Going far down, and much below the middle ages, Purple, in all its tones, and tints, and shades, was spoken of and looked upon as allowable to be worn in garments only to worshipful, ennobled, or royal personages. Whether it glowed with the brightness it seemed to have stolen from the rose, or wore its darkest tone it could borrow from the violet, whether it put on any one of those hundred shades to be found between those two extremes, it mattered not; it was gazed at with an admiring, a respectful eye. Eagerly sought out, and bought at high price, were those textiles that showed this colour, and had been dyed at Tyre, Antioch, Tarsus, Alexandria, Byzantium, or Naples. All these places were at one time or another, in days of old, famous for their looms, no less than their ability in the dyeing, especially of purple, among the nations living on the shores of the Mediterranean; and each of them had in its own tone a shade which distinguished it from that of all the others. What the tint of purple was which established this difference we cannot at this distance of time, and with our means of knowing, justly say. Of this, however, we are perfectly aware, that silks of purple usually bore their specific name from those above-named cities, as we perceive while reading the old inventories of our churches and cathedrals. Moreover, our native writers let us know that, if not always from Greece, it was through that country that purple textiles were brought to England. Besides speaking of a conversation held about, beside other things, the produce of Greece in purple silks--“Græcorum purpuris, et pannis holosericis”--Gerald Barry gives us to understand that in his days not only were our churches sumptuously hung with costly palls and purple silks, but that these textiles were the work of Grecian looms--“rex (Willielmus Rufus) ecclesiam quandam (in nova foresta) intraret quam adeo pulchram et decentius ornatam auletis historicis, et pretiosis Græcorum palliis, pannis holosericis et purpureis undique vestitam,” &c.[288] Silks woven of two colours, so that one of them showed itself unmixed and quite distinct on one side, and the second appeared equally clean on the other--a thing sometimes now looked upon as a wonder in modern weaving--might occasionally be met with here at the mediæval period: Exeter Cathedral had, A.D. 1327:--“Unus pannus sericus curtus rubei coloris interius et crocei coloris exterius.”[289] [287] St. Paul’s, ed. Dugdale, p. 328, &c. [288] Giraldus Cambrensis, De Instructione Principum, pp. 168-173. [289] Oliver, p. 316.