For many reasons the history of silk is not only curious but highly
interesting. In the earliest ages even its existence was unknown, and
when discovered the knowledge of it stole forth from the far east,
and straggled westward very slowly. For all that lengthened period
during which their remarkable civilization lasted, the older Egyptians
probably never saw silk: neither they, nor the Israelites, nor any
other of the most ancient kingdoms of the earth, knew of it in any
shape, either as a simple twist or as a woven stuff. Not the smallest
shred of silk has hitherto been found in the tombs or amid the ruins of
the Pharaonic period.
No where does Holy Writ, old or new, tell anything of silk but in one
single place, the Apocalypse xviii. 12. It is true that in the English
authorized version we read of “silk” as if spoken of by Ezekiel xvi.
10, 13; and again, in Proverbs xxxi. 22; yet there can be no doubt that
in both these passages, the word silk is wrong through the translators
misunderstanding the original Hebrew. The Hebrew word is not so
rendered in any ancient version: and the best Hebraists have decided
that silk was not known by the old Israelites. When St. John speaks
of it he includes it with the gold, and silver, and precious stones,
and pearls, and fine linen and purple which, with many other costly
freights, merchants were wont to bring to Rome.
It was long after the days of Ezekiel that silk in its raw form only,
made up into hanks, first found its way to Egypt, western Asia, and
eastern Europe.
We owe to Aristotle the earliest notice of the silkworm, and although
his account be incorrect it has much value, because he gives us
information about the original importation of raw silk into the western
world. Brought from China through India the silk came by water across
the Arabian ocean, up the Red Sea, and thence over the isthmus of
Suez (or perhaps rather by the overland route, through Persia) to the
small but commercial island of Cos, lying off the coast of Asia minor.
Pamphile, the daughter of Plates, is reported to have first woven silk
in Cos. Here, by female hands, were wrought those light thin gauzes
which became so fashionable; these were stigmatized by some of the
Latin poets, as well as by heathen moralists, as anything but seemly
for women’s wear. Tibullus speaks of them; and Seneca condemns them: “I
behold” he says “silken garments, if garments they can be called, which
are a protection neither for the body nor for shame.” Later still, and
in the Christian era, we have an echo to the remarks of Seneca in the
words of Solinus: “This is silk, in which at first women but now even
men have been led, by their cravings after luxury, to show rather than
to clothe their bodies.”
Looking over very ancient manuscripts we often find between richly
gilt illuminations, to keep them from harm or being hurt through the
rubbings of the next leaf, a covering of the thinnest gauze, just as
we now put sheets of silver paper for that purpose over engravings.
It is not impossible that some at least of these may be shreds from
the translucent textiles which found favour in the world for so long
a time during the classic period. The curious example of such gauzy
interleafings in the manuscript of Theodulph, now at Puy en Velay, will
occur perhaps to more than one of our readers.
It may be easily imagined that silken garments were brought, at an
early period, to imperial Rome. Not only, however, were the prices
asked for them so high that few could afford to buy such robes for
their wives and daughters, but, at first, they were looked upon as
quite unbecoming for men’s wear; hence, by a law of the Roman senate
under Tiberius, it was enacted: “Ne vestis serica vicos fœdaret.” While
noticing how womanish Caligula became in his dress Suetonius remarks
his silken attire: “Aliquando sericatus et cycladatus.” An exception
was made by some emperors for very great occasions, and both Titus
and Vespasian wore dresses of silk when they celebrated at Rome their
triumph over Judæa. Heliogabalus was the first emperor who wore whole
silk for clothing. Aurelian, on the other hand, neither had himself in
his wardrobe a garment wholly silk nor gave one to be worn by another.
When his own wife begged him to allow her to have a single mantle
of purple silk he replied, “Far be it from us to allow thread to be
reckoned worth its weight in gold.” For then a pound of gold was the
price of a pound of silk.
Clothing made wholly or in part out of silk, nevertheless, became
every year more and more sought for. So remunerative was the trade of
weaving the raw material into its various forms, that, by the revised
code of laws for the Roman empire published A. D. 533, a monopoly in it
was given to the court, and looms worked by women were set up in the
imperial palace. Thus Byzantium became and long continued famous for
the beauty of its silken stuffs. Still, the raw silk itself had to be
brought thither from abroad; until two Greek monks, who had lived many
years among the Chinese, learnt the whole process of rearing the worm.
Returning, they brought with them a number of eggs hidden in their
walking-staves; and, carrying them to Constantinople, they presented
these eggs to the emperor who gladly received them. When hatched the
worms were distributed over Greece and Asia minor, and very soon the
western world reared its own silk. In some places, at least in Greece,
the weaving not only of the finer kinds of cloth but of silk fell
into the hands of the Jews. Benjamin of Tudela, writing in 1161,
tells us that the city of Thebes contained about two thousand Jewish
inhabitants. “These are the most eminent manufacturers of silk and
purple cloth in all Greece.”
South Italy wrought rich silken stuffs by the end of the eleventh
century; for we are told by our countryman Ordericus Vitalis, who died
in the first half of the twelfth century, that Mainerius, the abbot of
St. Evroul at Uzey in Normandy, on coming home brought with him from
Apulia several large pieces of silk, and gave to his church four of the
finest ones, with which four copes were made for the chanters.
