huntsman with his horn, and in Newland Church one of the free miners of the Forest of Dean, cap and leather breeches tied below the knee, wooden mine-hod over shoulder, a small mattock in his right hand, and a candlestick between his teeth. This kind of historical evidence will help us with Thomas Paycocke. His family brasses were set in the north aisle of the parish church of St Peter Ad Vincula. Several of them have disappeared in the course of the last century and a half, and unluckily no brass of Thomas himself survives; but in the aisle there still lie two–the brass of his brother John, who died in 1533, and John’s wife, and that of his nephew, another Thomas, who died in 1580; the merchant’s mark may still be seen thereon.
Lastly, there is the evidence of the Paycocke wills, of which three are preserved at Somerset House–the will of John Paycocke _(d._ 1505), Thomas’s father and the builder of the house; the will of Thomas Paycocke himself _(d._ 1518); and the will of his nephew Thomas, the same whose brass lies in the aisle and who left a long and splendidly detailed testament, full of information upon local history and the organization of the cloth industry. For social historians have as yet hardly, perhaps, made as much use as they might of the evidence of wills. The enormous amount of miscellaneous information to be derived therefrom about the life of our forefathers can hardly be believed, save by those who have turned the pages of such a collection as the great _Testamenta Eboracensia_.[4] In wills you may see how many daughters a man could dower and how many he put into a nunnery, and what education he provided for his sons. You may note which were the most popular religious houses, and which men had books and what the books were, how much of their money they thought fit to leave for charitable purposes, and what they thought of the business capacity of their wives. You may read long and dazzling lists of family plate, all the favourite cups and dishes having pet names of their own, and of rings and brooches and belts and rosaries. There are detailed descriptions of dresses and furs, sometimes splendid, sometimes ordinary, for people handed on their rich clothes as carefully as their jewels. There are even more wonderful descriptions of beds, with all their bedclothes and hangings, for a bed was a very valuable article of furniture and must often, judging from the wills, have been a brilliant and beautiful object indeed; Shakespeare has earned a great deal of unmerited obloquy for leaving Ann Hathaway his second-best bed, though it is not to be denied that he might have left her his first-best. Even more beautiful than dressings and bed or chamber hangings are the brocaded and embroidered vestments mentioned in wills, and the elaborate arrangements for funeral ceremonies are extremely interesting. The wills are of all kinds; there are even villeins’ wills, though in theory the villein’s possessions were his lord’s, and there are wills of kings and queens, lords and ladies, bishops and parsons and lawyers and shopkeepers. Here also is more evidence for the social prosperity of the middle class, details of their trade, the contents of their shops, the inventories of their houses, their estates (sometimes) in the country, their house rents (almost always) in the town, their dressers garnished with plate and their wives’ ornaments, their apprentices and their gilds, their philanthropy, their intermarriage with the gentry, their religious opinions. Such a living picture do men’s wills give us of their daily lives.
These, then, are the three sources from which the life and times of Thomas Paycocke may be drawn. All three–houses, brasses, and wills–contain much evidence for the increasingly rapid growth during the last two centuries of the Middle Ages of a large and prosperous middle class, whose wealth was based not upon landed property but upon industry and trade. It is a class of whom we have already met typical examples in Thomas Betson and the anonymous Menagier de Paris, and we must now see what his house, his will, and his family brasses tell us about the clothier Thomas Paycocke. First and foremost, they tell us a great deal about the noble industry which supported him. Paycocke’s house is full of relics of the cloth industry. The merchant mark of the Paycockes, an ermine tail, looking like a two-stemmed clover leaf, is to be found on the carved beams of the chimney, on the breastsummers of the fire-places, and set in the midst of the strip of carving along the front of the house. Thomas marked his bales of cloth thus, and what other armorial bearings did he need? The whole house is essentially middle class-the house of a man who was _nouveau riche_ in an age when to be _nouveau riche_ was not yet to be vulgar. His prosperity has blossomed out into exquisitely ornate decoration. A band of carving runs along the front of the house, and from the curved stem of it branch out a hundred charming devices–leaves, tendrils, strange flowers, human heads, Tudor roses, a crowned king and queen lying hand in hand, a baby diving with a kick of fat legs into the bowl of an arum lily, and in the midst the merchant’s mark upon a shield and the initials of the master of the house. In the hall is a beautiful ceiling of carved oakwork, exceedingly elaborate and bearing at intervals the merchant’s mark again. Upstairs in the big bedchamber is a ceiling of beams worked in bold roll mouldings; and there is an exquisite little parlour, lined with linen fold panels, with a breastsummer carved with strange animals. This elaboration is characteristic. It is all of a piece with Coggeshall Church, and with all those other spacious East Anglian churches, Lavenham, Long Melford, Thaxted, Saffron Walden, Lynn, Snettisham, lofty and spacious, which the clothiers built out of their newly won wealth. The very architecture is characteristic, _nouveau riche_ again, like those who paid for it, the elaborate ornament and sumptuous detail of the Perpendicular taking the place of the simple majesty of the Early English style. It is just the sort of architecture that a merchant with a fortune would pay for. The middle class liked some show for its money; but again it was the ostentation without the vulgarity of wealth. Looking upon his beautiful house, or worshipping beside his family tombs, with the merchant’s mark on the brasses, in St Katherine’s aisle, Thomas Paycocke must often have blessed the noble industry which supported him.
The wills of the Paycockes tell the same story. To whom beside his family does Thomas leave legacies but the good folk of the neighbourhood, who worked for him. There is the Goodday family of cheerful name, two of whom were shearmen, or cloth finishers, and had substantial gifts. ‘I bequeth to Thomas Goodday Sherman xx s. and ych of his childryn iij s. iiij d. apece. Item, I bequeth to Edward Goodday Sherman xvj s. viij d., and to his child iij s. iiij d. He also left money to Robert Goodday of Sampford and to Robert’s brother John and to each of Robert’s sisters, with something extra for Grace, who was his goddaughter; and he did not forget Nicholas Goodday of Stisted and Robert Goodday of Coggeshall and their families, nor their relative John, who was a priest and had ten shillings for a trental. All these Gooddays were doubtless bound to Thomas Paycocke by ties of work as well as of friendship. They belonged to a well-known Coggeshall family, for generations connected with the cloth industry. Thomas Paycocke’s namesake and grand-nephew, whose will is dated 1580, was still in close relations with them, and left ‘to Edwarde Goodaye my godson Fourtie shillinges and to every brother and sister the saide Edwarde hath livinge at the tyme of my decease tenne shillinges a pece,’ and ‘unto William Gooday thelder tenne shillinges.’ The hurrying, scattering generation of today can hardly imagine the immovable stability of the village of past centuries, when generation after generation grew from cradle to grave in the same houses, on the same cobbled streets, and folk of the same name were still friends, as their fathers and grandfathers had been before them.
Other friends and employees of Thomas Paycocke also had their legacies. He leaves _6s. 8d_. to Humphrey Stonor, ‘somtyme my prentis’. We may see Humphrey Stonor, with sleepy eyes, making his way downstairs on a frosty morning, from those huge raftered attics, where perhaps the ‘prentices used to sleep. He was on terms of impudent friendship, no doubt, with the weavers and fullers whom his master set to work; withal a young man of good family, a relative perchance of those Stonors for whom Thomas Betson worked, for, as Deloney wrote, ‘the yonger sons of knights and gentlemen, to whom their Fathers would leave no lands, were most commonly preferred to learn this trade, to the end that thereby they might live in good estate and drive forth their days in prosperity.’ Two of his friends got substantial legacies; apparently Thomas Paycocke had lent them money and wished to wipe out the debt upon his death-bed, for, says the will, ‘I bequethe to John Beycham, my weyver, v li and [i.e. if] there be so moch bitwene vs and ells to make it vp v li, and a gowne and a doublett…. I bequeth and forgive Robert Taylor, fuller, all that is betwixt vs, and more I give him iij s. iiij d.’ Other legacies show even more clearly that his operations were on a larger scale. ‘I bequeth to all my wevers, ffullers and shermen that be not afore Rehersed by name xij d. apece, And will they that have wrought me verey moch wark have iij s. iiij d. apece. Item, I bequethe to be distributed amonge my Kembers, Carders and Spynners summa iiij li.'[5] Here are all the branches of the cloth industry at a glance. It is Thomas Paycocke, clothier, round whom the whole manufacture revolves. He gives the wool to the women to comb it and card it and spin it; he receives it from them again and gives it to the weaver to be woven into cloth; he gives the cloth to the fuller to be fulled and the dyer to be dyed; and having received it when finished, he has it made up into dozens and sends it off to the wholesale dealer, the draper, who sells it; perhaps he has been wont to send it to that very ‘Thomas Perpoint, draper’ whom he calls ‘my cosyn’ and makes his executor. The whole of Thomas Paycocke’s daily business is implicit in his will. In the year of his death he was still employing a large number of workers and was on friendly and benevolent terms with them. The building of his house had not signalized his retirement from business, as happened when another great clothier, Thomas Dolman, gave up cloth-making and the weavers of Newbury went about lamenting:
Lord have mercy upon us, miserable sinners. Thomas Dolman has built a new house and turned away all his spinners.[6]
The relations between Paycocke and his employees evinced in his will are happy ones. Such was not always the case, for if the clothiers of this age had some of the virtues of capitalists, they also had many of their vices, and the age-old strife of capital and labour was already well advanced in the fifteenth century. One detail Paycocke’s will does not give us, which we should be glad to know: did he employ only domestic weavers, working in their own houses, or did he also keep a certain number of looms working in his house? It was characteristic of the period in which he lived that something like a miniature factory system was establishing itself in the midst of the new outwork system. The clothiers were beginning to set up looms in their own houses and to work them by journeymen weavers; as a rule the independent weavers greatly disliked the practice, for either they were forced from the position of free masters into that of hired servants, obliged to go and work in the clothier’s loom shop, or else they found their payment forced down by the competition of the journeymen. Moreover, the clothiers sometimes owned and let out looms to their work-people, and then also part of the industrial independence of the weaver was lost. All through the first half of the sixteenth century the weavers in the cloth districts kept on petitioning Parliament against this new evil of capitalism. It was as though, long before it established itself in England they had a prevision of the factory system and of the worker no longer owning either his raw material, his tool, his workshop, or the produce of his industry, but only his labour; the master-weaver dwindled to a hired hand. Certainly the practice was growing in Essex, where, some twenty years after Thomas Paycocke’s death, the weavers petitioned against the clothiers, who had their own looms and weavers and fullers in their own houses, so that the petitioners were rendered destitute; ‘for the rich men, the clothiers, be concluded and agreed among themselves to hold and pay one price for weaving the said cloths,’ a price too small to support their households, even if they worked day and night, holiday and work-day, so that many of them lost their independence and were reduced to become other men’s servants.[7] Nevertheless, the outwork system remained the more common, and without doubt the majority of Paycocke’s workers lived in their own cottages, though it is probable also that he had some looms in his house, perhaps in the long, low room at the back, which is traditionally supposed to have been used for weaving, perhaps in a shed or ‘spinning house’.
A highly idyllic picture of work in one of these miniature factories, which we may amuse ourselves by applying to Thomas Paycocke’s, is contained in Deloney’s _Pleasant History of Jack of Newbery._ Jack of Newbury was an historical character, a very famous clothier named John Winchcomb who died at Newbury only a year later than Paycocke himself, and of whom Paycocke must certainly have heard, for his kersies were famous on the Continent, and old Fuller, who celebrates him among his _Worthies of England_ calls him ‘the most considerable clothier (without fancy or fiction) England ever beheld’.[8] The tales of how he had led a hundred of his own ‘prentices to Flodden Field, how he had feasted the King and Queen in his house at Newbury, how he had built part of Newbury Church, and how he had refused a knighthood, preferring ‘to rest in his russet coat a poor clothier to his dying day,’ spread about England, growing as they spread. In 1597 Thomas Deloney, the forefather of the novel, enshrined them in a rambling tale, half prose and half verse, which soon became extremely popular. It is from this tale that we may take an imaginary picture of work in a clothier’s house, being wary to remember, however, that it is an exaggeration, a legend, and that the great John Winchcomb certainly never had as many as two hundred looms in his own house, while our Thomas Paycocke probably had not more than a dozen. But the poet must have his licence, for, after all, the spirit of the ballad is the thing, and it is always a pleasant diversion to drop into rhyme:
Within one roome, being large and long There stood two hundred Loomes full strong. Two hundred men, the truth is so,
Wrought in these Loomes all in a row. By every one a pretty boy
Sate making quilts with mickle joy, And in another place hard by
A hundred women merily
Were carding hard with joy full cheere Who singing sate with voyces cleere,
And in a chamber close beside
Two hundred maidens did abide,
In petticoats of Stammell red,
And milk white kerchers on their head. Their smocke-sleeves like to winter snow That on the Westerne mountaines flow,
And each sleeve with a silken band
Was featly tied at the hand.
