its hand. It is interesting to note that an Act was passed forbidding all save the King and Queen and her children to wear any cloth but that made in England, for here we may trace surely the work of the legitimate ancestor of our passionate protectionist, Joseph Chamberlain.
But, after all, woollen cloth is dull stuff, and the first on the list of fabrics aiming at the beautiful is cloth of gold, which made its bid for fame in the days of Richard II., whose patronage of the luxury was, however, mild in comparison with that of that past master in the art of prodigality, Henry VIII., who is said to have had as many as twenty-five suits of cloth of gold, securing it at a price of 40s. per yard, which does not seem a very extravagant sum to-day.
A textile used in England during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is imperial, wrought with gold, and credited with being woven at the workshops kept by the Byzantine Emperors; and gold also gave its assistance to the making of a well-known stuff in the Middle Ages christened baudekin, which later came to be a term signifying any rich silk. A variety of the cloth of gold was plunket cloth of gold—plunket, however, being more properly described as a coarse woollen cloth; yet it is authentic that Richard III. had a gown lined with this, and in revels held by Henry VIII. at Greenwich it was registered that there were six ladies in "crimosin plunket" embroidered with gold and pearls, so that fashion seems to have idealised the homely plunket, which in its original state would have been more suitably classed with home-spuns, burnet, russet, and frieze. In the fourteenth century taffeta was introduced into
