Among the three meanings for the mediæval “Aresta,” one is, any kind of covering. To us, then, it seems as if these cloths of Areste took their name not from the place whereat they had been wove, but from the use to which, if not always, for the most part, we put them--that of hangings about our churches, since in the St. Paul’s inventory they are usually spoken of as such--“culcitræ pendules, panni penduli.”[281] Moreover, tapestry, or Arras work, being thick and heavy, could never have been employed for such light use as that of apparels, nor would it have been diapered like silk, yet we find it to have been so fashioned and so used--“maniculariis apparatis quodam panno rubeo diasperato de Laret, &c.”[282] [277] Excerpta Historica, p. 404. [278] St. Paul’s Cathedral, ed. Dugdale, p. 322. [279] Ibid. p. 329. [280] St. Paul’s Cathedral, ed. Dugdale, p. 329. [281] Ibid. p. 329. [282] Ibid. p. 335. For not a few it would be hard to understand some at least among those epithets meant in by-gone days to tell how SILKS WERE DISTINGUISHED THROUGH THEIR COLOURS AND SHADES OF COLOUR. To the inventories of vestments and church-stuffs of all sorts must we go to gather the information which we want about the textiles in use in this country at any particular period during by-gone days. The men who had, in the thirteenth century, the drawing up of such lists, seem to have been gifted with a keen eye for the varieties of shade and tints in the colour of silks then before them. For instance, a chasuble at St. Paul’s, London, A.D. 1295, is set down thus:--“De sameto purpureo aliquantulum sanguineo”--that is, made of samit (a thick silk) dyed in a purple somewhat bordering on a blood-red tone. Such language is unmistakable; not so, however, many other terms at the time in common use, and though well understood then, are now not so intelligible. We are told in the same inventory[283] several times of a “pannus Tarsicus,” a Tarsus cloth, and of a “pannus Tarsici coloris,” a Tarsus coloured cloth. What may have been the distinctive qualities of the stuffs woven at Tarsus, what the peculiar beauty in that tint to which that once so celebrated city had given its own name, we cannot say. We think, however, those Tarsus textiles were partly of silk, partly of fine goats’ hair, and for this reason Varro tells[284]--“Tondentur (capræ) quod magnis villis sunt, in magna parte Phrygiæ; unde Cilicia, et cætera ejus generis ferri solent. Sed, quod primum ea tonsura in Cilicia sit instituta, nomen id Cilicas adjecisse dicunt.” Goats are shorn in a great part of Phrygia, because there they have long shaggy hair. Cilicia (the Latin for hair cloths) and other things of the same sort, are usually brought from that country. For the reason that in Cilicia such a shearing of goats arose, they say that the name of Cilician was given to such stuffs woven of goats’ hair. As Tarsus is, so always was it, the head city in all that part of Asia Minor known of