Medieval People Part 10

The bride Margaret, who was somewhat after this merry fas.h.i.+on brought home to Coggeshall, came from Clare, the ancient home of the Coggeshall Payc.o.c.kes. She was the daughter of one Thomas Horrold, for whose memory Payc.o.c.ke 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 bra.s.s), 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 Payc.o.c.ke 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 G.o.dchild Grace Goodday. It was perhaps in the hope of a son to whom he might leave his house and name that Thomas Payc.o.c.ke 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 Payc.o.c.ke records makes it difficult to say whether Thomas Payc.o.c.ke's child lived or died; but it seems probable that it either died or was a girl, for Payc.o.c.ke 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 Payc.o.c.ke, while the house next door was in the hands of another Thomas Payc.o.c.ke, his brother Robert's son. This Thomas died about 1580, leaving only daughters, and after him, in 1584, died John Payc.o.c.ke, sadly commemorated in the parish register as 'the last of his name in c.o.xall'. So the beautiful house pa.s.sed out of the hands of the great family of clothiers who had held it for nearly a hundred years.[12]

Of Thomas Payc.o.c.ke'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 G.o.dfather 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 G.o.d childryn and they to have vj s. viij d. apece and euery oder child iiij d. apece ... and also euery G.o.d chyld besyde vj s. viij d. apece.' All these children were probably little bread-winners, employed at a very early age in sorting Thomas Payc.o.c.ke's wool. 'Poore people,' says Thomas Deloney, 'whom G.o.d 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 Payc.o.c.ke 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 Payc.o.c.ke 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 s.h.i.+llings for a trental and 3s.

4d. to repair their houses; and to the Friars of Clare he left twenty s.h.i.+llings 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 Ma.s.s 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 Ma.s.se 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 Ess.e.x order, in the district from which the Payc.o.c.kes originally came.

But his greatest care was naturally for Coggeshall Church. One of the Payc.o.c.kes had probably built the north aisle, where the altar was dedicated to St Katherine, and all the Payc.o.c.ke tombs lay there. Thomas Payc.o.c.ke 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 c.o.xhall Chirche in recompence of t.i.thes 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. n.o.bles.' He founded a chantry there also and left money to be given weekly to six poor men to attend Ma.s.s 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 Payc.o.c.ke'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 Payc.o.c.ke'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 c.o.xhall 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 pa.s.s 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 fis.h.i.+ng 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 t.i.thebarn, 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, ign.o.bly sheltering blue Ess.e.x hay wagons from the rain.

So Thomas Payc.o.c.ke'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 n.o.ble 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 Payc.o.c.ke 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 pa.s.sed. It is given best in the words of his will, for Thomas Payc.o.c.ke 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 ma.s.sis 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 wors.h.i.+p and laude of Almyghty G.o.d.' The worthy old clothier was not unmindful of the wors.h.i.+p and laud of Thomas Payc.o.c.ke also, and over 500 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 Payc.o.c.ke chantry in St Katherine's aisle, which had provided alms for six poor men weekly.

Thomas Payc.o.c.ke belonged to the good old days; in a quarter of a century after his death Ess.e.x 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 'c.o.xall's Whites', which Thomas Payc.o.c.ke'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 Payc.o.c.ke 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 Cla.s.sics, 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 sec.u.m 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 hibernatic.u.m 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 s.h.i.+llings 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 s.h.i.+llings.'

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. Ma.s.son (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. _Doc.u.ments 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 Kolbigk, 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 Schroder's study in _Zeitschrift fur 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.