Medieval People Part 9

Between the counting-house in Calais and the fairs and marts of the country Thomas Betson would dispose of his wool and fells. But his labour did not end here, for he would now have to embark upon the complicated business of collecting money from his customers, the Flemish merchants, and with it paying his creditors in England, the Cotswold wool dealers. It was customary for the staplers to pay for their wool by bills due, as a rule, at six months, and Thomas Betson would be hard put to meet them if the foreign buyers delayed to pay him. Moreover, his difficulties were inconceivably complicated by the exchanges. We think we know something about the difficulty of divers and fluctuating exchanges today, but we can hardly imagine the elaborate calculations and the constant disputes which racked the brain of a Merchant of the Staple in the fifteenth century. Not only did the rates between England and the Continent constantly vary, but, as the editor of the _Cely Papers_ points out, 'the number of potentates of all kinds who claimed the privilege of issuing their own coinage and the frequently suspicious character of what they uttered as gold and silver, made the matter of adjustment of values difficult for the Celys, who were evidently obliged to take what they could get.'[67] Only imagine the difficulties of poor Thomas Betson, when into his counting-house there wandered in turn the Andrew guilder of Scotland, the Arnoldus gulden of Gueldres (very much debased), the Carolus groat of Charles of Burgundy, new crowns and old crowns of France, the David and the Falewe of the Bishopric of Utrecht, the Hettinus groat of the Counts of Westphalia, the Lewe or French Louis d'or, the Limburg groat, the Milan groat, the Nimueguen groat, the Phelippus or Philippe d'or of Brabant, the Plaques of Utrecht, the Postlates of various bishops, the English Ryall (worth ten shillings), the Scots Rider or the Rider of Burgundy (so called because they bore the figure of a man on horseback), the Florin Rhenau of the Bishopric of Cologne and the Setillers.[68] He had to know the value in English money of them all, as it was fixed for the time being by the Fellowship, and most of them were debased past all reason. Indeed, English money enjoyed an enviable good fame in this respect until Henry VIII began debasing the coinage for his own nefarious ends. The letters of the Celys are full of worried references to the exchange, and much we should pity Thomas Betson. But doubtless he was like Chaucer's bearded merchant: 'Wel koude he in exchaunge sheeldes [French crowns] selle.'

[Ill.u.s.tration: VII. CALAIS ABOUT THE TIME OF THOMAS BETSON]

To effect their payments between England and the Netherlands the staplers used to make use of the excellent banking facilities and instruments of credit (bills of exchange and so forth), which were placed at their disposal by Italian and Spanish merchants and by the English mercers, all of whom combined trading with financial operations.

Thus we find William Cely writing to his masters:

[Ill.u.s.tration: VIII. THOMAS PAYc.o.c.kE'S HOUSE AT COGGESHALL]

Please your masterships to understand that I have received of John Delowppys upon payment of the bill, the which is sent me by Adlington but 300 fleming, whereof I have paid to Gynott Strabant 84 _6s. 6d_.

fleming. Item, I have made you over by exchange with Benynge Decasonn, Lombard, 180 n.o.bles sterling, payable at usance. I delivered it at _11s.

2-1/2d_. fleming the n.o.ble, it amounteth 100 _17s. 6d_. fleming. Item, I have made you over by exchange in like wise with Jacob van de Base 89 n.o.bles and _6s_. sterling, payable at London at usuance in like wise; I delivered it at _11s. 2d_. fleming for every n.o.ble sterling; it amounteth fl.--50 fleming and the rest of your 300 remains still by me, for I can make you over no more at this season, for here is no more that will take any money as yet. And money goeth now upon the bourse at _11s. 3-1/2d_. the n.o.ble and none other money but Nimueguen groats, crowns, Andrew guilders and Rhenish guilders, and the exchange goeth ever the longer worse and worse. Item, sir, I send you enclosed in this said letter, the two first letters of the payment of the exchange above written. Benynge Decasonn's letter is directed to Gabriel Defuye and Peter Sanly, Genoese, and Jacob van de Base's is directed to Anthony Carsy and Marcy Strossy, Spaniards; in Lombard Street ye shall hear of them.[69]

