King John in 1215 sent an order (extant in the Close rolls) to Reginald de Cornhull and William Cook to have made for him, besides five tunics, five banners with his arms upon them, well beaten in gold: “bene auro batuatas.” A very remarkable example attributed to the fourteenth century “the banner of Strasbourg” was preserved there until very lately, when it was unhappily destroyed in the bombardment of that city in 1870. Dugdale (in his Baronage) gives the original bill for fitting out one of the ships in which Beauchamp earl of Warwick, during the reign of Henry the sixth, went over to France. Among other items are these: “Four hundred pencils (long narrow strips of silk, used as flags) beat with the raggedstaff in silver; the other pavys (one of two shields probably of wood, and fastened outside the ship at its bows) painted with black, and a raggedstaff beat with silver occupying all the field; one coat for my lord’s body, beat with fine gold; two coats for heralds, beat with demi gold; a great streamer for a ship of forty yeards in length and eight yeards in breadth, with a great bear and griffin holding a raggedstaff poudred full of raggedstaffs; three penons (small flags) of satten; sixteen standards of worsted entailed with the bear and a chain.” The quatrefoils on the robe of Edward the first, the silver lions on the Glastonbury cope, the beasts and birds on the lady’s gown, the bear and griffin and raggedstaff belonging to the Beauchamp’s blazoning, and all similar enrichments put upon silken stuffs, were cut out of very thin plates of gold or silver, so as to hang upon them lightly, and were hammered up to show in low relief the fashion of the flower and the lineaments of the beast or bird meant to be represented. Such a style of ornamentation in gold or silver, stitched on silken stuffs, was far more common once than is now thought. It had also a technical description: in speaking of it people would either write or say, “silk beaten with gold or silver;” as, for example, Barbara Mason used the term when in 1538 she bequeathed to a church “a vestment of grene sylke betyn with goold.” Spangles, when they happened to be used, were not like those now employed but fashioned after another and artistic shape, and put on in a different manner. A fragment still exists from the chasuble belonging to the set of vestments wrought, it is said, by Isabella of Spain and her maids of honour; and used the first time high mass was sung in Granada, after it had been taken by the Spaniards from the Moors. Upon this are flowers, well thrown up in relief, done in spangles on a crimson velvet ground. The spangles--some in gold, some in silver--are, though small, of several sizes; all are voided; that is, hollow in the middle; with the circumference not flat but convex, and are sewed on like tiles, one overlapping the other, producing a rich and pleasing effect. Our present spangles, in the flat shape, are quite modern.