_Coventry and the Kingdom of England_
So far was Coventry from the great centres of the national life, that
there is little to connect the place in the earlier parts of its
history with the history of the kingdom.
William I. may have passed through on his way from Warwick to
Nottingham on one of his journeys to crush the rebellious Saxons,
and Stephen, as we have seen, swept down on the castle--that famous
"castlelet or pile"[197] in Earl Street--and razed it to the ground.
Other notable travellers came during this period to Coventry, but
secretly, for they wished to escape pursuit. Many evil-doers claimed
the protection of the Church in those days, and when any fugitive
entered the sanctuary, he was safe from pursuit. There he made
confession of his crime, and, if he left of his own free will, he must
abjure the kingdom, and make straight for some port appointed him by
the coroner, there to take ship for foreign lands. Many criminals on
quitting the sanctuary found their enemies lying in wait, and perished,
although they held the cross, symbol of the Church's protection, in
their hand. Men feared to incur the penalty of excommunication, which
the violation of sanctuary always brought, by dragging Faulkes de
Breauté from Coventry church; and this Norman adventurer, whom the
favour of John and Henry III. had raised to riches and greatness until
he was "plasquam rex in Anglia"--of more account than the King--put
himself under the bishop's protection, and travelled in his company
to Bedford to throw himself on the King's mercy. He was banished the
kingdom. With him fell, in 1222, the foreign party under Peter des
Roches, who for so many years had thwarted the designs of Henry's great
minister, Hubert de Burgh.
In other ways the reign of Henry III. was locally a memorable one.
During the siege of Kenilworth, which lasted from midsummer to December
1266, the neighbourhood was the centre of military operations, but
when the castle containing the remnant of De Montfort's following
surrendered, the smouldering fires of civil war died away. Part of the
famous ruin that witnessed this siege, the Norman keep, or Cæsar's
Tower, is standing yet. But of all these events the local documents
tell us nothing. In spite of the stirring scenes enacted at Kenilworth,
scarce five miles away, we do not know whether the folk of the town
took part with De Montfort or with the King.
The city has no associations with Edward I.,[198] but his son, who had
strong partisans among the convent folk, appointed a levy to meet him
at Coventry on February 28, 1322, before he went to fight with and
defeat Lancaster at Boroughbridge.[199] Edward III. tarried in Coventry
in 1327, the year Cheylesmore passed into Isabella's hands. This queen
is one of many women who bulk large in Coventry history. Her ears were
always open to the complaints of the hard usage her tenants received
from the prior, and messengers doubtless often travelled between
Coventry and Castle Rising, in Norfolk, to bear news to the queen of
her enemy's undoing. She also took the Grey Friars, who had become
famous for their sanctity, under her protection, and a letter[200]
from her, written at their request, begging that there might be no
interference with their privileges of burial, is still extant. At that
time many bodies of great folk, who "as Franciscans thought to pass
disguised," were buried clothed in the habit of the order in the Grey
Friars' chapel, bringing no small profit to that famous house. No doubt
the Queen's protection of their rivals was another drop in the monks'
cup of bitterness.
After Cheylesmore and the Earl's-half became a royal manor, kings and
princes very frequently visited the city; for as Coventry had by this
time become an important place--already accounted the fifth city in the
kingdom--its wealth was an attraction to needy kings, who desired to be
on good terms with burghers who were becoming a power in the land. It
was this wealth which enabled the citizens to establish their position
in the reign of Edward III. and his grandson by the purchase of fuller
and yet fuller charters of liberty; but this wealth did not relieve the
city from the agrarian and industrial unrest which makes memorable the
reign of Richard II. At the time of the Peasant Revolt in 1381 John
Ball was taken in hiding in an old house, says Froissart, in Coventry,
where he had possibly a home or relatives.[201] The commonalty of
the city had, maybe, given ear to his doctrines of equality and
communism in former days, for there was at that time great suffering
and discontent among the poorer folk. The artizans were oppressed not
by their lord--as the men of S. Alban's or Bury S. Edmund's--but by
their own fellow-townsfolk, the rich merchants, who held high office
in the corporation. Year after year there comes the same complaint.