A week later he writes:

I understand your masterships hath taken up by exchange of John Raynold, mercer, 60 sterling, payable the 25th day of the month and of Deago Decastron [Diego da Castro, a Spaniard] other 60 sterling, payable the 26th day of the same month, the which shall be both content at the day; and as for master Lewis More, Lombard, [he] is paid and I have the bill; his attorney is a wrangling fellow--he would none other money but Nimueguen groats.[70]

Many a letter such as this must Thomas Betson have written at his lodgings, sitting so late over his work that he must needs write to his friends when he ought to be sleeping and date his letters: 'At London, on our Lady day in the night, when I deem ye were in your bed, for mine eyne smarted, so G.o.d help me.'[71] And when he came to make up his annual accounts he had the hardest work of all to do. Here is a portrait of him at his labours:

The thridde day this marchant up ariseth, And on his nedes sadly hym avyseth, And up into his countour-hous gooth he, To rekene with hymself, as wel may be, Of thilke yeer, how that it with hymn stood, And how that he despended hadde his good, And if that he encressed were or noon.

His bookes and his bagges, many oon, He leith biform hymn on his countyng-bord.

Ful riche was his tresor and his hord, For which ful faste his countour dore he shette; And eek he nolde that no man sholde hymn lette Of his accountes, for the meene tyme; And thus he sit til it was pa.s.sed pry me.[72]

Thus was pa.s.sed the life of a Merchant of the Staple: in riding to the Cotswold farms for wool; in business at the counting-houses in Marks Lane; in sailing from London to Calais and from Calais to London again; in dealing with merchant strangers at the mart in Calais, or riding to the marts of Flanders in fair time. The great company sheltered him, arranged his lodging, kept a sharp eye on the quality of his wool, made rules for his buying and selling, and saw that he had justice in its court. It was in this setting of hard and withal of interesting work that Thomas Betson's love story flowered into a happy marriage. He was not destined to live long after his recovery from the serious illness of 1479; perhaps it left him permanently delicate, for he died some six years later, in 1486. During her seven years of married life (beginning, be it remembered, at the age of fifteen), the diligent Katherine had borne him five children, two sons, Thomas and John, and three daughters, Elizabeth, Agnes, and Alice. Fortunately Thomas died very comfortably off, as his will (still preserved in Somerset House) informs us. He had become a member of the Fishmongers' Company as well as a Merchant of the Staple, for by his time the great city companies were no longer confined to persons actually engaged in the trade which each represented. In his will[73] Thomas Betson leaves money for the repair of the roof loft in his parish church of All Hallows, Barking, where he was buried, and 'thirty pounds to the garnishing of the Staple Chapel in Our Lady Church at Calais, to buy some jewel', and twenty pounds to the 'Stockfishmongers' to buy plate. He makes the latter company the guardian of his children, leaves his house to his wife, and a legacy of 40_s_. to Thomas Henham, his colleague in Stonor's service, and characteristically gives directions 'for the costs of my burying to be done not outrageously, but soberly and discreetly and in a mean [moderate, medium] manner, that it may be unto the worship and laud of Almighty G.o.d.' Katherine, a widow with five children at the age of twenty-two, married as her second husband William Welbech, haberdasher (the Haberdashers were a wealthy company), by whom she had another son.

But her heart stayed with the husband who wrote her her first playful love-letter when she was a child, and on her death in 1510 she directed that she should be laid by the side of Thomas Betson at All Hallows, Barking, where three staplers still lie beneath their bra.s.ses, although no trace of him remains.[74] There let them lie, long forgotten, and yet worthier of memory than many of the armoured knights who sleep under carved sepulchres in our beautiful medieval churches.

The garlands wither on your brow; Then boast no more your mighty deeds!

Upon Death's purple altar now See where the victor-victim bleeds.

Your heads must come To the cold tomb: Only the actions of the just Smell sweet and blossom in their dust.

CHAPTER VII

_Thomas Payc.o.c.ke of Coggeshall_

AN ESs.e.x CLOTHIER IN THE DAYS OF HENRY VII

This was a gallant cloathier sure Whose fame for ever shall endure.

