the forerunner of the now so celebrated cashmere, and along with silk made of the downy wool of a family of goats reared in several parts of Asia, but especially in Tibet, as we shall try to show a little further on.
Velvet is a silken textile, the history of which has still to be written. Of the country whence it first came, or the people who were the earliest to hit upon the happy way of weaving it, we know nothing. The oldest piece we remember to have ever seen was in the beautiful crimson cope embroidered by English hands in the fourteenth century, now kept at the college of Mount St. Mary, Chesterfield, and exhibited here in the ever memorable year '62.
Our belief is, that to central Asia—perhaps China,—we are indebted for velvet as well as satin, and we think the earliest places in Europe to weave it was, first the south of Spain, and then Lucca.
In the earlier of those oldest inventories we have of church vestments, that of Exeter Cathedral, A.D. 1277, velvet is not spoken of; but in St. Paul's, London, A.D. 1295, there is some notice of velvet,[1] along with its kindred web, "fustian," for chasubles.[2] At Exeter, in the year 1327, velvet—and it was crimson—is for the first time there mentioned, but as in two pieces not made up, of which some yards had been then sold for vestment-making.[3] From the middle of the fourteenth century, velvet—mostly crimson—is of common occurrence.
The name itself of velvet, "velluto," seems to point out Italy as the market through which we got it from the East, for the word in Italian indicates something which is hairy or shaggy, like an animal's skin.
Fustian was known at the end of the thirteenth century. St. Paul's Cathedral had: "Una casula alba de fustian."[4] But in an English sermon preached at the beginning of this thirteenth century, great blame is found with the priest who had his chasuble made of middling fustian: "þe meshakele of medeme fustian."[5] As then wove, fustian, about which we have to say more, had a short nap on it, and one of the domestic uses to which, during the middle ages, it had been put, was for bed clothes, as thick undersheets. Lady Bargavenny bequeaths A.D. 1434, "A bed of gold of swans, two pair sheets of Raynes (fine linen, made at Rheims), a pair of fustians, six pair of other sheets, &c."[6] That this stuff may have hinted to the Italians the way of weaving silk in the same manner, and so of producing velvet, is not unlikely. Had the Egyptian Arabs been the first to push forward their own discovery of working cotton into fustian, and changing cotton for silk, and so brought forth velvet, it is probable some one would have told us; as it is, we
