But it was of her velvets that Florence was warrantably proud. Henry the seventh bequeathed “to God and St. Peter, and to the abbot and prior and convent of our monastery of Westminster, the whole suit of vestments made at Florence in Italy.” We may yet see how gorgeous this textile was in one of these Westminster abbey copes still in existence, preserved at Stonyhurst college. The golden ground is trailed all over with leaf-bearing boughs of a bold type, in raised or cut ruby-toned velvet of a rich soft pile, which is freckled with gold thread sprouting up like loops. Though not so rich in material nor so splendid in pattern, there are at South Kensington, nos. 7792 and 7799, two specimens of Florentine cut crimson velvet on a golden ground, like the royal vestments in their kind and having the same peculiarity, the little gold thread loop shooting out of the velvet pile. These pieces are a full century later than the cope at Stonyhurst. That peculiar sort of ornamentation--the little loop of gold thread standing well up and in single spots--upon some velvets, seems at times to have been replaced, perhaps with the needle, by small dots of solid metal, gold or silver gilt, upon the pile: of the gift of one of its bishops, John Grandisson, Exeter cathedral had a crimson velvet cope, the purple velvet orphrey of which was so wrought: “purpyll velvette worked with pynsheds” of pure gold. Milan, though now-a-days she stands in such high repute for the richness and beauty of her silks of all sorts, was not, we believe, at any period during mediæval times as famous for her velvets, her brocades, or cloths of gold, as for her armour, so strong and trustworthy for the field, so exquisitely demascened for courtly service. Still, in the sixteenth century, she earned a name for rich cut velvets as may be seen in the specimen, no. 698; for her silken net-work, no. 8336, which may have led the way to weaving silk stockings; and for her laces of the open tinsel kind once in great vogue for both sacred and secular use, as in no. 8331. England, from her earliest period, had textile fabrics varying in design and material; the colours in the woollen garments worn by each of the three several classes into which the Bardic order was divided, and of the chequered pattern in Boadicea’s cloak, have been already mentioned. It would seem from John Garland, whose witness is referred to above, p. 12, that the lighter and more tasteful webs wrought here came from women’s hands; and the loom, one of which must have been in almost every English nunnery and homestead, was of the simplest make.