Introduction

INTRODUCTION

In the absence of extensive records of noble household finance and organization in the early Tudor period and of systematic studies of the material which survives for the Elizabethan age, the regulations familiarly known as the Northumberland Household Book, compiled for the fifth Earl of Northumberland (1478-1527), have long been the keystone round which historians have built their conception of life in noble households of the sixteenth century. Although Henry Percy, ninth Earl of Northumberland (1564-1632), devoted one of his three Advices to his Son to a discussion of the management of officers and servants, no household manual, if it ever existed, has survived for the Percy household of his time, as has ' A Booke of Orders and Rules . . . for the better direction and governmente of my householde and family, together with the severall dutyes and charges apperteynninge to myne officers and other servantts ' for the household of his Sussex neighbour, Anthony Browne, second Viscount Montague of Cowdray (1574-1629). Such manuals, together with general compilations like the anonymous ' Breviate touching the Order and Governmente of a Nobleman's House ' and Richard Brathwait's Some Rules and Orders for the Government of the House of an Earl written in the early seventeenth century, provide valuable guidance in the theory of noble household management. There is every reason to believe that the composition of noble households in the Elizabethan period was broadly similar. The nobility, a small and compact section of society—there were no more than sixty peers in 1603—, whether old-established families like the Percies or newly-risen from the gentry and yeomanry like the Rus- sells, whether their income was derived, as the Percies' was, primarily from landed revenue or, like the Cecils', largely from perquisites of offices of State, were governed by the same concept of the state becoming their rank and had comparable problems of household management. The model for their households was the Sovereign's establishment, ' requisite to be the mirror of others ' as Henry VIII's regulations of 1526 specifically state *. Tradition undoubtedly played a large part in household affairs; as the ninth Earl of Northumberland warned his son, ' it is strange that in a household where men are gathered together from all the corners of the world . . . how strongly they will plead custom, if it be but a loaf of bread or a can of beer, which, when they have, they will give it to dogs rather than lose it'2. Custom and similarity of circumstance alike tended to produce uniformity of organization, and the American scholar, P. Van B. Jones, has argued that ' the only important dif- ference between a small household . . . and the very large establishments . . . lay largely in the number of servants employed, rather than in the general character and purpose of the help '3. Probably, however, in household management as in so much else of Elizabethan life, practice was in advance of theory; one suspects that the rigidity of organization envisaged in the household manuals never prevailed. Economic historians are gradually appreciating, from such detailed studies as Miss Mary Finch's The Wealth 1 Antiquaries, 146. 2 Harrison, 84. 3 Jones, 16-17. B xvii

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 01 Oct 2021 at 22:20:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2042171000000741 xviii INTRODUCTION of Five Northamptonshire Families, 1340-1640, the complexity of the forces which determined the varying fortunes of the landed families in the Elizabethan period 1. Personal character as well as contemporary conditions governed the economic stability or lack of it among the estates of the aristocracy and must equally have affected the efficiency of their households. A more cogent spur than convention led the writers of the fashionable ' advices ' of the day to urge upon their successors, as Sir Walter Raleigh did his son, ' know what thou hast; what everything is worth that thou hast; and . . . see that thou art not wasted by thy servants and officers '2. The ninth Earl of Northumberland devoted a chapter of his Advice on ' economical government ' to an explanation of the means by which he had reformed his household and estate management, after an initial period of abandon, by looking into his own affairs ' partly constrained by an imperfection that God laid upon me to call me back, partly out of necessity, so as in time I redeemed myself out of the disquieted thoughts, endeavouring to hug in mine arms faithful servants, jewels too precious, and to discard such as my knowledge told me were corrupt instruments to me . . . my understanding mine own affairs, although but in a mean degree, and their understanding that honesty is best where dishonesty is in hazard to be discovered, were somewhat reciprocal in this act'3. The Elizabethan age saw a far-reaching social and economic change and any interpretation which views noble household management as remaining wholly static in the face of that change is clearly suspect. The Northumberland Household Book not only does not represent the normal practice of the Elizabethan aristocracy, as general surveys have tended to suggest that it does, but it is a poor guide to the conduct of the Percy household itself at the end of the sixteenth century. Circum- stances had changed and at that radically; the Percies had seen as many changes as any. The principal residences of the fifth Earl of Northumberland had been in the north of England—Leconfield and Wressell in Yorkshire and Alnwick in Northumber- land. Of these, only Wressell remained in good repair in the time of the ninth Earl 4. For in the interval the Percy family had suffered two attainders, both arising from rebellions in the North,—those of Sir Thomas Percy, brother and heir to the sixth Earl, in 1537, and of his son, the seventh Earl, in 1572. When the ninth Earl's father succeeded to the family honours and lands by the provisions of the restoration of the title in 1557 5, he was required to live in the South and the Percies became absentee landlords in place of exercising that feudal sway in the North which had led to the saying, ' The North knows no prince but a Percy '. Though born at Tynemouth Castle, where his father was Governor, the ninth Earl never visited the North after the execution of his uncle, the seventh Earl 6. The principal residence of the Percy family in his time was Petworth in Sussex, the manor house at the 1 M. E. Finch, The Wealth of Five Northamptonshire Families 1540-1640 (Northamptonshire Rec. Soc. Publications, xix, Oxford, 1956), especially xi-xix, 1-3. 2 Practical Wisdom, 21. 3 Harrison, 83-84. 4 SeeE. J. Fisher, 'Some Yorkshire estates of the Percys, 1442-1615 ', unpubd. Leeds Ph.D. thesis, 1956. 6 Calendar of the] P[atent] R[olls], P. and M., iv. 179. 6 See G. R. Batho, ' The Percies and Alnwick Castle, 1557-1632 ', Archaeologia Aeliana, 4th Series, xxxv (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1957), 48-63; and James, xi-xxiv.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 01 Oct 2021 at 22:20:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2042171000000741 INTRODUCTION xix centre of that great Honour which had been the gift of Henry I's Queen Adeliza to her brother Josceline of Louvain at his marriage to the Percy heiress, Agnes, as long before as 1150. Between 1615 and his death in 1632, the ninth Earl considerably extended Petworth, which had already been restored by his father, and added the great stables there of which Fuller wrote 1. By his marriage in 1594 to Dorothy, the sister of Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, and widow of Sir Thomas Perrot, the ninth Earl acquired the lease of Syon House, Middlesex, the house on the north bank of the Thames opposite Kew which the Protector Somerset had built out of the ruins of the suppressed Abbey of the Bridgettines. The Earl heavily reconstructed Syon after James I made a gift of it to him in 1604 as a mark of gratitude for his part in securing the King's quiet accession to the English throne 2. The Earl inherited two Northumberland houses in London—a house in St Anne's, Aldersgate, held by his mother as part of her dower until her death in 1596, which he sold for £1,000 in 1607, and another, much decayed, at Katherine Hill, Aldgate, which he retained. Rather than use either of these houses to any extent, the Earl hired a succession of London houses, including Essex House after the execution of his brother-in-law in 1601. Not until 1603, when he had become a Privy Councillor and could hope to enjoy royal favour under the new regime, did he purchase a London house—Walsingham House, Sidon Lane, for £2,200. In the event, he was imprisoned from 1605 to 1621 in the Tower of London as a result of charges preferred against him in Star Chamber arising out of the Gunpowder Plot. Walsingham House was sold for £1,800 within a few weeks of his sentence in 1606, but the Earl continued to rent Essex House and also hired a house on Tower Hill for the accommodation of such of his servants as he could not have with him in his extensive suite in the Tower 3. Upon his release in 1621 the Earl retired to Petworth, where he was to enjoy eleven years of what has been aptly termed ' splendid leisure ' 4. During these last years he paid only occasional visits to Syon, London, Bath (for the waters), and Penshurst (to see his eldest daughter); indeed, he was restricted to travelling within a thirty-mile radius of Petworth as a condition of his freedom 6 and after the marriage of his heir in early 1629 he allowed the young Lord and Lady Percy to use Syon. The Percies had not only changed their places of residence within the century; they had also changed their religious allegiance. The seventh Earl and his father before him sacrificed their lives and imperilled the family fortunes for the Catholic faith; the eighth Earl died mysteriously in the Tower in 1585 while imprisoned for alleged complicity in a plot on behalf of Mary Queen of Scots. But the ninth Earl 1 See G. R. Batho, 'The Percies at Petworth, 1574-1632 ', Sussex Archaeological Collections, xcv (1958), 1-27. 2 See G. R. Batho, ' Henry, ninth Earl of Northumberland and Syon House, Middlesex, 1594-1632 ', Transactions of the Ancient Monuments Society, New Series, iv (1956), 95-109. 3 See G. R. Batho, ' The Wizard Earl in the Tower, 1605-21 ', History To-day, vi (1956), 344-51, and C. L. Kingsford, ' Essex House, formerly Leicester House and Exeter Inn ', Archaeo- logia, lxxiii (1923), 1-28; almost all the persons cited as using Essex House in the 1610's and 1620's in Kingsford, 13, were connexions of the Earl of Northumberland. 4 J. Dallaway, A History of the Western Division of the County of Sussex, vol. ii, pt. 1 (1819), 227. 5 P.R.O., S[tate] P[apers] Dom[estic] Jac. I, cxxii. 31, printed in N. E. McClure, The Letters of John Chamberlain (Philadelphia, 1939, 2 vols.).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 01 Oct 2021 at 22:20:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2042171000000741 xx INTRODUCTION was a Protestant. Before 1626, when a household chaplain was appointed at Per- worth, he had no clergy in his house, where the fifth Earl had had eleven priests. As he wrote soon after the Gunpowder Plot, ' the world knows that I am no Papist; the world knows that no man is more obedient to the laws of the Church of England than I am; and the world may know, I am no supporter of recusants, neither is my house pestered with them, some one or two old servants of my house excepted '. When he corresponded secretly with King James in the last years of Elizabeth's reign, he had sought to win a measure of toleration for the Catholics, but this had been, as he protested, ' to the end to hold them firm to his Majesty, suspecting by the general opinion and voice, that they affected the Infanta's title, or might do so if they were not held on with hopes '1. The accusations, both contemporary and modern, that the ninth Earl was a Catholic arise, not from his attempts to secure toleration of Catholicism nor from the presence in his household of such men as the Wycliffes, staunch Catholics, or Sir Edward Francis, whose wife was a suspected recusant 2, but from his employment of his distant cousin, Thomas Percy, a great- grandson of the fourth Earl. Percy was constable of Alnwick from 1596 and carried his secret letters to James; the Earl treated Percy as his confidential servant, and during his Captaincy of the Sovereign's ' nearest guard ' made him a Gentleman Pensioner in 1604 without exacting the required oath of allegiance. An ardent convert to the Catholic faith, Percy was a chief conspirator in the Gunpowder Plot and by that conspiracy compromised the Earl. ' Your Majesty,' the Earl wrote to the King, ' that is so great a scholar and so judicious, cannot but know how im- possible it is to prove a negative '3. There is no evidence that the Earl had any knowledge of the Plot, but the correspondence of his officers proves that Thomas Percy embezzled more than £1,900 of his estate revenues and that the Earl carried out a full investigation when he discovered it as to how this peculation had been possible 4. The survival of the greater part of the voluminous household accounts of the ninth Earl permits us both to follow in detail the differences brought about in the management of the Percy household by the changed circumstances of the family and by his close personal supervision of every aspect of his financial affairs, and to see the practical implications of the theories expounded in his Advice and in the contemporary household manuals. Financial papers reveal much of the way of life of any man and if a true picture of the way of life of the nobility in Elizabethan England is to emerge, historians must look rather to meticulous studies of accounting material than to idealized statements of household policy or to generalized surveys of such fragments of household records as have been printed. Many of the papers among the Duke of Northumberland's archives at Alnwick from which the manu- scripts printed here have mostly been selected are endorsed in the hand of an early nineteenth-century archivist: ' Old household accounts—of no use; destroy '. But 1 Aln[wick Castle] MS. 101, fos. 9-10, 14 Nov. 1605. 2 See W. Notestein, F. H. Relf and H. Simpson, ed., The Commons Debates of 1621 (1935), ii- 357- 3 S[yon] H[ouse] MS. [at Alnwick Castle] O. 1. 2 c, fo. 46', 7 Jan. 1608/09. For the secret correspondence, see J. Bruce, ed. Correspondence of King James VI of Scotland (Camden Soc, lxxviii, 1861), 53-76. * Aln. MSS. L[etters] & P[apers], vol. 7, fo. 209, Dec. 1605.