This or that mayor enclosed the common pasture lands,[202] so that
the people had not sufficient grass for their cattle, or refused to
punish his brethren and allies the victuallers, who broke the assize
of bread, so that the people were cheated of the barest necessaries
of life. The enraged artizans, who, in 1387, "cast loaves at the
mayor's head because the bakers kept not the assize, neither did the
mayor punish them according to his office," would no doubt listen
gladly to the discourses of this old-time socialist. "Good people," he
would say to the assembled multitude, "the maters gothe nat well to
passe in Englande, nor shall nat do tyll every thyng be common.... We
be all come fro one father and one mother, Adam and Eve; wherby can
they (the gentlemen) say or shewe that they be gretter lordes than we
be?... They dwell in fayre houses, and we have the payne and traveyle,
raine and wynde in the feldes; and by that that cometh of our labours
they kepe and maynteyne their estates.... Thus Jehan [Ball] sayd ...
and the people ... wolde murmure one with another in the feldes and
in the wayes as they went togyder, affermyng howe Jehan Ball sayd
trouthe."[203] Change a word here and there, substitute "merchant" for
"gentleman," and "in the workshops" for "in the fields," and you have a
discourse which would have greatly enraged the men of Coventry at the
time of the Peasant Revolt.
The murmur about another name greater than that of John Ball had also
reached the citizens. Lutterworth is scarcely fifteen miles distant
from Coventry, and if we may judge by the tale of subsequent troubles
and persecutions, there were many followers of Wickliffe within the
city.[204] William Swynderby, who had preached to crowds in the
Lollards' chapel at Leicester, being forsaken of his friends because he
had recanted rather than face martyrdom, left that place and so came to
Coventry in 1382.
[Illustration: HIGH STREET, COVENTRY]
There he tarried nearly a year, making many converts, but being forced
by the clergy to depart, he vanished into the fastnesses of the forest
beyond the Malvern Hills and there hid from his persecutors many
years.[205]
Nevertheless the Wickliffite tradition must have persisted after his
departure, for in Oldcastle's day the city had become a centre for
the issue of Lollard books.[206] Nicholas Hereford, collaborator in
Wickliffe's version of the Bible, is also associated with Coventry,
where--after 1417--he died.
His was a life of strange vicissitudes, for having endured imprisonment
in a papal dungeon at Rome, and "grievous torment" in the archbishop's
castle of Saltwood, Kent, he abandoned Lollardry, recanted at Paul's
Cross, and rising to important position in the Church, learned to
persecute those of his ancient faith. In later years he entered into
the solitude and silence of the Carthusian monastery at Coventry and so
vanished from our sight.[207]
The foundation-stone of the church of this very monastery had been
laid in 1385, by that champion of orthodoxy, Richard, King of England,
who, in the hearing of the mayor and other notables promised to be
the founder thereof and bring the work to completion.[208] After the
Dissolution this house passed into the hands of the Lincoln family;
the arms of Edward Clinton, Earl of Lincoln, are painted in one of
the rooms of the still existing house. Part of the Prior's lodging
remains, and in one room a portion of a large fresco of the Crucifixion
reveals the figure of Christ from the knees downwards sprinkled with
fleur-de-lys. Two years later Richard again visited the city what time
Chief-Justice Tressilian, the "hanging judge" of the Peasants' Revolt,
and the court of King's Bench,[209] sat therein, and bestowed on the
mayor the right to have the civic sword borne before him by an officer.
The MS. Annals say that in 1384 the mayor, John Deister, had forfeited
this right, and that the sword was borne behind him, "because he did
not justice." The _Leet Book_, however, makes John Marton mayor in this
year,[210] and indeed the Annals have come down to us in a state of sad
corruption.
