[MR] cotton

[Greg Lindahl]

On Wed, Oct 29, 2003 at 08:41:57AM -0500, Mistress Margret wrote:

> This quote from Queen Elizabeth does make the cotton issue easy for me,
> at least - if Queen Elizabeth considered cotton so rare she wasn't
> worthy to wear it,  then it was obviously too rare and fine for me. 

This is a good example of how one can read too much into a single
quote without context. First off, we can't be sure if Queen Elizabeth
thought it was such a great partlet due to the embroidery, or high
thread count and even weaving, or just because it was cotton. Second,
we don't know if "cotton" means "cotton". If you've run into linen
today which is actually non-linen in a linen-looking weave, you see
what I mean. I snagged an article long ago which discussed this issue:

http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/articles/cotton.html

It quotes a secondary source which claims that cotton was used to
describe a particular weave of wool in 16th and 17th century England.

-- Gregory