I THE ORGANIZATION OF THE HOUSEHOLD The Percies were ' one of the greatest families of Christendom '2 but the ninth Earl of Northumberland maintained a relatively small household by contemporary standards. A ' check-roll' of the household taken on 25 March 1586, in the first year after his succession to the title, lists 58 persons, including, as was customary, the Earl himself 3; another, written on 25 March 1604, at a time when the Earl was a Privy Councillor, shows a household of only 53 4. Analysis of wages lists and notes on accounting papers of the Earl suggests that the size of the complement of household servants varied between just under 50 in the late 1580's and early 1590's and over 70 for the year 1603-04, with a steadily rising wage bill between an average of £150 for the years 1592-96 and £350 per annum by 1603. In the first decade of his imprisonment the Earl's household was reduced to about 40 servants; thereafter, a further period of expansion followed until in the 1620's the Earl was regularly maintaining a household of eighty or so servants and spending £400-500 p.a. on wages. Members of the family, any young noblemen who may have been sent to be pages in his household as part of their education (though the custom was dying out), and the pensioners of the Earl who were in attendance upon him, as well as the ' gentlemen's men ' who served the chief officers of the household, all added to the numbers of the ' check-roll'. Besides the allowances which he made to his close relations, the Earl paid pensions at various periods to a select group who regarded themselves as bound thereby to his service—to former servants like Sir Edward Francis, steward of his household from 1595 to 1603 and principal officer at Pet- worth long afterwards, and to scholars like Thomas Hariot, the mathematician and astronomer for whom the Earl provided a house in the grounds of Syon and whose work, with his great interest in science, he chose to promote 5. In addition, separate households were maintained by the Countess and, after his marriage, by the heir, Algernon, Lord Percy. Little has survived of the financial 1 Howard, v. 2 Sir Simonds D'Ewes, Dec. 1641; see W. H. Coates, ed., The Journal of Sir Simonds D'Ewes (New York, 1942), 259. 3 S.H.MSS. X. II. 12 (4), ' The Booke of housholde expences at Boswell's howse, 1586 ', fo. 2V. 4Aln. MSS. L. & P., vol. 7, fo. I2ir. 6 See Appendix III for a list of servants, wages and pensions.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 01 Oct 2021 at 22:20:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2042171000000741 xxii INTRODUCTION papers of the Countess, so that the size of her household is known only for the year ending Michaelmas 1602, when she had seven gentlemen and yeomen and five gentlewomen and maids. During a period of separation resulting from a bitter quarrel between them, the Countess had been living in a rented house at Putney. Even when the Earl and Countess lived together, however, the personal expenses of the Countess and her household were accounted for separately; the pension paid her by the Earl relieved him of the responsibility for her expenses and, normally, for the charges of the daughters of the marriage as well1. Upon his marriage in January 1629, the Lord Percy established a considerable household of his own, for which wages lists and check-rolls are not known to have survived but the costs of wages and liveries in 1630-31 and in 1631-32 were £171 16 s. 4 d. and £251 13 s. 4 d. respectively 2. The ninth Earl of Northumberland clearly maintained a household which for size and expense fell far short of the ideal laid down by Richard Brathwait in the early seventeenth century in his formidable list of the more than 100 officers and servants of household ' the state of an Earl requires to have ': First a Steward, a Treasurer, and Comptroller, which three are called the chief officers. He may have an Auditor, and a Receiver: but these are extraordinary, and two of the chief officers (being men of experience) may supply those places; the one in taking account, the other in receiving rents and profits, and thereby free the Earl from fees that belong to those officers. He may have a Clerk Comptroller, but that needeth not, if the chief officers be painful in their places. He is to have two Gentlemen Ushers, a Preacher or Chaplain in ordinary, besides as many extraordinary as he please. A Gentleman of the Horse, a Sec- retary, ten Gentlemen Waiters, two Gentlemen Pages, a Clerk of the Kitchen, an Yeoman Usher, and Groom of the Great Chamber, two Yeomen of the Ward- robe of apparel for the Earl and Lady; two Grooms for their Bedchamber, one Yeoman and Groom for the Wardrobe of Beds. An Yeoman Usher and Groom for the Hall. An Yeoman and Groom for the Cellar, an Yeoman and Groom for the Pantry. An Yeoman and Groom for the Buttery. An Yeoman for the Ewery. An Yeoman of the Horse. An Yeoman Rider. Five Musicians. Six Yeoman waiters, two Footmen. An Yeoman Purveyor. A master Cook, Under Cooks and Pastrymen three. An Yeoman and Groom in the Scullery. One to be in the Larder and Slaughter house. An Achator. Conduits and kitchen boys three. Two in the woodyard. In the Bakehouse, Brewhouse, and Granary, five. A Trumpeter. A Drum. An Yeoman and Groom in the Armory. An Yeoman and Groom for the garden. A coachman, a waggoner, six grooms for the Stable, a groom for the Laundry, two Yeomen Porters. Gentlewomen, Chambermaids, and Launderers, the number to be set down by the Earl and his Lady3. Brathwait was writing a manual and may have idealized the position, but the Earl of Northumberland's neighbour, Viscount Montague of Cowdray, when he revised the ' Booke of Orders and Rules ' for his household in 1595, listed some 35 offices "For a discussion of the finances of the Countess, see Section III of this Introduction. a [243] and [245J. 3 Brathwait, 3-4.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 01 Oct 2021 at 22:20:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2042171000000741 INTRODUCTION xxiii of the household alone. The household of Richard Bertie and his wife, Lady Kath- erine, Duchess of Suffolk, in 1560-62 consisted of 80 persons, excluding gardeners, dairymaids, labourers and retainers 1; Thomas Percy, seventh Earl of Northumber- land, had a household check-roll of 120 in June 1568, and of 145 in October 1568 2; Baron North was served by 24 gentlemen and 70 yeomen on 28 July 1578 3; Henry Stanley, Earl of Derby, had a check-roll of 118 in May 1587, and of 145 in July 1590 4 ; and William Cecil, Lord Burghley, is reputed to have kept 80 servants at London, between 26 and 30 at Theobalds and others at Burghley and at Court 5. The author of a manual of household management compiled circa 1605 writes bitterly of ' a declining of such orders and government as at this day is but too apparent in noblemen's houses and others of great state ' 6, but there is no evidence that the size of noblemen's households had fallen markedly in the early seventeenth century. The household of the Earls of Rutland, which had numbered 135 in 1539, was 194 strong in 1612 7, and Henry, Earl of Worcester, is said to have had as many as 150 persons in his household at the time of the Civil War 8. Lord William Howard of Naworth Castle, Cumberland, on the other hand, never regularly employed more than 80 persons—the size of his household varied between 45 in 1612 and 78 in 1633 9; P. Van B. Jones thought that' this lesser state was probably due to Howard's taste and needs, or to his status among the nobility, rather than to any great change in the domestic arrangements of this entire class of English society ', but it seems clear from what has become known of the Howard finances that the real reason for the relative smallness of Lord William's household was his considerable indebtedness 10. Certainly, we have the testimony of Paul Hentzner, writing in the 1590*5, that' the English are serious like the Germans; lovers of show, liking to be followed wherever they go by whole troops of servants, who wear their masters' arms in silver fastened to their left arms ' u and the pomp surrounding such favourites at the Courts of the early Stuarts as the Duke of Buckingham and the Earl of Northumber- land's own son-in-law, James Hay, Earl of Carlisle, is legendary. ' The first conjecture one usually will give of a great man and of his understanding is upon sight of his followers and servants, whether they be able and faithful. For then he is reputed wise, as having knowledge to discern '.12 The ninth Earl of Northumberland had come into his estate at twenty-one, ignorant of any adequate understanding of his affairs. Almost all of his father's officers stayed in his service, though some left for his mother's (' servants' dispositions are such that they will rather elect to be a principal officer in a less house, than a second in a greater'). ' Wives commonly are great scratchers after their husbands' deaths, if things be loose ', he told his son, and, letters of administration being procured for his mother, ' I came to be an Earl of Northumberland so well left for movables, as I was not worth a fire shovel, or a pair of tongs; what was left me was wainscots, 1 Bertie, 460. s S.H.MSS. U. I. 3 (1), ' Expences in my Lord Thomas' howse, 1568 '. 'B.M., Stowe MS. 774, fos. 2T, 3r. 4 Derby, 23, 84. 8 F. Peck, Desiderata Curiosa (1732), i. 29-30. 6B.M., Add. MS. 36,746, fo. 5. 'Rutland, 296, 487-88. 8 Worcester, 3-6. • Howard, Appendix xxxviii. 10 Jones, 11; A. F. Upton, Sir Arthur Ingram (Oxford, 1961), 59-60, 175. 11 Paul Hentzner, Travels in England (1797), 63. 12 Stanley, /3, 12.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 01 Oct 2021 at 22:20:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2042171000000741 xxiv INTRODUCTION or things riveted with nails '. At first, he recruited new servants, ' young, hand- some, brave, swaggering, debauched, wild, abetting all my young desires ', who shortly led him into debt; in six or seven years he reckoned that he lost £60,000 or £70,000 ' what in letters of administration, in partition of thirds, in giving in honey- moon time or unadvisedly, in sales of woods, in demises of lands and sale '. When at last these errors unmasked themselves, ' I must confess I was forced to discard to the very kitchen boys before things could be settled as I wished '1. It was this experience which led the ninth Earl to practise a constant vigilance in the management of both his household and his estate for the rest of his days and to exhort his son to do the same. ' Those that you have to govern in your family ', he tells his son in his Advice, ' are of two sorts, the better and the meaner; of the better sort, especially of your chief instruments there are few, and they in very deed if you understand them well, not properly so fit to direct the greatest businesses as to execute the greatest business, and to direct the smaller, the prime direction being ever the master's work; otherwise shall you be but a master in show, and not in deed. The meaner are only to execute the smaller businesses and to do as they are bid '. Servants were to be ruled justly and kindly—' not to give succour and relief after that proportion you are able out of your fortune to such as waste their time in your business is inhuman and dishonourable '—and there are many instances recorded on the household accounts of such courtesies as the Earl showed Philip the footman when he hurt his leg at Shalford while upon his master's business. But servants must not be over-endeared. ' For once bring it but to pass that your servants do find that you need them not, and that if one be gone to-day, you can make another do your business as well to-morrow, you shall purchase to yourself from them awe, respect, obedience, carefulness, love, plain dealing, contentedness with less, and indeed all things else that belongeth to this mystery of governing '. Equally, the Earl devoted a chapter of his Advice to urging his son to ensure ' that your gifts and bestowing of your actions be your own without intercession of others ' or servants would steal the thanks due to the master 2. The Earl of Northumberland, with his experience of Thomas Percy the Con- spirator, would certainly have supported the warning which Lord Burghley gave his son and which James, seventh Earl of Derby, repeated: ' Be not served with kinsmen and friends, for they expect much and do little ' 3. The positions of the chief officers of the household involved great trust; upon them depended the disci- pline of the entire household. It is a signal tribute to the importance which North- umberland attached to his chief officers that he formally bequeathed his servants to his son in his will—' out of the special care I have for the well managing that estate which I am to leave unto my said son Algernon Lord Percy wherein I know he must use many instruments I give and bequeath unto him all my servants of whose fidelity I have had good proof ' i. The chief officers of an earl, Brathwait held, ' should be men, not only well-born and of good livings, but also grave and experienced, not proud and haughty, neither too affable and easy; gentle and cour- teous in matters concerning themselves, but severe and sharp, if offences be com- 1 Harrison, 78-84. 2 Harrison, 74-75, 86-87, 107-27. 8 Burghley, 65; Stanley, p, 44. 4 See document no. 6 of Part IV.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 01 Oct 2021 at 22:20:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2042171000000741 INTRODUCTION xxv mitted against God, or their Lord'. Their dignity was upheld by their having their own rooms and servants within the nobleman's houses, by their presence at the first table in Hall for the formal meals of the day (dinner and supper), and by grants of estates to them, over and above their wages and liveries for their offices. They might indeed be of noble blood themselves, as Brathwait testified: ' I have known, not only gentlemen of great livings, but also many Knights, yea Barons' sons, and some Earls' sons, to serve Earls in places of office ' *. Many of the ninth Earl of Northumberland's principal servants of household were drawn from the gentry of the county where the original nucleus of the Percies' vast estates lay—Yorkshire. Families like the Wycliffes of Scriven, with a long tradition of service to the Percies, and the Stockdales of Greenhamerton who produced the two William Stockdales, father and son, auditors to the Earl throughout his life, were related by marriage; William Stockdale the elder's second wife Dorothy was a second cousin of the brothers Francis, Thomas and William Wycliffe 2. But in a household, and especially in the household of a family with such breadth of influence and land-holding as the Percy family, as the Earl himself remarked, ' men are gathered together from all the corners of the world '. Besides men like Robert Delaval and Peter Dodsworth, both from old Northumberland families, one finds men like Robert Flood from Shropshire; Thomas Fotherley from Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire; Hugh Potter from Iddesleigh, Devon; Thomas Stanley from Dalgarth, Cumberland; and a few families like the Moses with particular connexions with Petworth. Few of the Earl's officers died in poverty, as Hugh Kenrick, a Catholic of a Northamptonshire family who had been attorney to the Earl for a time and was a prothonotary of London, did, directing ' my body to be buried something before day because I leave my executrix so poor ' 3. Some, like Dudley Carleton and Sir John Melton, rose to high positions in the State after leaving the Earl's service; others, like Sir Edward Francis, and Hugh Potter in the tenth Earl's time., became members of Parliament while retaining office in the Percy household. Most, like Robert Flood, were not wholly dependent upon the Percy family for their income; Flood's will shows him to have owned lands in St Giles-in-the-Fields, London, worth £520, yet he predeceased his father 4. Thomas Fotherley died a knight, with lands worth £1,000 in Lancashire to leave to his unmarried daughter Lucy, and his birth- place, Rickmansworth, to leave to his son John 5. Others, like Edmund Powton, cofferer and steward to the Earl from 1598 to his death in 1616, seem to have had little apart from their emoluments of household, to judge by their wills. Powton, described as ' of London, esquire ', died a bachelor in the Earl's service and, apart from small legacies to his family and serving-men, including an annuity to his nephew Thomas Burbage who was also in the Percy household, left some of his fellow-servants remembrances of him—Sir Edward Francis, ' my best horse and £10 to buy 1 Brathwait, 6, 15. 2 J. Foster, ed., The Visitation of Yorkshire, 1384/1383, by R. Glover, and 1612, by R. St George (1875), 377, 410; C. H. Hunter Blair, Visitations of the North, pt, iv (Surtees Soc. cxlvi, 1932), 14-15. 3 Prerogative] C[ourt of] Cfanterbury] 6 Lewyn, proved 4 Jan. 1597/8. 4 P.C.C. 32 Weldon, dated 22 Jan. 1616/17. 5 P.C.C. 5 Pembroke, proved 15 Jan. 1649/50.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 01 Oct 2021 at 22:20:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2042171000000741 xxvi INTRODUCTION a saddle ' ; Henry Taylor, ' £5 or ring of that value '; and Thomas Cartwright, to whose daughter he had stood godfather, ' £10 or ring of that value '1. Such little gifts are common in officers' wills. For a number of the servants were together in the Earl's household over many years. When he wrote his Advice on servants and officers in his study in the Tower of London in 1609, the Earl spoke of ' servants of seventeen years' standing, and most of fourteen, twelve, ten continuance, and so now more likely to continue than ever ' 2. This applied to the lesser as well as to the higher offices of the household, to men like John Vaughan, a groom for at least eighteen years, as well as to men like Christopher Ingram, clerk of the works at Syon from 1599 until his death in 1628. Sometimes men rose steadily in the service of the Earl, as Richard Ebetson began as a porter in 1595 and was acting as cater by 1604, or Henry Taylor, a payer of foreyn payments in 1602, was successively clerk of the kitchen and steward of household. Occasionally, men came to the Earl from the service of relatives or friends; William Lucas seems to have been servant to Sir John and Sir Thomas Perrot and to the Earl of Essex (the father-in-law, first husband, and brother of the Countess) before he became a disburser for apparel to the Earl of Northumber- land 3. Frequently, although the estate and household were organized separately, personnel was exchanged with the estate. Thus Robert Delaval left the household as gentleman of the horse to become Constable of Alnwick Castle and Roger Thorpe left to be receiver for the Earl's rents in Northumberland. Some officers held both estate and household positions; Sir Edward Francis was seneschal of Petworth and receiver of rents from the South Parts and Wales while steward of household and later officer in charge of Petworth. Such men as these, growing old in the family service, came to have a real bond of loyalty and affection towards the family. Edward Dowse, tutor to the Lord Percy from the time that the Earl's heir went to Cambridge in 1615 and subsequently a pensioner in the tenth Earl's household, may stand as an example of a devoted Percy follower. Dowse was not a rich man. He was born the second son of Thomas Dowse of Salisbury, Wiltshire, and Broughton, Hampshire, by his wife Blanche Covert of Slaugham, Sussex, and graduated M.A. of Oxford in 1604. During his service in the Percy household he was three times a member of Parliament. He married late in life and had no children to leave the farm and mill at Pagham which he had purchased of the tenth Earl, probably at advantageous rates. His regard for Petworth and for his master and mistress is abundantly evident in the provisions of his will, where he is described as ' of Petworth, esquire '. Dowse desired to be buried at Petworth, leaving £5 for bread for the poor at the funeral and £5 each to four poor children to bind them apprentice. Apart from legacies to his wife and his family, he left his man William Combe £5, two suits of apparel and two cloaks; his neighbour at Pagham five marks; the Earl £50 for twelve silver plates and his lady £50 for a ring ' as a token of my thankfulness unto them both ' 4. Dowse had had

