had been the first to think of twisting gold about a far less costly material, and thus, in fact, making gold thread such as we now have, but through his having suggested to the weaver the long-known golden thread as a woof into the textiles from his loom. From this point of view, we may easily believe what Pliny says: "Aurum intexere in eadem Asia invenit Attalus rex; unde nomen Attalicis."[1] In that same Asia King Attalus invented the method of using a woof of gold; from this circumstance the Attalic cloths got their name.
That, at least for working embroidery, ladies at an early Christian period used to spin their own gold thread, would seem from a passage in Claudian. Writing on the elevation to the consulate of the two brothers Probinus and Olybrius, at the end of the fourth century, the poet thus gracefully compliments their aged mother, Proba, who with her own hands had worked the purple and gold-embroidered robes, the "togæ pictæ," or "trabeæ," to be worn by her sons in their office:
Lætatur veneranda parens, et pollice docto
Jam parat auratas trabeas . . .
Et longum tenues tractus producit in aurum
Filaque concreto cogit squalere metallo.[2]
The joyful mother plies her learned hands,
And works all o'er the trabea golden bands,
Draws the thin strips to all their length of gold,
To make the metal meaner threads enfold.
A consular figure, arrayed in the purple trabea, profusely embroidered in gold, is shown in "The Church of our Fathers."[3]
That, in the thirteenth century our own ladies, like the Roman Proba, themselves used to make the gold thread needed for their own embroidery is certain; and the process which they followed is set forth as one of the items among the other costs for that magnificent frontal wrought A.D. 1271, for the high altar at Westminster Abbey. As that bill itself, to be seen on the Chancellor's Roll for the year 56 of Henry III., affords so many curious and available particulars about the whole subject in hand, we will give it here at full length for the sake of coming back hereafter to its several parts: "In xij. ulnis de canabo ad frontale magni altaris ecclesiæ (Westmonasterii) et cera ad eundem pannum ceranda, vs. vid. Et in vj marcis auri ad idem frontale, liij marcas. Et in operacione
