In her velvets Flanders had no need to fear a comparison with anything of the kind that Italy ever threw off from her looms, whether at Venice, Florence, or Genoa. Not to name others one example, with its cloth of gold ground and its pattern in a dark blue deep-piled velvet, is not surpassed in gorgeousness even by that splendid stuff from Florence of which the Stonyhurst cope, just spoken of, was made. Block-printed linen toward the end of the fourteenth century was another production of Flanders. Though existing examples to the eyes of many may look poor or mean, yet to men like the cotton-printers of Lancashire they will have a strong attraction; and to the scholar they will be deeply interesting as suggestive of the art of printing. Such specimens are rare, but it is likely that England can show in the chapter library at Durham the earliest sample of the kind as yet known; a fine sheet wrapped about the body of some old bishop found in a grave opened by Mr. Raine in 1827, within the cathedral. Several pieces of ancient silks and English embroidery were found at the same time. What Bruges was in silks and velvets, Yprès, in the sixteenth century, became for linen; and for many years Flemish linens were in favourite use throughout England. Hardly a church of any size, scarcely a gentleman’s house in this country, but used a quantity of towels and other napery that was made in Flanders, especially at Yprès. French silks, now in such extensive use, were not much cared for until the end of the sixteenth century in France itself, and seldom heard of abroad. The reader, then, must not be astonished at finding so few examples of the French loom in any collection of ancient silken textiles. In France, as in England, women in mediæval days, old and young, rich and poor, while filling up their leisure hours in-doors used to work on a small loom, weaving narrow webs, often of gold and diapered with coloured silks. At South Kensington, nos. 1250, 7062, and 7064 are examples of such French wrought stuffs belonging to the thirteenth century. In damasks, the earliest French productions are of the sixteenth century; and no. 8352 is a favourable example of what this manufacture then was in France; everything later is of the type so well known to everybody. In several of her textiles a leaning towards classicism in design is discernible. Like Flanders, France knew how to weave fine linen which here in England was much employed for ecclesiastical as well as household purposes. Three new cloths of Rains (Rennes in Brittany) were, in 1327, in use for the high altar in Exeter cathedral, and many altar cloths of Paris linen. In the poem of the ‘Squire of low degree’ the lady is told Your blankettes shal be of fustyane, Your shetes shal be of cloths of rayne; and, in 1434, lady Bergavenny devises in her will “two pair sheets of Raynes, a pair of fustians,” etc.