1 P.C.C. 125 Cope, proved 17 Dec. 1616. 2 Harrison, 84. 3 See Cal[endar of] S\tate] P\apers] Dom\estic\ Eliz., ccxxxiii. 93; cclxiv. 6; and S.H.MSS. Y. III. 1 (1). 4 P.C.C. 60 Essex, proved 29 Apr. 1648; M. F. Keeler, The Long Parliament 1640-1641 (Philadelphia, 1954), I5^~59-

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 01 Oct 2021 at 22:20:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2042171000000741 INTRODUCTION xxvii a full and satisfying life in the Percy household and one suspects that he was typical of many. Where rigidity and systematization dominate the theoretical accounts of contemporary household manuals, the outstanding feature of the organization of the Percy household in the time of the ninth Earl of Northumberland was its flexibility. This flexibility was due to a combination of the Earl's determination to retain the ' prime direction ', as he termed it, in his own hands and of the lack of a consistent system in that responsibility was personal to the officer accounting rather than attached to the office or offices which he held. While it is possible to discern broad divisions of responsibility between the various offices of the household, these divisions were far from absolute; the practice of combining offices so that the steward might also be clerk of the works or the cofferer solicitor as well, and almost every officer was appointed at some stage in his career a ' payer of foreyn payments ' whether he held another office or not, meant that more than one officer commonly accounted in any audit-period for any particular type of expenditure or receipt. No man in the Percy household was placed, as Miss Scott Thomson has described the receiver- general of the Russell household in the later seventeenth century, charged with ' all the responsibility for the Earl [of Bedford]'s affairs, estate, household and personal alike . . . He took control of and was accountable for all the money that was put into and taken out of the trunk and his account book is, in effect, a budget of the Earl's finances ' 1. It is possible to calculate a budget of the Percy finances only from the joint accounts of all the officers of household returning accounts in the audit-period and it is necessary to examine each of the officers' accounts to discover the details of any heading in the accounts for a particular period. And this, of course, quite apart from the difficulty inherent in all accounting that like items are not always placed under like headings. Moreover, there was an irregularity of accounting within the household, arising both from the submission of accounts in some audit-periods and not in others by the holders of some permanent offices— for example, the gentleman rider—, and from the existence at some periods of offices like that of the secretary which did not exist at others in a household constantly adapting itself to the needs of the moment 2. The main responsibility for the provision of ready money for the household, for the receipt of the deliveries from the estates and of other sources of income and for the advancing of money to other household officers, normally rested with an officer known as the ' cofferer' or, less usually, as the ' receiver-general'. The receiver-generalship was an estate office, of such importance that it was for many years divided into the receiver-generalship of the Percy estates in the North Parts (Yorkshire, Northumberland, and Cumberland) and of the South Parts and Wales, positions held in 1608, for example, by Thomas Fotherley and Sir Edward Francis respectively. It did not commonly carry responsibility in the household at all, as it did exceptionally in 1597-99; thus, neither Fotherley nor Francis accounted in the household in 1608-09 as receiver-general—Fotherley returned a household account as disburser for necessaries and books and for surveying of land, Francis as officer at Petworth. A careful distinction must, therefore, be made between the duties of the receiver-general accounting for the revenues of the estates in several 1 Thomson, 44. 2 See Appendix I.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 01 Oct 2021 at 22:20:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2042171000000741 xxviii INTRODUCTION shires as delivered him by the receivers for those particular areas and the household officer, more commonly and correctly called the ' cofferer', in charge of the coffers of the Earl. For long periods (1587-92 and 1613-32) there is no account from either a cofferer or a receiver-general. Instead, deliveries of rents and revenues from the estates into the household are noted on the accounts of the various household officers as received ' from the hands of his lordship ' or ' out of the coffers '. At these times, the presumption must be that the Earl was controlling the monies in person. Jones, in his survey of Tudor household management, stated that the office of receiver-general was ' one of the chief official stations in the household, and certainly the position of highest trust in the domestic service. This officer had in his keeping all the funds coming in from the estates '1. At no time was this true in the household of the ninth Earl of Northumberland. Most of the deliveries passed through the cofferer's hands when that office existed, but never all. The idea of assignments of portions of the revenue had been established in the Percy household as long before as 1512. Between 1585 and 1598 the delivery of some of the rents and revenues from the estates through other officers was a marked practice and was evidently regarded as a convenient way of advancing or ' impresting' money to officers. After the appointment of Edmund Powton as cofferer in 1598, such assignments became less common but persisted; thus, in 1608-09 £674 8 s. 10 d. from Sussex rents and revenues were handed by Francis, as receiver, to Powton, but Francis accounted on his Petworth officer's account for £12 19 s. 10 d. Equally, while the household officers normally received the greater part of their ' imprest' money from the cofferer or the Earl, it was not unusual for the officers to imprest money from one to another as well independently of him and to receive money from sources outside the household, for example, the sale of horses or the aftermath of grass, without its passing through the coffers 2. The auditor normally had the sole responsibility of checking the household accounts, as he had for checking the estate. Between September 1603 and March 1605, however, Dudley Carleton served the Earl as ' controller of the household '; the office was revived in the Percy household in 1626 for William Mose the younger and he held it until the ninth Earl's death. There is some variation of definition of the duties of the office among contemporary descriptions of noble households. Lord Montague's ' Booke of Orders ' of 1595 defines the duties of the office as one would expect from the derivation of the title from ' contrarotulator ', i.e. an officer who enters the accounts of other officers and keeps a counter-roll to check them. Dudley Carleton's responsibilities were general within the household, though of far less financial importance than the steward's or cofferer's and with particular reference to the clerk of the kitchen and the gentleman of horse, and included the checking of figures—his signature is to be found at the bottom of every page of a book of disbursements of the gentleman of horse in 1604-05 3. Lord Montague writes of the office as exceptional—' A Comptroller is a principal officer belonging unto me

