And it is in white we invariably picture it, yet more constantly in olden days it was made in red. Suffering much change in its orthography, it was originally written "samits," later "samit," and finally invested with the final "e," and yet while every record grants it a silken surface, some German scholar, owing to the circumstance that to this day their word "samt" expresses velvet, is quite convinced that the samit of old was of velvet substance. To China was accorded the privilege of persuading us permanently of the charms of brocade and velvet, and the descriptions of the mediæval velvets suggest that this could have been no difficult task, for they include diapered velvets, figured velvets, changeable velvets, velvets figured with white, and velvets worked upon gold, while the Genoese and the French rivalled each other in the best manufacture of these. The making of linen has been traced back to the early Egyptians, and the art was brought to England by the Romans, but a very fine linen dedicated to altar cloths and shirts in the middle ages was first manufactured at Rennes in Brittany. The English linen trade made no great stride until the reign of Charles I., and lawn and cambric were first greatly used in England in the sixteenth century. Fur as a trimming appears to have had no popular existence previous to the thirteenth century, but after the reign of Henry III. it bears its part bravely in romance and chronicles, ermine being pre-eminent together with a fur known as lettice, which closely resembles it; there were lettice caps worn by ladies in the reign of Elizabeth, who indeed forbade their wear to any but "a gentlewoman born, having arms," and sable was permitted only to the nobility and to certain officers of the Royal household in the Middle Ages.