These pretty maids did never lin
But in that place all day did spin, And spinning so with voyces meet
Like nightingales they sang full sweet. Then to another roome came they
Where children were in poore aray;
And every one sate picking wool
The finest from the course to cull: The number was sevenscore and ten
The children of poore silly men:
And these their labours to requite
Had every one a penny at night,
Beside their meat and drinke all day, Which was to them a wondrous stay.
Within another place likewise
Full fifty proper men he spies
And these were sheremen everyone,
Whose skill and cunning there was showne: And hard by them there did remaine
Full four-score rowers taking paine. A Dye-house likewise had he then,
Wherein he kept full forty men:
And likewise in his Fulling Mill
Full twenty persons kept he still.
Each weeke ten good fat oxen he
Spent in his house for certaintie,
Beside good butter, cheese and fish And many another wholesome dish.
He kept a Butcher all the yeere,
A Brewer eke for Ale and Beere;
A Baker for to bake his Bread,
Which stood his hushold in good stead. Five Cookes within his kitchin great
Were all the yeare to dress his meat. Six Scullion boyes vnto their hands,
To make clean dishes, pots and pans, Beside poore children that did stay
To turne the broaches every day.
The old man that did see this sight Was much amaz’d, as well he might:
This was a gallant Cloathier sure,
Whose fame forever shall endure.[9]
The private life of Thomas Paycocke, no less than his business, can be made to live again. Of his family the invaluable will tells us a little. His first wife was that Margaret whose initials, together with his own, decorate the woodwork of the house, and indeed it is probable that old John Paycocke built the house for the young couple on their wedding. Gay, indeed, must have been the sights which it witnessed on that happy day, for our ancestors knew how to put their hearts into a wedding, and Merry England was never merrier then when the bridegroom led home the bride. We may borrow once again from Deloney’s idyll, to recreate the scene:
The Bride being attyred in a gowne of sheepes russet and a kertle of fine woosted, her head attyred with a billiment of gold and her haire as yeallow as gold hanging downe behinde her, which was curiously combed and pleated, according to the manner in those dayes; shee was led to Church betweene two sweete boyes, with Bridelaces and Rosemary tied about their silken sleeves. Then was there a fair Bride-cup of silver and gilt carried before her, wherein was a goodly branch of Rosemary gilded very faire, hung about with silken Ribands of all colours; next was there a noyse of Musicians that played all the way before her; after her came all the chiefest maydens of the Country, some bearing great Bride Cakes and some Garlands of wheate finely gilded and so she past unto the Church. It is needlesse for mee to make any mention here of the Bridegroome, who being a man so well beloued, wanted no company and those of the best sort, beside diuers Marchant strangers of the Stillyard that came from London to the wedding. The marriage being solemnized, home they came in order as before and to dinner they went where was no want of good cheare, no lack of melody…. The wedding endured ten dayes, to the great reliefe of the poore that dwelt all about.[10]
Much dancing the house doubtless saw under the beautiful carved roof of the hall, with much song, games, kissing, and general abandon. Even when the bride and groom retired to the bridal chamber with its roll-moulded beams the merry-making was not done; they must hold a levee to their nearest friends in the bedchamber itself, enthroned in the great four-poster bed. There was no false delicacy about our ancestors. Indeed, as Henry Bullinger says (he was a very different person from jovial Deloney, but he was a contemporary of Paycocke’s, and Coverdale translated him, so let him speak): ‘After supper must they begynne to pype and daunce agayne of the new. And though the yonge parsones, beynge weery of the bablyng noyse and inconuenience, come ones towarde theyer rest, yet can they haue no quietnesse. For a man shall fynd unmanerly and restlesse people, that will first go to theyr chambre dore, and there syng vycious and naughtie balates that the deuell maye haue his triumphe now to the vttermost.'[11] What would we not give for one of those ‘naughty ballads’ today?
The bride Margaret, who was somewhat after this merry fashion brought home to Coggeshall, came from Clare, the ancient home of the Coggeshall Paycockes. She was the daughter of one Thomas Horrold, for whose memory Paycocke retained a lively affection and respect, for in founding a chantry in Coggeshall Church he desired specially that it should be for the souls of himself and his wife, his mother and father, and his father-in-law, Thomas Horrold of Clare. He also left five pounds, with which his executors were ‘to purvey an oder stone to be hade to Clare chirch and layd on my ffader in lawe Thomas Horrold w’t his pycture and his wife and childryn thereon’ (i.e. a memorial brass), and also five cows or else three pounds in money to Clare Church ‘to kepe and mayntene my ffader in lawe Thomas Horrold his obitt’. He also left money to his wife’s brother and sisters. Margaret Paycocke died before her husband and without children; and the only young folk of his name whom Thomas ever saw at play in his lofty hall, or climbing upon his dresser to find the head, as small as a walnut, hidden in the carving of the ceiling, were his nephews and nieces, Robert and Margaret Uppcher, his sister’s children; John, the son of his brother John; and Thomas, Robert, and Emma, the children of his brother Robert; perhaps also his little godchild Grace Goodday. It was perhaps in the hope of a son to whom he might leave his house and name that Thomas Paycocke married again a girl called Ann Cotton. She was the wife of his old age, ‘Anne my good wif’, and her presence must have made bright the beautiful house, silent and lonely since Margaret died. Her father, George Cotton, is mentioned in the will, and her brothers and sister, Richard, William, and Eleanor, have substantial legacies. But Thomas and Ann enjoyed only a short term of married life; she brought him his only child, but death overtook him before it was born. In his will he provides carefully for Ann; she is to have five hundred marks sterling, and as long as she lives the beautiful house is to be hers; for to his elaborate arrangements for its inheritance he adds, ‘provided alwey that my wif Ann haue my house that I dwell in while she lyvyth at hir pleyser and my dof house [dove-house] with the garden y’t stoundeth in.’ A gap in the Paycocke records makes it difficult to say whether Thomas Paycocke’s child lived or died; but it seems probable that it either died or was a girl, for Paycocke had bequeathed the house, provided that he had no male heirs, to his nephew John (son of his eldest brother John), and in 1575 we find it in the hands of this John Paycocke, while the house next door was in the hands of another Thomas Paycocke, his brother Robert’s son. This Thomas died about 1580, leaving only daughters, and after him, in 1584, died John Paycocke, sadly commemorated in the parish register as ‘the last of his name in Coxall’. So the beautiful house passed out of the hands of the great family of clothiers who had held it for nearly a hundred years.[12]
Of Thomas Paycocke’s personal character it is also possible to divine something from his will. He was obviously a kind and benevolent employer, as his thought for his work-people and their children shows. He was often asked to stand godfather to the babies of Coggeshall, for in his will he directs that at his burial and the ceremonies which were repeated on the seventh day and ‘month mind’ after it there were to be ‘xxiiij or xij smale childryn in Rochettes with tapers in theire hands and as many as may be of them lett them be my god childryn and they to have vj s. viij d. apece and euery oder child iiij d. apece … and also euery god chyld besyde vj s. viij d. apece.’ All these children were probably little bread-winners, employed at a very early age in sorting Thomas Paycocke’s wool. ‘Poore people,’ says Thomas Deloney, ‘whom God lightly blessed with most children, did by meanes of this occupation so order them, that by the time they were come to be sixe or seven yeeres of age, they were able to get their owne bread’;[13] and when Defoe rode from Blackstone Edge to Halifax, observing the cloth manufacture, which occupied all the villages of the West Riding, it was one of his chief grounds for admiration that ‘all [were] employed from the youngest to the oldest; scarce any thing above four years old, but its hands were sufficient for its own support.'[14] The employment of children at what we should regard as an excessively early age was by no means a new phenomenon introduced with the Industrial Revolution.
That Thomas Paycocke had many friends, not only in Coggeshall but in the villages round, the number of his legacies bears witness. His will also shows that he was a man of deep religious feeling. He was a brother of the Crutched Friars of Colchester and left them on his death five pounds to pray ‘for me and for them that I am bound to pray fore’. It was customary in the Middle Ages for monastic houses to give the privilege of the fraternity of the house to benefactors and persons of distinction; the reception took place at a long and elaborate ceremony, during which the _consrater_ received the kiss of peace from all the brethren. It is a mark of the respect in which Thomas Paycocke was held in the countryside that he should have been made a brother by the Crutched Friars. He seems to have had a special kindness for the Order of Friars; he left the Grey Friars of Colchester and the Friars of Maldon, Chelmsford, and Sudbury each ten shillings for a trental and 3s. 4d. to repair their houses; and to the Friars of Clare he left twenty shillings for two trentals, ‘and at Lent after my deceste a kade of Red heryng’. He had great interest in Coggeshall Abbey; it lay less than a mile from his house, and he must often have dined in state with the abbot at his guest table on feast days and attended Mass in the abbey church. He remembered the abbey as he lay dying, and the sound of its bells ringing for vespers came softly in at his window on the mellow September air; and he left ‘my Lord Abbot and Convent’ one of his famous broadcloths and four pounds in money ‘for to have a dirige and Masse and their belles Ryngyng at my buriall when it is doon at Chirche, lykewyse the vijth day and mounth day, with iij tryntalls upon the same day yf they can serve them, orells when they can at more leasur, Summa x li.’
His piety is shown also in his bequests to the churches of Bradwell, Pattiswick, and Markshall, parishes adjacent to Coggeshall, and to Stoke Nayland, Clare, Poslingford, Ovington, and Beauchamp St Pauls, over the Essex order, in the district from which the Paycockes originally came. But his greatest care was naturally for Coggeshall Church. One of the Paycockes had probably built the north aisle, where the altar was dedicated to St Katherine, and all the Paycocke tombs lay there. Thomas Paycocke left instructions in his will that he should be buried before St Katherine’s altar, and made the following gifts to the church: ‘Item, I bequeth to the high aulter of Coxhall Chirche in recompence of tithes and all oder thyngs forgoten, Summa iiij li. Item, I bequethe to the Tabernacle of the Trenyte at the high awlter and an other of Seint Margarete in seint Katryne Ile, there as the great Lady stands, for carvyng and gildyng of them summa c. marcs sterlinge. Item, to the reparacons of the Chirch and bells and for my lying in the Chirche summa c. nobles.’ He founded a chantry there also and left money to be given weekly to six poor men to attend Mass in his chantry thrice a week.
Of piety and of family pride these legacies to religious houses and to churches speak clearly. Another series of legacies, which takes a form characteristic of medieval charity, bears witness perhaps to Thomas Paycocke’s habits. He must often have ridden abroad, to see the folk who worked for him or to visit his friends in the villages round Coggeshall; or farther afield to Clare, first to see the home of his ancestors, then to court Margaret Horrold, his bride, and then, with Margaret beside him, to visit his well-loved father-in-law. Certainly, whether he walked to church in Coggeshall, or whether he rode along the country lanes, he often sighed over the state of the road as he went; often he must have struggled through torrents of mud in winter or stumbled among holes in summer; for in the Middle Ages the care of the roads was a matter for private or ecclesiastical charity, and all except the great highways were likely to be but indifferently kept. Langland, in his _Piers Plowman_, mentions the amending of ‘wikked wayes’ (by which he means not bad habits but bad roads) as one of those works of charity which rich merchants must do for the salvation of their souls. Thomas Paycocke’s choice of roads no doubt reflects many a wearisome journey, from which he returned home splashed and testy, to the ministrations of ‘John Reyner my man’ or ‘Henry Briggs my servant’, and of Margaret, looking anxiously from her oriel window for his return. In his own town he leaves no less than forty pounds, of which twenty pounds was to go to amend a section of West Street (where his house stood), and the other twenty was ‘to be layde on the fowle wayes bitwene Coxhall and Blackwater where as moost nede ys’; he had doubtless experienced the evils of this road on his way to the abbey. Farther afield, he leaves twenty pounds for the ‘fowle way’ between Clare and Ovington, and another twenty for the road between Ovington and Beauchamp St Pauls.
