Both Roger de Wendover and Matthew Paris mention a stuff called “imperial:”  it was partly gold in weave, but there is some doubt as to its actual texture.

Baudekin was a very costly textile of gold and silk which was used largely in altar coverings and hangings, such as dossals; by degrees the name became synonymous with “baldichin,” and in Italy the whole altar canopy is still called a baldachino.

During Royal Progresses the streets were always hung with rich cloth of gold.  As Chaucer makes allusion to streets

  “By ordinance throughout the city large
   Hanged with cloth of gold, and not with serge,”

so Leland tells how the Queen of Henry VII. was conducted to her coronation and “all the stretes through which she should pass were clenely dressed... with cloths of tapestry and Arras, and some stretes, as Cheepe, hanged with rich cloths of gold, velvetts, and silks.”  And in Machyn’s Diary, he says that “as late as 1555 at Bow church in London, was hangyd with cloth of gold and with rich Arras.”

The word “satin” is derived from the silks of the Mediterranean, called “aceytuni,” which became “zetani” in Italian, and gradually changed through French and English influence, to “satin.”  The first mention of it in England is about 1350, when Bishop Grandison made a gift of choice satins to Exeter Cathedral.

The Dalmatic of Charlemagne is embroidered on blue satin, although this is a rare early example of the material.  At Constantinople, also, as early as 1204, Baldwin II. wore satin at his coronation.  It was nearly always made in a fiery red in the early days.  It is mentioned in a Welsh poem of the thirteenth century.

Benjamin of Tudela, a traveller who wrote in 1161, mentions that the Jews were living in great numbers in Thebes, and that they made silks there at that time.  There is record that in the late eleventh century a Norman Abbot brought home from Apulia a quantity of heavy and fine silk, from which four copes were made.  French silks were not remarkable until the sixteenth century, while those of the Netherlands led all others as early as the thirteenth.

Shot silks were popular in England in the sixteenth century.  York Cathedral possessed, in 1543, a “vestment of changeable taffety for Good Friday.”

St. Dunstan is reported to have once “tinted” a sacerdotal vestment to oblige a lady, thus departing from his regular occupation as goldsmith to perform the office of a dyer of stuff.

Many rich mediaeval textiles were ornamented by designs, which usually show interlaces and animal forms, and sometimes conventional floral ornament.  Patterns originated in the East, and, through Byzantine influence, in Italy, and Saracenic in Spain, they were adopted and modified by Europeans.  In 1295 St. Paul’s in London owned a hanging “patterned with wheels and two-headed birds.”  Sicilian silks, and many others of the contemporary textiles, display variations