloured stripes, and specimens of this, at one time known as “stragulata” may be found here at pp. 21, 27, 33, 56, 57, 161, 225, 226, &c. Though made in so many places round the Mediterranean, this silk took its name, at least in England, from Alexandria, because it was to be had in that Egyptian city, always celebrated for its silks, either better made or at a much lower price than elsewhere.

In all likelihood the curtains for the tabernacle, as well as the girdles for Aaron and his sons, of fine linen and violet and purple, and scarlet twice dyed, were wrought with this very pattern, so that in the “stragulata” or “burd Aliscaunder” we behold the oldest known design for any textile.

Fustian, of which two of its forms we still have in velveteen and corduroy, was originally wove at Fustat, on the Nile, with a warp of linen thread and a woof of thick cotton, which was so twilled and cut that it showed on one side a thick but low pile; and the web so managed took its name of Fustian from that Egyptian city. At what period it was invented we do not rightly know, but we are well aware it must have been brought to this country before the Normans coming hither, for our Anglo-Saxon countryman, St. Stephen Harding, when a Cistercian abbot and an old man, circ. A.D. 1114, forbade chasubles in his church to be made of anything but fustian or plain linen: “neque casulas nisi de fustaneo vel lino sine pallio aureo vel argenteo,” &c.[275] The austerity of his rule reached even the ornament of the church. From such a prohibition we are not to draw as a conclusion that fustian was at the time a mean material; quite the contrary, it was a seemly textile. Years afterwards, in the fourteenth century, Chaucer tells us of his knight:—

Of fustian he wered a gepon.[276]

Fustian, so near akin to velvet, is more especially noticed along with what is said upon that fine textile.

In the fifteenth century Naples had a repute for weaving fustians, but our English churchwardens, not being learned in geography, made some laughable bad spelling of this, like some other continental stuffs: “Fuschan in appules,” for fustian from Naples, is droll; yet droller still is “mustyrd devells,” for a cloth made in France at a town called Mustrevilliers.

Muslin, as it is now throughout the world, so from the earliest antiquity has been everywhere in Asia in favourite use, both as an article of dress and as furniture. Its cloud-like thinness, its lightness, were, as they still are to some Asiatics, not the only charms belonging to this stuff: it was esteemed equally as much for the taste in which stripes of gold had been woven in its warp. As we learn from the travels of Marco Polo, the further all wayfarers in Asia wandered among its eastern nations, the higher they found the point of excellence which had been reached by those people in weaving silk and gold into splendid fabrics. If the silkworm lived, nay, thrived there, the cotton plant was in its home, its birth-place, in those regions. Where stood Nineveh Mosul stands now.

Like many cities of Middle Asia, Mosul had earned for itself a reputation of old for the beauty of its gold-wrought silken textiles. Cotton grew all around in plenty; the inhabitants, especially the women, being gifted with such quick feeling of finger, could spin thread from this cotton of more than hair-like fineness. Cotton then took with them, on many occasions, the place of silk in the loom; but gold was not forgotten in the texture. This new fabric, not only because it was so much cheaper, but from its own peculiar beauty and comeliness, won for itself a high place in common estimation. At once, and by the world’s accord, on it was bestowed as its distinctive name, the name of the place where it was wrought in such perfection. Hence, whether wove with or without gold, we call to this day this cotton web Muslin, from the Asiatic city of Mosul.

Cloth of Areste is another of those terms for woven stuffs which students of textiles had never heard of were it not to be found in our old English deeds and inventories. The first time we meet it is in an order given, A.D. 1244, by Henry III. for finding two of these cloths of Areste with which two copes had to be made for royal chapels: “Duos pannos del Areste ad duas capas faciendas,” &c.[277] Again it comes a few years later at St. Paul’s, which cathedral, A.D. 1295, had, besides a dalmatic and tunicle of this silk—“de serico albo diasperato de Arest,”[278]—as many as thirty and more hangings of this same texture.[279]

From the description of these pieces we gather that this so-called cloth of Areste must have been as beautiful as it was rich, being for the most part cloth of gold figured elaborately, some with lions and double-headed eagles, others, for example, with the death and burial of our Lord—“campus aureus cum leonibus et aquilis bicapitibus de aurifilo contextis—campus rubeus cum historia Passionis Domini et sepulturæ ejusdem.” These designs speak of the looms at work in the middle ages on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, and we are much strengthened in this thought by beholding how the death and burial of our Lord, like the sample here, number 8278, p. 170-1, are shown on a crimson ground, as we shall have to instance further on under Symbolism, § VII.