1 Jones, 139. s Cf. Part II; the rents and revenues from the estates in 1585-87 were accounted for by the steward K362 18 s. y£ d.), the cofferers (^4,081 6 s. 7 d. and ^1,655 17 s. 1 d. respectively), and the clerk of the kitchen (£100), while the pursebearer received borrowed money, for example. 3 S.H.MSS. U. I. 50 (2), a book of disbursements for the stable 1604-05.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 01 Oct 2021 at 22:20:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2042171000000741 INTRODUCTION xxix . . . though, as Comptroller I shall not necessarily have cause daily to employ him: but I may as I shall think convenient bestow that title on some discreet person of especial desert, either retainer, or household servant for his better credit and coun- tenance in my service 'x—and probably Carleton's appointment is to be attributed to the accusations made at this time against William Stockdale, the auditor. These accusations also led the Earl to call upon the services of John Smyth of Nibley, officer to the Lords Berkeley, as temporary auditor. Stockdale protested at great length at the slur on his reputation, ' my conscience acquitting me of any abuse wittingly committed to the loss or offence of your lordship since I first became your officer'. Stockdale had been involved in controversy before with John Carvell, the Earl's solicitor, who seems to have been his principal accuser, and the auditor asked for ' trial by men of mine own faculty '. The storm blew over. Carleton left the Earl's service, and Stockdale was soon restored as auditor 2. The author of ' A Breviate ' (c. 1605) presents another view of the position of the controller and makes it the second office in the household, with a particular responsibility for provisions and household furnishings 3. The accounts submitted by Mose in the last years of the Earl's life suggest that he held the title of controller in this second sense rather than in the sense implied by Montague's definition. The total sums involved in Mose's accounts are always very much less than those for which the steward of the time was responsible and Mose was primarily concerned with household provisions, reparations and building at Petworth. The timing of his appointment—immediately after the death of Sir Edward Francis, who for so long had been the Earl's ' officer at Petworth ' with a special responsibility for the household there and for the improvements of the house and gardens—makes it clear that Mose was given the title to enhance his dignity and authority as the highly responsible official in charge of these domestic matters and not with any suggestion of a superior position in the household over such established servants as Henry Taylor, the steward. The steward is normally assumed to have been the chief officer of a household, as he was of Queen Elizabeth's in 1601. The Lord Steward, her ' Booke of House- hold ' stated, ' is the sovereign and chief officer of the household. He has the charge and government of the whole household; the commandment, direction and appointment, of all matters therein; and the placing and displacing of all her Majesty's servants. He is to be counselled and assisted by the Treasurer, Comptroller and the rest of the officers of the board; but is full and absolute of himself for appointment of any thing ' *. The ninth Earl of Northumberland himself noted what he con- ceived to be the ' steward's charge ' in 1597-98, when Powton was coming to him to put his household affairs upon a more orderly basis. He denned it as consisting in these points: provisions of all household expenses as wine, corn, hay, spice, wood, coal, beef, mutton and things belonging to diet; also all works, as paling, grubbing, gardening, building and such; also wages and liveries; also horses, carriages, oxen, carts, teams, necessaries, tables, stools, beds, plate, furniture for the kitchen, and stable s. Over these aspects of household expenditure the steward had particular charge. 1 Montague, 188-89. 2 S.H.MS. P. 1. 3 g. » Breviate, 317-18. 4 Antiquaries, 281. 5 S.H.MSS. U. I. 2, a loose sheet, 'Steward's charge'.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 01 Oct 2021 at 22:20:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2042171000000741 xxx INTRODUCTION The steward's account always showed the largest total expenditure of any returned in the audit-period on the strictly household matters for which he had supreme responsibility and normally included, for instance, the payment of wages and the cost of liveries for the greater part of the household. But not all the expenditure on the categories of items listed in the Earl's note will be found recorded on the steward's account. Much of the expenditure on diet and on gross provision was incurred by the steward's subordinate officer, the clerk of the kitchen, and in many audit-periods the clerk of the kitchen returned a separate account from the steward. ' Payers of foreyn payments ' commonly accounted for small sums spent on diet and provision and, upon occasion, some of them were given a special responsibility for provisioning, as Thomas Fotherley was for the London house between 1599 and 1602 and Rocke Church was while with the Earl on his visits to the Low Countries in 1600 and 1601. At no time is it possible to draw precise lines of demarcation in the responsibilities of the various officers within the Percy household for provisioning or even to make such general statements as Miss Scott Thomson does when she writes of the Russell household in the later seventeenth century that ' the clerk of the kitchen was, as a general rule, responsible from the beginning for the supplies of butcher's meat, game, fruit, vegetables and dairy produce ' but he had to look to the steward ' for the purchase of all groceries; for the enormous supplies of salt which were always needed for the household; and for coal' 1. On the other hand, the officers in charge of provisioning were normally the steward, clerk of the kitchen and cater, and the broad divisions between them are clear. The steward was in charge and usually to be found at the Earl's residence where the majority of the household were for the time being; the clerk of the kitchen was especially responsible for the keeping of the records of food spent in the household and moved with the Earl even when, as Northumberland did, he went to prison; and the cater, under the clerk of the kitchen, was the servant who brought in the ' acates ' or fresh provisions which had to be purchased outside the household 2. Just as the clerk of the kitchen often relieved the steward of the direct responsibility for much of the provisioning, so normally there were officers in the household returning separate accounts for reparations and for stable charges. Where most offices carried responsibility in all the Earl's establishments, clerkships of the works were usually associated, for obvious reasons, with a particular house. The clerk of the works accounted for the major expenses on the gardens, reparations and new buildings at the house over which he was given this authority. The position in the stables was more complex, in that upon occasion as many as three officers accounted in one audit-period for stable charges. Thus, between 1600 and 1603, admittedly a period when the Earl was travelling a lot and buying a large number of horses, a gentleman of the horse, a yeoman and the steward all returned accounts and appear

1 Thomson, 126 and 162. 2 See Section II of this Introduction for a further discussion of the offices of clerk of the kitchen and cater. An interesting distinction between the functions of the controller, the steward and the clerk of the kitchen is implied in the general account for 1630—31, where the controller accounts for the provisions of the household, the steward for wine, vinegar and cream cheeses, and the clerk of the kitchen for acates and necessaries for diet [244].

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 01 Oct 2021 at 22:20:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2042171000000741 INTRODUCTION xxxi to have provided indiscriminately for every aspect of the needs of the stables from buying horses down to the provision of a bit. Although the steward was in charge of the stables, these expenses were always more carefully distinguished from other household expenses than most, as Henry Taylor proved in 1617-19 when he returned separate accounts as steward and as ' officer appointed to defray the stable charges at Syon and London '. Brathwait reflects this distinction when he writes of the office of gentleman of horse as ' not properly of household, yet annexed unto it; so that, if the chief officers do, either in the said gentleman or any else belonging to the stable, find offences, they may correct and punish the same; but they are not to set down what number of horses (either of the Earl's, their own or other men's) shall be allowed in the stables, parks or horse pastures; nor what allowance shall be made to them in hay or provender; neither appoint any horses to any journey, but to leave these things to the discretion of the gentleman ', and Brathwait provides a place for the gentleman at the chief officers' board in Hall. The yeoman of the horse Brathwait regarded as especially in charge of provender and, like the gentleman rider and grooms, under the direction of the gentleman of horse 1. As Lord Burghley commented, ' thy extraordinaries . . . always surmount the ordinary by much ' and he reckoned that payments outside the household would be at least double those within2. These extraordinary payments were called ' foreyn payments '. The ninth Earl of Northumberland tried to list them in 1597-98 and noted these items: New Year's gifts to the royal household; the Countess's pension; annuities; books; suits in law; purchase of land; payment of debts; livery money in the Court of Wards; subsidies; house rents; carriages; bills of riding and outward charges except for those attending the Earl; gardens, walks and outward works; boathire; paper, ink, wax and carriage of letters; cowper; scavenger; interest on money borrowed; and apparel for pages and footmen. In theory there was a distinction between such expenses as these and those incurred for the Earl's private purse, which he noted at the same time as rewards and gifts; money lost in play; the Earl's travelling charges; apparel; tobacco; and necessaries ' as lace, poynts, rybands, &c.' 3. In practice, the distinction was not wholly kept and most of the items listed as belonging to his privy purse appeared often enough under the heading of ' foreyn payments ', though ' livery money ' in the sense of money delivered the Earl, including money lost in play, was usually kept separate on the accounts. Sometimes the Earl designated one of his gentlemen of chamber ' pursebear ' or ' disburser for the privy purse ', but that was no more intended to give that officer complete charge of these aspects of expenditure than the more frequent title ' payer of foreyn payments ' did for what may more strictly be called foreyn payments. The responsibility for these important items was, rather, deliberately distributed among several of the household officers at any time. Besides making almost every officer a ' payer of some foreyn payments ', the Earl from time to time appointed officers with a special responsibility for some aspect of foreyn payments or privy purse expenses—disbursers for apparel, for books and necessaries, and for surveying of land, to name only a few examples. In addition, occasional accounts were returned by the secretary and by the solicitor to the Earl. 1 Brathwait, 13. 2 Burghley, 64. 3 S.H.MSS. U. I. 2, a loose sheet, ' Steward's charge '.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 01 Oct 2021 at 22:20:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2042171000000741 xxxii INTRODUCTION Both Richard Brathwait and Lord Montague had very definite ideas on the place of the secretary in the household. Brathwait, after expounding the learning which he expected of an Earl's secretary, commented: ' as he carries the name of a Secretary, so ought he to be very secret, and not to make shew of his knowledge and credit, by blabbing abroad that which he should keep secret and unrevealed '. The secretary was to have ' a closet, with cupboards of drawing boxes and shelves, therein and upon to place in due order, all letters received from the king's Majesty, from the Lords of the Privy Council, and from other noblemen and gentlemen ' and was to be in charge of the evidence house which Brathwait thought every Earl ought to have, 'for the Earl ought to have more care of the safe keeping of his evidences than either of his plate or jewels '1. Lord Montague required his secretary not to wear his livery except upon special occasions, but to wear as his upper gar- ment in the house ' a comely black cloak ' as more in keeping with the dignity of an officer who was to be ' a man of a good, grave discretion, and especially very secret' 2. Although the term was sometimes loosely associated with such servants as Carleton the controller and Timothy Elks, a reader to the Earl for a short time during his imprisonment, only two men are known to have held the position of secretary to the Earl—Francis Wycliffe from 1596 to 1598 and Hugh Potter from 1627 to 1630. Judging by the accounts which they submitted, both were primarily concerned with suits in law and legal expenses. It is difficult to distinguish their function within the household from that of the officer designated the Earl's ' solicitor '. The Earl customarily retained the services of a number of lawyers practising in the various courts, to all of whom he paid both a retaining fee and separate fees for individual cases. In addition, a household officer was usually made specially responsible for accounting for his legal expenses; that officer was generally termed the Earl's solicitor 3. In the audit-period 1595-96, a household account was returned jointly by John Carvell as solicitor and Hugh Kenrick as attorney; but this was exceptional. Sometimes two officers accounting separately appear to have had responsibility for legal affairs; thus, in 1597-98 Francis Wycliffe accounted as secretary and John Carvell is known to have presented an account as solicitor, but it is lost. Probably in this important aspect of his household management, the Earl took an especial interest himself, for he was not a man to neglect his evidences, as is shown by the survival of so many of them and of the evidence house which he built at Syon. In addition to the officers who returned accounts, there were of course many other household servants filling less important positions in the household, including a few women acting as housekeepers, launderers, nurses and maids to the Countess and the children, and even as weeders in the gardens. To each servant a quarterly wage was paid, for each board was provided or ' board-wages ' in lieu 4. Every man in the household, from the steward or cofferer down, was in the livery of the