From a feeling alive in the middle ages throughout the length and
breadth of Christendom, that the best of all things ought to be
given for the service of the Church, the garments of its celebrating
priesthood were, if not always, at least very often wholly of silk;
holosericus. Owing to this fact, we are now able to learn from
the few but tattered shreds before us what elegantly designed and
gorgeous stuffs the foreign mediæval loom could weave, and what
beautiful embroidery our own countrywomen knew so well how to work.
These specimens help us also to rightly understand the description
of the splendid vestments enumerated with such exactness in the old
inventories of our cathedrals and parish churches, as well as in the
early wardrobe accompts of our kings, and in the wills and bequests of
dignified ecclesiastics and nobility.
Coming westward among us, these much coveted stuffs brought with them
the several names by which they were commonly known throughout the
east, whether Greece, Asia minor, or Persia. Hence when we read of
samit, ciclatoun, cendal, baudekin, and other such terms unknown to
trade now-a-days, we should bear in mind that, notwithstanding the wide
variety of spelling which each of these appellations has run through,
we arrive at their true derivations, and discover in what country and
by whose hands they were wrought.
As commerce grew these fine silken textiles were brought to our
markets, and articles of dress were made of silk for men’s as well as
women’s wear among the wealthy. At what period the raw material came to
be imported here, not so much for embroidery as to be wrought in the
loom, we do not exactly know; but from several sides we learn that our
countrywomen of all degrees, in very early times, busied themselves in
weaving. Among the home occupations of maidens St. Aldhelm, at the end
of the seventh century, includes weaving. In the council at Cloveshoo,
in 747, nuns are exhorted to spend their time in reading or singing
psalms rather than weaving and knitting vainglorious garments of many
colours. By that curious old English book the ‘Ancren Riwle,’ written
towards the end of the twelfth century, ankresses are forbidden to
make purses or blodbendes (which were narrow strips to bind round the
arm after bleeding), to gain friends therewith. Were it not that the
weaving especially of silk was so generally followed in the cloister by
English women, it had been useless to have so strongly discountenanced
the practice.
But on silk weaving by our women in small hand-looms a very important
witness, especially about several curious specimens in the great
collection at South Kensington, is John Garland, born at the beginning
of the thirteenth century in London, where many of his namesakes were
and are still known. First, a John Garland, in 1170, held a prebend’s
stall in St. Paul’s cathedral. Another was sheriff at a later period.
A third, a wealthy draper of London, gave freely towards the building
of a church in Somersetshire. A fourth, who died in 1461, lies buried
in St. Sythe’s; and, at the present day, no fewer than twenty-two
tradesmen of that name, of whom six are merchants of high standing in
the city, are mentioned in the London post office directory for the
year 1868. We give these instances as some have tried to rob us of John
Garland by saying he was not an Englishman, though he has himself told
us he was “born in England and brought up in France.”
In a kind of short dictionary drawn up by that writer and printed at
the end of ‘Paris sous Philippe le Bel,’ edited by M. Geraud, our
countryman tells us that, besides the usual homely textiles, costly
cloth-of-gold webs were wrought by women; and very likely, among their
other productions, were those blodbendes “cingula” the weaving of which
had been forbidden to ankresses and nuns. Perhaps, also, some of the
narrow gold-wrought ribbons in the South Kensington collection, nos.
1233, 1256, 1270, 8569, etc., may have been so employed.
John Garland’s “cingula” may also mean the rich girdles or sashes worn
by women round the waist, of which there is one example in the same
collection, no. 8571. Of this sort is that fine border, amber coloured
silk and diapered, round a vestment found in a grave at Durham; which
is described by Mr. Raine in his book about St. Cuthbert as “a thick
lace, one inch and a quarter broad--evidently owing its origin, not to
the needle, but to the loom.” In an after period the same bands are
shown on statuary, and in the illuminated manuscripts of the thirteenth
century: as instances of the narrow girdle, the effigy of a lady in
Romney church, Hants and of Ann of Bohemia in Westminster abbey may be
referred to; both to be found in Hollis’s monumental effigies of Great
Britain; for the band about the head, the examples in the wood-cuts in
Planchè’s British costumes, p. 116.
Specimens of such head bands may be seen at South Kensington, nos.
8569, 8583, 8584, and 8585.
They are, no doubt, the old snôd of the Anglo-saxon period. For ladies
they were wrought of silk and gold; women of lower degree wore them
of simpler stuff. The silken snood, used in our own time by young
unmarried women in Scotland, is a truthful witness to the fashion in
vogue during Anglo-saxon and later ages in this country.
The breeding of the worm and the manufacture of its silk spread
themselves with steady though slow steps over most of the countries
which border on the shores of the Mediterranean; so that, by the
tenth century, those processes had reached from the far east to the
uttermost western limits of that sea. Even then, and a long time after,
the natural history of the silkworm became known but to a very few.
Our countryman Alexander Neckham, abbot of Cirencester A. D. 1213, was
probably the first who tried to help others to understand the habits
of the insect: his brief explanation may be found in his once popular
book ‘De natura rerum,’ which has been lately reprinted by order of the
Master of the Rolls.
[Illustration: Indian woman reeling silk from a wheel.]