Maybe these frequent royal visits were not always welcome. A court of
justice accompanied the King wherever he went, for the steward and
marshal of the household had jurisdiction, superseding other authority
of shire or borough, over an area of twelve miles to be counted from
the King's lodging.[211] Before setting forth the steward gave notice
to the sheriff of the place wherein the King proposed to sojourn, so
that prisoners might be brought thither for trial at the household
officers' court, a practice so little popular that rich and powerful
towns purchased the chartered privilege, whereby the mayor became
steward and marshal of the household. This right Coventry obtained in
1451. Kings, when they came to the city, were usually lodged at the
Priory, though there was a quasi-royal residence, first occupied by
the Mohauts, at Cheylesmore; but the vast retinue found shelter within
the town. At the command of the marshal the doors of the principal
folk of the place were marked with chalk, and the dwellers there found
they had to accommodate some member of the royal party. There was a
certain price to be paid for the advantages of situation as a great
thoroughfare town between London and the north-west, and a manorial
relationship to the Princes of Wales.
The most memorable sojourn of this vain, beautiful, decadent king,
Richard II., within the city took place in 1397 when Coventry witnessed
the preparations for the duel between Henry Bolingbroke and Mowbray,
Duke of Norfolk. The splendour of royal and knightly accoutrements at
this meeting must have dazzled the sober townsfolk, and perhaps they
shared in the bewilderment of the Court at the strange vacillation of
the King, who, when all preparations were made, forbade the duel to
take place. Holinshed[212] tells of the "sumptuous theater" on Gosford
Green wherein the lists were made ready for the combat; and wherein
too, after the combat had been stayed, the two adversaries sat two
long hours waiting until the King's pleasure should be known. When
sentence of banishment was pronounced and leave-takings over, "the duke
of Norfolk departed sorrowfullie into Almanie, and at the last came
to Venice, where he for thought and melancholie deceased"; for Harry
Bolingbroke, however, whose sentence was not like his adversary's, for
life, but for ten years, many active days remained. Gosford Green,
where this scene was enacted, is still a green, and as yet unbuilt
on. The ruins of Caludon Castle, where Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk,
passed the night before the meditated encounter with Bolingbroke, are
still visible from the highway leading from Stoke to Leicester, but
of Baginton Castle, where his adversary slept, scarcely more than
the foundations remain. Richard was lodged in a tower belonging to
Sir William Bagot, about a quarter of a mile without the town. Sir
William, who with Bushy and Greene acquired such unenviable notoriety
as creatures of Richard II., lies buried in Baginton church, where a
monumental brass of rare workmanship, now placed immediately under the
rafters of the chancel roof, once marked the place where he was laid.
It is likely that Richard saw Coventry once again when, badly horsed
and in unkingly array, in 1399 they brought him, a prisoner, on the way
from Flint on the last journey to London.
It is fitting that in a city so unorthodox as Coventry the first
attack should be made on the vast possessions of the Church. At the
summoning of the "Unlearned Parliament" in 1404 a special precept was
given to the sheriffs to prevent the return of those skilled in the
law as members of parliament, and Coventry, remote as it was from the
law-courts at Westminster, was a happy spot to choose for such an
assembly. The respect the clergy had once commanded was now withheld
from them by reason of the dissolute lives so many led, and their
greed of wealth, whereto we find such abundant allusion in "Piers
Plowman" and Chaucer's poems, and the proposal to appropriate the
wealth of the Church to secular ends was well liked by the knights
of the shire. Archbishop Arundel pleaded in response to this attack
that the clergy gave tenths and the laity only fifteenths towards
the King's necessities; moreover, the Church was not wanting day nor
night in rendering the King service by masses and prayers to implore
God's blessing upon him. Whereat Sir John Cheyne, the speaker of the
Commons, with a stern countenance, said "that he valued not the prayers
of the Church." But it was early days for such words as these. "It
might easily be seen what would become of the kingdom," was the severe
reply, "when devout addresses to God, wherewith His Divine Majesty was
pleased, were set so light by." The work of Henry VIII. was not to be
anticipated, and the knights desisted from the attempt at the threat of
excommunication.[213]
The town was witness at this time of an example of the lack of
reverence for the mysteries of religion displayed by the people who
were about the person of the King. Dysentery was very prevalent at
Coventry during the session of parliament, and one day the archbishop
of Canterbury encountered a procession bearing the Host through the
streets to some sick man's bedside.[214] The archbishop bent his
knee, but the King's knights and esquires, not interrupting their
conversation, turned their backs upon the Sacrament. The ecclesiastic
was filled with holy indignation at such irreverence. "Never before
was the like abomination beheld among Christian men," he cried, and
went to complain of the offenders to the King. Henry was at first loth
to punish his followers, but he was finally moved to do so by the
prelate's eloquence, for the House of Lancaster in its weakness had
allied itself with the Church, and looking to that body for support,
the King was careful not to alienate so powerful a friend as the
Archbishop of Canterbury.
