13 



able to print and bring here. And so on up to to-day, the Church 

 has become the nursing mother of all that is beautiful in design, 

 and colouring, and in texture of silk, and so it should be to give 

 God our best. 



Let us turn now to the silk of the present day. I will not weary 

 you with the history of the introduction of silk manufacture into 

 England. I have here a specimen of blue and red silk from a deed 

 of the time of Richard I., A.D. 1190, which was used as an attach- 

 ment to a large wax seal. Both the silk and the dyes are interesting. 

 The blue is woad, the ancient English blue dye. The poet Dyer, 

 who wrote in the early part of the last century, thus mentions it : — 



" Our valleys yield not, or but sparing' yield 



The dyers' gay materials. Only weld, 



Or root of madder, here, or purple woad. 



By which our naked ancestors obscur'd 



Their hardy limbs, inwrought with mystic forms 



Like Egypt's obelisks." 



The red is Kermes, an ancient colour produced by the oak- 

 feeding insect, Coccus queicus. It was generally used for this 

 purpose in those days in Europe before the introductionof Cochineal 

 from Mexico into Spain by the Spaniards in 1543, and practised 

 at Bow, where it became celebrated as the Bow dye. Its intro- 

 ucdtion into Italy was not until 1548, five years later. It was soon 



the downfall of Kermes, which, although generally now disused, is 

 still found and used in Tripuliza in Greece. Pardon this digression, 

 but it is difficult for a dyer to disassociate dyeing from silk. 

 From the time when the persecuted Hugenots brought to us them- 

 selves and their trades at the time of the persecution of the 

 protestants in Flanders and France in the latter half of the sixteenth 

 century, and again in 1685, at the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, 

 we have been a silk manufacturing country. These epochs gave us 

 a silk industry, as well as many other arts and crafts. The old 

 rhyme sings : — 



'' Hops, Reformation, bays, and beer 

 Came into England all in a year." 



Very varying have been the vicissitudes of our silk industry. 

 Spitalfields, almost the oldest centre, still maintains its artistic 

 prestige as these gorgeous and artistic surroundings show. My 

 friends, Messrs. Warner and Sons, have to-day done the Field Club 

 a signal service in lending these beautiful examples of brocades, 

 damasks and brocatelles, unrivalled for texture, pattern and colour- 



