In a kind of short dictionary drawn up by that writer and printed at the end of ‘Paris sous Philippe le Bel,’ edited by M. Geraud, our countryman tells us that, besides the usual homely textiles, costly cloth-of-gold webs were wrought by women; and very likely, among their other productions, were those blodbendes “cingula” the weaving of which had been forbidden to ankresses and nuns. Perhaps, also, some of the narrow gold-wrought ribbons in the South Kensington collection, nos. 1233, 1256, 1270, 8569, etc., may have been so employed. John Garland’s “cingula” may also mean the rich girdles or sashes worn by women round the waist, of which there is one example in the same collection, no. 8571. Of this sort is that fine border, amber coloured silk and diapered, round a vestment found in a grave at Durham; which is described by Mr. Raine in his book about St. Cuthbert as “a thick lace, one inch and a quarter broad--evidently owing its origin, not to the needle, but to the loom.” In an after period the same bands are shown on statuary, and in the illuminated manuscripts of the thirteenth century: as instances of the narrow girdle, the effigy of a lady in Romney church, Hants and of Ann of Bohemia in Westminster abbey may be referred to; both to be found in Hollis’s monumental effigies of Great Britain; for the band about the head, the examples in the wood-cuts in Planchè’s British costumes, p. 116. Specimens of such head bands may be seen at South Kensington, nos. 8569, 8583, 8584, and 8585. They are, no doubt, the old snôd of the Anglo-saxon period. For ladies they were wrought of silk and gold; women of lower degree wore them of simpler stuff. The silken snood, used in our own time by young unmarried women in Scotland, is a truthful witness to the fashion in vogue during Anglo-saxon and later ages in this country. The breeding of the worm and the manufacture of its silk spread themselves with steady though slow steps over most of the countries which border on the shores of the Mediterranean; so that, by the tenth century, those processes had reached from the far east to the uttermost western limits of that sea. Even then, and a long time after, the natural history of the silkworm became known but to a very few. Our countryman Alexander Neckham, abbot of Cirencester A. D. 1213, was probably the first who tried to help others to understand the habits of the insect: his brief explanation may be found in his once popular book ‘De natura rerum,’ which has been lately reprinted by order of the Master of the Rolls. [Illustration: Indian woman reeling silk from a wheel.] CHAPTER III. Of the several raw materials which from the earliest periods have been employed in weaving, though not in such frequency as silk, one is gold: which, when judiciously brought in, adds not a barbaric but artistical richness.