According to Balsa de la Vega, whose interesting articles on Spanish lace (published in the newspaper _El Liberal_) are worth perusal by all who are interested in this craft, about the middle of the seventeenth century the custom originated in Spain of making lace in broader pieces, dividing the pattern into a number of strips or _fajas_ which were subsequently sewn together. In Belgium, on the contrary, the design was cut out, following the contour of the floral or other decoration. In former ages gold and silver lace was made in France, and also at Genoa. I think it possible that Genoese merchants, many of whom are known to have settled in Granada and other Spanish cities, may first have introduced this branch of lace-making among the Spaniards. The sumptuary laws of Aragon, Castile, León, and Navarre would seem to show that lace of these materials, known as _punto_ or _redecilla de oro_ (or _plata_) was manufactured by the Spanish Jews between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. During the seventeenth century and part of the eighteenth, the quantity produced in the Peninsula was very large. In his _Fenix de Cataluña_, a work which was published at Barcelona in 1683, Feliu de la Peña says that Spanish _randa_ or _réseuil_, of gold and silver, silk, thread, and aloe fibre, was better made in Spain than in the Netherlands. The journal of Bertaut de Rouen contains the following notice of this silver lace: "Le Roy y envoya le Lieutenant du Maistre des Postes, avec huit postillons, couverts de clinquant, et quarante chevaux de poste, dont il y en avoit huit avec des selles et des brides du Roy où il y avoit de la dentelle d'argent, que Monsieur le Mareschal fit distribuer à environ autant de gens que nous estions, sur une liste qu'il avoit envoyée quelques jours auparavant." [Illustration: XXVIII A _MAJA_ (_By Goya_)]