As his life drew to its close he doubtless rode less often afield. The days would pass peacefully for him; his business flourished and he was everywhere loved and respected. He took pride in his lovely house, adding bit by bit to its beauties. In the cool of the evening he must often have stood outside the garden room and seen the monks from the big abbey fishing in their stewpond across the field, or lifted his eyes to where the last rays of sun slanted on to the lichened roof of the great tithebarn, and on to the rows of tenants, carrying their sheaves of corn along the road; and he reflected, perhaps, that John Mann and Thomas Spooner, his own tenants, were good, steady friends, and that it was well to leave them a gown or a pound when he died. Often also, in his last year or two, he must have sat with his wife in his garden with the dove-house and watched the white pigeons circling round the apple-trees, and smiled upon her bed of flowers. And in winter evenings sometimes he would take his furred cloak and stroll to the Dragon Inn, and Edward Aylward, mine host, would welcome him with bows; and so he would sit and drink a tankard of sack with his neighbours, very slow and dignified, as befitted the greatest clothier of the town, and looking benevolently upon the company. But at times he would frown, if he saw a truant monk from the abbey stolen out for a drink in spite of all the prohibitions of bishop and abbot, shaking his head, perhaps, and complaining that religion was not what it had been in the good old days; but not meaning much of it, as his will shows, and never dreaming that twenty years after his death abbot and monks would be scattered and the King’s servants would be selling at auction the lead from off the roof of Coggeshall Abbey; never dreaming that after four hundred years his house would still stand, mellow and lovely, with its carved ceiling and its proud merchant’s mark, when the abbey church was only a shadow on the surface of a field in hot weather and all the abbey buildings were shrunk to one ruined ambulatory, ignobly sheltering blue Essex hay wagons from the rain.
So Thomas Paycocke’s days drew to a close amid the peace and beauty of the most English of counties, ‘fatt, frutefull and full of profitable thinges,'[15] whose little rolling hills, wych elms, and huge clouded skies Constable loved to paint. There came a day in September when gloom hung over the streets of Coggeshall, when the spinning-wheels were silent in the cottages, and spinners and weavers stood in anxious groups outside the beautiful house in West Street; for upstairs in his bridal chamber, under its noble ceiling, the great clothier lay dying, and his wife wept by his bedside, knowing that he would never see his child. A few days later the cottages were deserted again, and a concourse of weeping people followed Thomas Paycocke to his last rest. The ceremony of his burial befitted his dignity: it comprised services, not only on burial day itself, but on the seventh day after it, and then again after a month had passed. It is given best in the words of his will, for Thomas Paycocke followed the custom of his time, in giving his executors elaborate injunctions for his funeral rites: ‘I will myne executors bestowe vpon my buryng daye, vij day and mounthe daye after this manner: At my buriall to have a tryntall of prests and to be at dirige, lawdis, and comendacons as many of them as may be purveyed that day to serve the tryntall, and yf eny lack to make it vpp the vij’th daye. And at the Mounthe daye an oder tryntall to be purveyed hoole of myne executors and to kepe dirige, lawdis and commendacons as is afore reherssed, with iij high massis be note [by note, i.e. with music], oon of the holy gost, an other of owre lady, and an other of Requiem, both buriall, seuenth day and Mounthe daye. And prests beyng at this obseruance iiij d. at euery tyme and childryn at euery tyme ij d., w’t torches at the buriall xij, and vj at the vij’th day and xij at the mounthe daye, with xxiij’th or xij smale childryn in Rochettes with tapers in theire honds, and as many as may be of them lett them be my god Childryn, and they to haue vj s. viij d. apece; and euery oder child iiij d. apece; and euery man that holdith torches at euery day he to have ij apece; and euery man, woman and child that holdeth upp hound [hand] at eny of thes iij days to haue j d. apece; And also euery god chyld besyde vj s. viij d. apece; and to the Ryngars for all iij dayes x s.; and for mete, drynke, and for twoo Semones of a doctor, and also to haue a dirige at home, or I be borne to the Chirche summa j li.’
Here is something very different from the modest Thomas Betson’s injunction: ‘The costes of my burying to be don not outrageously, but sobrely and discretly and in a meane maner, that it may be unto the worship and laude of Almyghty God.’ The worthy old clothier was not unmindful of the worship and laud of Thomas Paycocke also, and over L500 in modern money was expended upon his burial ceremonies, over and above the cost of founding his new chantry. Well indeed it was that his eyes were closed in death, ere the coming of the Reformation abolished all the chantries of England, and with them the Paycocke chantry in St Katherine’s aisle, which had provided alms for six poor men weekly. Thomas Paycocke belonged to the good old days; in a quarter of a century after his death Essex was already changing. The monks were scattered from the abbey, which stood roofless; the sonorous Latin tongue no longer echoed in the church, nor priests prayed there for the souls of Thomas and his wife and his parents and his father-in-law. Even the cloth industry was changing, and the county was growing more prosperous still with the advent of finer kinds of cloth, brought over there by feat-fingered aliens, the ‘new drapery’, known as ‘Bays and Says’. For as the adage says:
Hops, reformation, bays and beer
Came into England all in a year,
and Coggeshall was destined to become more famous still for a new sort of cloth called ‘Coxall’s Whites’, which Thomas Paycocke’s nephews made when he was in his grave.[16] One thing, however, did not change; for his beautiful house still stood in West Street, opposite the vicarage, and was the delight of all who saw it. It stands there still, and looking upon it today, and thinking of Thomas Paycocke who once dwelt in it, do there not come to mind the famous words of Ecclesiasticus?
Let us now praise famous men and our fathers that begat us. The Lord hath wrought great glory by them through His great power from the beginning…
Rich men furnished with ability, living peaceably in their habitations:
All these were honoured in their generations and were the glory of their times.
_Notes and Sources_
* * * * *
CHAPTER II
THE PEASANT BODO
_A. Raw Material_
1. The Roll of the Abbot Irminon, an estate book of the Abbey of St Germain des Pres, near Paris, written between 811 and 826. See _Polyptyque de l’Abbaye de Saint-Germain des Pres_, pub. Auguste Longnon, t. I, _Introduction_; t. II, _Texte_ (Soc. de l’Hist. de Paris, 1886-95).
2. Charlemagne’s capitulary, _De Villis_, instructions to his stewards on the management of his estates. See Guerard, _Explication du Capitulaire ‘de Villis’_ (Acad. des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, _Memoires_, t. XXI, 1857), pp. 165-309, containing the text, with a detailed commentary and a translation into French.
3. _Early Lives of Charlemagne_, ed. A.J. Grant (King’s Classics, 1907). Contains the lives by Einhard and the Monk of St Gall, on which see Halphen, cited below.
4. Various pieces of information about social life may be gleaned from the decrees of Church Councils, Old High German and Anglo-Saxon charms and poems, and Aelfric’s _Colloquium_, extracts from which are translated in Bell’s Eng. Hist. Source Books, _The Welding of the Race_, 449-1066, ed. J.E.W. Wallis (1913). For a general sketch of the period see Lavisse _Hist. de France_, t. II, and for an elaborate critical study of certain aspects of Charlemagne’s reign (including the _Polyptychum_) see Halphen, _Etudes critiques sur l’Histoire de Charlemagne_ (1921); also A. Dopsch, _Wirtschaftsentwicklung der Karolingerzeit, Vornehmlich in Deutschland_, 2 vols. (Weimar, 1912-13), which Halphen criticizes.
_B. Notes to the Text_
1. ‘Habet Bodo colonus et uxor ejus colona, nomine Ermentrudis, homines sancti Germani, habent secum infantes III. Tenet mansum ingenuilem I, habentem de terre arabili bunuaria VIII et antsingas II, de vinea aripennos II, de prato aripennos VII. Solvit ad hostem de argento solidos II, de vino in pascione modios II; ad tertium annum sundolas C; de sepe perticas III. Arat ad hibernaticum perticas III, ad tramisem perticas II. In unaquaque ebdomada corvadas II, manuoperam I. Pullos III, ova XV; et caropera ibi injungitur. Et habet medietatem de farinarium, inde solvit de argento solidos II.’ Op. cit., II, p. 78. ‘Bodo a _colonus_ and his wife Ermentrude a _colona_, tenants of Saint-Germain, have with them three children. He holds one free manse, containing eight _bunuaria_ and two _antsinga_ of arable land, two _aripenni_ of vines and seven _aripenni_ of meadow. He pays two silver shillings to the army and two hogsheads of wine for the right to pasture his pigs in the woods. Every third year he pays a hundred planks and three poles for fences. He ploughs at the winter sowing four perches and at the spring sowing two perches. Every week he owes two labour services _(corvees)_ and one handwork. He pays three fowls and fifteen eggs, and carrying service when it is enjoined upon him. And he owns the half of a windmill, for which he pays two silver shillings.’
2. _De Villis_, c. 45.
3. Ibid. cc. 43, 49.
4. From ‘The Casuistry of Roman Meals,’ in _The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey_, ed. D. Masson (1897), VII, p. 13.
5. Aelfric’s _Colloquium_ in op. cit. p. 95.
6. The Monk of St Gall’s _Life_ in _Early Lives of Charlemagne_, pp. 87-8.
7. Einhard’s _Life_ in op. cit., p. 45.
8. Anglo-Saxon charms translated in Stopford Brook, _English Literature from the Beginning to the Norman Conquest_ (1899), p. 43.
9. Old High German charm written in a tenth-century hand in a ninth-century codex containing sermons of St Augustine, now in the Vatican Library. Brawne, _Althochdeutsches Lesebuch_ (fifth edition, Halle, 1902), p. 83.
10. Another Old High German charm preserved in a tenth-century codex now at Vienna. Brawne, op. cit., p. 164.
11. From the ninth-century _Libellus de Ecclesiasticis Disciplinis_, art. 100, quoted in Ozanam, _La Civilisation Chretienne chez les Francs_ (1849), p. 312. The injunction however, really refers to the recently conquered and still half-pagan Saxons.
12. _Penitential_ of Haligart, Bishop of Cambrai, quoted ibid. p. 314.
13. _Documents relatifs a l’Histoire de l’Industrie et du Commerce en France_, ed. G. Faigniez, t. I, pp. 51-2.
14. See references in Chambers, _The Medieval Stage_ (1913), I, pp. 161-3.
15. For the famous legend of the dancers of Koelbigk, see Gaston Paris, _Les Danseurs Maudits, Legende Allemande du XIe Siecle_ (Paris 1900, reprinted from the _Journal des Savants_, Dec., 1899), which is a _conte rendu_ of Schroeder’s study in _Zeitschrift fuer Kirchengeschichte_ (1899). The poem occurs in a version of English origin, in which one of the dancers, Thierry, is cured of a perpetual trembling in all his limbs by a miracle of St Edith at the nunnery of Wilton in 1065. See loc. cit., pp. 10, 14.
16. ‘Swete Lamman dhin are,’ in the original. The story is told by Giraldus Cambrensis in _Gemma Ecclesiastica_, pt. I, c. XLII. See _Selections from Giraldus Cambrensis_, ed. C.A.J. Skeel (S.P.C.K. _Texts for Students_, No. XI), p. 48.
