As in other places abroad so at Lucca cloths of gold and of silver were often wrought, and the Lucchese cloths of this costly sort were in much request in England during the fourteenth century. In all likelihood they were not of the deadened but the sparkling kind, afterwards especially known as “tissue.” Exeter cathedral, in 1327, had a cope of silver tissue, or cloth of Lucca:--“de panno de Luk.” At a later date, belonging to the same church, were two fine chasubles--one purple, the other red--of the same glittering stuff: “de purpyll panno.” York cathedral possessed many copes of tissue shot with every colour required by its ritual, and among them were “a reade cope of clothe of tishewe with orphry of pearl, a cope with orphrey, a cope of raised clothe of goulde,” making a distinction between tissue and the ordinary cloth of gold. In the wardrobe accounts of Edward the second the golden tissue, or Lucca cloth, is several times mentioned. Whether the ceremony happened to be sad or gay this glittering web was used; palls made of Lucca cloth were, at masses for the dead, strewed over the corpse; at marriages the care-cloth was made of the same stuff: thus when Richard de Arundell and Isabella, Hugh le Despenser’s daughter, had been wedded at the door of the royal chapel, the veil held spread out over their heads as they knelt inside the chancel during the nuptial mass was of Lucca cloth. About the same time velvet became known, and came into use both for vestments and for personal wear; and Lucca probably was among the first places in Europe to weave it. The specimens at South Kensington of this fine textile from Lucchese looms, though few in comparison with those from Genoa, still have a certain historical value for the English workman: no. 1357, with its olive green plain silken ground and trailed all over with flowers and leaves in a somewhat deeper tone, and the earlier example, no. 8322, with its ovals and feathering stopped with graceful cusps and artichokes, afford us good instances of what Lucca could produce in the way of artistic velvets. Genoa, though in mediæval times not so conspicuous as she afterwards became for her textile industry, encouraged over her narrow territory the weaving of silken webs. Of these the earliest mention we have found is in the inventory of vestments belonging to St. Paul’s cathedral, London, in 1295: besides a cope of Genoa cloth that church had, of the same manufacture, a hanging patterned with wheels and two-headed birds. Though this first description be scant, we may reasonably gather that the Genoese cloths must have resembled the textiles wrought at Lucca. Genoa still keeps up her old reputation for beautiful velvets.