At the end of the twelfth century there was brought to England, from Greece, a sort of precious silk named there _Imperial_. Ralph, dean of St Paul’s cathedral, tells us that William de Magna Villa, on coming home from his pilgrimage to the holy land about 1178, made presents to several churches of cloths which at Constantinople were called “Imperial.” We are told by Roger Wendover, and after him by Matthew Paris, that the apparition of king John was dressed in royal robes made of the stuff they call imperial. In the inventory of St. Paul’s, drawn up in 1295, four tunicles (vestments for subdeacons and lower ministers at the altar) are mentioned as made of this imperial. No colour is specified, except in the one instance of the silk being marbled; and the patterns are noticed as of red and green, with lions woven in gold. It seems not to have been thought good enough for the more important vestments, such as chasubles and copes. Probably the name was not derived from its colour (supposed royal purple) nor its costliness, but for quite another reason: woven at a workshop kept up by the Byzantine emperors, like the Gobelins is to-day in Paris, and bearing about it some small though noticeable mark, it took the designation of “Imperial.” We know it was partly wrought with gold; but that its tint was always some shade of the imperial purple is a gratuitous assumption. In France this textile was in use as late as the second half of the fifteenth century, but looked upon as old. At York somewhat later, in the early part of the sixteenth, one of its deans bestowed on that cathedral “two (blue) copes of clothe imperialle.” _Baudekin_ was a costly stuff much employed and often spoken of in our literature during many years of the mediæval period. Ciclatoun, as we have already remarked, was the usual term during centuries throughout western Europe by which the showy golden textiles were called. When, however, Bagdad or Baldak held for no short length of time the lead all over Asia in weaving fine silks, and in especial golden stuffs shot as now in different colours, tinted cloths of gold became known, and more particularly among the English, as “baldakin,” “baudekin,” or “baudkyn,” or silks from Baldak. At last the earlier term “ciclatoun” dropped out of use. Remembering this the reader will more readily understand several otherwise puzzling passages in our old writers, as well as in the inventories of royal furniture and church vestments. Kings and the nobility affected much this rich stuff for the garments worn on high occasions. When Henry the third knighted William of Valence, in 1247, he had on a robe of cloth of gold made of baudekin; “facta de pretiosissimo baldekino.” In the year 1259 the master of Sherborn hospital in the north bequeathed to that house a cope made of the like stuff: “de panno ad aurum scilicet baudekin.” Vestments of this material are frequently mentioned in the old church inventories.