In the year 801 the news reached Charlemagne that one Isaac the Jew, whom he had sent four years before to the King of Persia, was returning, bringing with him an elephant and many other presents. He had got as far as Fez. Special arrangements were made for bringing the elephant across the sea, and he arrived at Spezzia in October, wintering at Vercelli because the Alps were already covered with snow. Eginhart thought the arrival of the elephant at Aix-la-Chapelle to be of sufficient importance to have the precise day named, the only event thus honoured in a year rather full of events. It was the twentieth of July; and the elephant’s name was Abulabaz. Under the year 810, another year full of important events, Eginhart records that Charlemagne heard of a sudden and successful raid of Northmen upon the Frisians; he set off in great haste, summoned all his forces from all parts, crossed the Rhine at Lippenheim, and waited there a few days for the troops to assemble. He had taken his favourite animal with him. While he was waiting, the elephant died suddenly. See Appendix E. The strange form of an elephant made it a frequent subject for the ornamentation of silk and woollen robes. We hear of silk pallia thus adorned in Charlemagne’s lifetime, and it is probable that in a stuff of this kind his body was clothed in the grave at Aachen. Alcuin’s great predecessor in learning, Aldhelm, had a chasuble of scarlet silk, wrought with black scrolls containing the representations of peacocks,[269] and this chasuble was preserved at Malmesbury in the time of William of Malmesbury, about 1140. The silk robes in which the body of St. Cuthbert was wrapped were ornamented with large circular spaces containing men on horseback with hawk and hound, and an island with trees, fishes, and eider ducks. [Illustration: PLATE VII Elephant from the tomb of Charlemagne. _To face p. 290_] [Illustration: PLATE VIII The fringe of the robe from the Tomb of Charlemagne. _To face p. 291._]