ce to the delicate stuffs woven on
the coast of Telingana, there can be no doubt that a cotton texture is
meant, and apparently a fine muslin. (See Bk. III. ch. xviii.) Buckram is
_generally_ named as an article of price, _chier bouquerant_, _rice
boquerans_, etc, but not always, for Polo in one passage (Bk. II. ch.
xlv.) seems to speak of it as the clothing of the poor people of Eastern
Tibet.

Plano Carpini says the tunics of the Tartars were either of buckram
(_bukeranum_), of _purpura_ (a texture, perhaps velvet), or of _baudekin_,
a cloth of gold (pp. 614-615). When the envoys of the Old Man of the
Mountain tried to bully St. Lewis, one had a case of daggers to be offered
in defiance, another a _bouqueran_ for a winding sheet (_Joinville_, p.
136.)

In accounts of materials for the use of Anne Boleyn in the time of her
prosperity, _bokeram_ frequently appears for "lyning and taynting" (?)
gowns, lining sleeves, cloaks, a bed, etc., but it can scarcely have been
for mere stiffening, as the colour of the buckram is generally specified
as the same as that of the dress.

A number of passages seem to point to a _quilted_ material. Boccaccio (Day
viii. Novel 10) speaks of a quilt (_coltre_) of the whitest buckram of
Cyprus, and Uzzano enters buckram quilts (_coltre di Bucherame_) in a list
of _Linajuoli_, or linen-draperies. Both his handbook and Pegolotti's
state repeatedly that buckrams were sold by the piece or the half-score
pieces--never by measure. In one of Michel's quotations (from _Baudouin de
Sebourc_) we have:

"Gaufer li fist premiers armer d'un auqueton
Qui fu de _bougherant_ et _plaine de bon coton_."

Mr. Hewitt would appear to take the view that Buckram meant a quilted
material; for, quoting from a roll of purchases made for the Court of
Edward I., an entry for Ten Buckrams to make sleeves of, he remarks, "The
sleeves appear to have been of _pourpointerie_," i.e. quilting. (_Ancient
Armour_, I. 240.)

This signification would embrace a large number of passages in which the
term is used, though certainly not all. It would account for the mode or
sale by the piece, and frequent use of the expression _a_ buckram, for its
habitual application to _coltre_ or counterpanes, its use in the
_auqueton_ of Baudouin, and in the jackets of Falstaff's "men in buckram,"
as well as its employment in the frocks of the Mongols and Tibetans. The
winter _chapkan_, or long tunic, of Upper India, a form of dress whi