velvet raised in a net-work pattern. [145] P. 318. [146] P. 323. [147] Ed. Oliver, p. 317. [148] Ed. Dugdale, p. 323. [149] Reliquiæ Antiquæ, i. 129. [150] Test. Vet. i. 227. [151] Fabric Rolls, p. 309. [152] Ib. p. 311. [153] Ib. p. 310. _Diaper_ was a silken fabric, held everywhere in high estimation during many hundred years, both abroad and here in England. This we know from documents beginning with the eleventh century. What was its distinctive characteristic, and whence it drew its name, we have not been hitherto told, with anything like certainty. Several eminent men have discussed these points, but while hazarding his own conjecture, each of these writers has differed from the others. Till a better may be found, we submit our own solution. The silk weavers of Asia had, of old, found out the way so to gear their looms, and dress their silk, or their threads of gold, that with a warp and woof, both precisely of the same tone of colour they could give to the web an elegant design, each part of which being managed in the weaving, as either to hide or to catch the light and shine, looked to be separated from or stand well up above the seeming dusky ground below it: at times the design was dulled, and the ground made glossy. To indicate such a one-coloured, yet patterned silk, the Byzantine Greeks of the early middle ages bethought themselves of the term διασπρον, diaspron, a word of their own coinage, and drawn from the old Greek verb, διασπαω, I separate, but meant by them to signify “what distinguishes or separates itself from things about it,” as every pattern must do on a one-coloured silk. Along with this textile, the Latins took the name for it from the Greeks, and called it “diasper,” which we English have moulded into “diaper.” In the year 1066, the Empress Agnes gave to Monte Cassino a diaper-chasuble of cloth of gold, “optulit planetam diasperam totam undique auro contextam.”[154] How a golden web may be so wrought is exemplified, amid several other specimens in this collection, by the one under No. 1270, p. 38, done most likely by an English hand. At York Minster, in the year 1862, was opened a tomb, very likely that of some archbishop; and there was found, along with other textiles in silk, a few shreds of what had been a chasuble made of cloth of gold diapered all over with little crosses, as we ourselves beheld. It would seem, indeed, that cloth of gold was at most times diapered with a pattern, at least in Chaucer’s days, since he thus points to it on the housing of his king’s horse:-- -- -- trapped in stele, Covered with cloth of gold diapred wele.[155] [154] Chron. S. Monast. Cassin. Lib. iii. cap. 73, p. 450, ed. Muratori. [155] Knight’s Tale, l. 2159-60.