Textile Fabrics. Daniel Rock

work of the middle ages is often very fine and delicate. Probably the embroidery which we read of in the descriptions of the vestments belonging to our old churches (for instance “An amice embroidered with pure gold”) was worked with gold wire. To go back to Anglo-saxon times in this country, such gold wire would seem to have been then well known and employed, since in Peterborough minster there were two golden altar-cloths: “ii. gegylde þeofad sceatas;” and there were at Ely cathedral “two girdles of gold wire” in the reign of William Rufus.

      The first use of a wire-drawing machine seems to have been about the year 1360, at Nuremberg; and it was not until two hundred years after, in 1560, that the method was brought to England. Two examples of a stuff with pure wire in it may be seen in the South Kensington collection, nos. 8581 and 8228.

      The process of twining long narrow strips of gold, or gilt silver, round a line of silk or flax and thus producing gold thread is much earlier than has been supposed; and when Attalus’s name was bestowed upon a new method of interweaving gold with wool or linen, thence called “Attalic,” it was probably because he suggested to the weaver the introduction of the long-known golden thread as a woof into the textiles from his loom. It would seem, from a passage in Claudian, that ladies at an early Christian period used to spin their own gold thread. Writing at the end of the fourth century, the poet thus compliments Proba:

      The joyful mother plies her learned hands,

       And works all o’er the trabea golden bands,

       Draws the thin strips to all their length of gold,

       To make the metal meaner threads enfold.

      The superior quality of some gold thread was known to the mediæval world under the name of the place where it had been made. Thus we find mention at one time of Cyprus gold thread; “a vestment embroidered with eagles of gold of Cyprus:” later, of Venice gold thread, “for frenge of gold of Venys at vjs. the ounce;” and again, “one cope of unwatered camlet laid with strokes of Venis gold.” What may have been their difference cannot now be pointed out: perhaps the Cyprian thread was esteemed because its somewhat broad shred of flat gold was wound about the hempen twist beneath it so nicely as to have the smooth unbroken look of gold wire; while the manufacture of Venice showed everywhere the twisting of common thread.