Silks had various names
given them, meaning either their kind of texture and dressing, their colour and its several tints, the sort of design or pattern woven on them, the country from which they were brought, or the use for which, on particular occasions, they happened to be especially set apart.
All of these designations are of foreign growth; some sprang up in the seventh and following centuries at Byzantium, and, not to be found in classic writers, remain unknown to modern Greek scholars; some are half Greek, half Latin, jumbled together; other some, borrowed from the east, are so shortened, so badly and variously spelt, that their Arabic or Persian derivation can be hardly recognized at present. Yet, without some slight knowledge of them, we may not understand a great deal belonging to trade, and the manners of the times glanced at by our old writers; much less see the true meaning of many passages in our mediæval English poetry.
Among the terms significative of the kind of web, or mode of getting up some sorts of silk, we have
Holosericum, the whole texture of which, as its Greek-Latin compound means to say, is warp and woof wholly pure silk: in a passage from Lampridius, quoted before, p. xix., we learn that so early as the reign of Alexander Severus, the difference between "vestes holosericæ," and "subsericæ," was strongly marked, and from which we learn that
Subsericum implied that such a texture was not entirely, but in part—likely its woof—of silk.
Although the warp only happened to be of silk, while the woof was of gold, still the tissue was often called "holosericum;" of the vestments which Beda says[1] S. Gregory sent over here to S. Austin, one is mentioned by a mediæval writer as "una casula oloserica purpurei coloris aurea textura"—a chasuble all silk, of a purple colour, woven with gold.[2] Examples of "holosericum" and "subsericum" abound in this collection.
Examitum, xamitum, or, as it is called in our old English documents so often, samit, is a word made up of two Greek ones, [Greek: ex], "six," and [Greek: mitoi], "threads," the number of the strings in the warp of the texture. That stuffs woven so thick must have been of the best, is evident. Hence, to say of any silken tissue that it was "examitum," or "samit," meant that it was six-threaded, in consequence costly and splendid. At the end of the thirteenth and beginning of the fourteenth centuries,
