goods (real cottons) that were then competing with the woollens in the home markets. It is not a little singular, that a manufacture destined afterwards to eclipse not merely the glory of the old "Manchester cottons," but that of all other manufactures, should thus have existed in name long before it existed at all in fact. The word "fustians" was in the same manner applied to a certain kind of woollen or worsted goods made at Norwich and in Scotland.

"The exact period when the cotton manufacture was introduced into England is unknown. The article of cotton wool had for centuries been imported in small quantities, to be used as oandlewicks, as appears from an entry in the books of Bolton Abbey in l298." The city of Barcelona, in Spain, was famous for its cotton manufacture in the middle of the thirteenth century. Weavers of cotton fustians, for which Oldham became peculiarly distinguished, were numerous in Barcelona in 1255. The name of fustian is derived from the Spanish word fuste, signifying "substance." The cotton fustian manufacture prevailed in Flanders, Saxony, and Suabia, before the fifteenth century, if not earlier. Dr. Fuller remarked, in 1662, that "foreign fustians were anciently creditable wearing in England, for persons of the primest quality." Chaucer, who wrote between 1370 and 1380, thus clothes his knight in the prologue to the " Canterbury Tales :"—

"Of Fustian he wered a Gipon,
All besmotrid with his Habergion."

A gipon, is a short doublet or little coat, and a habergion, a breast plate.

The linen manufacture of England is of great antiquity. It prevailed in this part of the country long before the reign of Elizabeth; and, as linen-yarn was used as the warp for fustians, and nearly all other

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