In her velvets, Flanders had no need to fear a comparison with anything of the kind that Italy ever threw off from her looms, whether at Venice, Florence, or Genoa, as the samples we have here under Nos. 8673, p. 254, 8674, p. 255, 8704, p. 264, will prove. Nay, this last specimen, with its cloth of gold ground, and its pattern in a dark blue deep-piled velvet, is not surpassed in gorgeousness even by that splendid stuff from Florence yet to be seen in one of the copes for Westminster Abbey given it by Henry VII. Block-printed linen was, toward the end of the fourteenth century, another production of Flanders, of which pieces may be seen at Nos. 7022, p. 118, 7027, p. 120, 8303, p. 184, 8615, p. 234. Though to the eyes of many, these may look so poor, so mean; to men like the cotton-printers of Lancashire and other places they will have a strong attraction; to the scholar they will be deeply interesting as suggestive of the art of printing. Such specimens are rare, but it is likely that England can show, in the chapter library at Durham, the earliest sample of the kind as yet known, in a fine sheet wrapped about the body of some old bishop discovered, along with several pieces of ancient silks, and still more ancient English embroidery, in a grave opened by Mr. Raine, A.D. 1827, within that grand northern cathedral. What Bruges was in silks and velvets Yprès, in the sixteenth century, became for linen, and for many years Flemish linens had been in favourite use throughout England. Hardly a church of any size, scarcely a gentleman’s house in this country, but used a quantity of towels and other napery that was made in Flanders, especially at Yprès.[260] Of this textile instances may be seen at pp. 34, 73, 75, 124, 203, 205, 255, 263. [257] Hist. p. 396, Frankfort, A.D. 1601. [258] Church Furniture, ed. Peacock, p. 94. [259] Fabric Rolls, p. 302. [260] Oliver’s Exeter, p. 356. _French_ silks, now in such extensive use, were until the end of the sixteenth century not much cared for in France itself, and seldom heard of abroad. The reader, then, must not be astonished at finding so few examples of the French loom, in a collection of ancient silken textiles. France, as England, used of old to behold her women, old and young, rich and poor, while filling up their leisure hours in-doors, at work on a small loom, and weaving certain narrow webs, often of gold, and diapered with coloured silks, as we mentioned before (p. xxii.) Of such French wrought stuffs belonging to the thirteenth century, some samples are described at pp. 29, 130, 131. In damasks, her earliest productions are of the sixteenth century, and are described at pp. 13, 205, 206; and the last is a favourable example of what the loom then was in France; everything later is of that type so well known to everybody. In several of her textiles a leaning towards classicism in design is discernible.