which it was the lion. Other beasts, birds, and monsters were also figured with great frequency, such as griffins, peacocks, swans, crows, bulls, tigers, or dogs; but the emblem most in favour, especially throughout the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries, was the eagle, owing to the numerous and illustrious qualities attributed to it, such as majesty, victory, valour, and good omen. These creatures, too, were frequently represented face to face or back to back, in pairs; nor were they so disposed in textile fabrics only, but on ivory, wood, or silver caskets, and on numerous other objects, as well as on the painted friezes of a place of worship.[2]

The colours of these fabrics also varied very greatly. That which was most admired was probably red, crimson, or carmine, used by preference as a ground, with the pattern inwoven or super-woven in gold, silver, or otherwise. Velvets, too, were not invariably in monochrome, but would contain two or three colours such as purple, crimson, blue, or yellow, besides gold and silver. Miquel y Badía mentions a magnificent velvet pluvial in gold and three colours, belonging to a church in Cataluña. The following observations are by the same authority, who himself possesses a valuable collection of early textile fabrics, many of which are Spanish. “The same prevailing colours are found in the Mudejar textile fabrics as in those of the Spanish Moors—the same ground of red inclining to carmine, of dark blue, or of bluish green, with a pattern in yellow, green, blue, or red, according to the colour which combines with it. I have seen copies of Mudejar stuffs in which there is no white, because this was wanting in the fragments which the copying artist had before him. And it is a fact that from some cause, which we cannot now determine, white silk is that which disappears soonest from among the textile fabrics of the Spanish Moors and Mudejares, so that by far the greater part of them contain no white at all, or only traces of it.”

In Spain these handsome stuffs were used by all the wealthier classes, and some idea of their prevalence and popularity may be formed from the voluminous mass of sumptuary laws which deal with them at almost every stage of Spanish history. Thus, an edict of Jayme the First of Aragon established, in the year 1234, that neither the monarch nor any of his subjects were to decorate their clothes with gold and silver, or fasten their cloaks with gold or silver clasps. The Ordenamiento of Alfonso the Tenth, subscribed at Seville, February 27th, 1256, provides that no woman is to carry aljofar-work, trim her dress with gold or silver, or wear a toca decorated with those metals, but only a plain white one, the price of which is not to exceed three maravedis. It is also provided by this edict that on the celebration of a wedding, the cost of the bridal clothes must not exceed sixty maravedis, nor may the number of guests who sit down to the marriage banquet exceed five women and five men, besides the witnesses of the ceremony and relatives of the bride and bridegroom. This absurd law was so extensively neglected that two years later the Cortes of Valladolid took up the matter afresh, and even resolved that the expenses of the king's table, without the cost of his invited guests, were not to exceed a daily total of a hundred and fifty maravedis.

In a.d. 1286 the Council of Cordova decreed that knights and squires, upon the celebration of their marriage, were not to present their brides with more than two dresses, one of these to be of scarlet, without trimming of ermine or grey fur, or decoration of gold, silver, or aljofar. A law of Alfonso the Eleventh, dated May 6th, 1338, proclaimed that the women of the upper classes were not to clothe themselves in any silken fabric decorated with gold thread. Similar restrictions were laid upon the other sex. “No man, whatever be his condition (excepting only Us, the King), shall wear cloth of gold, or silk, or any stuff adorned with gold lace, aljofar, or any other trimming, or with enamel: only his cloak may bear aljofar pearl-work, or fillets without pearls.” Other dispositions signed by the same monarch show that the Spaniards of his time were in the habit of wearing costly cloth adorned with gold and silver, pearls, gold buttons, enamel, and other ornament, while even the squires wore furs and gilded shoes. The ricos-hombres loaded their saddles with gold and with aljofar-work, and their wives were licensed to bear on each of their dresses the same aljofar-work or strings of tiny pearls, to the value of four thousand maravedis.

Provisions of the same tenor are contained in the prolix sumptuary pragmatic of Pedro the Cruel, signed in the year 1351 at Valladolid, as well as in that of Juan the First, a.d. 1385, which ordained, together with other vexatious prohibitions, that “neither man nor woman, whatever be their condition or estate, shall wear cloth of gold or any silk-stuff, gold or silver aljofar, or other precious stones, excepting the Infante and Infantas, who may wear whatever pleases them.”

The extravagance of Isabella the Catholic in dress and personal adornment generally, was illustrated in an earlier chapter of this work. A further instance is recorded by Clemencin. According to this chronicler, in 1476 and 1477, upon her reception at Alcalá of two embassies from France, the queen was dressed in a magnificent robe, which drew upon her a sharp rebuke from her confessor, the virtuous and austere Hernando de Talavera. From this charge Isabella defended herself with more spirit than truthfulness. “Neither myself nor my ladies,” she wrote in her letter of reply, “were dressed in new apparel. All that I wore on this occasion I had already worn in Aragon, and the French themselves had seen me wearing it. I only used one robe at all, and that of silk with three marks of gold, the plainest I could find: in this was all my festival. I say this much in that my clothing was not new; nor did we deem that error could dwell therein.”[3]

Although their own extravagance is past all question, on September 30th, 1499, Ferdinand and his consort issued a proclamation at Granada, in which it was commanded that “no persons shall wear clothing of brocade, or silk, or silk chamelote, or zarzahan, or taffeta, or carry linings of the same upon the trappings of their horses, or upon hoods, or the straps and scabbards of their swords, or bits, or saddles, or alcorques[4] … nor shall they wear embroidered silk-stuffs decorated with gold plates, whether such gold be drawn or hammered, spun to a thread, or interwoven with the fabric.”

These prohibitions, or others of their import, were ratified by Doña Juana at the Cortes of Burgos, and, in 1533, by Charles the Fifth at Valladolid. In 1551 the Emperor again prohibited “all brocaded stuffs, or gold or silver cloth, whether embroidered or enriched with gold or silver thread, or bound with cord or edging of the same;”