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/42

 *sume that the work upon them done by the needle in gold, required by its minuteness that the precious metal should be not flat, but in the shape of a real wire. By the delicate management of female fingers, the usual narrow flat strips might have been pinched or doubled up, so that the two edges should meet, and then rubbed between men's harder hands, or better still, between two pieces of smooth highly-polished granite, would produce a golden wire of any required fineness. Belonging to the writer is an Egyptian gold ring, which was taken from off the finger of a mummy by a friend. The hoop is a plain, somewhat thick wire. On each side of its small green-dyed ivory scarabee, to keep it in its place, are wound several rounds of rather fine wire. In Etruscan and Greek jewellery, wire is often to be found; but in all instances it is so well shaped and so even, that no hammer could have hardly wrought it, and it must have been fashioned by some rolling process. All through the mediæval times the filigree work is often very fine and delicate. Likely is it that the embroidery which we thus read of in the descriptions of the vestments belonging whilom to our old churches, for instance: "amictus breudatus cum auro puro" —was worked with gold wire. To go back to Anglo-Saxon times in this country, such gold wire would seem to have been well known and employed, since in Peterborough minster there were two golden altar-cloths: "ii. gegylde eofad sceatas;" and at Ely Cathedral, among its old ritual ornaments, were, in the reign of William Rufus: "Duo cinguli, unus totus de auri filo, alter de pallio cujus pendentia" (the tassels) "sunt bene ornata de auri filo."

The first idea of a wire-drawing machine dawned upon a workman's mind in the year 1360, at Nuremberg; and yet it was not until two hundred years after, 1560, that the method was brought to England. One sample of a stuff with pure wire in it may be seen, p. 220, No. 8581, in this collection, as well as at No. 8228, p. 150.

Equally interesting to our present subject is the process of twining long narrow strips of gold, or in its stead gilt silver, round a line of silk or flax, and thus producing

.

Probably its origin, as far as flax and not silk is concerned, as being the underlying substance, 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, it happened so not because that Pargamanean king