That this sort of stuff, wove of silk and gold, was of any kind of Arras, or made in that town, to our seeming is a very unhappy guess. Arras had not won for itself a reputation for its tapestry before the fourteenth century. Tapestry itself is too thick and heavy for use in vestments; yet this cloth of Areste was light enough for tunicles, and when worn out was sometimes condemned at St. Paul’s to be put aside for lining other ritual garments—“ad armaturam faciendam.”[280] The term “Areste” has little or nothing in it common to the word “Arras,” as written either in French, or under its Latin appellation “Atrebatum.”

Among the three meanings for the mediæval “Aresta,” one is, any kind of covering. To us, then, it seems as if these cloths of Areste took their name not from the place whereat they had been wove, but from the use to which, if not always, for the most part, we put them—that of hangings about our churches, since in the St. Paul’s inventory they are usually spoken of as such—“culcitræ pendules, panni penduli.”[281] Moreover, tapestry, or Arras work, being thick and heavy, could never have been employed for such light use as that of apparels, nor would it have been diapered like silk, yet we find it to have been so fashioned and so used—“maniculariis apparatis quodam panno rubeo diasperato de Laret, &c.”[282]

For not a few it would be hard to understand some at least among those epithets meant in by-gone days to tell how

Silks were distinguished through their colours and shades of colour.

To the inventories of vestments and church-stuffs of all sorts must we go to gather the information which we want about the textiles in use in this country at any particular period during by-gone days. The men who had, in the thirteenth century, the drawing up of such lists, seem to have been gifted with a keen eye for the varieties of shade and tints in the colour of silks then before them. For instance, a chasuble at St. Paul’s, London, A.D. 1295, is set down thus:—“De sameto purpureo aliquantulum sanguineo”—that is, made of samit (a thick silk) dyed in a purple somewhat bordering on a blood-red tone. Such language is unmistakable; not so, however, many other terms at the time in common use, and though well understood then, are now not so intelligible. We are told in the same inventory[283] several times of a “pannus Tarsicus,” a Tarsus cloth, and of a “pannus Tarsici coloris,” a Tarsus coloured cloth. What may have been the distinctive qualities of the stuffs woven at Tarsus, what the peculiar beauty in that tint to which that once so celebrated city had given its own name, we cannot say. We think, however, those Tarsus textiles were partly of silk, partly of fine goats’ hair, and for this reason Varro tells[284]—“Tondentur (capræ) quod magnis villis sunt, in magna parte Phrygiæ; unde Cilicia, et cætera ejus generis ferri solent. Sed, quod primum ea tonsura in Cilicia sit instituta, nomen id Cilicas adjecisse dicunt.” Goats are shorn in a great part of Phrygia, because there they have long shaggy hair. Cilicia (the Latin for hair cloths) and other things of the same sort, are usually brought from that country. For the reason that in Cilicia such a shearing of goats arose, they say that the name of Cilician was given to such stuffs woven of goats’ hair. As Tarsus is, so always was it, the head city in all that part of Asia Minor known of old as Phrygia. Hence then we think that—

Cloth of Tarsus, of Tars, &c., was woven of fine goats’ hair and silk. But this web was in several colours, and always looked upon as very costly.

The Tarsus colour itself was, as we take it, some shade of purple differing from, and perhaps to some eyes more beautiful than, the Tyrian dye. The people of Tarsus no doubt got from their murex, a shell-fish of the class mollusca and purpurifera family to be found on their coast, their dyeing matter; and when it is borne in mind what changes are wrought in the animal itself by the food it eats, and what strong effects are made by slight variations in climate, even atmosphere, upon materials for colouring in the moments of application, we may easily understand how the difference arose between the two tints of purple.

