but especially sith clmrcli-work, as copes, vestments, albes, tiinicles, altar-cloths, canopies, and such tr£trashare worthily abolished, upon which our countrymen superstitiously bestowed no small quantities of them. For I think there were few churches or religious houses, besides bishops' mitres, books, and other pontifical vestures, but were either thoroughly fretted or notably garnished with huge numbers of them." He adds, "I have at sundry times gathered more than an ounce of them, of which divers have holes already entered by nature, some of them not much inferior to great peason (peas) in quantity, and thereto of sundry colours, as it happeneth among such as are brought from the easterly coast to Saffron Walden in Lent, when for want of flesh stale stinking fish and welked mussels are thought to be good meat, for other fish is too dear amongst us when law doth bind us to use it. They (pearls) are also sought for in the latter end of August, a little before which time the sweetness of the dew is most convenient for that kind of fish which doth engender and conceive them, whose form is flat, and much like unto a lempit. The further north, also, that they be found, the brighter is their colour, and their substances of better valure, as lapidaries do give out." In another place, Harrison mentions, as found in England, what he calls mineral pearls, "which," he says, "as they are for greatness and colour most excellent of all other, so they are digged out of the main land, and in sundry places far distant from the shore." Camden, and his translator, Gibson, have given us an account of pearls found in the river Conway in their time. "The pearls of this river," saysthe latter, "are as large and well coloured as any we find either in Britain or Ireland, and have probably been fished for here ever since the Roman conquest, if not sooner." The writer goes on to inform us, that the British and Irish pearls are found in a large black mussel; that they are peculiar to rapid and strong rivers; and that they are common in Wales, in the North of England, in Scotland, and some parts of Ireland. They are called by the people of Caernarvonshire, kretyin diliw, or deluge