17. Einhard’s _Life_ in op. cit. p. 45. See also ibid., p. 168 (note).
18. The Monk of St Gall’s _Life_ in op. cit., pp. 144-7.
19. Einhard’s _Life_ in op. cit., p. 39.
20. Ibid., p. 35.
21. Beazley, _Dawn of Modern Geography_ (1897), I, p. 325.
22. The Monk of St Gall’s _Life_ in op. cit., pp. 78-9.
23. See the description in Lavisse, _Hist. de France II_, pt. I, p. 321; also G. Monod, _Les moeurs judiciaires au VIIIe Siecle_, Revue Historique, t. XXXV (1887).
24. See Faigniez, op. cit., pp. 43-4.
25. See the Monk of St Gall’s account of the finery of the Frankish nobles: ‘It was a holiday and they had just come from Pavia, whither the Venetians had carried all the wealth of the East from their territories beyond the sea,–others, I say, strutted in robes made of pheasant-skins and silk; or of the necks, backs and tails of peacocks in their first plumage. Some were decorated with purple and lemon-coloured ribbons; some were wrapped round with blankets and some in ermine robes.’ Op. cit., p. 149. The translation is a little loose: the ‘phoenix robes’ of the original were more probably made out of the plumage, not of the pheasant but of the scarlet flamingo, as Hodgson thinks _(Early Hist. of Venice_, p. 155), or possibly silks woven or embroidered with figures of birds, as Heyd thinks _(Hist. du Commerce du Levant_, I, p. 111).
26. The Monk of St. Gall’s _Life_ in op. cit., pp. 81-2.
27. This little poem was scribbled by an Irish scribe in the margin of a copy of Priscian in the monastery of St Gall, in Switzerland, the same from which Charlemagne’s highly imaginative biographer came. The original will be found in Stokes and Strachan, _Thesaurus Palaeohibernicus_ (1903) II, p. 290. It has often been translated and I quote the translation by Kuno Meyer, _Ancient Irish Poetry_ (2nd ed., 1913), p. 99. The quotation from the _Triads of Ireland_ at the head of this chapter is taken from Kuno Meyer also, ibid. pp. 102-3.
CHAPTER III
MARCO POLO
_A. Raw Material_
1. _The Book of Ser Marco Polo the Venetian concerning the Kingdoms and Marvels of the East_, trans. and ed. with notes by Sir Henry Yule (3rd edit., revised by Henri Cordier, 2 vols., Hakluyt Soc., 1903). See also H. Cordier, _Ser Marco Polo: Notes and Addenda_ (1920). The best edition of the original French text is _Le Livre de Marco Polo_, ed. G. Pauthier (Paris, 1865), The most convenient and cheap edition of the book for English readers is a reprint of Marsden’s translation (of the Latin text) and notes (first published, 1818), with an introduction by John Masefield, _The Travels of Marco Polo the Venetian_ (Everyman’s Library, 1908; reprinted, 1911); but some of the notes (identifying places, etc.) are now out of date, and the great edition by Yule and Cordier should be consulted where exact and detailed information is required. It is a mine of information, geographical and historical, about the East. I quote from the Everyman Edition as Marco Polo, op. cit., and from the Yule edition as Yule, op. cit.
2. _La Cronique des Veneciens de Maistre Martin da Canal_. In _Archivo Storico Italiano_, 1st ser., vol. VIII (Florence, 1845). Written in French and accompanied by a translation into modern Italian. One of the most charming of medieval chronicles.
_B. Modern Works_
1. For medieval Venice see–
F.C. Hodgson: _The Early History of Venice from the Foundation to the Conquest of Constantinople_ (1901); and _Venice in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries, A Sketch of Venetian History, 1204-1400_ (1910).
P.G. Molmenti: _Venice, its Growth to the Fall of the Republic_, vols. I and II (_The Middle Ages_), trans. H.F. Brown (1906); and _La Vie Privee a Venise_, vol. I (1895). H.F. Brown: _Studies in the History of Venice_, vol. I (1907). Mrs Oliphant: _The Makers of Venice_ (1905) is pleasant reading and contains a chapter on Marco Polo.
2. For medieval China, the Tartars, and European intercourse with the far East see–
Sir Henry Yule’s introduction to his great edition of Marco Polo (above). _Cathay and the Way Thither: Medieval Notices of China_, trans. and ed. by Sir Henry Yule, 4 vols. (Hakluyt Soc., 1915-16). Contains an invaluable introduction and all the best accounts of China left by medieval European travellers. Above all, Oderic of Pordenone (d. 1331) should be read as a pendant to Marco Polo. R. Beazley: _The Dawn of Modern Geography_, vols. II and III (1897-1906).
R. Grousset: _Histoire de l’Asie_, t. III (3rd edit., 1922), Chap. I. A short and charmingly written account of the Mongol Empires from Genghis Khan to Timour.
H. Howarth: _History of the Mongols_ (1876).
3. For medieval trade with the East the best book is– W. Heyd: _Histoire du Commerce du Levant au Moyen-Age_, trans., F. Raynaud; 2 vols. (Leipzig and Paris, 1885-6, reprinted 1923).
_C. Notes to the Text_
1. To be exact, the Flanders galleys which sailed via Gibraltar to Southampton and Bruges were first sent out forty years after 1268–in 1308. Throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries they sailed every year, and Southampton owes its rise to prosperity to the fact that it was their port of call.
2. The occasion of the speech quoted was when the imperial representative Longinus was trying to get the help of the Venetians against the Lombards in 568 and invited them to acknowledge themselves subjects of the Emperor. The speech is quoted in _Encyclop. Brit._, Art. _Venice_ (by H.F. Brown), p. 1002. The episode of the loaves of bread belongs to the attempt of Pipin, son of Charlemagne, to starve out the Rialto in the winter of 809-10. Compare the tale of Charlemagne casting his sword into the sea, with the words, ‘Truly, even as this brand which I have cast into the sea shall belong neither to me nor to you nor to any other man in all the world, even so shall no man in the world have power to hurt the realm of Venice; and he who would harm it shall feel the wrath and displeasure of God, even as it has fallen upon me and my people.’–See Canale, _Cron._, c. VIII. These are, of course, all legends.
3. ‘Voirs est que la mer Arians est de le ducat de Venise.’–Canale, op. cit., p. 600. Albertino Mussato calls Venice ‘dominatrix Adriaci maris.’–Molmenti, _Venice_, I, p. 120.
4. See some good contemporary accounts of the ceremony quoted in Molmenti, _Venice_, I, pp. 212-15.
5. During the fatal war of Chioggia between the two republics of Venice and Genoa, which ended in 1381, it was said that the Genoese admiral (or some say Francesco Carrara), when asked by the Doge to receive peace ambassadors, replied, ‘Not before I have bitted the horses on St Mark’s.’–H.F. Brown, _Studies in the Hist. of Venice_, I, p. 130.
6. Canale, op. cit., p. 270.
7. ‘The weather was clear and fine … and when they were at sea, the mariners let out the sails to the wind, and let the ships run with spread sails before the wind over the sea’–See, for instance, Canale, op. cit., pp. 320, 326, and elsewhere.
8. Canale, op. cit., cc. I and II, pp. 268-72. Venice is particularly fortunate in the descriptions which contemporaries have left of her–not only her own citizens (such as Canale, Sanudo and the Doge Mocenigo) but also strangers. Petrarch’s famous description of Venetian commerce, as occasioned by the view which he saw from his window in the fourteenth century, has often been quoted: ‘See the innumerable vessels which set forth from the Italian shore in the desolate winter, in the most variable and stormy spring, one turning its prow to the east, the other to the west; some carrying our wine to foam in British cups, our fruits to flatter the palates of the Scythians and, still more hard of credence, the wood of our forests to the Egean and the Achaian isles; some to Syria, to Armenia, to the Arabs and Persians, carrying oil and linen and saffron, and bringing back all their diverse goods to us…. Let me persuade you to pass another hour in my company. It was the depth of night and the heavens were full of storm, and I, already weary and half asleep, had come to an end of my writing, when suddenly a burst of shouts from the sailors penetrated my ear. Aware of what these shouts should mean from former experience, I rose hastily and went up to the higher windows of this house, which look out upon the port. Oh, what a spectacle, mingled with feelings of pity, of wonder, of fear and of delight! Resting on their anchors close to the marble banks which serve as a mole to the vast palace which this free and liberal city has conceded to me for my dwelling, several vessels have passed the winter, exceeding with the height of their masts and spars the two towers which flank my house. The larger of the two was at this moment–though the stars were all hidden by the clouds, the winds shaking the walls, and the roar of the sea filling the air–leaving the quay and setting out upon its voyage. Jason and Hercules would have been stupefied with wonder, and Tiphys, seated at the helm, would have been ashamed of the nothing which won him so much fame. If you had seen it, you would have said it was no ship but a mountain, swimming upon the sea, although under the weight of its immense wings a great part of it was hidden in the waves. The end of the voyage was to be the Don, beyond which nothing can navigate from our seas; but many of those who were on board, when they had reached that point, meant to prosecute their journey, never pausing till they had reached the Ganges or the Caucasus, India and the Eastern Ocean. So far does love of gain stimulate the human mind.’–Quoted from Petrarch’s _Lettere Senili_ in Oliphant, _Makers of Venice_ (1905), p. 349; the whole of this charming chapter, ‘The Guest of Venice’, should be read. Another famous description of Venice occurs in a letter written by Pietro Aretino, a guest of Venice during the years 1527 to 1533, to Titian, quoted in E. Hutton, _Pietro Aretino, the Scourge of Princes_ (1922), pp. 136-7; compare also his description of the view from his window on another occasion, quoted ibid., pp. 131-3. The earliest of all is the famous letter written by Cassiodorus to the Venetians in the sixth century, which is partly translated in Molmenti, op. cit., I, pp. 14-15.
9. The account of the march of the gilds occupies cc. CCLXIII-CCLXXXIII of Canale’s Chronicle, op. cit., pp. 602-26. It has often been quoted.
10. Canale, op. cit., c. CCLXI, p. 600.
11. This account of Hangchow is taken partly from Marco Polo, op. cit., bk. II, c. LXVIII: ‘Of the noble and magnificent city of Kinsai’; and partly from Odoric of Pordenone, _Cathay and the Way Thither_, ed. Yule, pp. 113-20.
12. Oderic of Pordenone, who was a man before he was a friar, remarks: ‘The Chinese are comely enough, but colourless, having beards of long straggling hair like mousers, cats I mean. And as for the women, they are the most beautiful in the world.’ Marco Polo likewise never fails to note when the women of a district are specially lovely, in the same way that that other traveller Arthur Young always notes the looks of the chambermaids at the French inns among the other details of the countryside, and is so much affronted if waited on by a plain girl. Marco Polo gives the palm for beauty to the women of the Province of Timochain (or Damaghan) on the north-east border of Persia, of which, he says, ‘The people are in general a handsome race, especially the women, who, in my opinion, are the most beautiful in the world.’–Marco Polo, op. cit., p. 73. Of the women of Kinsai he reports thus: ‘The courtesans are accomplished and are perfect in the arts of blandishment and dalliance, which they accompany with expressions adapted to every description of person, insomuch that strangers who have once tasted of their charms, remain in a state of fascination, and become so enchanted by their meretricious arts, that they can never divest themselves of the impression. Thus intoxicated with sensual pleasures, when they return to their homes they report that they have been in Kinsai, or the celestial city, and pant for the time when they may be enabled to revisit paradise.’ Of the respectable ladies, wives of the master craftsmen he likewise says: ‘They have much beauty and are brought up with languid and delicate habits. The costliness of their dresses, in silks and jewellery, can scarcely be imagined.’–op. cit., pp. 296, 297-8.
13. Yule, op. cit., II, p. 184.
14. For Prester John see Sir Henry Yule’s article ‘Prester John’ in the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, and Lynn Thorndike, _A History of Magic and Experimental Science_ (1923), II, pp. 236-45. There is a pleasant popular account in S. Baring Gould, _Popular Myths of the Middle Ages_ (1866-8).
15. For their accounts see _The Journal of William of Rubruck to the Eastern Parts, 1253-5, by himself, with two accounts of the Earlier Journey of John of Pian da Carpine_, trans. and ed. with notes by W.W. Rockhill (Hakluyt Soc., 1900). Rubruck especially is a most delightful person.