The Lancastrian kings were, however, better known in the city as
borrowers than as champions of the orthodox faith. Royal folk at that
time, in spite of their great array and state, were often at a loss for
ready money, and the treasury of Henry IV. was notoriously an empty
one. Henry V. too, wanting money to prosecute his wars, in the third
year of his reign borrowed 200 marks from the mayor and community,
leaving in pledge "his great collar, called Iklynton collar,"[215]
garnished with 4 rubies, 4 great sapphires, 32 great pearls, and 53
other pearls of a lesser sort, weighing 36-3/4 oz., and then valued
at £500. When the King or any great noble desired to borrow, and
the citizens were willing to lend, collectors were appointed by the
corporation to go through each ward and take from every man his
contribution towards the loan. Each citizen paid, according to his
ability, a sum varying from 13s. 4d., taken from the most substantial
people, to a penny from those, of the poorest class. The extent
of every one's property, more or less accurately gauged on these
occasions, was a matter of common knowledge. Where there was so little
privacy in life and such frequent assessments, neither wealth nor
poverty could well be hid.
Did Shakespeare glean any legends of Prince Hal from Coventry sources?
He must often have visited the city as a travelling player, and,
since both the names of Shakespeare and Ardern (or Arden) occur in
the Coventry records, the poet may have had kinsfolk in the place.
He brings the prince quite gratuitously thither, causing him to
meet Falstaff followed by the famous ragged regiment on the high
road leading to the city.[216] Falstaff was in his youth "page to
Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk,"[217] who held Caludon Castle, a
few miles from Coventry, and Peto, whom his master bade meet him
at the towns-end, bears a Coventry name.[218] It may be there is
little or no contemporary evidence for the tale of Henry's wild
doings, which Shakespeare localised at Gadshill and the "Boar's Head"
tavern in Eastcheap, and it is more or less a matter of temperament
or preconceived notions with historians whether, on weighing the
testimony, they dismiss or accept familiar traditions of the prince's
robbery of his own receivers,[219] or assault on Judge Gascoigne.[220]
To the ordinary reader it seems as if there cannot have been such a
vast deal of smoke without some little fire. The suspicion grows that
Henry may well have passed a short time of idle apprenticeship before
becoming a veritably industrious master.
There is a familiar Coventry variant of the Gascoigne story
wherein the mayor, John Hornby, plays, as it were, the part of
the Chief-Justice, since he, in 1412, say the City Annals or
Mayor-lists--"arrested the Prince in the Priory [one MS. reads "city"]
of Coventry." Unfortunately the source whence this information is
obtained--the MS. Annals or Mayor-lists--is not above suspicion.
The annals are a collection of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
documents,[221] varying slightly among themselves, but evidently,
as far as the bulk of the earlier entries are concerned, copies of
a common original, now probably lost. A chronological tangle, they
contain most valuable and authentic information--particularly about
the mystery plays--coupled with entries that are manifestly corrupt.
It is conceivable that the earliest annalist placed on record that the
prince "rested," _i.e._ remained at the priory during that particular
mayoralty, or that he was concerned in some arrest made at the time,
and that the entry has been transformed by the errors of successive
copyists. In the latter case the process could be paralleled by
the entry of 1425 when the MSS. gave as the principal event in the
mayoralty of John Braytoft:--"He arrested the Earl of Warwick and
brought him to the Gaol of this city." This is, beyond all possibility
of doubt, an error. No Earl of Warwick was ever arrested at Coventry.
