Fustian, of which we still have two forms in velveteen and corduroy, was originally wove at Fustat on the Nile, with a warp of linen thread and a woof of thick cotton, so twilled and cut that it showed on one side a thick but low pile; and the web thus managed took its name of Fustian from that Egyptian city. At what period it was invented we do not rightly know, but we are well aware it must have been brought very early to this country; for our countryman St. Stephen Harding, when a Cistercian abbot and an old man about the year 1114, forbade chasubles in his church to be made of anything but fustian or plain linen. The austerity of his rule reached even the ornaments of the church. From such a prohibition we are not to draw as a conclusion that fustian was at the time a mean material; quite the contrary, although not splendid it was a seemly textile. Years afterwards, in the fourteenth century, Chaucer tells us of his knight:-- Of fustian he wered a gepon. In the fifteenth century Naples had a repute for weaving fustians; and our English churchwardens, not being learned in geography or spelling, made some odd mistakes in their accounts about this as about some other continental stuffs: “Fuschan in appules” for fustian from Naples is droll; yet droller still is “mustyrd devells,” for a cloth made in France at a town called Mustrevilliers. Muslin, as it is now throughout the world so from the earliest antiquity, has been everywhere in Asia in favourite use both as an article of dress and as furniture. Its cloud-like thinness and its lightness were not the only charms belonging to this stuff: it was esteemed equally as much for the taste with which stripes of gold had been woven in its warp. As we learn from the travels of Marco Polo, the further all wayfarers in Asia wandered among eastern nations the higher they found the point of excellence which had been reached in weaving silk and gold into splendid fabrics. The silkworm lived and thrived there and the cotton plant also was in its home, its birth-place, in those regions. Like many cities of central Asia, Mosul had earned for itself a reputation of old for the beauty of its gold-wrought silken textiles. Cotton grew all around in plenty; the inhabitants, especially the women, were gifted with such quick feeling of finger that they could spin thread from this cotton of more than hair-like fineness. Cotton with them took the place of silk in the loom; and gold was not forgotten in the weaving. Their work, not only because it was so much cheaper but from its own peculiar beauty and comeliness, won for itself a high place in common estimation: and the name of the town where it was wrought in such perfection was given to it as its distinctive name. Hence, whether wove with or without gold, we call this cotton web muslin, from the Asiatic city of Mosul.