"mustyrd devells," for a cloth made in France at a town called Mustrevilliers.
Muslin, as it is now throughout the world, so from the earliest antiquity has been everywhere in Asia in favourite use, both as an article of dress and as furniture. Its cloud-like thinness, its lightness, were, as they still are to some Asiatics, not the only charms belonging to this stuff: it was esteemed equally as much for the taste in which stripes of gold had been woven in its warp. As we learn from the travels of Marco Polo, the further all wayfarers in Asia wandered among its eastern nations, the higher they found the point of excellence which had been reached by those people in weaving silk and gold into splendid fabrics. If the silkworm lived, nay, thrived there, the cotton plant was in its home, its birth-place, in those regions. Where stood Nineveh Mosul stands now.
Like many cities of Middle Asia, Mosul had earned for itself a reputation of old for the beauty of its gold-wrought silken textiles. Cotton grew all around in plenty; the inhabitants, especially the women, being gifted with such quick feeling of finger, could spin thread from this cotton of more than hair-like fineness. Cotton then took with them, on many occasions, the place of silk in the loom; but gold was not forgotten in the texture. This new fabric, not only because it was so much cheaper, but from its own peculiar beauty and comeliness, won for itself a high place in common estimation. At once, and by the world's accord, on it was bestowed as its distinctive name, the name of the place where it was wrought in such perfection. Hence, whether wove with or without gold, we call to this day this cotton web Muslin, from the Asiatic city of Mosul.
Cloth of Areste is another of those terms for woven stuffs which students of textiles had never heard of were it not to be found in our old English deeds and inventories. The first time we meet it is in an order given, A.D. 1244, by Henry III. for finding two of these cloths of Areste with which two copes had to be made for royal chapels: "Duos pannos del Areste ad duas capas faciendas," &c.[1] Again it comes a few years later at St. Paul's, which cathedral, A.D. 1295, had, besides a dalmatic and tunicle of this silk—"de serico albo diasperato de Arest,"[2]—as many as thirty and more hangings of this same texture.[3]
From the description of these pieces we gather that this so-called cloth of Areste must have been as beautiful as it was rich, being for the most