16. This, together with the whole account of the first journey of the elder Polos, the circumstances of the second journey, and of their subsequent return occurs in the first chapter of Marco Polo’s book, which is a general introduction, after which he proceeds to describe in order the lands through which he passed. This autobiographical section is unfortunately all too short.
17. As a matter of fact, William of Rubruck had seen and described it before him.
18. For Marco Polo’s account of this custom in the province which he calls ‘Kardandan’, see op. cit., p. 250. An illustration of it from an album belonging to the close of the Ming dynasty is reproduced in S.W. Bushell, _Chinese Art_ (1910), fig. 134.
19. Marco Polo, _op. cit_., pp. 21-2.
20. A certain _Poh-lo_ was, according to the Chinese annals of the Mongol dynasty, appointed superintendent of salt mines at Yangchow shortly after 1282. Professor Parker thinks that he may be identified with our Polo, but M. Cordier disagrees. See E.H. Parker _Some New Facts about Marco Polos Book_ in _Imperial and Asiatic Quarterly Review_ (1904), p. 128; and H. Cordier, _Ser Marco Polo_, p. 8. See also Yule, _Marco Polo_, I, Introd., p. 21.
21. P. Parrenin in _Lett. Edis_., xxiv, 58, quoted in Yule, _op. cit_., I, Introd., p. II.
22. On Marco Polo’s omissions see Yule, _op. cit_., I, Introd., p. 110.
23. Marco Polo, _op. cit_., p. 288.
24. On Chao Meng-fu see S.W. Bushell, _Chinese Art_ (1910), II, pp. 133–59; H.A. Giles, _Introd. to the History of Chinese Pictorial Art_ (Shanghai, 2nd ed., 1918), pp. 159 ff.; the whole of c. VI of this book on the art which flourished under the Mongol dynasty is interesting. See also L. Binyon, _Painting in the Far East_ (1908), pp. 75-7, 146-7. One of Chao Meng-fu’s horse pictures, or rather a copy of it by a Japanese artist, is reproduced in Giles, _op. cit_., opposite p. 159. See also my notes on illustrations for an account of the famous landscape roll painted by him in the style of Wang Wei.
25. Bushell, _op. cit_., p. 135.
26. _Ibid_., pp. 135-6, where the picture is reproduced.
27. For the episode of the mangonels constructed by Nestorian mechanics under the directions of Nicolo and Maffeo see Marco Polo, _op. cit_., pp. 281-2.
28. Marco Polo, _op. cit_., bk. III, c. I, pp. 321-3.
29. Ramusio’s preface, containing this account, and also the story of how Rusticiano came to write the book at Marco Polo’s dictation at Genoa, is translated in Yule, _op. cit_., I, Introd., pp. 4-8.
30. He mentions these in Marco Polo, _op. cit_., pp. 136, 138, 344.
31. Yule, _op. cit_., I, Introd., p. 79.
32. On Rusticiano (who is mistakenly called a Genoese by Ramusio), see _ibid_., Introd., pp. 56 ff.
33. Paulin Paris, quoted _ibid_., Introd., p. 61.
34. _Ibid_., Introd., pp. 67-73.
35. Extract from Jacopo of Acqui’s _Imago Mondi_, quoted _ibid_., Introd., p. 54.
36. M. Ch.-V. Langlois in _Hist. Litt. de la France_, XXXV (1921), p. 259. For tributes to Marco Polo’s accuracy see Aurel Stein, _Ancient_ _Khotan_ (1907) and _Ruins of Desert Cathay_ (1912); Ellsworth Huntington, _The Pulse of Asia_ (1910); and Sven Hedin, _Overland to India_ (1910).
37. Yule, _op. cit_., I, Introd., pp. 106-7.
38. For these later missions and traders see Yule, _Cathay and the Way Thither_, Introd., pp. cxxxii-iv, and text, _passim_.
39. _Ibid_., II, p. 292; and App., p. lxv.
40. Concerning the marginal notes by Columbus see Yule, _op. cit_., II, App. H, p. 558. The book is preserved in the Colombina at Seville. I must, however, frankly admit that modern research, iconoclastic as ever, not content with white-washing Lucrezia Borgia and Catherine de Medicis, and with reducing Catherine of Siena to something near insignificance, is also making it appear more and more probable that Columbus originally set sail in 1492 to look for the islands of the Antilles, and that, although on his return after his great discovery in 1493 he maintained that his design had always been to reach Cipangu, this was a _post hoc_ story, the idea of searching for Cipangu having probably come from his partner, Martin Pinzon. It is a pity that we do not know _when_ he made his notes in the edition (the probable date of publication of which was 1485) of Marco Polo’s book, which might settle the matter. On the whole question see Henry Vignaud, _Etudes critiques sur la vie de Colomb avant ses decouvertes_ (Paris, 1905) and _Histoire de la Grande Enterprise de 1492_, 2 vols. (Paris, 1910), and the summary and discussion of his conclusions by Professor A.P. Newton in _History_, VII (1922), pp. 38-42 (_Historical Revisions_ XX.–‘Christopher Columbus and his Great Enterprise.’) The idea that a new road to the East was being sought at this time, primarily because the Turks were blocking the old trade routes, has also been exploded. See A.H. Lybyer, _The Ottoman Turks and the Routes of Oriental Trade_ in _Eng. Hist. Review_, XXX (1915), pp.577-88.
CHAPTER IV
MADAME EGLENTYNE
_A. Raw Material_
1. Chaucer’s description of the Prioress in the Prologue to the _Canterbury Tales_.
2. Miscellaneous visitation reports in episcopal registers. On these registers, and in particular the visitation documents therein, see R.C. Fowler, _Episcopal Registers of England and Wales_ (S.P.C.K. Helps for Students of History, No. 1), G.G. Coulton, _The Interpretation of Visitation Documents_ (Eng. Hist. Review, 1914), and c. XII of my book, cited below. A great many registers have been, or are being, published by learned societies, notably by the Canterbury and York Society, which exists for this purpose. The most important are the Lincoln visitations, now in the course of publication, by Dr A. Hamilton Thompson, _Visitations of Religious Houses in the Diocese of Lincoln_, ed. A. Hamilton Thompson (Lincoln Rec. Soc. and Canterbury and York Soc., 1915 ff.); two volumes have appeared so far, of which see especially vol. II, which contains part of Bishop Alnwick’s visitations (1436-49); each volume contains text, translation, and an admirable introduction. See also the extracts from Winchester visitations trans. in H.G.D. Liveing, _Records of Romsey Abbey_ (1912). Full extracts from visitation reports and injunctions are given under the accounts of religious houses in the different volumes of the Victoria County Histories (cited as V.C.H.).
3. The monastic rules. See _The Rule of St Benedict_, ed. F.A. Gasquet (Kings Classics, 1909), and F.A. Gasquet, _English Monastic Life_ (4th ed., 1910).
4. For a very full study of the whole subject of English convent life at this period see Eileen Power, _Medieval English Nunneries c. 1275 to 1535_(1922).
_B. Notes to the Text_
1. _The Register of Walter de Stapeldon, Bishop of Exeter_ (1307-26), ed. F. Hingeston Randolph (1892), p. 169. The passage about Philippa is translated in G.G. Coulton, _Chaucer and His England_ (1908), p. 181.
2. See the account of expenses involved in making Elizabeth Sewardby a nun of Nunmonkton (1468) in _Testamenta Eboracensia_, ed. James Raine (Surtees Soc., 1886), III, p. 168; and Power, _op. cit_., p. 19.
3. _Year Book of King Richard II_, ed. C.F. Deiser (1904), pp. 71-7; and Power, _op. cit_., pp. 36-8.
4. G.J. Aungier, _Hist. of Syon_ (1840), p. 385.
5. As at Gracedieu (1440-1), _Alnwick’s Visit_, ed. A.H. Thompson, pp. 120-3.
6. G.J. Aungier, _op. cit_., pp. 405-9.
7. Translated from John de Grandisson’s Register in G.G. Coulton, _A Medieval Garner_ (1910), pp. 312-14.
8. _Rule of St Benedict_, c. 22.
9. _V.C.H. Lincs_., II, p. 131.
10. Translated in G.G. Coulton, _A Medieval Garner_.
11. _Myroure of Oure Ladye_, ed. J.H. Blunt (E.E.T.S., 1873), p. 54. On Tittivillus see my article in _The Cambridge Magazine_ (1917), pp.158-60.
12. _Linc. Visit_., ed. A.H. Thompson, II, pp. 46-52; and Power, _op. cit._ pp. 82-7.
13. _V.C.H. Oxon_, II. p. 77.
14. _Linc. Visit_., ed. A.H. Thompson, I, p. 67.
15. On these gaieties see Power, _op. cit_. pp. 309-14.
16. _Linc. Visit_., II, pp. 3-4; and see Power, _op. cit_., pp. 75-7, 303-5, on gay clothes in nunneries.
17. _Linc. Visit_., II. p. 175.
18. Power, _op. cit_., p. 307. On pet animals see _ibid_., pp. 305-9, and Note E (‘Convent Pets in Literature’), pp. 588-95.
19. Power, _op. cit_., p. 77.
20. _Ibid_., pp. 351-2; and see Chap. IX _passim_ on the Bull _Periculoso_ and the wandering of nuns in the world.
21. _Linc. Visit_., II, p. 50.
22. _V.C.H. Yorks_., III, p. 172.
CHAPTER V
THE MENAGIER’S WIFE
_A. Raw Material_
I. _Le Menagier de Paris, Traite de Morale et d’Economie Domestique, compose vers_ 1393 _par un Bourgeois Parisien … publie pour la premiere fois par la Societe des Bibliophiles Francois_. (Paris, 1846). 2 vols., edited with an introduction by Jerome Pichon. There is a notice of it by Dr F.J. Furnivall, at the end of his edition of _A Booke of Precedence_ (Early English Text Soc., 1869 and 1898), pp. 149-54. It was a book after his own heart, and he observes that it well deserves translation into English.
2. On the subject of medieval books of deportment for women see A.A. Hentsch, _De la litterature didactique du moyen age s’addressant specialement aux femmes_ (Cahors, 1903), an admirably complete collection of analyses of all the chief works of this sort produced in western Europe from the time of St Jerome to the eve of the Renaissance. It is full of plums for adventurous Jack Horners.
3. With the Menagier’s cookery book there may profitably be compared _Two Fifteenth Century Cookery Books_, ed. by Thomas Austin (E.E.T.S., 1888).
_B. Notes to the Text_
1. Pp. 1-2.
2. These long moral treatises on the seven deadly sins and the even deadlier virtues were very popular in the Middle Ages. The best known to English readers occurs in the _Parson’s Tale_ in Chaucer’s _Canterbury Tales,_ and is taken from the _Somme de Vices et de Vertus_ of Frere Lorens, a thirteenth-century author. The sections on the deadly sins are usually, however, well worth reading, because of the vivid illustrative details which they often give about daily life. The Menagier’s sections are full of vigour and colour, as one would expect. Here, for instance, is his description of the female glutton: ‘God commands fasting and the glutton says: “I will eat”. God commands us to get up early and go to church and the glutton says: “I must sleep. I was drunk yesterday. The church is not a hare; it will wait for me.” When she has with some difficulty risen, do you know what her hours are? Her matins are: “Ha! what shall we have to drink? is there nothing left over from last night?” Afterwards she says her lauds thus: “Ha! we drank good wine yesterday.” Afterwards she says thus her orisons: “My head aches, I shan’t be comfortable until I have had a drink.” Certes, such gluttony putteth a woman to shame, for from it she becomes a ribald, a disreputable person and a thief. The tavern is the Devil’s church, where his disciples go to do him service and where he works his miracles. For when folk go there they go upright and well spoken, wise and sensible and well advised, and when they return they cannot hold themselves upright nor speak; they are all foolish and all mad, and they return swearing, beating and giving the lie to each other.’–_Op. cit_., I, pp. 47-8. The section on Avarice is particularly valuable for its picture of the sins of executors of wills, rack-renting lords, extortionate shopkeepers, false lawyers, usurers, and gamblers.–See _ibid_., I, pp. 44-5.
