] has left a description of the Royal manufactory at
Palermo, and the Hotel de Tiraz which absorbed all the smaller
Saracenic factories already started. The Hotel de Tiraz had four
great workshops, in which were separately carried on the weaving of
plain tissues, velvets, examits and satins, and flowered stuffs
(damasks), and lastly, gold brocades and embroideries. It was from the
last that proceeded the real works of art, and the embroideries with
pearls and precious stones.[258] The highest efforts of the loom were
apparently finished with the needle,[259] as in the figured textiles
of Egypt.

The continuity of Sicilian textile designs from the sixth to the
sixteenth centuries (a thousand years) is very remarkable. Owing to
its originally strongly stamped Oriental character, great knowledge of
the arts of weaving, spinning, and dyeing silk is required to enable
any one to assign an exact date to materials which only remodelled
their style three times.

Dr. Rock's rules for deciphering these three dates may, however, be
easily learned, as they are broad and simple. In his comprehensive
"Introduction to the Textiles in the Kensington Museum" (p. lxvii) he
says that the three defined periods of silk-weaving in Sicily are:
First, from the time of Justinian to the Hohenstaufen (from the sixth
to the twelfth century); secondly, from the accession of Frederick I.
(Barbarossa), 1152, to Charles IV., 1347 (twelfth to fourteenth
centuries); the third period is of one century only, from 1347 to
1456.

The first period especially shows African animals, such as the giraffe
and the different kinds of antelopes, mixed with Arabian mottoes; and
the patterns are generally woven with gold. This is merely gilt
parchment, the silk being mingled with cotton.

[Illustration: Pl. 35.
Peacock Pattern. Silk Wrapping on the body of St. Cuthbert. Durham.]

The second period, beginning in the twelfth century, shows the arrival
of Count Roger's Persian and Greek workmen, captives from Thebes,
Corinth, and Athens. The fresh designs show fragments of Greek taste,
such as masks and foliage, and give one a slight foretaste of the
Renaissance.[260]

These semi-classical echoes are contemporary in the Sicilian looms
with such Norman motives as a crowned sovereign riding with a hawk
upon his wrist.

This description singularly applies to the relics removed from the
tomb of St. Cuthbert, at Durham, in 1827; among which are fragments of
t