--THOMAS DELONEY

The great and n.o.ble trade of cloth-making has left many traces upon the life of England, architectural, literary, and social. It has filled our countryside with magnificent Perpendicular churches and gracious oak-beamed houses. It has filled our popular literature with old wives'

tales of the worthies of England, in which the clothiers Thomas of Reading and Jack of Newbury rub elbows with Friar Bacon and Robin Hood.

It has filled our shires with gentlemen; for, as Defoe observed, in the early eighteenth century 'many of the great families who now pa.s.s for gentry in the western counties have been originally raised from and built up by this truly n.o.ble manufacture'. It has filled our census lists with surnames--Weaver, Webber, Webb, Sherman, Fuller, Walker, Dyer--and given to every unmarried woman the designation of a spinster.

And from the time when the cloth trade ousted that of wool as the chief export trade of England down to the time when it was in its turn ousted by iron and cotton, it was the foundation of England's commercial greatness. 'Among all Crafts,' says old Deloney, 'this was the only chief, for that it was the greatest merchandize, by the which our Country became famous thorowout all Nations.'[1]

Already by the end of the fourteenth century the English clothiers were beginning to rival those of the Netherlands in the making of fine cloth, as witness Chaucer's Wife of Bath:

Of clooth-making she hadde swiche an haunt She pa.s.sed hem of Ypres and of Gaunt,

and by the end of the sixteenth century all real rivalry was at an end, for the English manufacture was so clearly victorious. With the development of the manufacture a change too took place in its organization. It had never been an easy industry to organize on a gild basis, because the making of a piece of cloth entailed so many distinct processes. The preliminary processes of spinning and carding were always by-industries, performed by women and children in their cottages; but the weavers, who bought the spun yarn, had their gild; and so had the fullers, who fulled it; and the shearmen, who finished it; and the dyers who dyed it. All could not sell the finished piece of cloth, and in the group of inter-dependent crafts, each with its gild, we sometimes find the weavers employing the fullers and sometimes the fullers the weavers.

Moreover, since weaving is a much quicker process than spinning, the weaver often wasted much time and found it hard to collect enough yarn to keep his loom busy; and, as the market for cloth grew wider and was no longer confined to the town of the weaver, the need was felt for some middleman to specialize in the selling of the finished cloth. So by degrees there grew up a cla.s.s of men who bought wool in large quant.i.ties and sold it to the weavers, and then by a natural transition began, not to sell the wool outright, but to deliver it to the weavers to weave, to the fullers to full, and to the shearmen to finish at a wage, receiving it back again when the work was done. These men grew rich; they ama.s.sed capital; they could set many folk at work. Soon they began to set to work all the different workers who combined to make a piece of cloth; their servants carried wool to the cottages for the women to card and spin; carried the spun yarn in turn to dyers, weavers, fullers, shearers; and carried the finished piece of cloth back to the industrial middleman--the clothier, as he was called--who in his turn disposed of it to the mercantile middleman, who was called a draper. The clothiers grew rapidly in wealth and importance, and in certain parts of the country became the backbone of the middle cla.s.s. They pursued their activities in country villages, rather than in the old corporate towns, for they wished to avoid the restrictions of the gilds, and gradually the cloth industry migrated almost entirely to the country. In the west of England and in East Anglia (though not in Yorkshire) it was carried out by clothiers on this 'putting out' system, right up to the moment when the Industrial Revolution swept it out of the cottages into the factories and out of the south into the north. Then the thriving villages emptied themselves, so that today we must needs re-create again from scattered traces and old buildings, and still older names, the once familiar figures of the East Anglian clothier and his swarm of busy workmen.