1 Brathwait, 17-18. 2 Montague, 192. 3 For the significance of the terms ' solicitor ' and ' attorney ' in this period, see W. S. Holdsworth, A History of the Common Law, vi (1937), 431-57, and T. F. T. Plucknett, A Concise History of the Common Law (1948), 214-16. 4 See Appendix III and cf. Howard, Appendix xxxviii; Huntingdon, 354; Rutland, 260-62, 296-300; B.M., Stowe MS. 774, passim, and Add. MS. 19,208, fos. 42-51.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 01 Oct 2021 at 22:20:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2042171000000741 INTRODUCTION xxxiii Earl—azure blue cloth with a cognizance of silver bearing the Percy half-moon— for which commonly an allowance of 10 s. a year was made, while pages and the like were at the Earl's ' finding ' for all clothing. Certain offices also carried by tradition ' fees ', perquisites of the office or their equivalent in money. Thus, the yeoman of the cellar, the baker and the brewer claimed in 1587 the profit of bran, grain and empty casks and vessels and the grooms of the stable in 1599 the stable dung 1. For the most part, the Earl could rely upon his chief officers to keep order in his household. Lord Montague laid the burden on his steward and in doing so has provided a list of possible offences against order which gives us a lively insight into the peccadilloes of household servants in Elizabethan times: I will that in civil sort he do reprehend and correct the negligent and disordered persons and reform them by his grave admonition and vigilant eye over them, the riotous, the contentious, and quarrellous persons of any degree, the re- vengers of their own injuries, the privy mutineers, the frequenters of tabling, carding, and dicing in corners and at untimely hours and seasons, the conveyers of meat and other matter out of my house, the haunters of alehouses or suspicious places by day or by night; the absenters from their charge, and lodging abroad without leave, and they that have leave of absence that do not return home at their time limited without lawful let 2. Brathwait suggested a set of instructions for the chief officers on how to deal with offenders in noble houses. For the first offence, the chief officers were to call the offending party before them in the counting house and there admonish him; for the second, ' if he be a gentleman, ye shall imprison him in the counting house, under the custody of an yeoman usher; if he be an yeoman or groom, then to imprison him in the porter's lodge ' for as long as in the chief officers' discretion the fault deserved. But if the miscreant commit a third offence, he was to be called into the counting house, ' the greatest part of my servants being there assembled, and you shall openly make recital of all his offences, and take from him his livery, or at the least his badge, and pay him such wages as to him is due, discharging him from coming within my house, that he may be an example to others ' 3. ' This I must truly testify for servants out of experience ', the ninth Earl of North- umberland told his son, ' that in all my fortunes, good and bad, I have found them more reasonable than either wife, brother, or friends '. But ' you must not expect to find gods of them for knowledge, nor saints for life . . . since officers are men for the most part, if it be well marked, but of the ordinary strain of understanding ' and the first principle in household management he held to be ' to understand your own estate generally better than any your officers ' 4. The old proverb ran ' the eye of the master maketh the horse fat ' and that was as true of good household management as it was of breeding horses, both tasks which the ninth Earl did supremely well. 1 See Jones, 56-57, and the references there quoted, especially Brathwait, 16, 26; cf. document no. 5 of Part II. 2 Montague, 186. Cf. Stanley, /3, 46 and Whytehorne, perhaps the fullest account of life below stairs in Elizabethan times available to us. 3 Brathwait, 5. 4 Harrison, 74-76. C

1 E. Peragallo, Origin and Evolution of Double-entry Book-keeping (New York, 1938), 36; see also Littleton & Yamey, 114-74. 2 Littleton & Yamey, 202-14. 3 Littleton & Yamey, 98. 4 N. Denholm-Young, Seignorial Administration in England (1937), 126-27.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 01 Oct 2021 at 22:20:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2042171000000741 INTRODUCTION xxxv tieth century 1, and examination of a cross-section of estate and household accounts for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries leaves no doubt that it was by this system, and not by double entry book-keeping, that accounts were kept by the landed classes in the period 2. The household accounts of the ninth Earl of Northumberland may not be regarded as typical, but their form does not differ materially from that of other extant noble accounts of the Elizabethan age and their survival in quantity permits a study of the processes by which they were produced at every stage. The estate accounts form a separate series 3, but the Earl employed only one auditor for both estate and household. His duties seem fairly summarized by Lord Montague's description of the office of his auditor: I will that mine Auditor at the time appointed for mine audit do repair to the place and house of my then abode, and do take the accounts of my Steward of Household, Clerk of Kitchen, and all other my inferior officers domestical, of all manner of provisions, receipts, and disbursements by them made, and any way incident or belonging to their several charges, and faithfully and diligently do peruse and examine the books, tales, stores and bills of every of them; and do cast, gather, sum up and divide the same into their proper and peculiar titles; that done, I will that he call unto accounts, my receiver-general, wood- wards, clerks of iron works, and all other my mean collectors and accountants to render their reckonings of all such several sums of money as they or any of them may justly be charged withal either by estreats, court rolls, or otherwise, as well as for arrearages, rents, revenues, fines, perquisites of courts and wood- sales, as also of all other profits for that year in any sort or by means accruing and growing due unto me. And when he has with mature and ripe judgment duly and thoroughly examined and summed every several charge and digested them orderly and severally into fair and perfect books, my will is, that he, in distinct and ample sort, declare the same unto me in the presence of my steward, and the rest of my principal officers; and this done that afterwards he do ingross into parchment every of the said particular accounts of every particular manor, of intent that the several charge of every such accountant may severally and particularly appear; and deliver the same unto me, with all the rest of the accounts in convenient time after mine audit ended, to the end they may be placed and remain among mine evidences always ready to be produced upon any just occasion 4. For these services, the author of ' A Breviate ' laid down, the auditor was ' to have his diet with bouge of allowance into his chamber, for thence he is not to depart before he has ended his audit, the charge and trust being so great, so well betwixt the lord and his accountants, as betwixt party and party. He is to have his man allowed in the house, his horses at the lord's charge, and his fee paid before his departure, and to attend twice a year, or yearly, to keep audit, at the pleasure of the lord ' 5. 1 R. Brown, A History of Accounting and Accountants (Edinburgh, 1905), 58. 2 See the Select Bibliography of this volume. 3 See James, especially xxiv-xxxiv. 4 Montague, 191. 5 Breviate, 328.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 01 Oct 2021 at 22:20:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2042171000000741 xxxvi INTRODUCTION The audit-periods in the household normally approximated to one year, but in the early years of the ninth Earl's time the Percy household audit was not kept so regularly, with the result that one finds audit-periods varying between nine and 37 months. After 1595, apart from 1600-02 when the Earl was visiting the Low Countries, auditing became more regular and the accounts were normally rendered for a year ending in late January or early February. The audit itself would take place at one of the southern houses in March or April. Thus Henry Taylor accounted in 1610-11 for: The dyett of his lordship's auditor and ij clerkes sittinge at the howse on Tower Hill in takinge the accomptes as well of his Lordship's baylifes, ministers and receavors for the Southe partes as also of his Lordship's officers and servauntes in howse by the space of vij weekes ended the ix th. of Aprill 1610, xiiij li.; a buckeram bagge to put the books and billes of the houshold accomptes in, xx d.; and for paper bookes and paper for this Accomptant & spent at the tyme of the audytt, iij s. vj d. The estate accounts for the North Parts had already been audited in Yorkshire at Michaelmas 1. The initial stages of accounting were the responsibility of the officers of the household. They had to produce for the auditor the appropriate receipts for ex- penditures incurred, the bills of tradesmen and their books of record. Tradesmen's bills were normally written on small pieces of paper and signed by the payee when the account was settled. Servants' claims for board-wages and for riding charges were presented and receipted in the same way. Often a composite bill was compiled within the household, from a number of bills for smaller amounts from one tradesman or from a collection of purchases of one type of commodity both with and without the presentation of bills. These ' great bills ', as they were generally called, were no doubt made the more conveniently to explain the expenditure to the auditor 2. An important part of household management was concerned with purveyance and the care of food and many of the accounting papers which survive from noble households are devoted to various aspects of this great problem. For, as Van Meteren from Antwerp commented, the English ' feed well and delicately, and eat a great deal of meat; and as the Germans pass the bounds of sobriety in drinking, these do the same in eating ' 3. On special occasions, such as the visit of King James to the Earl of Northumberland at Syon on 8 June 1603, sums running into hundreds of pounds might be spent on food and drink for the household and guests in one day—King James's visit cost the Earl more than £364 4. At all times, a nobleman was expected to offer hospitality at his table to any passer-by who could claim the dignity of a gentleman. An anonymous writer testified in the ninth Earl of Northumberland's lifetime that he was no exception among noblemen in this respect but rather kept one of the best tables in the kingdom, ' wherein I mean not 1 [123]. 2 See documents nos. 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 of Part I. Cf. B.M., Add. MS. 33,508, passim; Hunting- don, 389 (butcher's bill), 392 (clothing), and 396 (grocer's). s Q. Jones, 64. 4 [85], [86]- Cf. North, 287-90, for Lord North's expenses at Kirtling on the Queen's visit, Sept. 1577.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 01 Oct 2021 at 22:20:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2042171000000741 INTRODUCTION xxxvii only the diet of flesh and fish which answer to the stuff of our clothes; but I consider also the bread, wine, salads, oil, vinegar, fruit, sweetmeats, linen, plate, and lights which at the table account as the petty toys of our attire ' 1. The delicacies for the table were purchased by the ' cater '. One contemporary description of a eater's duties was: He is to inquire and look for in the country, as he travels, what dainties there be, as young chickens, pigeons, or such like, at the first coming of them, and likewise for fowl and fish, of all sorts, according to the season of the year, and to be acquainted with such fowlers and fishers as be the best takers of fowl and fish, to be accustomed with them, so shall he be the best served, and before others; and to have a special care that such dead fowl as he buys be new taken, sweet and good, for else it is not serviceable but money lost so bestowed.2 The ' acates ' for a noble household were often very varied; thus, Francis Lucas, clerk of the kitchen to the Earl of Northumberland, listed under the title of ' acates and necessaries ' in 1587 ' pigs, geese, capon, conies, kids, chickens, pigeons, mallards, shovelers, herons, curlews, pheasants, woodcocks, snipes, teals, peewits, partridges, plover, quails, larks, small birds and such like with divers other necessaries by diet' 3. Jones has commented that ' there was scarcely a living creature which habited the air, the dry land, or the waters under the earth whose right to exist was not sounded by these zealous officials ' 4. The cater normally received his instructions from, and accounted to, the clerk of the kitchen. The clerk, under the general supervision of the steward of household, was usually in charge of some eight offices concerned with the receipt and storage of supplies of food, fuel and light—the granary, cellar, buttery (for beer), larder (for dressed meats, fish, dairy produce), pantry (for bread), ewery (for linen and candle- sticks) , scullery and wood-yard. At every stage a careful- check was kept upon the receipt and expenditure of all these items by a series of books: as Brathwait remarked, the clerk of the kitchen ' should be very quick and very ready with his pen, and in casting accounts ' 6. It was only by such records that a check could be kept upon purloining of supplies by unscrupulous servants and an accurate estimate could be made of the requirements of the household for ' gross provision ' of grain, fuel, lighting material and the like. For commonly the demesne supplied much of these needs of the household and the deficiency was provided for by bulk purchases at advantageous occasions in the year. Without such detailed accounting, too, great abuses could occur in a large household which might well at any time find itself divided between the several residences of the master and perhaps in addition the ' travelling household ' accompanying the nobleman on some journey. The clerk of the kitchen or other officer accounting for provisions recorded daily the costs of provisions bought, often separating the charges for each of the two main meals (dinner in the late forenoon and supper in the early evening) and noting the

