Marco Polo says of the Persians in certain sections; "There are excellent artificers in the cities, who make wonderful things in gold, silk, and embroidery.... In veins of the mountains stones are found, commonly called turquoises, and other jewels. There also are made all sorts of arms and ammunition for war, and by the women excellent needlework in silks, with all sorts of creatures very admirably wrought therein." Marco Polo also reports the King of Tartary as wearing on his birthday a most precious garment of gold, while his barons wore the same, and had given them girdles of gold and silver, and "pearls and garments of great price." This Khan also "has the tenths of all wool, silk, and hemp, which he causes to be made into clothes, in a house for that purpose appointed: for all trades are bound one day in the week to serve him." He clothed his armies with this tythe wool. In Anglo-Saxon times a fabric composed of fine basket-weaving of thin flat strips of pure gold was used; sometimes the flat metal was woven on a warp of scarlet silk threads. Later strips of gilded parchment were fraudulently substituted for the genuine flat metal thread. Often the woof of gold strips was so solid and heavy that it was necessary to have a silk warp of six strands, to support its wear. Gold cloth was of varying excellence, however: among the items in an inventory for the Earl of Warwick in the time of Henry VI., there is allusion to "one coat for My Lord's body, beat with fine gold; two coats for heralds, beat with demi-gold."