Page:Textile fabrics; a descriptive catalogue of the collection of church-vestments, dresses, silk stuffs, needle-work and tapestries, forming that section of the Museum (IA textilefabricsde00soutrich).pdf/20

 inhabitants of North Africa, Arabia, and Persia, besides the above-named animal produce, employed for these purposes, as well as tent-making, the wool and hair which their camels gave them: the Baptist's garment was of the very coarsest kind.

Of the use of woollen stuff, not woven but plaited, among the older stock of the Britons, a curious instance was very lately brought to light while cutting through an early Celtic grave-hill or barrow in Yorkshire: the dead body had been wrapped, as was shown by the few unrotted shreds still cleaving to its bones, in a woollen shroud of coarse and loose fabric wrought by the plaiting process without a loom.

As time crept on, it brought along with it the loom, fashioned though it was after its simplest form, to the far west, and taught its use throughout the British islands. The art of dyeing very soon followed; and so beautiful were the tints which our Britons knew how to give to their wools, that strangers, while they wondered at, were not a little jealous of the splendour of those tones. From the heavy stress laid upon the rule which taught that the official colour in their dress assigned to each of the three ranks into which the bardic order was distinguished, must be of one simple unbroken shade, whether spotless white, symbolic of sun-light and holiness, for the druid or priest—whether sky-blue, emblem of peace, for the bard or poet—or green, the livery of the wood and field, for the Ovydd or teacher of natural history and leech-craft, yet at the same moment we know that party-coloured stuffs were woven here, and after two forms: the postulants asking leave to be admitted into bardism might be recognized by the robe barred with stripes of white, blue, and green, which they had to wear during all the term of their initiation. With regard to the bulk of our people, according to the Greek historian of Rome—Dion Cassius, born 155—the garments worn by them were made of a texture wrought in a square pattern of several colours; and speaking of our brave-hearted British queen, Boadicea, that same writer tells us that she usually had on, under her cloak, a motley tunic, [Greek: chitôn pampoikilos], that is, checkered all over with many colours. This garment we are fairly warranted in deeming to have been a native stuff, woven of worsted after a pattern in tints and design exactly like one or other of the present Scotch plaids. Pliny, who seems to have gathered a great deal of his natural history from scraps of hearsay, most likely included these ancient sorts of British textiles along with those from Gaul, when he wrote:—"Plurimis vero liciis texere quæ polymita appellant, Alexandria instituit: scutullis dividere, Gallia." But to weave with a