Cologne, the queen of the Rhine, became famous during the whole of the fifteenth and part of the sixteenth century for a certain kind of ecclesiastical textile which, from the very general use to which it has been applied, we may call “orphrey web.” The productions of Cologne, however, are every way far below in beauty the similar works of Italy. Italian orphrey-webs are generally worked in gold or yellow silk upon a crimson ground of silk. Florentine are often distinguished from the Venetian by the introduction of white for the faces; those of Cologne vary from both by introducing blue, while the material is almost always poor and the weaving coarse. In England this orphrey web was in church use and called, as we learn from the York “wills and testaments,” “rebayn de Colayn.” The piece of German napery, no. 8317 (of the beginning of the fifteenth century), will be to those curious about household linen an acceptable specimen. If in some old inventory of church vestments we find an entry mentioning a chasuble made of cloth of Cologne, we should understand it to mean not a certain broad textile woven there, but merely a vestment composed of several pieces of this kind of web sewed together; like the frontal made of pieces of woven Venice orphreys, no. 8976. CHAPTER VII. The countries whence silks came to England are numerous; we find early notices of Antioch, Tarsus, Alexandria, Damascus, Byzantium, Cyprus, Trip or Tripoli, and Bagdad, and later of Venice, Genoa, and Lucca. To fix the localities of others would be but guess work. At the beginning of the fourteenth century a silk called “_Acca_” is occasionally mentioned: and, from the description, it must have been a cloth of gold shot with coloured silk, figured with animals: William de Clinton, earl of Huntingdon, gave to St. Alban’s monastery a whole vestment of cloth of gold shot with sky-blue and called cloth of Acca. It would look as if this stuff took its name from having been brought to us through the port of Acre: and Macri, in his valuable Hierolexicon, says that the name of the ancient Ptolemais in Syria was so written.