yield the merit to Asia—may be China. Other nations took up this manufacture, and the weaving of velvet was wonderfully improved. It became diapered, and upon a ground of silk or of gold, the pattern came out in a bold manner, with a raised pile; and, at last, that difficult and most beautiful of all manners of diapering, or making the pattern to show itself in a double pile, one pile higher than the other and of the same tint, now, as formerly, known as velvet upon velvet, was brought to its highest perfection: and velvets in this fine style were wrought in greatest excellence all over Italy and in Spain and Flanders. Our old inventories often specify these differences in the making of the web. York cathedral had "four copes of crimson velvet plaine, with orphreys of clothe of goulde, for standers;"[1] and besides, "a greene cushion of raised velvet,"[2] possessed "a cope of purshed velvet (redd)[3] "purshed" meaning the velvet raised in a network pattern.
Diaper was a silken fabric, held everywhere in high estimation during many hundred years, both abroad and here in England. This we know from documents beginning with the eleventh century. What was its distinctive characteristic, and whence it drew its name, we have not been hitherto told, with anything like certainty. Several eminent men have discussed these points, but while hazarding his own conjecture, each of these writers has differed from the others. Till a better may be found, we submit our own solution.
The silk weavers of Asia had, of old, found out the way so to gear their looms, and dress their silk, or their threads of gold, that with a warp and woof, both precisely of the same tone of colour they could give to the web an elegant design, each part of which being managed in the weaving, as either to hide or to catch the light and shine, looked to be separated from or stand well up above the seeming dusky ground below it: at times the design was dulled, and the ground made glossy. To indicate such a one-coloured, yet patterned silk, the Byzantine Greeks of the early middle ages bethought themselves of the term [Greek: diaspron], diaspron, a word of their own coinage, and drawn from the old Greek verb, [Greek: diaspaô], I separate, but meant by them to signify "what distinguishes or separates itself from things about it," as every pattern must do on a one-coloured silk. Along with this textile, the Latins took the name for it from the Greeks, and called it "diasper," which we English have moulded into "diaper." In the year 1066, the Empress Agnes gave to Monte Cassino a diaper-chasuble of cloth of gold, "optulit planetam diasperam totam undique auro contextam.[4]
