_Camoca_, _camoka_, _camak_, as the name is differently written, was a textile of which in England we hear nothing before the latter end of the fourteenth century. No sooner did it make its appearance than this camoca rose into great repute; the Church used it for her vestments, and royalty employed it for dress as well as in adorning palaces, especially in draping beds of state. In the year 1385, besides some smaller articles, the royal chapel in Windsor castle had a whole set of vestments and other ornaments for the altar, of white camoca; and our princes must have arrayed themselves, on grand occasions, in the same material; for Herod, in one of the Coventry mysteries--the adoration of the Magi--is made to boast of himself: “In kyrtyl of cammaka kynge am I cladde.” But it was in draping its state-beds that our ancient royalty showed its affection for camoca. Edward the Black Prince bequeaths to his confessor “a large bed of red camoca with our arms embroidered at each corner,” and the prince’s mother leaves to another of her sons “a bed of red camak.” Edward lord Despencer, in 1375, wills to his wife “my great bed of blue camaka, with griffins, also another bed of camaka, striped with white and black.” What may have been the real texture of this stuff, thought so magnificent, we do not positively know, but it was probably woven of fine camels’ hair and silk, and of Asiatic workmanship. From this mixed web we pass to another more precious, the _Cloth of Tars_; which we presume to have been the forerunner of the now celebrated cashmere, and together with silk made of the downy wool of goats reared in several parts of Asia, but especially in Tibet. _Velvet_ is a silken textile, the history of which has still to be written. Of the country whence it first came, or the people who were the earliest to hit upon the happy way of weaving it, we know nothing. A very old piece was in the beautiful crimson cope embroidered by English hands in the fourteenth century, now kept at the college of Mount St. Mary, Chesterfield. We are probably indebted to central Asia, or perhaps China, for velvet as well as satin; and among the earliest places in Europe where it was manufactured, were perhaps first the south of Spain, and then Lucca. In the earliest of the inventories which we have of church vestments, that of Exeter cathedral, 1277, velvet is not spoken of; but in St. Paul’s, London, A. D. 1295, there is some notice of velvet with its kindred web “fustian,” for chasubles. Velvet is for the first time mentioned at Exeter in 1327, but as in two pieces not made up, of which some yards had been then sold for vestment-making. From the middle of the fourteenth century velvet is of common occurrence. The name itself of velvet, “velluto,” seems to point out Italy as the market through which we got it from the east, for the word in Italian indicates something which is hairy or shaggy, like an animal’s skin.