Thomas Sharp, who worked eighty or ninety years ago, from documents
that have been since destroyed, gives the early, correct version, borne
out by independent testimony, when he reads: "The Earl of Warwick came
to Coventry to seize on the Franchises, and inquisition was made of
John Grace, and the mayor arrested him and brought him to the Gaol of
the City."[222] It is therefore possible that similar errors may have
crept into the Hornby entry, though this cannot be dismissed as a pure
invention until a searching investigation has been made of contemporary
records.
Henry V. seems to have been much beloved in Coventry, if we may
judge by the hearty welcome given to him on his coming thither on
March 21, 1421. The mayor and council ordered that £100 and a gold
cup worth £10 should be presented to the King, and the same to the
Queen "in suo adventu a Francia in Coventre," for those times a truly
magnificent gift. The citizens never thereafter beheld the King. For
in the following year, being overtaken at the Bois de Vincennes by a
so grievous sickness that his physicians told him he had but two hours
to live, he bade his confessors chant the Penitential Psalms. And in
the midst of their chanting, as if in answer to an unseen adversary, he
cried: "Thou liest, thou liest! My part is with the Lord Jesus." Thus
died Henry V.
Troubles connected with religion soon came upon Coventry. In 1424
the preaching of a hermit attracted a great audience in the Little
Park during five days' space. The preacher, one Grace, who had been
first a monk, then a friar, and lastly a recluse, disarmed suspicion
by announcing that he had been licensed to preach by the bishop's
ministers of the diocese. At last, however, a report spread that he
was not "licenciate," "and grett seying was among the people that
the priour and frer Bredon wold have cursid all tho' that herdon the
said John Grace preche." This rumour of the intention of the two most
influential churchmen in the city--the head of S. Mary's convent,
and the best-known member of the community of Grey Friars--greatly
moved the townsfolk, and the two ecclesiastics above-named, fearful
lest harm should befall them, refused to leave Trinity church, whither
they had repaired for evensong, until the mayor should come to appease
the multitude. "Notwithstandyng they myght have goone well inoughe
whethur thei wold," the _Leet Book_ says, with a touch of contempt.
And thus it was that a report went about in the country "that the
comens of Coventre wer rysen, and wold have distroyd the priour and the
said frer," which report unhappily spread to the ears of those that
were about the King. The next year the Earl of Warwick and a special
commission of justices were sent down from Westminster to inquire into
this movement within the city.[223] For some time the franchises were
in danger of confiscation; but after the citizens had borne great
charges, upwards of £80 for "counsel" and other costs, their peace with
the ruling powers was made.
It is natural to infer that this disturbance, which the city
authorities treated as so trifling, but which appeared to the powers
at Westminster a highly serious matter, was connected with Lollard
preaching. It seems that this obscure sect was never wholly crushed,
but lingered on in certain districts throughout the fifteenth century.
Leicestershire, in Wickliffe's time, had been a perfect hot-bed of
heresy. "There was not a man or woman in that county," it has been
said, "save priests and nuns, who did not at that time openly profess
their disbelief in the doctrines of the Church, and their approval
of the new views of the Lollards."[224] The contagion soon spread to
Warwickshire. No doubt persecution did its work in many parts. The open
profession of Lollardism was highly dangerous in the fifteenth century,
and the cause counted many martyrs.
The Coventry men were, most likely, implicated in the obscure rising
under Jack Sharpe in 1431; at least arrests were made in their
neighbourhood.[225] These offenders, whose scheme for the disendowment
of the Church was both behind and in advance of those times, were shown
no mercy, but suffered the penalty of treason. The bishops of Coventry,
at a later date, made the city the theatre of their persecutions,
whereat many recanted, but others endured to the end.
Echoes, first of the great doings of Englishmen in the French wars,
and then of the reverses which befell them, reach us from time to
time, chiefly in the form of requests to relieve the royal poverty.
