but real gold thread, if I may so term it, not round, but flat. This is the character of the whole web, with the exception of the figures, the undulating cloud-shaped pedestal upon which they stand, the inscriptions, and the foliage; for all of which, however surprising it may appear, vacant spaces have been left by the loom, and they themselves afterwards inserted with the needle. Further on, in his description of a girdle, the same writer tells us: Its breadth is exactly seven-eighths of an inch. It has evidently proceeded from the loom; and its two component parts are a flattish thread of pure gold, and a thread of scarlet silk, &c.[1] Let it be borne in mind that Winchester was then a royal city, and abounded, as it did afterwards, with able needle-*women.
The employment, till a late period, of flattened gold in silk textiles is well shown by those fraudulent imitations, and substitution in its stead of gilt parchment, which we have pointed out among the specimens in this collection, as may be seen at Nos. 7095, p. 140; 8590, p. 224; 8601, p. 229; 8639, p. 244, &c.
That these Durham cloth-of-gold stuffs for vestments were home made—we mean wrought in Anglo-Saxondom—is likely, and by our women's hands, after the way we shall have to speak about further on.
This love for such glittering attire, not only for liturgical use but secular wear, lasted long in England. Such golden webs went here under different names; at first they were called "ciclatoun," "siglaton," or "siklatoun," as the writer's fancy led him to spell the common Persian word for them at the time throughout the east.
By the old English ritual, plain cloth of gold was allowed, as now, to be taken for white, and worn in the Church's ceremonials as such, when that colour happened to be named for use by the rubric. Thus in the reign of Richard II., among the vestments at the Chapel of St. George, Windsor Castle, there was "unum vestimentum album bonum de panno adaurato pro principalibus festis B. Mariæ," &c.[2]
St. Paul's, London, had, at the end of the thirteenth century, two amices; one an old one, embroidered with solid gold wire: "Amictus breudatus de auro puro; amictus vetus breudatus cum auro puro.[3]
The use of golden stuffs not unlikely woven in England, but assuredly worn by royalty here, is curiously shown by the contrast between the living man clothed in woven gold, and the dead body, and its frightful state at burial, of Henry I., set forth by Roger Hoveden; who thus writes of that king: "vide . . . quomodo regis potentissimi corpus cujus cervix
