For state receptions, our kings used to send out an order that the houses should be "curtained" all along the streets which the procession would have to take through London, "incortinaretur."[1] How this was done we learn from Chaucer in the "Knight's Tale,"[2]
By ordinance, thurghout the cite large
Hanged with cloth of gold, and not with sarge;
as well as from the "Life of Alexander:"—
Al theo city was by-hong
Of riche baudekyns and pellis (palls) among.[3]
Hence, when Elizabeth, our Henry VII.'s queen, "proceded from the Towre throwge the Citie of London (for her coronation) to Westminster, al the strets ther wich she shulde passe by, were clenly dressed and besene with clothes of Tappestreye and Arras. And some strets, as Cheepe, hangged with riche clothes of gold, velvetts, and silks, &c.[4] "As late as A.D. 1555, at Bow chyrche in London was hangyd with cloth of gold and with ryche hares (arras)."[5]
Those same feelings which quickened our doughty knights and high-*born ladies to go and overspread the bier of each dead noble friend, with costly baudekins or cloths of gold, so the church whispered and she whispers us still to do, in due degree, the same to the coffin in which the poor man is being carried to the grave beneath a mantle of silk and velvet. The brother or the sister belonging to any of our old London gilds had over them, however lowly they might have been in life, one or other of those splendid hearse-cloths which we saw in this museum, among the loans, in the ever memorable year 1862.
This silken textile interwove with gold, first known as "ciclatoun," on account of its glitter, then as "baudekin," from the city where it was best made, came at last to be called by the name of "pall." Whether employed on jubilant occasions, for a joyful betrothal, or a stately coronation, or for a sorrowing funeral, it mattered not, it got the common term of "cloth of pall," which we yet keep up in that velvet covering for a coffin, a burial pall.
Lettered Silks
are of no uncommon occurrence, and some examples may be seen in this collection.
