[274] Yorkshire Wills. Part i. p. 174. _Fustian_, of which two of its forms we still have in velveteen and corduroy, was originally wove at Fustat, on the Nile, with a warp of linen thread and a woof of thick cotton, which was so twilled and cut that it showed on one side a thick but low pile; and the web so 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 to this country before the Normans coming hither, for our Anglo-Saxon countryman, St. Stephen Harding, when a Cistercian abbot and an old man, _circ._ A.D. 1114, forbade chasubles in his church to be made of anything but fustian or plain linen: “neque casulas nisi de fustaneo vel lino sine pallio aureo vel argenteo,” &c.[275] The austerity of his rule reached even the ornament 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, it was a seemly textile. Years afterwards, in the fourteenth century, Chaucer tells us of his knight:-- Of fustian he wered a gepon.[276] Fustian, so near akin to velvet, is more especially noticed along with what is said upon that fine textile. In the fifteenth century Naples had a repute for weaving fustians, but our English churchwardens, not being learned in geography, made some laughable bad spelling of this, like 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. [275] Mon. Anglic. ed. Dugdale, v. 225. [276] The Prologue, Poems, ed. Nicolas, ii. 3. _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, its lightness, were, as they still are to some Asiatics, not the only charms belonging to this stuff: it was esteemed equally as much for the taste in 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 its eastern nations, the higher they found the point of excellence which had been reached by those people in weaving silk and gold into splendid fabrics. If the silkworm lived, nay, thrived there, the cotton plant was in its home, its birth-place, in those regions. Where stood Nineveh Mosul stands now.