We are strengthened in our conjecture that not only was the cloth of Tarsus of a rare and costly kind, but its tint some shade of royal purple, from the fact that while noticing the robes worn on a grand public occasion by a king, Chaucer thus sketches the prince:—

Sky-blue was a liturgical colour everywhere in use for certain festivals throughout England, as we have shown in another place.[286] In the early inventories the name for that tint is “Indicus,” “Indus,” reminding us of our present indigo. In later lists it is called “Blodius,” not sanguinary, but blue.

Murrey, or a reddish brown, is often specified; and a good specimen of the tint is given us, No. 709, p. 9. Old St. Paul’s, London, had several pieces of baudekin of this colour: “baudekynus murretus cum griffonibus datus pro anima. Alphonsi filii regis E.”[287]

Going far down, and much below the middle ages, Purple, in all its tones, and tints, and shades, was spoken of and looked upon as allowable to be worn in garments only to worshipful, ennobled, or royal personages. Whether it glowed with the brightness it seemed to have stolen from the rose, or wore its darkest tone it could borrow from the violet, whether it put on any one of those hundred shades to be found between those two extremes, it mattered not; it was gazed at with an admiring, a respectful eye. Eagerly sought out, and bought at high price, were those textiles that showed this colour, and had been dyed at Tyre, Antioch, Tarsus, Alexandria, Byzantium, or Naples. All these places were at one time or another, in days of old, famous for their looms, no less than their ability in the dyeing, especially of purple, among the nations living on the shores of the Mediterranean; and each of them had in its own tone a shade which distinguished it from that of all the others. What the tint of purple was which established this difference we cannot at this distance of time, and with our means of knowing, justly say. Of this, however, we are perfectly aware, that silks of purple usually bore their specific name from those above-named cities, as we perceive while reading the old inventories of our churches and cathedrals. Moreover, our native writers let us know that, if not always from Greece, it was through that country that purple textiles were brought to England. Besides speaking of a conversation held about, beside other things, the produce of Greece in purple silks—“Græcorum purpuris, et pannis holosericis”—Gerald Barry gives us to understand that in his days not only were our churches sumptuously hung with costly palls and purple silks, but that these textiles were the work of Grecian looms—“rex (Willielmus Rufus) ecclesiam quandam (in nova foresta) intraret quam adeo pulchram et decentius ornatam auletis historicis, et pretiosis Græcorum palliis, pannis holosericis et purpureis undique vestitam,” &c.[288]

Silks woven of two colours, so that one of them showed itself unmixed and quite distinct on one side, and the second appeared equally clean on the other—a thing sometimes now looked upon as a wonder in modern weaving—might occasionally be met with here at the mediæval period: Exeter Cathedral had, A.D. 1327:—“Unus pannus sericus curtus rubei coloris interius et crocei coloris exterius.”[289]

Shot, or, as they were then called, changeable silks, were fashionable in England during the sixteenth century, for when the King’s (Edward VI.) Lord of Misrule rode forth with great pageantry, among other personages there came “afor xx. of ys consell on horsbake in gownes of chanabulle lynyd with blue taffata and capes of the sam, like sage (men); then cam my lord with a gowne of gold furyd,” &c.[290] At York Cathedral, A.D. 1543, there was “a vestment of changeable silke,”[291] “besides one of changeable taffety for Good Friday.” [292]

Marble silk had a weft of several colours so put together and woven as to make the whole web look like marble, stained with a variety of tints; hence it got its name. In the year 1295 St. Paul’s had “paruram de serico marmoreo”[293]—an apparel of marble silk; “tunica de quodam panno marmoreo spisso”[7]—a tunicle of a certain thick marble cloth; “tunica de diaspro marmoreo spisso”[294]—a tunicle of thick diaper marble; “casula marmorei coloris”[295]—a chasuble of marble colour. During full three centuries this marble silk found great favour among us since H. Machyn, in his very valuable and curious Diary tells his readers how “the old Qwyne of Schottes rod thrught London,” and how “then cam the Lord Tresorer with a C. gret horsse and ther cotes of marbull,”[9] &c., to meet her the 6th of November, A.D. 1551.[296]