3. _Prudence and Melibeus_ is worth reading once, either in Chaucer’s or in Renault de Louens’ version, because of its great popularity in the Middle Ages, and because of occasional vivid passages. Here, for instance, is the episode in Chaucer’s version, in which Melibeus, the sages, and the young men discuss going to war, and the sages advise against it: ‘Up stirten thanne the yonge folk at ones, and the mooste partie of that compaignye scorned the wise olde men, and bigonnen to make noyse, and seyden that “Right so as, whil that iren is hoot, men sholden smyte, right so men sholde wreken hir wronges while that they been fresshe and newe”; and with loud voys they criden, “Werre! werre!” Up roos tho oon of thise olde wise, and with his hand made contenaunce that men sholde holden hem stille, and yeven hym audience. “Lordynges,” quod he, “ther is ful many a man that crieth ‘Werre! werre!’ that woot ful litel what werre amounteth. Werre at his bigynnyng hath so greet an entryng and so large, that every wight may entre whan hym liketh and lightly fynde werre; but certes, what ende that shal ther-of bifalle it is nat light to knowe; for soothly, whan that werre is ones bigonne ther is ful many a child unborn of his mooder that shal sterve yong by cause of that ilke werre, or elles lyve in sarwe, and dye in wrecchednesse; and therefore, er that any werre bigynne, men moste have greet conseil and greet deliberacioun.”–Chaucer, _Tale of Melibeus_,Sec. 12; and see the French version, _op. cit_., I, p. 191.
4. II, p. 72-9.
5. I, pp. 71-2. These medieval games are very difficult to identify. The learned editor remarks that _bric_, which is mentioned in the thirteenth century by Rutebeuf was played, seated, with a little stick; _qui fery_ is probably the modern game called by the French _main chaude; pince merille,_ which is mentioned among the games of Gargantua, was a game in which you pinched one of the players’ arms, crying ‘Merille’ or ‘Morille’. Though the details of these games are vague, there are many analagous games played by children today, and it is easy to guess the kind of thing which is meant.
6. I, pp. 13-15.
7. I, 92, 96.
8. The story of Jeanne la Quentine is reproduced in the _Heptameron_ of Margaret of Navarre (the 38th tale, or the 8th of the 4th day), where it is attributed to a _bourgeoise_ of Tours, but it is probable that the Menagier’s is the original version, since he says that he had it from his father; although, knowing the ways of the professional raconteur, I should be the first to admit that this is not proof positive.
9. I, pp. 125-6.
10. I, p. 139.
11. This was a favourite saying. It occurs in the story of Melibeus, ‘Trois choses sont qui gettent homme hors de sa maison, c’est assavoir la fumee, la goutiere et la femme mauvaise.’–_Ibid_., I, p. 195. Compare Chaucer’s use of it: ‘Men seyn that thre thynges dryven a man out of his hous,–that is to seyn, smoke, droppyng of reyn and wikked wyves.’–_Tale of Melibeus_, Sec.15; and
‘Thou seyst that droppying houses, and eek smoke, And chidyng wyves, maken men to flee
Out of hir owene hous.’
–_Wife of Bath’s Prologue_, LL, 278-80.
12. I, pp. 168-71, 174-6.
13. II, p. 54. The Menagier also warns against running up long bills on credit. ‘Tell your folk to deal with peaceable people and to bargain always beforehand and to account and pay often, without running up long bills on credit by tally or on paper, although tally or paper are better than doing everything by memory, for the creditors always think it more and the debtors less, and thus are born arguments, hatreds, and reproaches; and cause your good creditors to be paid willingly and frequently what is owed to them, and keep them in friendship so that they depart not from you, for one cannot always get peaceable folk again.’
14. II, pp. 56-9.
15. It is curious here to note the antiquity of the term ‘bloody’ as an expletive. The Menagier says: ‘Forbid them … to use ugly oaths, or words which are bad or indecent, as do certain evil or ill bred persons who swear at bad bloody fevers, the bad bloody week, the bad bloody day (‘de males sanglantes fievres,’ ‘de male sanglante sepmaine,’ ‘de male sanglante journee’), and they know not, nor should they know, what a bloody thing is, for honest women know it not, since it is abominable to them to see the blood but of a lamb or a pigeon, when it is killed before them.’–_Ibid._, II, p. 59.
16. The section on household management described above occupies sec. II, art. 2, of the Menagier’s book (II, pp. 53-72).
17. I, pp. 171-2.
18. I, pp. 172-3.
19. The cookery book occupies sec. II, arts. 4 and 5 (II, pp. 80-272).
20. II, pp. 222-3. Translated by Dr Furnivall in _A Booke of Precedence_ (E.E.T.S.), pp. 152-3.
21. II, pp. 108-18, 123. The feast was still a thing of the future when the Menagier thus gathered all the details. He calls it ‘L’ordenance de nopces que fera maistre Helye en May, a un mardy … l’ordonnance du souper que fera ce jour.’
22. ‘The office of the woman is to make provision of tapestries, to order and spread them, and in especial to dight the room and the bed which shall be blessed…. And note that if the bed be covered with cloth, there is needed a fur coverlet of small vair, but if it be covered with serge, or broidery, or pinwork of cendal, not.’–II, p. 118. The editor quotes the following ceremony for blessing the wedding bed: ‘_Benedictio thalami ad nuptias et als_, Beredic, Domine, thalamum hunc et omnes habitantes in eo, ut in tua voluntate permaneant, requiescant et multiplicentur in longitudinem dierum. Per Christum, etc. _Tunc thurificet thalamum in matrimonio, postea sponsum et sponsam sedentes vel jacentes in lecto suo. Benedicentur dicendo_: Benedic, Domine, adolescentulos istos; sicut benedixisti Thobiam et Sarram filiam Raguelis, ita benedicere eos digneris, Domine, ut in nomine tuo vivant et senescant, et multiplicentur in longitudinem dierum. Per Christum, etc. Benedictio Dei omnipotentis, Patris et Filii et Spiritus sancti descendat super vos et maneat super vobiscum. In nomine Patris, etc.’–_Ibid._, I, _Introd._, p. lxxxvi.
23. Chaucer, _Tale of Melibeus_, Sec. 15.
CHAPTER VI
THOMAS BETSON
_A. Raw Material_
1. _The Stonor Letters and Papers_, 1290-1483, ed. C.L. Kingsford (Royal Hist. Soc., Camden, 3rd Series), 2 vols., 1919. The Betson correspondence is in vol. II.
2. _The Cely Papers, selected from the Correspondence and Memoranda of the Cely Family, Merchants of the Staple_, 1475-88, ed. H.E. Malden (Royal Hist. Soc., Camden 3rd series), 1900.
I am much beholden to the excellent introductions to these two books, which are models of what editorial introductions should be.
3. The best introduction to the history of the Company of the Staple is to be found in Mr Malden’s aforesaid introduction to _The Cely Papers_, which also contains a masterly account of the political relations of England, France and Burgundy during the period. I have constantly relied upon Mr Malden’s account of the working of the Staple system. Other useful short accounts of the wool trade and the Stapler’s Company may be found in the following works: Sir C.P. Lucas, _The Beginnings of English Overseas Enterprise_ (1917), c. II; and A.L. Jenckes, _The Staple of England_ (1908).
_B. Notes to the Text_
1. Four interesting contemporary illustrations of Parliament in 1523, 1585, some date during the seventeenth century, and 1742 respectively, are reproduced in Professor A.F. Pollard’s stimulating study of _The Evolution of Parliament_ (1920).
2. _The Lybelle of Englyshe Polycye_, in _Political Poems and Songs_, ed. Thos. Wright (Rolls Ser., 1861), II, p. 162. This remarkable poem was written in 1436 or 1437, in order to exhort the English ‘to kepe the see enviroun and namelye the narowe see’ between Dover and Calais, since in the author’s opinion the basis of England’s greatness lay in her trade, for the preservation of which she needed the dominion of the seas. Its chief value lies in the very complete picture which it gives of English import and export trade with the various European countries. There is a convenient edition of it in _The Principal Navigations Voyages Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation by Richard Hakluyt_ (Everyman’s Lib. Edition, 1907), I, pp. 174-202.
3. G.W. Morris and L.S. Wood, _The Golden Fleece_ (1922), p. 17.
4. For accounts of these brasses see H. Druitt, _A Manual of Costume as Illustrated by Monumental Brasses_ (1906), pp. 9, 201, 205, 207, 253. John Fortey’s brass and William Greville’s brass are conveniently reproduced in G.W. Morris and L.S. Wood, _op. cit_., pp. 28, 32, together with several other illustrations, pertinent to the wool trade.
5. Gower, _Mirour de l’Omme_ in _The Works of John Gower_. I. _The French Works_, ed. G.C. Macaulay (1899), p. 280-1.
6. _The Paston Letters_, ed. J. Gairdner (London, 1872-5); Supplement 1901. See also H.S. Bennett, _The Pastons and their England_ (1922).
7. _Plumpton Correspondence_, ed. T. Stapleton (Camden Soc., 1839).
8. _Cely Papers_, p. 72; and compare below p. 134.
9. _Stonor Letters_, II, p. 2.
10. _Ibid_., II, pp. 2-3.
11. The brasses of his father ‘John Lyndewode, woolman’, and of his brother, also ‘John Lyndewode, woolman’ (_d._ 1421), are still in Linwood Church. They both have their feet on woolpacks, and on the son’s woolpack is his merchant’s mark. See H. Druitt, _op. cit_., pp. 204-5.
12. See _Magna Vita S. Hugonis Episcopi Lincolniensis_, ed. J.F. Dimock (Rolls Series, 1864), pp. 170-7.
13. For these extracts see a vastly entertaining book, _Child Marriages and Divorces in the Diocese of Chester_, 1561-6, ed. F.J. Furnivall (E.E.T.S., 1897), pp. xxii, 6, 45-7.
14. _Stonor Letters_, II, pp. 6-8.
15. _Ibid_., II, pp. 28, 64.
16. _Ibid_., II, p. 64.
17. _Ibid_., II, pp. 42-43.
18. _Ibid_., II, p. 44.
19. _Ibid_., II, pp. 61, 64-5.
20. _Ibid_., II, pp. 46-8.
21. _Ibid_., II, p. 53.
22. _Ibid_., II, p. 28.
23. _Ibid_., II, p. 47.
24. _Ibid_., II, p. 53.
25. _Ibid_., II, pp. 54-5.
26. _Ibid_., II, pp. 56-7.
27. _Ibid_., II, p. 69.
28. _Ibid_., II, pp. 87-8.
29. _Ibid_., II, pp. 88-9.
30. _Ibid_., II, p. 89.
31. _Ibid_., II, pp. 102-3, 117.
32. See Richard Cely’s amusing account of the affair in a letter to his brother George, written on May 13, 1482, _Cely Papers_, pp. 101-4. For other references to the wool dealer William Midwinter see _ibid_., pp. 11, 21, 28, 30, 32, 64, 87, 89, 90, 105, 124, 128, 157, 158.
33. _Stonor Letters_, II, p. 3.
34. _Ibid_., II, p. 64.
35. _Testamenta Eboracensia_ (Surtees Soc.), II, p. 56. He was a well-known wool merchant of York, at different times member of the town council of twelve, sheriff and mayor, who died in 1435. He is constantly mentioned in the city records; see _York Memorandum Book_, ed. Maud Sellers (Surtees Soc., 1912 and 1915), vols. I and II, _passim_.
36. _Cely Papers_, pp. 30-1.
37. _Ibid_., p. 64.
38. See his will (1490) in _Test. Ebor._, IV, p. 61, where he is called ‘Johannes Barton de Holme juxta Newarke, Stapulae villae Carlisiae marcator,’ and ordains ‘Volo quod Thomas filius meus Johannem Tamworth fieri faciat liberum hominem Stapulae Carlis,’ _ibid_., p. 62.
39. _Ibid_., p. 45.
40. _Ibid_., p. 48.
41. _Ibid_., pp. 154-5.
