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/89

 of abroad. The reader, then, must not be astonished at finding so few examples of the French loom, in a collection of ancient silken textiles.

France, as England, used of old to behold her women, old and young, rich and poor, while filling up their leisure hours in-doors, at work on a small loom, and weaving certain narrow webs, often of gold, and diapered with coloured silks, as we mentioned before (p. xxii.) Of such French wrought stuffs belonging to the thirteenth century, some samples are described at pp. 29, 130, 131.

In damasks, her earliest productions are of the sixteenth century, and are described at pp. 13, 205, 206; and the last is a favourable example of what the loom then was in France; everything later is of that type so well known to everybody. In several of her textiles a leaning towards classicism in design is discernible.

Though so few, her cloths of gold, pp. 9, 15, are good, more especially the fine one at p. 104.

Her velvets, too, pp. 14, 89, 106, are satisfactory.

Satins from France are not many here.

The curious and elaborately ornamented gloves, p. 105, which got into fashion, especially for ladies, at the end of the sixteenth century, will be a welcome object for such as are curious in the history of women's dress, in France and England.

Quilting, too, on coverlets, shown at pp. 13, 104, displays the taste of our neighbours in such stitchery, so much in use among them and ourselves from the sixteenth century.

Like Flanders, France knew how to weave fine linen, which here in England was much in use for ecclesiastical as well as household purposes. Three new cloths of Rains (Rennes in Brittany) were, 1327, in use for the high altar in Exeter cathedral, and many altar cloths of Paris linen. In the poem of the "Squier of Low Degree," the lady is told

Your blankettes shal be of fustyane, Your shetes shal be of cloths of rayne;

and, 1434, Joane Lady Bergavenny devises in her will, "two pair sheets of Raynes, a pair of fustians," &c. For her Easter "Sepulchre" Exeter had a pair of this Rennes sheeting; "par linthiaminum de Raynys pro sepulchro."

Cologne, the queen of the Rhine, became famous during the whole of the fifteenth and part of the sixteenth century for a certain kind of eccle-*