1 B.M., Hargrave MS. 226, no. 21, ' A Character of the most excellent Lord, the Earle of Northumberland ', fo. 242V. 2 Breviate, 339. 3 See document no 5. of Part II. Cf. Howard, 77-86. 4 Jones, 66. 5 Brathwait, 19; see also Jones, chs. iv and v.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 01 Oct 2021 at 22:20:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2042171000000741 xxxviii INTRODUCTION cost of ' necessaries ' such as flour, spice and wine at the end of the week. Sub- sequently, these costs would be rearranged under titles such as ' butcher ' and ' butter and eggs ' and set out weekly; items bought in bulk like wine, beer and fuel were often dealt with separately at the end of the year, but their consumption would be noted weekly. This type of record was often known as a ' book of provisions '; sometimes, one meets such a phrase as a ' book of daily expenses ' or weekly expenses as the case may be 1. Books of provision were complementary to, but distinct from, another type of record, the breving book. Where books of provision are concerned with disbursements, breving books deal with the actual consumption of items in the household. In the Percy household at least, the most usual form gave the quantity of meat and acates consumed with the cost or provenance (i.e. ' store ' or ' present') for each main meal daily, with the necessaries of diet, purchase of kitchen ware and the like at the end of the week, when the quantities and charges for each title of expenditure were summed. The remainder at the end of the week was then recorded. Usually this involved listing or tabulating, for each of the categories of items in the officer's charge, the remainder of the previous week, the receipts and expenses in terms of consumption for this week, and finally the remainder for this week. Upon occasion the officer also recorded the disbursements on provisions for the whole week under titles 2. Naturally, a number of variations in the manner of keeping breving books occur in the records of the Elizabethan aristocracy. To quote only one other instance, sometimes the remainder, receipts, expenses and final remainder were recorded daily, often with a note at the bottom of each day's entries listing the presents received, the items brought from store (perhaps from other houses of the nobleman nearby) and the expenses. In such breving books, the consumption is not generally given for each main meal separately 3. A particularly interesting feature of both books of provision and breving books is that they commonly contain notes recording the numbers of the check-roll and of ' strangers ' or guests and, often enough, their names as well. The officer sometimes began by setting out a check-roll, either of the entire household or of that part of it resident for the time being at the house for which he was accounting. The names of guests are often noted at the end of each day's record and, where this is done, usually separately for dinner and supper; other officials noted the names of guests only at the end of the week. Menservants attending chief officers of the household and those brought by guests were indicated by a number after the name of their master and not, as a rule, by their own names. Where the numbers only of the check-roll and of' strangers ' are given at the end of the week, the total number of main meals served guests is given and not the number of guests being entertained 4. All this information was important to the officers of the household in estimating the amount of food required both for the formal meals and for the ' liveries ', care-

1 See documents nos. 9 and 10 of Part I. Cf. Buckingham, passim; Derby, e.g. 13-19; Lestrange, 481-90. 2 See documents nos. 7 and 8 of Part I. 8 A good example of this type of breving book is B.M., Harl. MS. 4,782; see e.g. fos. 2-68. 4 See document no. 7 of Part I. Cf. e.g. Derby, 19.

, 1-*'- r. I 1 *r -* -

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_ -y- - '-fc

• r PLATE I A sheet from a breving book (see p. 9) showing the names of guests at dinner and supper with the Earl at Bath on Sunday, 25 April 1591

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 01 Oct 2021 at 22:20:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2042171000000741 INTRODUCTION xxxix fully graded and granted to each member and each guest every day. Lord Montague, for example, required his clerk of the kitchen to ' resort often into the cellar, buttery and pantry to see that their offices be cleanly kept, and well ordered, and that they serve wine, beer and bread to comers at the bar, and that he do charge in his book, at every week's end, the expenditure of wine, beer and bread; and the remain of every their several offices together with a note in the margin of his hand book, of the days, number and names, of strangers repairing to mine house that week ' 1. The Northumberland Household Book contained a full statement of the liveries of bread, beer, wine, white-lights, and wax allowed each person in the household daily according to their status and of the liveries of wood and coals allowed each chamber 2. Thus, gentlemen of the household were allowed in the fifth Earl of Northumber- land's time half a loaf of household bread, a pottle of beer and two white lights, and in winter the chief officers of household were allowed a peck of coals daily. The custom persisted in Elizabethan times and the quantities of provisions required were often laid down in household regulations. A memorandum in Queen Eliza- beth's household book tells us that one mutton will make ten messes or services; one veal twelve; one pig thirteen; and one stork twenty-four 3. John Smyth of Nibley, again, noted that one quarter of wheat will make 200 cakes of bread, every loaf weighing into the oven 18 ounces, and out of it 16; one quarter of malt and three pounds of good hops will make three hogsheads of beer, every hogshead in wine measure sixty gallons and in other fifty; and one quarter of wheat and ten strikes of malt will find every week forty persons in any nobleman's house 4. Good house- keeping necessitated this sort of precision and care and the keeping of these records permitted both of easy check upon waste and of simple calculation of future needs. Unfortunately for the historian, the same considerations did not apply to bills of fare for everyday meals and they have not, therefore, survived, although records were kept of the menus on grand occasions 5. Apart from provisions, foreyn payments constituted the main expenses of the household and the other major types of preliminary books of accounts are concerned primarily with them. These may be referred to under the generic term ' books of disbursements ', a term which also includes what has been distinguished as ' books of provision '. Commonly one part of any book of disbursements is devoted to receipts, though upon occasion record is made only of expenses. Expenses themselves were first recorded in what was often called a ' book of daily remembrances ', that is to say the items were listed more or less as they occurred without any attempt on the part of the accounting officer to title them 8. Subsequently, expenses were customarily entered under the appropriate titles in a ' book of foreyn payments '. Thus, in July 1603, it is recorded that Edmund Powton, the cofferer to the Earl of Northumberland, had paid out various sums in suits of law ' not yet entered into the book of foreyne paymentes but remayneth in a booke of dalye remembrances'7. Brathwait said of a book of foreyn payments that it ' should be large, that all such payments as are made within a year may be entered into the same. It is to be

'Montague, 198. 2 Northumberland Household Book, 96—101. 3 Antiquaries, 297. 4 Smyth of Nibley Papers, vol. iii, fo. 79. 5 For bills of fare see e.g. Bertie, 473; Leconfield MS. 330, fo. 51*. 6 See document no. 12 of Part I. ' See document no. 14 of Part I.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 01 Oct 2021 at 22:20:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2042171000000741 xl INTRODUCTION divided into several titles, and to every of them left so many leaves as, by estimation, will contain the bills that concern the title '. What those titles were, depended obviously on the nature of the position held by the accounting officer within the household. Brathwait suggested the following: apparel for the Earl and Countess; apparel for the Earl's children; apparel for gentlewomen, pages, footmen and boys; expenses in journeying; suits in law; gifts; foreyn rewards; alms; buildings and reparations ; household stuff and furniture; books bought; physic and chirurgery; surveys and keeping of audits; wages and liveries1. Imprests or advances to the Earl or other officers were sometimes listed in separate books but frequently merely formed a separate title in a book of foreyn payments. The signature of the recipient was demanded for each imprest, whether he was the Earl or the lowliest officer of the household 2. Books of stable charges and of other categories of expenses not included under foreyn payments followed an exactly similar pattern. In all books of disbursements, the items on every page are normally summed and the total given at the end; often, this total is repeated on the cover 3. From the books of particulars, i.e. the breving books and books of disbursements, the auditor and his men compiled the various final accounts, first titling any books of daily expenses which had not been properly made up into divided books of foreyn payments or whatever the expenses were, and checking each item against the bill or other record of the expenditure. Often half-way through the audit-period the nobleman would call for a ' view ' of his accounts, either as a whole or for some part of them. The auditor then produced the ' brief ' of, say, the building charges or the ' brief view ' of the accounts of the whole household 4. The most important documents were, of course, compiled at the final audit. When, in modern parlance, the auditor had received all the explanations which he required from the accounting officer, he produced a draft declaration of account. The term ' declaration of account ' must be regarded as a technical term. In govern- mental practice, a compotus was a summary of the account prepared by the auditor from a schedule drawn up by the officer accounting; a declaration of account was made up by the auditor from the preliminary books of the officer accounting. The distinction applies to the household accounts of the nobility as well6. Draft declarations were often written in a rapid, untidy hand on small sheets of indifferent paper, with the items listed without much order and without any of the set formulae to be found in the final versions of officers' accounts: probably it was these drafts which were ' declared ' to the Earl and his principal officers, as Lord Montague described 6. At the same time, the auditor and his clerks would make other memoranda on equally undistinguished scraps of paper which can be priceless evidence from the point of view of the historian—noting, for example, the initials only of all the house- 1 Brathwait, 46-50. 2 See document no. 11, A, of Part I. 3 See documents nos. 11, 12, and 13 of Part I. Cf. Bertie, 459-73; Howard, passim; and Huntingdon, 361-66. 4See document no. 14 of Part I. Cf. B.M., Stowe MS. 774, fo. 8. 5 See M. D. George, ' Notes on the Origin of the Declared Account ', Eng. Hist. Rev., xxxi (1916), 41-58, and F. C. Dietz, English Government Finance 1485-1558 (Urbana, 1921), 76, 180-81. 6 See the draft declarations listed in Appendix I.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 01 Oct 2021 at 22:20:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2042171000000741 INTRODUCTION xli hold officers returning accounts for that audit-period or the wages paid all the servants of household in the past twelve months 1. The summary household accounts of the Percy family were engrossed, not on to parchment as Lord Montague of Cowdray decreed, but on to strips of paper stitched together to form a length and loosely rolled. Usually about a foot wide, they might be as much as sixteen feet long. The rolls are written in English in a good, formal hand but with Roman numerals throughout and auditor's notes generally in decadent Latin. The heading of the account usually sets out clearly the office or offices held by the person or persons returning the account and the space of time covered. A note at the very top of the roll may give the date of audit 2. The ' charge ' follows the heading, generally beginning in words similar to these: 'The said accountant is charged with ready money by him received within the time of this account, viz. with', written close to the left margin and bracketed together to link with another bracket enclosing all the items of the charge. The order in which the ' receipts ' are detailed is usually ' arrearages ', any sums ' imprest' or advanced out of the coffers or by any officer, rents, revenues and other income derived from the estates of the Earl, and casualties such as sales and loans. The titles and sub-titles of the items are written in margins at the left, the details set out in narrative form enclosed by brackets on either side, and the totals given in columns formed by brackets to the right. The sum of the charge is usually given merely as a figure in the last column on the right hand. The second, and almost always much longer, part of the roll deals with the ' discharge ', after a similar pattern and lay-out. The discharge begins with some such words as: 'whereof The said accountant demands allowance of ready money by him disbursed within the time of this account, viz. in', and the order of titles tends to be ' expenses by diet', ' gross provision ', ' stable charges ', ' foreyn payments ', ' rents resolute ' and ' delivery money '. Immediately beneath the discharge, a note is made of the sum remaining when the total of the discharge is subtracted from the total of the charge. Often, however, sums out of this remainder have been advanced to other officers or to tradesmen, when these ' imprests ' are duly noted and a new remainder calculated. Sometimes further imprests have been made since the audit was taken or ' allowances ' for desperate debts are to be sought of the Earl, when this will be set down and a further final figure reached for the remainder for which the officer (s) returning the account will be held responsible. Frequently, the discharge actually exceeds the charge; in this case, a note is made of the ' super-plussage ' or ' surplussage ' and this sum, if not settled before, will be included in the discharge of the next account. The account rolls are normally concluded by the signature of the auditor, 1 Auditors' memoranda are frequently found with the household rolls in the ' U ' series at Alnwick; for wages lists, see the references in Appendix III. 2 See document no. 15 of Part I, and Part II. Cf. Elizabeth and Hodgson.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 01 Oct 2021 at 22:20:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2042171000000741 xlii INTRODUCTION William Stockdale the elder to 1614 and his son and namesake with less elaboration to his signature thereafter. If the remainder has been paid over to the Earl or is discharged, his signature will also appear. The Earl's signature rarely appears on the account rolls otherwise, though occasionally he signed preliminary books of account to show that he personally had checked an officer's return x; the infrequency of the Earl's signature must not be taken as implying any lack of interest on his part, however, for officers' letters and notes in his own handwriting prove the contrary. Edmund Powton, the cofferer, implored John Carvell the solicitor in 1602 to bring all his relevant documents with him to the audit' though you carry them back again, for you know what has been said and can imagine what will be if you should not have them ready to show ' 2. Denholm-Young argued, when writing of charge and discharge accounts on medieval estates, that ' the balance between the two halves of the account, the charge and the discharge, described by Professor Levett as the " spurious net balance ", reveals the object of the document, by the way in which it is usually stated et sic debet. . . , namely the liability of the accounting official and his subordinates ' 3, and there is no doubt that this was regarded by contemporaries as one of the objects of engrossing a declaration of account. After Thomas Percy had managed to rob him of so much money, the Earl of Northumberland wrote angrily to William Stock- dale : ' You may see what a strange arrearage you suffered me to slide into as appears by Percy's account which if I had then as well known as now I should have had means to have freed myself of much loss and more trouble '. But Stockdale replied that' engrossments are more material for matter of records, posterities, and royalties than for any present profits ' 4. Close analysis of the declarations of account shows this to be true. Not every entry arises from a monetary transaction, as a consideration of ' arrearages ' and ' borrowed money' shortly demonstrates. Broadly, three classes of arrearage appear on the accounts. The first is the ' spurious net balance ' of Professor Levett, the excess of the charge over the discharge on the last account of the officer, possibly supplemented by the remainders on the accounts of others in some way subordinate to him. For example, Edmund Powton in 1599-1600 acknowledged as ' arrearages ' not only the remainder upon his own account for 1598-99 but also the remainders upon the last accounts of John Carvell, solicitor; Henry Meere, lately receiver for the Earl in Somerset and Dorset; and Roger Thorpe, lately receiver in Yorkshire 5. The other two types of ' arrearage ' are interrelated. When the officer has advanced money to another person for any reason, the details are noted at the end of the ' discharge ' side of his account as an ' imprest '; if this money is' repaid or the officer relieved of responsibility for it in some other way, e.g. by the delivery of the goods for which it was advanced, then the item will appear as an ' arrearage ' on the officer's account in the next audit-period but the sum will be discharged and nothing more will be heard of it. Thus, John Wilshire the paler received £19 10 s. in two sums of

