At the end of the twelfth century there was brought to England, from Greece, a sort of precious silk named there Imperial.
Ralph, dean of St. Paul's cathedral, London, tells us, that William de Magna Villa, on coming home from his pilgrimage to the Holy Land, made presents to several churches, A.D. 1178, of cloths which at Constantinople were called imperial: "Pannos quos Constantinopolis civitas vocat Imperiales, &c."[1] Relating the story of John's apparition, A.D. 1226, Roger Wendover, and after him Matt. Paris, tells us that the King stood forth dressed in royal robes made of the stuff they call Imperial: "Astitit rex in vestibus regalibus de panno scilicet quem imperialem appellant."[2] In the Inventory of St. Paul's, London, drawn up A.D. 1295, four tunicles, vestments for subdeacons and lower ministers about the altar, are mentioned as made of this imperial. No colour is specified, except in the one instance of the silk being marbled; and the patterns are noticed as of red and green, with lions wove in gold.[3] It seems not to have been thought good enough for the more important vestments, such as chasubles and copes. Were it not spoken of thus by Wendover and Paris, as well as by a dean of St. Paul's, and mentioned once as used in a few liturgical garments for that cathedral, we had never heard a word about such a textile anywhere in England. Our belief is that it got its name neither from its colour—supposed royal purple—nor its costliness, but through quite another reason: woven at a workshop kept up by the Byzantine emperors, just like the Gobelins is to-day in Paris by the French, and bearing about it some small, though noticeable mark, it took the designation of "Imperial." That it was partly wrought with gold, we know; but that its tint was always some shade of the imperial purple—hence its appellation—is a purely gratuitous assumption. Moreover, as Saracenic princes in general had wrought in their own palaces, at the tiraz there, those silks wanted by themselves, their friends, and officers, and caused them to be marked with some adopted word or sentence; so, too, the rulers of Byzantium followed, it is likely the same usage, and put some royal device or word, or name in Greek upon theirs, and hence such textiles took the name of Imperial. In France, this textile was in use as late as the second half of the fifteenth century, but looked upon as old. Here, at York, as late as the early part of the sixteenth, one of its deans bestowed on that cathedral "two (blue) copes of clothe imperialle."[4]
