The increased facilities for travelling offered to those engaged in the Crusades, and the necessary intercourse with other nations, caused considerable quantities of foreign materials to be imported to England during the Middle Ages: and this had a corresponding effect upon the costume of the period, which was chiefly remarkable for its richness and eccentricity of form. Among the materials in use may be mentioned diaper cloth from Ypres, a town in Flanders, famous for its rich dress stuffs; tartan, called by the French "tyretaine," meaning _teint_, or colour of Tyre (scarlet being indifferently used for purple by ancient writers, and including all the gradations of colour formed by a mixture of blue and red, from indigo to crimson). There was a fine white woollen cloth called Blanket, named after its inventor, Sarcenet, also from its Saracenic origin, and gauze which was made at Gaza in Palestine. Ermine was strictly confined to the use of the Royal Family and nobles, and cloth of gold, and habits embroidered with jewellery, or lined with minever or other expensive fur, could only be worn by knights and ladies with incomes exceeding 400 marks per annum. Those who had not more than 200 marks were permitted to wear silver cloth, with ribands, girdles, &c., reasonably embellished; also woollen cloth not costing more than six marks the piece. [Illustration: 12TH CENTURY.] The tight forms of dress now in common use among women were an incentive to tight lacing, an injurious practice, from which their descendants suffer. A lady is described "Clad in purple pall, With gentyll body and middle small," and another damsel, whose splendid girdle of beaten gold was embellished with emeralds and rubies, evidently, from the description, had a waist which was not the size intended by Nature. [Illustration: 14TH CENTURY.] During the Wars of the Roses both trade and costume made little progress, and after the union of the Houses of York and Lancaster by the marriage of Henry VII. with his Queen, Elizabeth, their attention was chiefly concerned in filling their impoverished coffers, which left them little opportunity for promoting new fashions in dress. Henry VIII. afforded ample facilities for the revival of the trade in dress goods, and there is little difficulty in tracing female costume of the sixteenth century when we remember that in the course of thirty-eight years he married six wives, besides having them painted times without number by all the popular artists of the day. [Illustration: 16TH CENTURY. _From Portrait of Mary Queen of Scots._]