Like many cities of Middle Asia, Mosul had earned for itself a reputation of old for the beauty of its gold-wrought silken textiles. Cotton grew all around in plenty; the inhabitants, especially the women, being gifted with such quick feeling of finger, could spin thread from this cotton of more than hair-like fineness. Cotton then took with them, on many occasions, the place of silk in the loom; but gold was not forgotten in the texture. This new fabric, not only because it was so much cheaper, but from its own peculiar beauty and comeliness, won for itself a high place in common estimation. At once, and by the world’s accord, on it was bestowed as its distinctive name, the name of the place where it was wrought in such perfection. Hence, whether wove with or without gold, we call to this day this cotton web Muslin, from the Asiatic city of Mosul. _Cloth of Areste_ is another of those terms for woven stuffs which students of textiles had never heard of were it not to be found in our old English deeds and inventories. The first time we meet it is in an order given, A.D. 1244, by Henry III. for finding two of these cloths of Areste with which two copes had to be made for royal chapels: “Duos pannos del Areste ad duas capas faciendas,” &c.[277] Again it comes a few years later at St. Paul’s, which cathedral, A.D. 1295, had, besides a dalmatic and tunicle of this silk--“de serico albo diasperato de Arest,”[278]--as many as thirty and more hangings of this same texture.[279] From the description of these pieces we gather that this so-called cloth of Areste must have been as beautiful as it was rich, being for the most part cloth of gold figured elaborately, some with lions and double-headed eagles, others, for example, with the death and burial of our Lord--“campus aureus cum leonibus et aquilis bicapitibus de aurifilo contextis--campus rubeus cum historia Passionis Domini et sepulturæ ejusdem.” These designs speak of the looms at work in the middle ages on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, and we are much strengthened in this thought by beholding how the death and burial of our Lord, like the sample here, number 8278, p. 170-1, are shown on a crimson ground, as we shall have to instance further on under Symbolism, § VII. That this sort of stuff, wove of silk and gold, was of any kind of Arras, or made in that town, to our seeming is a very unhappy guess. Arras had not won for itself a reputation for its tapestry before the fourteenth century. Tapestry itself is too thick and heavy for use in vestments; yet this cloth of Areste was light enough for tunicles, and when worn out was sometimes condemned at St. Paul’s to be put aside for lining other ritual garments--“ad armaturam faciendam.”[280] The term “Areste” has little or nothing in it common to the word “Arras,” as written either in French, or under its Latin appellation “Atrebatum.”