Such a familiar figure was once old Thomas Payc.o.c.ke, clothier, of Coggeshall in Ess.e.x, who died full of years and honour in 1518. His family originally came from Clare, in Suffolk, but about the middle of the fifteenth century a branch settled at Coggeshall, a village not far distant. His grandfather and father would seem to have been grazing butchers, but he and his brother and their descendants after them followed 'the truly n.o.ble manufacture' of cloth-making, and set an indelible mark upon the village where they dwelt. Coggeshall lies in the great cloth-making district of Ess.e.x, of which Fuller wrote: 'This county is charactered like Bethsheba, "She layeth her hand to the spindle and her hands hold the distaffe."... It will not be amiss to pray that the plough may go along and the wheel around, that so (being fed by the one and clothed by the other) there may be, by G.o.d's blessing, no danger of starving in our nation[2] All over Ess.e.x there lay villages famous for cloth-making, Coggeshall and Braintree, Bocking and Halstead, Shalford and Dedham, and above all Colchester, the great centre and mart of the trade. The villages throve on the industry and there was hardly a cottage which did not hum with the spinning wheel, and hardly a street where you might not have counted weavers' workshops, kitchens where the rough loom stood by the wall to occupy the goodman's working hours. Hardly a week but the clatter of the pack-horse would be heard in the straggling streets, bringing in new stores of wool to be worked and taking away the pieces of cloth to the clothiers of Colchester and the surrounding villages. Throughout the fifteenth century Coggeshall was an important centre, second only to the great towns of Norwich, Colchester, and Sudbury, and to this day its two inns are called the 'Woolpack' and the 'Fleece.' We must, as I said, build up the portrait of Thomas Payc.o.c.ke and his compeers from scattered traces; but happily such traces are common enough in many and many an English village, and in Coggeshall itself they lie ready to our hand. Out of three things he can be brought to life again--to wit, his house in the village street, his family bra.s.ses in the aisle of the village church, and his will, which is preserved at Somerset House. A house, a bra.s.s, a will--they seem little enough, but they hold all his history. It is the greatest error to suppose that history must needs be something written down; for it may just as well be something built up, and churches, houses, bridges, or amphitheatres can tell their story as plainly as print for those who have eyes to read. The Roman villa, excavated after lying lost for centuries beneath the heel of the unwitting ploughboy--that villa with its s.p.a.cious ground-plan, its floors rich with mosaic patterns, its elaborate heating apparatus, and its shattered vases--brings home more clearly than any textbook the real meaning of the Roman Empire, whose citizens lived like this in a foggy island at the uttermost edge of its world. The Norman castle, with moat and drawbridge, gatehouse and bailey and keep, arrow slits instead of windows, is more eloquent than a hundred chronicles of the perils of life in the twelfth century; not thus dwelt the private gentleman in the days of Rome. The country manor-house of the fourteenth century, with courtyard and chapel and hall and dovecote, speaks of an age of peace once more, when life on a thousand little manors revolved round the lord, and the great ma.s.s of Englishmen went unscathed by the Hundred Years' War which seamed the fair face of France. Then begin the merchants' elaborate Perpendicular houses in the towns and villages of the fifteenth century, standing on the road, with gardens behind them, and carved beams, great fire-places, and a general air of comfort; they mark the advent of a new cla.s.s in English history--the middle cla.s.s, thrust between lord and peasant and coming to its own. How the s.p.a.cious days of great Elizabeth are mirrored in the beautiful Elizabethan houses, with their wide wings and large rooms, their chimneys, their gla.s.s windows, looking outwards on to open parks and spreading trees, instead of inwards on to the closed courtyard. Or go into a house built or redecorated in the eighteenth century, where you will see Chippendale chairs and lacquer tables and Chinese wall-papers covered with paG.o.das and mandarins; and surely there will come to your mind the age of the nabobs, the age which John Company had familiarized with the products of the Far East, the age in which tea ousted coffee as the drink for a gentleman of fashion, in which Horace Walpole collected porcelain, Oliver Goldsmith idealized China in 'The Citizen of the World', and Dr Johnson was called the Great Cham of Literature. Look here upon this picture and on this: look at that row of jerry-built houses, a hundred in a row and all exactly alike, of that new-art villa, all roof and hardly any window, with false bottle gla.s.s in its panes; here is the twentieth century for you. Indeed all the social and very much of the political history of England may be reconstructed from her architecture alone; and so I make no apology for calling Thomas Payc.o.c.ke's house first-rate historical evidence.

