England has always held its own in the manufacture of woollen goods of good material, mostly of plain cloth, but sometimes inwrought or woven with designs of figures, animals, and foliage patterns. At Bath, Norwich, Worcester, and in the abbeys and great religious houses during the Middle Ages the monks employed a good deal of their time at the loom, and considerable quantities of their work were exported to the Continent during the fourteenth century. The town of Worsted in Norfolk has given the name—worsted—to a cloth made there from a new preparation of the woollen yarn, which consisted of a special twisting of the threads so as to make the yarn of a harder texture. This cloth has been used for church vestments, hangings, and bed coverings. Cotton, the woolly product of the cotton-tree, and the cloth made from it, has been known in India and the East from the earliest times. Pliny mentions cotton under the name of a fabric called _oxylina_, made from the cotton that grew about the branches of the _xylon_ or _gossypium_ tree, or shrub, which grew in India, Upper Egypt, and Arabia. The Romans imported cotton fabrics from India, and the priests of ancient Egypt used it for their dresses. The cotton plant was cultivated by the Moors in Spain about the beginning of the tenth century, and they were the first people in Europe to make cotton fabrics. They are also credited with the invention of fustian-making (Spanish, _fustes_), a cotton material woven and afterwards cut precisely like velvet; it is generally thought that as fustian preceded the manufacture of velvet, the making of the latter may have been suggested to the Italians by the Spanish fustian. In the year 1585, after the sacking of Antwerp, some Flemish weavers settled at Manchester—now the great seat of cotton manufacture in England—and commenced the new industry of cotton spinning and weaving. Before this date Manchester and its neighbourhood were noted for the weaving of linen. The linen yarn was imported from Ireland, woven at Manchester, and the cloth sent back for distribution and sale in Ireland and other parts of the kingdom. The power of production in cotton goods was enormously increased by the inventions of Arkwright with his water-frame spinning machine, Hargreaves, who in 1770 invented the spinning-jenny, and by Compton, who improved on the latter by his invention of the mule-jenny in 1779. In 1785 Dr. Cartwright invented an automatic loom, which others improved on, when finally Horrocks, of Stockport, in 1803 brought to a successful issue his invention of the power-loom now in general use. Cotton printing and dyeing in colours have been successfully practised in India, Asia Minor, the Levant, and in the East generally from the earliest times. The patterns found in the commoner prints and chintzes of to-day have still reminiscences of Indian and Persian ornament.