1 Cf. the signatures of Stanhope, B.M., Add. MS. 34,785, and of Capel, Add. MS. 40,632 C, fo. I4r. 2 Leconfield MS. D 22/2/1, 17 Jan. 1601/02. s N. Denholm-Young, Seignorial Administration in England (1937), 127- 4 S.H.MSS. P. II. 2 p and Q. I. 31. 6 [59].

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 01 Oct 2021 at 22:20:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2042171000000741 INTRODUCTION xliii £13 and £6 10 s. towards £30 for paling in the Little Park at Petworth in 1601, as we learn from the ' imprests ' at the end of Edward Francis' account for 1600-02 1. In 1602-03, however, the £30 was paid in full and an item recording the expenditure appears on the discharge of Francis' account 2. Therefore, the £19 10 s. which had been advanced to Wilshire is entered as an ' arrearage ' on the charge in 1602-03, but that is the final entry of the sum. Supposing, on the other hand, that a sum of money has been advanced for some goods but they have never been delivered and the bill has never been settled, then the item will recur on every account of the officer concerned as both an ' arrearage ' and an ' imprest'; the constant charging and discharging of the item will serve to keep the entry on the books and relieve the officer of responsibility. The £20 imprested Mr Richard Gossham, the London goldsmith, upon a bargain of new plate in 1594-95 was noted in this way on all Edward Francis' accounts between that time and 1604-05 when the auditor noted against the item as an imprest ' This is accounted for in the cofferer's account of this year'3. Entries of ' borrowed money ' on household accounts are even more misleading at first sight. Most of the borrowing by the ninth Earl of Northumberland was short-term and for sums between £100 and £500, usually for six months at a time at ten per cent interest upon bonds. When a loan was renewed, the money borrowed was discharged and charged again, yet the Earl's indebtedness had remained un- altered and no money had passed hands at this stage. This process seriously distorts the statements on summary household accounts of the indebtedness of the nobleman and provides a major pitfall for the unsuspecting researcher. The calculation of the actual indebtedness outstanding at the end of an audit- period and of the course of any individual loan demands careful collation of the dates given. Take, for example, the loans which the Earl made of Dame Bennet Webb in the 1600's. The following table shows the information on the various accounts and on a supplementary auditing paper for the period: Charge: 10 March 1601/02, £100 4; 3 times to 13 Dec, 1602, £300 5; 4 times to 19 Dec, 1603, £600 6. Discharge: 2 times to 13 Dec, 1602, £300 5; 16 June 1603, £100 6; 18 Oct., 1603, £200 7; 19 Dec, 1603, £100 7; 9 May 1604, £300 '. The discharge of £300 on 9 May 1604 suggests that both the £200 and the £100 loans indicated were settled on the same day. Assuming that the loans were six-monthly, the discharges of £200 on 18 October 1603 and of £100 on 19 December indicate borrowings of similar sums on 18 April 1603 and 19 June 1603 respectively. The discharge of 9 May indicates that the loans must have been renewed on 18 October and 19 December and this accounts for a total of £600 on four occasions in the audit- period 1603-04. The discharge of £100 on 16 June 1603 shows that the £100, which from the argu- ment above was probably borrowed in June 1603, was in fact a renewal. The loan

1 [67]- s [76]. 3 [95]. 1 [66]. * [75]- 6 [83]. ' S.H.MSS. U. I. 3 (2), a loose sheet, ' Borrowed Money 1603 '.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 01 Oct 2021 at 22:20:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2042171000000741 xliv INTRODUCTION was probably taken up on 13 December 1602, the date mentioned on the cofferer's account for 1602-03. The £100 charged on 10 March 1601/02 is known to have been repaid not later than 13 December 1602; probably it was renewed in September. This accounts for £200 of both the charge and discharge to 13 December 1602; probably, the other £100 was in fact a loan taken out in June 1602, and renewed in December. This would give three occasions for charge and two for discharge in 1602-03—June, September, December for charge, September and December for discharge. So it may be concluded that the £100 borrowed of Dame Bennet Webb on 10 March 1601/02 was repaid on 13 December but that meanwhile a further £100 had been borrowed in June. This was constantly renewed at six-monthly intervals until it was repaid in a sum of £300 on 9 May 1604. In addition, £200 had been borrowed in April 1603 and this was renewed in October and was repaid the following May with the £100. Declarations of account provide the quickest means of understanding the finances of a noble household in terms of large figures, where the preliminary accounting papers reveal the detailed, day-to-day transactions, but the purpose for which they were compiled and the limitations of the system of accountancy must be constantly borne in mind. In the Northumberland household there were three main types of declaration—the declaration of the account of an individual officer, the general account, and the brief declaration. Each followed the format described, a format bearing a close resemblance to that of medieval estate accounts. The occurrence at the end of some individual declarations of ' rear accounts ' showing the store of gross provision or the indebtedness of the Earl emphasizes the closeness of the system of accountancy to that used in medieval estate records, where a store account is commonly found on the dorse of a money account1. The general account is a composite, shortened version of all the household accounts returned in any particular audit-period and is in fact often headed ' a joint and brief declaration '; it is the nearest approach which will be found to a statement of the budget for the household for the year, but it is not a budget since the idea was alien both to contemporary thought and to the system of accountancy 2. The brief declaration of an individual officer's account is merely a shortened version of the full declaration, serving to give the gist of the account without the details 3. Sometimes the declaration was of expenses only but this was very exceptional in the Percy household 4. The Percy declarations were always engrossed on rolls but in other households declarations were sometimes engrossed into books, with a consequent rearrangement of lay-out; the general principles outlined above hold, however the auditor chose to write the declarations 5.