And the chief folk of the town frequently travelled to London in order
to procure sureties for repayment of money lent to the King or other
members of the royal house. Thus when the Earl of Warwick, in 1423,
wrote to beg the citizens to relieve the necessities of the child-king
Henry, "now in his tender age and his greatest need," informing them,
as an incentive to their liberality, that the townsmen of Bristol
had "notably and kindly acquit them" in these matters, the citizens
lent £100 willingly enough. But with the prudence which distinguished
their everyday doings, they sent John Leder, late mayor, to London to
negotiate for pledges for future repayment,[226] which sureties, we
are told, "might not be gotten without great labour."[227] Richard
Joy and Laurence Cook[228] undertook a like errand the same year,
for the protector Gloucester, the husband of Jacoba of Hainault,
who proposed--so he informed the citizens--"to pass over the sea
with God's might ... to receive ... his lands and lordships," begged
the good folk of Coventry to ease him in his undertaking with £200
"upon sufficient surety." Whether the good folk believed that the
expedition to Flanders would turn to "right great ease of the people,
and especially of these merchants of this realm," as the duke boasted,
we cannot tell; but they sent him 100 marks, insisting nevertheless
upon obtaining the security he had been so ready to offer. They gave,
however, "with all their good hearts" to those more worthy of respect
than Gloucester; and when Talbot was a prisoner in the hands of the
French, they sent 23 marks towards his ransom.[229] To the King's later
applications for a loan, they usually gave a favourable answer. In 1431
Laurence Cook bore to London £100, lent for the prosecution of the
war, "and many lords, spiritual and temporal," the _Leet Book_ says,
"that is to say, the worthy cardinal, then bishop of Winchester, the
bishop of Bath, the bishop of Ely, and the bishop of Rochester, lords
spiritual, the duke of York, the duke of Norfolk, the earl of Warwick,
the earl of Stafford ... with other reverent barons and bachelors
... took the water at Dover, and riveden (arrived) thro' God's grace
at Calais, and so comen to the city of Roan (Rouen) by the land of
Picardy."[230]
Four years later the government was forced yet again to have recourse
to borrowing, and on the occasion of the congress at Arras the same
sum was collected to relieve the King's necessities "by way of loan"
throughout the wards of the city.[231]
There were other charges besides direct loans that the citizens were
forced to support that they might pleasure the members of the royal
house. The Dukes of Gloucester and Bedford came frequently to the
royal castle of Fullbrook, which lay some four miles beyond Warwick,
and the good folk of the town felt called upon to furnish them with
appropriate gifts. Thus, in 1434, a sum of 50 marks, with a silver
cup, was presented to the Duchess of Bedford, and an offering to the
Duke, of 24 pike, 12 bream, 12 tench, and a ton of red wine.[232] These
presents were often not without some political significance. Thus, in
1431, the year wherein the protector Gloucester made a progress through
England on the track of the Lollards, the Coventry men, who were, it
seems, not free from the suspicion of holding unorthodox tenets, sent
to the duke and duchess at Fullbrook a silver cup, 40 marks, and a
plentiful supply of fish and wine.[233]
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 197: This castle, afterwards rebuilt, fell into decay, and
was let out into tenements. Cheylesmore, where the De Mohaut's lived,
had originally been a nursery for the Earl of Chester's children (Stowe
in Harl. MS. 539, No. 4: see also Corp. MS. C. 61).]
[Footnote 198: The borough sent two members to the 1295 parliament, but
remained unrepresented from 1315 to 1452.]
[Footnote 199: Stubb's _Const. Hist._, ii. 49.]
[Footnote 200: Sharp, _op. cit._, 179.]
[Footnote 201: The name of Ball occurs in Coventry deeds. It is, of
course, a common name.]
[Footnote 202: On the Trinity guild enclosure of 1384, see _Leet Book_,
6; on the formation of the first of the defiant artizan guilds about
this year, see above and _Vict. County Hist., Warw._, ii. 154.]
[Footnote 203: Berners, _Froissart's Chron._ (1901) ii. 224.]
[Footnote 204: Warwickshire may have been a county addicted to
Lollardry. John Lacy, vicar of Chesterton, near Warwick, was charged
with receiving and harbouring the famous Oldcastle, Lord Cobham
(_Diocesan Hist. Worcester_, 103).]