Of much the same type, though less interesting, is the evidence of monumental bra.s.ses, which are to be found in most parts of England and which abound in East Anglia, the Home Counties, and the Thames Valley.[3] Their variety is magnificent; bra.s.ses of ecclesiastics in vestments, of doctors of law and divinity and masters of arts in academic dress and of a few abbots and abbesses; bra.s.ses of knights in Armour; bra.s.ses of ladies, with their little dogs at their feet and dresses which show the changes in fashion from century to century and make clear all the mysteries of kirtles and cotte-hardies, wimples and partlets and farthingales and the head-dresses appropriate to each successive mode. The bra.s.ses also, like the houses, bear witness to the prosperity of the middle cla.s.s, for in the fourteenth century when merchants began to build themselves fine houses they began also to bury themselves under splendid bra.s.ses. Finest of all, perhaps, are the bra.s.ses of the wool staplers, with feet resting on woolpack or sheep; but there are many other merchants too. Mayors and aldermen abound; they set their merchants' marks upon their tombs as proudly as gentlemen set their coats of arms, and indeed they had as great cause for pride. You may see them at their proudest in the famous bra.s.s at Lynn, where Robert Braunch lies between his two wives, and at his feet is incised a scene representing the feast at which he entertained Edward III royally and feasted him on peac.o.c.ks. There is a tailor with his shears, as glorious as the Crusader's sword, at Northleach, and a wine merchant with his feet upon a wine cask at Cirencester. There are smaller folk, too, less dowered with wealth but proud enough of the implements of their craft; two or three public notaries with penhorn and pencase complete, a 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 Payc.o.c.ke. His family bra.s.ses 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 bra.s.s of Thomas himself survives; but in the aisle there still lie two--the bra.s.s 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 Payc.o.c.ke wills, of which three are preserved at Somerset House--the will of John Payc.o.c.ke _(d._ 1505), Thomas's father and the builder of the house; the will of Thomas Payc.o.c.ke himself _(d._ 1518); and the will of his nephew Thomas, the same whose bra.s.s 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 cla.s.s, 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 Payc.o.c.ke may be drawn. All three--houses, bra.s.ses, 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 cla.s.s, whose wealth was based not upon landed property but upon industry and trade. It is a cla.s.s 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 bra.s.ses tell us about the clothier Thomas Payc.o.c.ke. First and foremost, they tell us a great deal about the n.o.ble industry which supported him. Payc.o.c.ke's house is full of relics of the cloth industry. The merchant mark of the Payc.o.c.kes, an ermine tail, looking like a two-stemmed clover leaf, is to be found on the carved beams of the chimney, on the b.r.e.a.s.t.summers 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 cla.s.s-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 b.r.e.a.s.t.summer carved with strange animals.

This elaboration is characteristic. It is all of a piece with Coggeshall Church, and with all those other s.p.a.cious East Anglian churches, Lavenham, Long Melford, Thaxted, Saffron Walden, Lynn, Snettisham, lofty and s.p.a.cious, 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 cla.s.s 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 bra.s.ses, in St Katherine's aisle, Thomas Payc.o.c.ke must often have blessed the n.o.ble industry which supported him.

The wills of the Payc.o.c.kes 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 G.o.ddaughter; 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 Payc.o.c.ke 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 Payc.o.c.ke's namesake and grand-nephew, whose will is dated 1580, was still in close relations with them, and left 'to Edwarde Goodaye my G.o.dson 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 Payc.o.c.ke 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 Payc.o.c.ke 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 Payc.o.c.ke, 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 Payc.o.c.ke'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 Payc.o.c.ke 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 Payc.o.c.ke'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 compet.i.tion 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 pet.i.tioning 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 Ess.e.x, where, some twenty years after Thomas Payc.o.c.ke's death, the weavers pet.i.tioned against the clothiers, who had their own looms and weavers and fullers in their own houses, so that the pet.i.tioners were rendered dest.i.tute; '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 Payc.o.c.ke'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 Payc.o.c.ke'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 Payc.o.c.ke himself, and of whom Payc.o.c.ke 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 Payc.o.c.ke 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 b.u.t.ter, 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 Payc.o.c.ke, 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 Payc.o.c.ke 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 Payc.o.c.ke'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?