_Fustian_ was known at the end of the thirteenth century. St. Paul’s cathedral at that date had “a white chasuble of fustian.” In an English sermon preached at the beginning of the same century great blame is found with the priest who had his chasuble made of middling fustian: “þe meshakele of medeme fustian.” As then wove, fustian had a short nap on it, and one of the domestic uses to which during the middle ages it had been put was for bed clothes, as thick undersheets. Lady Bargavenny bequeaths, in 1434, “A bed of gold of swans, two pair sheets of raynes (fine linen, made at Rheims), a pair of fustians, six pair of other sheets, etc.” It is not unlikely that this stuff may have hinted to the Italians the way of weaving silk in the same manner, and so of producing velvet. Other nations took up the manufacture, and the weaving of velvet was wonderfully improved. It became diapered and, upon a ground of silk or of gold, the pattern came out in a bold manner, with a raised pile. At last, the most beautiful of all manners of diapering, namely, making the pattern to show itself in a double pile, one pile higher than the other and of the same tint, now, as formerly, known as velvet upon velvet, was brought to its highest perfection; and velvets in this fine style were wrought in greatest excellence in Italy, in Spain and in Flanders. Our old inventories often specify these differences in the making of the web. York cathedral had “four copes of crimson velvet plaine, with orphreys of clothe of goulde, for standers;” “a greene cushion of raised velvet;” and “a cope of purshed velvet (redd):” “purshed” means that the velvet was raised in a network pattern. _Diaper_ was a silken fabric, held everywhere in high estimation during many hundred years, both abroad and in England. We know this from documents beginning with the eleventh century: but the origin of the name is uncertain. Possibly, in order to indicate a one-coloured yet patterned silk, which diaper is, the Byzantine Greeks of the early middle ages invented the term διαςπρὸν, diaspron, from διαςπαω, I separate, to signify “what distinguishes or separates itself from things about it,” as every pattern does on a one-coloured silk. With this textile the Latins took the name for it from the Greeks and called it “diasper,” which in English has been moulded into “diaper.” In the year 1066 the empress Agnes gave to Monte Cassino a diaper-chasuble of cloth of gold, “planetam diasperam.” This early mention of the name seems to be a conclusive argument against those writers who derive it from Yprès, in Flanders; a town celebrated for linen manufactures at a somewhat later period: yet even then, according to Chaucer, rivalled by workwomen in England. He tells us of the “good wif of Bathe” that Of cloth-making she hadde swiche an haunt She passed hem of Ipres and of Gaunt.