Beads

Beads are small spherical or cylindrical ornaments, made of stone, wood, bone, ivory, jet, or amber, or most generally of glass, and so perforated that they can be strung on threads or sewn on cloth as decorative embroidery. Wooden and ivory beads are often elaborately carved; glass beads are found in the earliest known Egyptian tombs, and aggry beads, now highly valued all over West Africa, were probably used for barter with the natives by the ancient Phoenicians. Since the fourteenth century glass beads have been largely manufactured at and near Venice. The glass is drawn out into rods of very small diameter, which are then cut into very short lengths, and while still soft are rounded and polished. The name is in fact derived from the old English bede, a prayer. From the use of beads on rosaries (q.v.), to tell one's beads became synonymous with saying prayers, and bedesmen existed in the Middle Ages whose function it was to pray for the persons who employed them. In Scotland the king's bedesmen, or blue-gowns, were privileged beggars.