42. _The Lybelle of Englysche Polycye_ in _loc. cit._, pp. 174-7, _passim_. Compare Gower’s account of the machinations of the Lombards, _op. cit_., pp. 281-2.
43. See the clear account of all these operations in Mr Malden’s introduction to the _Cely Papers_, pp. xi-xiii, xxxviii.
44. _Ibid_., p. vii.
45. _Cely Papers_, pp. 194-6; and see _Introd_., pp. xxxvi-viii.
46. _Ibid_., pp. 71-2.
47. _Ibid_., pp. 174-88, a book entitled on the cover ‘The Rekenyng of the Margett Cely,’ and beginning, ‘The first viage of the Margaret of London was to Seland in the yere of our Lord God m iiijciiijxxv. The secunde to Caleis and the thrid to Burdews ut videt. Md to se the pursers accomptes of the seide viages. G. Cely.’
48. _Ibid_., p. xxxviii.
49. _Stonor Letters_, II, p. 2.
50. _Ibid_., II, p. 4.
51. _Cely Papers_, pp. 112-13.
52. _Ibid_., p. 106; compare _ibid_., p. 135.
53. ‘Sir, the wool ships be come to Calais all save three, whereof two be in Sandwich haven and one is at Ostend, and he hath cast over all his wool overboard.’–_Ibid_., p. 129. ‘Item, sir, on Friday the 27 day of February came passage from Dover and they say that on Thursday afore came forth a passenger from Dover to Calais ward and she was chased with Frenchmen and driven in to Dunkirk haven.’–_Ibid_., p. 142. (There are many records of similar chases; see _Introd_., pp. xxxiv-v.)
54. _Ibid_., p. 135.
55. ‘Sir, I cannot have your wool yet awarded, for I have do cast out a sarpler, the which is [ap]pointed by the lieutenant to be casten out toward the sort by, as the ordinance now is made that the lieutenant shall [ap]point the [a]warding sarplers of every man’s wool, the which sarpler that I have casten out is No. 24, and therein is found by William Smith, packer, a 60 middle fleeces and it is a very gruff wool; and so I have caused William Smith privily to cast out another sarpler No. 8, and packed up the wool of the first sarpler in the sarpler of No. 8, for this last sarpler is fair wool enough, and therefore I must understand how many be of that sort and the number of the[m], for they must be packed again’ (12 Sept., 1487).–_Ibid_., p. 160. Item, sir, your wool is awarded by the sarpler that I cast out last, etc. Item, sir, this same day your mastership is elected and appointed here by the Court one of the 28, the which shall assist the Master of the Staple now at this parliament time.’-_Ibid_., p. 162.
56. Gower, _op. cit_., p. 281.
57. _Cely Papers_, pp. xii, xxiv-v.
58. _Stonor Letters_, II, pp. 62-3; see also _Cely Papers_, pp. 1, 10, 13.
59. _Stonor Letters_, II, p. 4.
60. Chaucer, _Canterbury Tales (Shipman’s Tale_) LL, 1243-6.
61. _Stonor Letters_, II, p. 48.
62. _Cely Papers_, p. xxiii.
63. _Lybelle of Englysshe Polycye_ in _loc. cit_., pp. 179-81.
64. With deference, I think that Mr Malden in his introduction to the _Cely Papers_, App. II, pp. lii-iii, is mistaken in seeking to identify Synchon Mart with a particular fair at Antwerp on St John’s Day, Bammes mart with the fair at St Remy (a Flemish name for whom is Bamis) on August 8, and Cold Mart with Cortemarck near Thourout. The names simply refer to the seasons in which there were fairs in most of the important centres, though doubtless in one place the winter and in another the spring, summer, or autumn fair was the more important. That the names refer to seasons and not to places appears quite clearly in various letters and regulations relating to the Merchant Adventurers of York. See _The York Mercers and Merchant Adventurers_, 1356-1917, ed. M. Sellers (Surtees Soc., 1918), pp. 117, 121-5, 160, 170-1; see Miss Sellers’ note, _ibid_., p. 122, quoting W. Cunningham: ‘The ancient Celtic fairs … were a widespread primitive institution and appear to have been fixed for dates marked by the change of seasons.’–_Scottish Hist. Review_, xiii, p. 168. For instance, a document of 1509 (‘For now att this cold marte last past, holdyn at Barow in Brabond,’ _loc. cit_. p. 121) disposes of the idea that the Cold mart was the mart at Cortemarck, while another document refers to merchants intending to ship ‘to the cold martes’ and ‘to the synxon martes’ in the plural. _Ibid_., p. 123. The identification of Balms mart with the fair at St Remy on August 8 is, moreover, belied by the same document (1510-11), which runs, ‘Whereas this present marte … we have lycensed and set you at libertie to shipp your commodities to the balmes marte next coming. Nevertheless … we thinke it good … that upon the recepte of these our letters ye … assemble and consult together, and if ye shall thinke good amongest yourselffs … discretly to withdraw and with holde your hands from shippyng to the said balmes marte…. Wryten at Andwarp the xvij day of August.’ _Ibid_., p. 124. The Balms mart was obviously the autumn fairtide, and Mr Malden is no doubt right in identifying Balms (Bammys, Bammes) with Bamis, the local Flemish name of St Remy; St Remy’s Day was October 28, and the Balms mart was not the mart held on August 8 at St Remy, but the mart held on and round about St Remy’s Day. Another document of 1552 gives interesting information about the shippings for three of the marts: ‘The last daye of shippinge unto the fyrst shippinge beinge for the pasche marte is ordeyned to be the laste of Marche nexte ensuyinge; and the seconde shippinge which is appointed for the sinxon marte the laste day to the same, is appoynted the laste of June then nexte followinge; and unto the colde marte the laste day of shippinge is appoynted to be the laste of November then nexte insuyinge.’–_Ibid_., p. 147. The Merchant Adventurers tried sometimes to restrict merchants to the Cold and the Synxon marts, which were the most important.
65. _Cely Papers_, p. xl, and _passim_.
66. _Ibid_., p. 74. Richard Cely the younger to George: ‘I understand that ye have a fair hawk. I am right glad of her, for I trust to God she shall make you and me right great sport. If I were sure at what passage ye would send her I would fetch her at Dover and keep her till ye come. A great infortune is fallen on your bitch, for she had 14 fair whelps, and after that she had whelped she would never eat meat, and so she is dead and all her whelps; but I trust to purvey against your coming as fair and as good to please that gentleman.’–_Ibid_., p. 74.
67. _Ibid_., p. xlix.
68. _Ibid_., App. I., pp. xlix-lii, a very interesting note on contemporary coinage, identifying all the coins mentioned in the letters.
69. _Ibid_., p. 159.
70. _Ibid_., p. 161.
71. _Stonor Letters_, II, p. 43. So Dame Elizabeth Stonor ends a letter to her husband: ‘Written at Stonor, when I would fain have slept, the morrow after our Lady day in the morning,’–_Ibid_., p. 77.
72. Chaucer, _Canterbury Tales (Shipman’s Tale_), LL, 1265-78, in _Works_ (Globe Ed., 1903), p. 80.
73. The will is P.C.C. 24 Logge at Somerset House. For this analysis of its contents and information about the life of Thomas Betson after his breach with the Stonors see _Stonor Letters_, I, pp. xxviii-ix.
74. They are (1) John Bacon, citizen and woolman, and Joan, his wife (_d_. 1437); (2) Thomas Gilbert, citizen and draper of London and merchant of the Staple of Calais (_d_. 1483), and Agnes, his wife (_d_. 1489); (3) Christopher Rawson, mercer of London and merchant of the Staple of Calais, Junior Warden of the Mercers’ Company in 1516 (_d_. 1518), and his two wives. Thomas Betson was doubtless acquainted with Gilbert and Rawson.
CHAPTER VII
THOMAS PAYCOCKE OF COGGESHALL
_A. Raw Material_
1. The raw material for this chapter consists of Paycocke’s House, presented to the Nation in 1924 by the Right Hon. Noel Buxton, M.P., which stands in West Street, Coggeshall, Essex (station, Kelvedon); the Paycocke brasses, which lie in the North aisle of the parish church of St Peter ad Vincula at Coggeshall; and the wills of John Paycocke (_d_. 1505), Thomas Paycocke (_d_. 1518), and Thomas Paycocke (_d_. 1580), which are now preserved at Somerset House (P.C.C. Adeane 5, Ayloffe 14, and Arundell 50, respectively), and of which that of the first Thomas has been printed in Mr Beaumont’s paper, cited below, while I have analysed fully the other two in my book, _The Paycockes of Coggeshall_ (1920), which deals at length with the history of the Paycockes and their house. See also G.F. Beaumont, _Paycocke’s House, Coggeshall, with some Notes on the Families of Paycocke and Buxton_ (reprinted from Trans. Essex Archaeol. Soc., IX, pt. V) and the same author’s _History of Coggeshall_ (1890). There is a beautifully illustrated article on the house in _Country Life_ (June 30, 1923), vol. LIII, pp. 920-6.
2. For an apotheosis of the clothiers, see _The Pleasant History of John Winchcomb, in his younger days called Jack of Newbery, the famous and worthy Clothier of England_ and _Thomas of Reading, or the Six Worthy Yeomen of the West_, in _The Works of Thomas Deloney_, ed. F.O. Mann (1912), nos. II and V. The first of these was published in 1597 and the other soon afterwards and both went through several editions by 1600.
3. On the cloth industry in general see G. Morris and L. Wood, _The Golden Fleece_ (1922); E. Lipson, _The Woollen Industry_ (1921); and W.J. Ashley, _Introd. to English Economic History_ (1909 edit.). For the East Anglian woollen industry see especially the _Victoria County Histories_ of Essex and Suffolk. For a charming account of another famous family of clothiers see B. McClenaghan, _The Springs of Lavenham_ (Harrison, Ipswich, 1924).
_B. Notes to the Text_
1. _Deloney’s Works_, ed. F.O. Mann, p. 213.
2. Thomas Fuller, _The Worthies of England_ (1622), p. 318.
3. A convenient introduction to the study of monumental brasses, with illustrations and a list of all the surviving brasses in England, arranged according to counties, is W. Macklin, _Monumental Brasses_ (1913). See also H. Druitt, _Costume on Brasses_ (1906). These books also give details as to the famous early writers on the subject, such as Weaver, Holman, and A.J. Dunkin.
4. _Testamenta Eboracensia, a selection of wills from the Registry at York_, ed. James Raine, 6 vols. (Surtees Soc., 1836-1902). The Surtees Society has also published several other collections of wills from Durham and elsewhere, relating to the northern counties. A large number of wills have been printed or abstracted. See, for instance, _Wills and Inventories from the Registers of Bury St Edmunds_, ed. S. Tymms (Camden Soc., 1850); _Calendar of Wills Proved and Enrolled in the Court of Hastings_, _London_, ed. R.R. Sharpe, 2 vols. (1889); _The Fifty Earliest English Wills in the Court of Probate, London_, ed. F.J. Furnivall (E.E.T.S., 1882); _Lincoln Wills_, ed. C.W. Foster (Lincoln Record Soc., 1914); and _Somerset Medieval Wills_, 1383-1558, ed. F.W. Weaver, 3 vols. (Somerset Record Soc., 1901-5).
5. The will of the other Thomas Paycocke ‘cloathemaker’, who died in 1580, also refers to the family business. He leaves twenty shillings ‘to William Gyon my weaver’; also ‘Item, I doe give seaven poundes tenne shillinges of Lawful money of Englande to and amongest thirtie of the poorest Journeymen of the Fullers occupacion in Coggeshall aforesaide, that is to every one of them fyve shillinges.’ William Gyon or Guyon was related to a very rich clothier, Thomas Guyon, baptized in 1592 and buried in 1664, who is said to have amassed L100,000 by the trade. Thomas Paycocke’s son-in-law Thomas Tyll also came of a family of clothiers, for in a certificate under date 1577 of wool bought by clothiers of Coggeshall during the past year there occur the names of Thomas Tyll, William Gyon, John Gooddaye (to whose family the first Thomas Paycocke left legacies), Robert Lytherland (who receives a considerable legacy under the will of the second Thomas), and Robert Jegon (who is mentioned incidentally in the will as having a house near the church and was father of the Bishop of Norwich of that name). See Power, _The Paycockes of Coggeshall_, pp. 33-4.
