_Camoca_, _camoka_, _camak_, _camora_ (a misspelling), as the name is differently written, was a textile of which in England we hear nothing before the latter end of the fourteenth century. No sooner did it make its appearance than this camoca rose into great repute; the Church used it for her liturgical vestments, and royalty employed it for dress on grand occasions as well as in adorning palaces, especially in draping beds of state. In the year 1385, besides some smaller articles, the royal chapel in Windsor Castle had a whole set of vestments and other ornaments for the altar, of white camoca: “Unum vestimentum album de camoca,” &c.... “Album de camoca, cum casula.”[138]... “Duo quissini rubei de camoca.”[139] To his cathedral of Durham, the learned Richard Bury left a beautifully embroidered whole set of vestments, A.D. 1345: “Unum vestimentum de alma camica (_sic_) subtiliter brudata,” &c.[140] Our princes must have arrayed themselves, on grand occasions, in camoca; for thus Herod, in one of the Coventry Misteries--the Adoration of the Magi--is made to boast of himself: “In kyrtyl of cammaka kynge am I cladde.”[141] But it was in draping its state-beds that our ancient royalty showed its affection for camoca. To his confessor, Edward the Black Prince bequeaths “a large bed of red camora (_sic_) with our arms embroidered at each corner,”[142] and the prince’s mother leaves to another son of hers, John Holland, “a bed of red camak.”[143] Our nobles, too, had the same likings, for Edward Lord Despencer, A.D. 1375, wills to his wife, “my great bed of blue camaka, with griffins, also another bed of camaka, striped with white and black.”[144] What may have been the real texture of this stuff, thought so magnificent, we do not positively know, but hazarding a guess, we think it to have been woven of fine camel’s hair and silk, and of Asiatic workmanship. From this mixed web pass we now to another, one even more precious, that is the _Cloth of Tars_, which we presume to have, in a manner, been the forerunner of the now so celebrated cashmere, and along with silk made of the downy wool of a family of goats reared in several parts of Asia, but especially in Tibet, as we shall try to show a little further on. [138] Mon. Anglic. ed. Dugdale, new edition, p. viii. 1363, _a_. [139] Ib. p. 1366, _a_. [140] Wills and Inventories, t. i. p. 25, published by the Surtees Society. [141] Ed. Halliwell, p. 163. [142] Nicolas’s Testamenta Vetusta, t. i. p. 12. [143] Ib. p. 14. [144] Ib. p. 99. _Velvet_ is a silken textile, the history of which has still to be written. Of the country whence it first came, or the people who were the earliest to hit upon the happy way of weaving it, we know nothing. The oldest piece we remember to have ever seen was in the beautiful crimson cope embroidered by English hands in the fourteenth century, now kept at the college of Mount St. Mary, Chesterfield, and exhibited here in the ever memorable year ’62.