[Footnote 205: Trevelyan, _Age of Wycliffe_, 315; Knighton, _Chron._
ii. 198.]
[Footnote 206: _Eng. Hist. Rev._ xx. 447.]
[Footnote 207: Trevelyan, _op. cit._, 310; _Dict. Nat. Biog._, _s.v._
Hereford, Nicholas.]
[Footnote 208: _Vict. Coun. Hist._, ii. 84.]
[Footnote 209: Knighton, _Chron._ ii. 235.]
[Footnote 210: _Leet Book_, 3.]
[Footnote 211: Green, _op. cit._, i. 209.]
[Footnote 212: Holinshed, iii, 494.]
[Footnote 213: Dugdale, _Warw._, i. 142. The only reference to Coventry
in the business of this parliament is a petition from the convent
against the men of Coventry, who injured the conduit built by the
people of the priory (Corp. MS. B. 34).]
[Footnote 214: Trokelowe and Blaneforde, _Chron. S. Albani_ (ed.
Riley), 394.]
[Footnote 215: _Leet Book_, 70. _Issue Roll of Exchequer_, H. III.-VI.,
402.]
[Footnote 216: Shakespeare I. _Hen._ IV. iv. 2.]
[Footnote 217: _Ib._, iii. 2. See my letter in _Athenæum_ 4330, p. 489.]
[Footnote 218: Henry Peyto was mayor in 1423. The Peto family came from
Chesterton.]
[Footnote 219: Kingsford, _Early Biographies of Henry V._, in _Eng.
Hist. Rev._, xxv. 78. Although Stow's _Chronicle_, where this story
first occurs, was not published until 1570, the author relied on early
authority ultimately derived, it seems, from the Earl of Ormond, who
died 1452.]
[Footnote 220: See Solly-Flood, "Henry V. and Judge Gascoigne," _Trans.
R. Hist. Soc._, iii. 49; Harcourt, "The Two Sir John Fastolfs,"
_Ib._ 3rd Ser. iv. 47; Kingsford, _Henry V._, 80-93. The Gascoignes
subsequently settled at Oversley, Warwickshire.]
[Footnote 221: Two versions are printed, and there are at least seven
in MS. For the former, see Fordun _Scoti-chronicon_ (ed. Hearne). V.
App.; Dugdale, _Warw._ (1730), i. 147-53; for MS. versions, see British
Museum Harl. MSS. 6,388 (a compilation of several previously existing
copies made in 1690 by Humphrey Wanley); Add. MSS. 11,364; Birmingham
Free Library, _Warw._, MSS. 115,915 (see _Athenæum_, No. 4328);
Coventry Corp. MSS. A. 37, A. 43, A. 48. An eighteenth-century version
in the hands of Mr Eynon of Leamington has relatively correct dates.
See also Solly-Flood, _op. cit._, 50-1.]
[Footnote 222: Sharp, _op. cit._, 205.]
[Footnote 223: Sharp, _Antiq._, 205; _Leet Book_, 96-7.]
[Footnote 224: Thompson, _Hist. Leicester_, 78.]
[Footnote 225: _Proc. Privy Counc._, iv. 89; Ramsay, _Lanc. and York_,
i. 437.]
[Footnote 226: _Leet Book_, 83.]
[Footnote 227: _Ibid._]
[Footnote 228: The surety for the loan "might not be gotten without
great cost," and the different emissaries of the citizens spent, one
40s., one 13s. 4d., and another £6, 2s. 2d. in journeys to London,
Boston, and Sandwich about this business (_Ib._ 86).]
[Footnote 229: _Leet Book_, 119-20.]
[Footnote 230: _Ib._, 129-30.]
[Footnote 231: _Ib._, 174.]
[Footnote 232: _Leet Book_, 152. The total cost of these presents
(exclusive of the 50 marks and the cup), with the carriage, was £12,
15s. 4d. In addition to this, the expenses of officers and all the
worthy men, riding to Fullbrook, amounted to 29s. 6d.]
[Footnote 233: _Ib._, 138.]