6. Quoted in Lipson, _Introd. to the Econ. Hist, of England_ (1905), I, p. 421.
7. Quoted _ibid_., p. 417.
8. On John Winchcomb see Power, _op. cit_., pp. 17-18; and Lipson, _op. cit_., p. 419.
9. Deloney’s Works, ed. F.C. Mann, pp. 20-1.
10. _Ibid_., p. 22.
11. Quoted in C.L. Powell, _Eng. Domestic Relations_, 1487-1563 (1917), p. 27.
12. The house subsequently passed, it is not quite clear at what date, into the hands of another family of clothiers, the Buxtons, who had intermarried with the Paycockes some time before 1537. William Buxton (_d_. 1625) describes himself as ‘clothyer of Coggeshall’ and leaves ‘all my Baey Lombs [Looms]’ to his son Thomas. Thomas was seventeen when his father died and lived until 1647, also carrying on business as a clothier, and the house was certainly in his possession. He or his father may have bought it from John Paycocke’s executors. By him it was handed down to his son Thomas, also a clothier (_d_. 1713), who passed it on to his son Isaac, clothier (_d_. 1732). Isaac’s two eldest sons were clothiers likewise, but soon after their father’s death they retired from business. He apparently allowed his third son, John, to occupy the house as his tenant, and John was still living there in 1740. But Isaac had left the house by will in 1732 to his youngest son, Samuel, and Samuel, dying in 1737, left it to his brother Charles, the fourth son of Isaac. Charles never lived in it, because he spent most of his life in the pursuit of his business as an oil merchant in London, though he is buried among his ancestors in Coggeshall Church. In 1746 he sold the house to Robert Ludgater and it passed completely out of the Paycocke-Buxton connexion, and in the course of time fell upon evil days and was turned into two cottages, the beautiful ceilings being plastered over. It was on the verge of being destroyed some years ago when it was bought and restored to its present fine condition by Mr Noel Buxton, a direct lineal descendant of the Charles Buxton who sold it. See Power, _op. cit_., pp. 38-40.
13. _Deloney’s Works_, ed. F.O. Mann, p. 213.
14. Defoe, _Tour through Great Britain_, 1724 (1769 edit.), pp. 144-6.
15. ‘This shire is the most fatt, frutefull and full of profitable thinges, exceeding (as far as I can finde) anie other shire for the general commodities and the plentie, thowgh Suffolk be more highlie comended by some (wherewith I am not yet acquainted). But this shire seemeth to me to deserve the title of the Englishe Goshen, the fattest of the lande, comparable to Palestina, that flowed with milk and hunnye.’–Norden, _Description of Essex_ (1594), (Camden Soc.), p. 7.
16. According to Leake, writing about 1577, ‘About 1528 began the first spinning on the distaffe and making of Coxall clothes…. These Coxall clothes weare first taught by one Bonvise, an Italian.’–Quoted _V.C.H. Essex_, II, p. 382.
_Notes on Illustrations_
PLATE I. _Bodo at his work_
From an eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon calendar in the British Museum (MS. Tit., B.V., pt. I), showing the occupations of Bodo, or of his masters, for each month of the year. The months illustrated are January (ploughing with oxen), March (breaking clods in a storm), August (reaping), and December (threshing and winnowing). The other pictures represent February (pruning), April (Bodo’s masters feasting), May (keeping sheep), June (mowing), July (woodcutting), September (Bodo’s masters boar-hunting), October (Bodo’s masters hawking), and November (making a bonfire).
PLATE II. _Embarkation of the Polos at Venice_
From the magnificent MS. of Marco Polo’s book, written early in the fifteenth century and now preserved at the Bodleian Library, Oxford (MS. no. 264, f. 218). The artist gives an admirable view of medieval Venice, with the Piazetta to the left, and the Polos embarking on a rowing boat to go on board their ship. In the foreground are depicted (after the medieval fashion of showing several scenes of a story in the same picture) some of the strange lands through which they passed. Note the Venetian trading ships.
PLATE III. _Part of a landscape roll by Chao Meng-fu_
This very beautiful scene is taken from a roll painted by Chao Meng-fu in 1309 in the style of Wang Wei, a poet and artist of the T’ang dynasty (A.D. 699-759). A fine description of it is given by Mr Laurence Binyon: ‘In the British Museum collection is a long roll, over seventeen feet long, painted almost entirely in blues and greens on the usual warm brown silk…. It is one continuous landscape, in which the scenes melt into one another. Such rolls are not meant to be exhibited or looked at all at once, but enjoyed in small portions at a time, as the painting is slowly unrolled and the part already seen rolled up again. No small mastery is requisite, as may be imagined, to contrive that wherever the spectator pauses an harmonious composition is presented. One has the sensation, as the roll unfolds, of passing through a delectable country. In the foreground water winds, narrowing and expanding, among verdant knolls and lawns, joined here and there by little wooden bridges; and the water is fed by torrents that plunge down among pine-woods from crags of fantastic form, glowing with hues of lapis-lazuli and jade; under towering peaks are luxuriant valleys, groves with glimpses of scattered deer, walled parks, clumps of delicate bamboo, and the distant roofs of some nestling village. Here and there is a pavilion by the water in which poet or sage sits contemplating the beauty round him. These happy and romantic scenes yield at last to promontory and reed-bed on the borders of a bay where a fisherman’s boat is rocking on the swell. It is possible that a philosophic idea is intended to be suggested–the passage of the soul through the pleasant delights of earth to the contemplation of the infinite.’–Laurence Binyon, _Painting in the Far East_ (1908), pp. 75-6. The section of the roll which has been chosen for reproduction here has already been reproduced in S.W. Bushell, _Chinese Art_ (1910), II, Fig. 127, where it is thus described: ‘A lake with a terraced pavilion on an island towards which a visitor is being ferried in a boat, while fishermen are seen in another boat pulling in their draw-net; the distant mountains, the pine-clad hills in the foreground, the clump of willow opposite, and the line of reeds swaying in the wind along the bank of the water are delightfully rendered, and skilfully combined to make a characteristic picture.’–_Ibid_., II, p. 134. Other sections of the same roll are reproduced in H.A. Giles, _Introd. to the Hist, of Chinese Pictorial Art_ (2nd ed., 1918) facing p. 56; and in L. Binyon, _op. cit_., plate III (facing p. 66). It is exceedingly interesting to compare this landscape roll with the MS of Marco Polo, illuminated about a century later, from which the scene of the embarkation at Venice has been taken; the one is so obviously the work of a highly developed and the other of an almost naive and childish civilization.
PLATE IV. _Madame Eglentyne at home_
This is a page from a fine manuscript of _La Sainte Abbaye_, now in the British Museum (MS. Add. 39843, f. 6 vo). At the top of the picture a priest with two acolytes prepares the sacrament; behind them stands the abbess, holding her staff and a book, and accompanied by her chaplain and the sacristan, who rings the bell; behind them is a group of four nuns, including the cellaress with her keys, and nuns are seen at the windows of the dorter above. At the bottom is a procession of priest, acolytes and nuns in the choir; notice the big candles carried by the young nuns (perhaps novices) in front, and the notation of the music books.
PLATE V. _The Menagier’s wife has a garden party_
This beautiful scene is taken from a fifteenth-century manuscript of the _Roman de la Rose_ (Harl. MS. 4425), which is one of the greatest treasures of the British Museum.
PLATE VI. _The Menagier’s wife cooks his supper with the aid of his book_
From MS. Royal, 15 D. I, f. 18, in the British Museum which is part of a _petite bible historiale_, or biblical history, by Guyart des Moulins, expanded by the addition of certain books of the Bible, in French. It was made at Bruges by the order of Edward IV, King of England by one J. du Ries and finished in 1470, so that it is about eighty years later than the Menagier’s book. The illustration represents a scene from the story of Tobias; Tobit, sick and blind, is lying in bed, and his wife Anna is cooking by the fire, with the help of a book and a serving maid. The right-hand half of the picture, which is not reproduced here, shows the outside of the house, with Tobias bringing in the angel Raphael. The illuminated border of the page from which this scene is taken contains the arms of Edward IV, with the garter and crown.
PLATE VII. _Calais about the time of Thomas Betson_
This plan of Calais in 1546 is reproduced from a ‘Platt of the Lowe Countrye att Calleys, drawne in October, the 37th Hen. VIII, by Thomas Pettyt,’ now in the British Museum. (Cott. MS. Aug. I, vol. II, no. 70). There is only room to show the top corner of the plan, with the drawing of Calais itself, but the whole plan is charming, with its little villages and great ships riding in the channel.
PLATE VIII. _Thomas Paycocke’s house at Coggeshall_
From a photograph of the front of the house, standing on the street. Note the long carved breastsummer that supports the overhanging upper story. On the left can be seen, much foreshortened, the archway and double doors of linen fold panels. The windows are renovations on the original design, flat sash windows having been put in in the eighteenth century.
_Index_
ABU LUBABAH, 33
Acqui, Jacapo of, 66, 182
Acre, 51, 53
Adrianople, 7, 42
Adriatic, 39, 41, 42, 63, 179
Aegean, 42, 179
Aelfric, _Colloquium_, 174, 175
Agnes, Dame, _see_ Beguine
Aldgate, 121
Alexander, 54
Alexandria, 40, 42
Alnwick, William, Bishop of Lincoln, 77, 184 Ambrose, 9
Andaman Islands, 69, 70
Anglia, East, 153, 156
Antilha, Antilles, 72, 183
Antwerp, 121, 145, 147
Arab, Arabia, 43, 47, 61, 171
Ararat, Mount, 54
Aretino, Pietro, 180
Arghun, Khan of Persia, 60, 61
Armenia, 42, 49, 53, 179
Arnold, Matthew, 51
Arras, 147
Asia: Central, 40, 49, 50, 51, 54, 67, 71, 72; Minor, 49
Attila, 8, 49
Audley, Lady, 91
Augustine, St, 9, 175
Augustus, 3
Ausonius, 5 ff;
his country estate, 6 ff;
his friends, 6 ff;
and University of Bordeaux, 5
Austin Friars, 93
Auvergne, 5 ff
Bacon, Francis, 122
Badakhshan, 43, 54, 67
Bagdad, 43, 54
Baku, 54
Bale: Peter, 131;
Wyllikyn, 131
Balk, 54
Ballard: James, 127;
Jane, 127
Balms (_Bammers, Bamis, Bammys_)
Mart, 147, 193
Barbarians, 1-17
Babarian invasions, 7
Bardi, 71
Barton, John, of Holme, 138
Base, Jacob van de, 149
Bath, Wife of, 84, 104, 118, 152
Bayard, 138
_Bays and Says_, 172
Beauchamp St Pauls, 169, 170
Becerillo, 33
_Beguine_, Dame Agnes the, 107, 116, 117 Bellela, _see_ Polo
Benedict, St, 81, 82, 184
Betson: Agnes, Alice, Elizabeth,
John, Thomas (the younger), 150;
Katherine, _see_ Riche
Betson, Thomas; Chap VI _passim_, 158; children of, 150; death of, 150;
illness of, 133-5;
letters of, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 189; member of Fishmongers Company, 150;
partnership with Sir W. Stonor, 125, 137; will of, 134, 150, 194
Bevice, Mistress, 134
Bishops’ registers, 74, 75, 76, 78, 183 _Bicorne_, 104
Black Death, 108, 109
Black Prince, 19
Black Sea, 40, 42, 50, 71
Blakey, Sir Roger, 127
Booking, 154
Bodo, Chap _II passim_, 18-38, 174-5, 198 Bokhara, 51, 52
Bolgana, wife of Khan of Persia, 60 Bordeaux, Burdews, 142; University of, 6 Bordelais, the, 6, 7
Brabant, 146, 148
Brad well, 140
Brasses, 123, 136, 151, 155, 156, 157, 159, 190, 195 Braunch, Robert, 156