1 For rear accounts of gross provision, see document no. 16 of Part I and cf. Wharton, 19-21; B.M., Add. MS. 19,191, fos. 66—76, and Harl. MS. 4,782, fo. 130. For rear accounts of borrowed money, see document no. 17 of Part I. For a rear account of horses, see B.M., Add. MS. 19,191, fos. 77-78. 2 See document no. 7 of Part II, and Part III. 3 See document no. 18 of Part I. 1 See Derby, 1-7; Wharton; and B.M., Stowe MS. 774, fo. 31. 6 Elizabeth is an example of a declaration of account written in book form and Wharton of a declaration of expenses set out chronologically rather than under titles.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 01 Oct 2021 at 22:20:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2042171000000741 INTRODUCTION xlv Besides these accounting papers subject to audit, there were other archives arising in a nobleman's house which are primarily documents of record. For any major project of building, whether it was a new house to be built from the ground or an extension to an existing house, it was customary to cause a household officer to compile a ' computation ' or estimate of the costs from a careful inquiry into the quantities and prices of materials required and into the extent to which the household and estate could provide both labour and material. Such records might be gathered together into a commonplace book with sundry other notes—for example, recipes for cooking, methods of curing the diseases of horses, and notes of measurements of notable houses which the nobleman or his officers had visited 1. Inventories are the most significant of these documents of record. Since detailed ground-plans of Elizabethan houses rarely survive, inventories are often the main source of our knowledge of the lay-out of a great house in the period. There were three main occasions when inventories were commonly made—when a nobleman succeeded to his title or first took up residence in a house; when a change was made in the officer in charge of the particular aspect of the household affected; and when the nobleman died. Each type of inventory is complementary to the others; given a series of the different types, the historian is in a position to assess the condition and the state of the furnishing of each of the nobleman's houses. An inventory taken on gaining possession was concerned primarily with recording the state of the house and of the fixtures; it is as likely as not to be in narrative form, as was the view of Petworth when the eighth Earl of Northumberland came to take possession in 1574 after his brother's execution 2. A list was generally made of the fixtures in each room, with or, more usually, without their value; an inventory of Syon House in 1593 lists as fixtures ' plate locks, stocklocks, glass, bars of iron, bolts, handles, mattings, iron casements, wooden casements, wainscot shuttings, sheets of lead, cisterns of lead, cocks, dresser boards, tables, forms, tressels, and cupboards, with doors and iron work unto them belonging '. Occasionally, a plan of the house was attached to this type of inventory, often with no more than the barest indication of the size of the main wings 3. Inventories of household goods and of apparel generally date from a transfer of responsibility within the household. Thus, when Peter Dodsworth became manservant to the Lord Percy in 1613, an inventory was compiled of the items of apparel for which he assumed responsibility 4. Household manuals require officers to write inventories upon their appointment. Lord Montague of Cowdray, for instance, set it down as the first duty of his clerk of kitchen at his entrance ' to take a perfect inventory of all the utensils, implements and necessaries within every inferior office as Hall, Cellar, Buttery, Pantry, Ewery, Kitchen, Bakehouse, Laundry, Scul- lery, Larders, Porter's Lodge, and Brewhouse, and that he do indent the same tripartite, and deliver one part thereof to my Steward of Household, another to 1 See document no. 1 of Part I. Cf. G. R. Batho, 'Notes and Documents on Petworth House, 1574-1632 ', Sussex Archaeological Collections, xcvi (1958), 108-34. 2 See document no. 1 of Part IV. Cf. Verney. 3 Syon MSS. H. I. 3 and B. XIII. 2 c. 4 See document no. 3 of Part IV. Cf. documents nos. 2 and 4 of Part IV; the inventories of household stuff, including plate, linen and books in the Fairfax Inventories, of goods in More, 288, and of pictures in Lumley.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 01 Oct 2021 at 22:20:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2042171000000741 xlvi INTRODUCTION the Officer of the Plate, and that he do keep the third remaining with himself'1. Inventories giving the value of goods which were compiled in the lifetime of the nobleman usually arise from a desire to compare expenses or to consider sales; the term ' inventory ', indeed, was commonly used for an abstract from accounts listing, say, the outstanding debts due from the estates in a particular county. Most of the inventories which survive in noble archives are inventories for probate. The law required the making of an inventory of the deceased's goods and chattels by or in the presence of persons qualified to assess their value, whether or not there was a will 2. The valuations made were generally low, as they tend to be to this day. The inventory does not, of course, include all the property in a given house; fixtures and property held in the right of the deceased's wife were naturally excluded and many items were dismissed summarily. No account was taken of freehold but an inventory of leases had to be attached or included in the main inventory. Despite their somewhat cursory nature, inventories for probate are often very long, being customarily written on narrow vellum, where other inventories were sometimes written on paper sheets 3. An account had to be returned to the Prerogative Court of the debts due to the deceased and owed by him, as well as the inventory of his goods, chattels and leases. Because of the exclusion of freehold property, the executor's account might show a wealthy landowner like the Earl of Northumberland to have died without a spare penny to his name. Indeed, it did in the case of the ninth Earl, as the administration account demonstrates 4. When the value of the Earl's goods, chattels, debts, and rents due in his lifetime but not paid was set against the cost of his funeral, debts, and wages and allowances due to his dependants in his lifetime but not paid, the latter exceeded the former by £412 15 s. 7 d. In fact, the Earl held lands which brought in a net revenue of £12,758 in the year of his death, and was of course far from bankrupt. The control of the household by this great variety of record and check could never be perfect, even when the master was as vigilant as the ninth Earl of Northum- berland was in his mature years. He confessed to his son in his Advice that he had never found a way to ' free me from absolute cozenage ', but ' I must needs say, that it is the master's fault, if an evil and dishonest servant serve him long '. Mis- takes of accountancy were inseparable from a system which was largely based on the use of Roman numerals and which was concerned rather with record than with the establishment of a true balance. But, given their limitations, the household papers could show the master ' when your causes proceed well or evil, slowly or swiftly ' and can enable the historian to reconstruct a very full picture of the nobleman's fortunes 5. 1 Montague, 197-98. Cf. the inventory of kitchen utensils in B.M., Harl. MS. 4,782, fo. ig6v. 2 The law was 12 Henry VIII, c. 5, s. 4. For a discussion of probate inventories, see S. Jayne, Library Catalogues of the English Renaissance (1956), 9—12. 3 See document no. 5 of Part IV and cf. e.g. Huntingdon, 355-61; Leicester, 28-48; North- ampton; Ramsey, 323-42 and Rutland, 344—49. Occasionally, a testator compiled an inventory of his goods to ensure their preservation and proper distribution; see e.g. the inventories attached to the will and codicils of Elizabeth, Countess of Shrewsbury (' Bess of Hardwick ') in the Chats- worth MSS. 4 See document no. 7 of Part IV. 5 Harrison, 77, 84.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 01 Oct 2021 at 22:20:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2042171000000741 INTRODUCTION xlvii III THE FINANCES OF THE NINTH EARL OF NORTHUMBERLAND * The income of the ninth Earl of Northumberland was derived almost entirely from land. He had no patent of monopoly and indulged in no large-scale investment. Apart from the Governorship of Tynemouth Castle, to which he was appointed in 1591 at a fee of £100 a year and which, like his father before him, he was to lose temporarily as a prisoner of State 2, the only office of profit under the Crown to which he was appointed was the Captaincy of the Gentlemen Pensioners, which he held from 1603 to 1606 at a fee of £280 a year 3. The estates of the Percy family lay in some eight counties of England and Wales. The nucleus of the family lands was not in Northumberland, the county from which they took their title, but in Yorkshire, where their possessions included Spofforth, Topcliffe, Tadcaster and Leconfield, all acquired in the two centuries after the Norman Conquest, as well as Wressell, which came to them in 1380. In 1582, three years before the ninth Earl's succession, the net rental from Yorkshire was valued at £1,177 out °f a total net income from land of £3,602 4. The estates of the Percies in Northumberland—Alnwick, Warkworth, Newburn, Prudhoe and Langley—were, on the other hand, largely acquired in the fourteenth century and their net value in 1582 was only £826, to which the Tynemouthshire lands formerly held by Tynemouth Priory and administered as a separate unit added £703. In Cumberland, the chief possessions of the family, Cockermouth and Egremont, had equally been acquired only in the fourteenth century and at this time yielded a mere £351. The Percy lands in the south were more dispersed, but far from insignificant financially. Chief amongst them was the Honour of Petworth, in the hands of the family since 1150. Other estates in the south at this time were the manors of Laugharne in Carmarthenshire, Stogursey, Week Fitzpayne and Shockerwick in Somerset, and Haselbury Bryan in Dorset, besides the two Northumberland Houses in London. The total net income of the ' South Parts ' in 1582 was £545. There was the customary division of lands upon the death of the eighth Earl in 1585 to provide for the maintenance of his widow 5. The ninth Earl held that he was badly treated by the division; his servants persuaded him to pass to his mother all the western lands as part of her dowry and to pay her £1,085 a year in settlement of the remainder, so that, according to his account of the matter, ' she received all the best profit that the western lands would afford, and the rest without trouble or care was laid at her doors '. He contended that out of the western lands ' she 1 This section is based upon the editor's article, ' The Finances of an Elizabethan Nobleman ', in the Economic History Review, 2nd Series, ix (1957), 433^5°< where tables giving fuller statistics will be found. The information derived from the discovery at Petworth, since the writing of that article, of the household accounts for the period 1620-30 has been incorporated. 2 See Cal. S.P. Dom. Eliz., Addenda 1566-79, xix. 57 and Northumberland County History Committee: A History of Northumberland, viii (1907), ed. H. H. E. Craster, 160 if. 3 [83]- 4 The figures given for the income are to the nearest £; those for 1582 are taken from Syon MS. A. I. 8, a valuation of the eighth Earl of Northumberland's lands by William Stockdale the elder. 5 The demise is Syon MS. F. I. 6 (1), 19 Aug. 1585.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 01 Oct 2021 at 22:20:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2042171000000741 xlviii INTRODUCTION received more fines in her lifetime, being but £120 yearly, than I did of all the lands I had in England besides 'x. The Countess also had an income in her own right; as the eldest daughter and co-heiress of John, the last Lord Latimer, she was en- titled to lands in ten different southern and midland counties which yielded a net revenue of £111 in 1580 2. In his Advice to his Son, which he revised in the Tower in 1609, the Earl puts his income in the first years after his succession at £3,000 a year, which is in fact the average delivery from the estates into the household shown on the household accounts between 1585 and 1595. This was not enough for a young man's fancy; within eighteen months, he claims, he was in debt for £15,000 3. Almost all of his estates were entailed by the restoration of the title and lands in 1557 4, and so he and his officers were hard pressed to find means of relief. As a result, woods were sold; ' within a few years was sold the value of £20,000 well worth £50,000, jewellers and silkmen making their nests in the branches ' 5. Where the Earl speaks of £20,000 received from wood sales, the total amount recorded on the summary household accounts as from this source between 1585 and 1600 is only £3,862. Even allowing for the possible inclusion of some of the un- recorded money in the sums ' imprest from the coffers ' or given under the title ' Rents and Revenues ', it is clear that much of the money must have been assigned away before it reached the household at all. In particular, a lot of wood was sold at the Perries' principal seat, Petworth—' in preserving of woods that might easily have been raised the memory of good trees in rotten roots doth appear above ground at this day ', he commented in 1609, ' being forced now for the fuel relief of your house at Petworth to sow acorns, whereas I might have had plenty if either they [his servants] had had care or I knowledge ' e. He attributed much of his trouble to a lack of knowledge of estate affairs and household management. As he said, ' easy supplies and prodigal expenses do ever strive who shall be foremost' and the next source to be tapped was the raising of fines. The western lands were in his mother's hands; ' Northumberland, Cumberland and Sussex being but copyholders of inheritance would yield nothing. A little pittance in Yorkshire remained wherein commodities might be raised; the tenants having few years to come, by persuasion of officers I renewed their estates for twenty-one years, made £1,700 fine, and lost by that bargain almost £3,000 a year till the time was expired ' '. The Earl's memory played him false here, for in fact he raised substantial sums from Northumberland and Sussex at least. In the year following his father's death, the tenants in Northumberland were fined £1,763 8; Sussex is shown on the household accounts alone to have yielded £520 in fines between 1590 and 1595. Lastly, there was the sale of lands. ' Some lands were sold and more would 1 Harrison, 79. 2 James, 211—12; a list of the Latimer lands is given in E. B. De Fonblanque, Annals of the House of Percy (privately printed, 2 vols., 1887), ii. 583. 3 Leconfield MS. 24/1, fo. 10; the figure of ^17,000 given by Harrison, 81, is an error. 4 C.P.R., P. and M., iv. 179, 16 Aug. 1557. 6 Harrison, 82. 6 Harrison, 82. Cf. the ^800 received from wood sales at Petworth in 1585-87, Part II, document no. 2. ' Harrison, 82-83. 8 James, xxxix. Cf. the fines recorded on the household accounts, Part II, documents nos. 2 and 6.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 01 Oct 2021 at 22:20:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2042171000000741 INTRODUCTION xlix have been if I could at under rates '1. Among them was the manor at Carnaby, Yorkshire; £452 was received from fines from the tenants in 1585-87 and a further £373 m 1587-88, yet it was sold for £1,400 in 1587 2. This period of profligacy was over by the early 1590's and the Earl was settling to a wiser management of his affairs. His marriage in 1594 to Dorothy, the widow of Sir Thomas Perrot, improved his income, though not as much as he hoped. The new Countess had a pension from the Crown of £400 a year out of the lands of her father-in-law, Sir John Perrot, and a lease for thirty-one years of his former lands in Wales; in 1604 James I raised her pension to £500 3. She also brought to the Earl the lease of Syon House, Middlesex. In her own estimation, her estate was worth in plate, sheep, cattle and bonds some £3,000 4. Between 1597 and 1604 there was an average delivery into the household of £1,057 a year out of the Welsh leases and the deductions amounted to only £300 annually. These leases, it is true, were held in trust for the Countess's daughter by her first marriage, but the Earl was to succeed in purchasing the leases from the trustees in 1618 for £3,667 5. The lease of Syon was not very profitable in itself; the average revenue was only £140 and the rent alone was £99. But it was a great advantage to have a house so near London and in 1604 the Earl was granted the house in fee simple 6. The Earl's income was, then, improved by £800 a year because of his marriage. At first, the Countess's pension from the Earl was as low as £360; it was raised to £500 a year in Michaelmas 1596, to £600 in 1602 and to £800 in 1607 7. Despite protests from the Countess and her family, she never received more than this, that is to say, pre- cisely what she contributed to the Earl's finances; in his Advice he specifically states that he had looked for a wife who could ' bring with her meat in her mouth to main- tain her expense ' 8 and he evidently found one. His mother's death in October 1596 further increased his income. She had remarried, but the Earl secured the administration of her estate 9. The western lands came back to him, apparently in good order, for the revenue from them added a steady £500 to his rent-roll. He no longer had to pay her dowry and he regained possession of Northumberland House, Aldersgate, which was yielding a revenue of £50 a year, of which £30 was given to the Countess. More important, he secured most of his mother's inheritance from her father; the lands ' lately Lord Latimer's ' produced £169 a year on an average between 1597 and 1604. From time to time he was able to capitalize these assets; he sold Banbury, Oxfordshire, in 1604 for £140, Fittons, Norfolk, in 1608 for £2,500, West Compton, Berkshire, in the same year for £3,400, Dullingham, Cambridgeshire, in the next year for £1,100, and Calver- ton, Buckinghamshire, in 1616 for £3,315 10. He also sold Northumberland House, Aldersgate, in 1607 for £1,000 u. 1 Harrison, 83. a Part II, document no. 2; [8] and [12]. 3 Cal. S.P. Dom. Eliz., ccxlix. 6, June 1594; Cal. S.P. Horn. Jac. I, viii. 46, 29 May 1604. 4 Syon MS. F. II. 1 k. 5 [175]. 6 Cal. S.P. Dom. Jac. I, viii. 89, 4 July 1604; Syon MS. D. XIV. 10 b. '[43]; [75]; Part III, document no. 3. Cf. Syon MS. G. II. 4 h, 20 Mar. 1618/19. 8 Harrison, 94. 8 Syon MSS. H. I. 5, 6, letters of administration, Prerogative Court of York, 6 Apr. 1597, and of Canterbury, 14 Nov. 1597. 10 [83]; [109]; [116]; [122]; [163]. "Part III, document no. 3. D

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 01 Oct 2021 at 22:20:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2042171000000741 1 INTRODUCTION The Earl's income from his estates in the second decade of his earldom, however, was not only augmented because of his marriage and of his mother's death. The deliveries into the household from his other estates increased markedly in these years. Whereas the average annual delivery of rents and revenues from the ' North Parts ' (Yorkshire, Cumberland, Northumberland and Tynemouth) had been approxi- mately £2,050 between 1592 and 1596, it was as much as £4,150 between 1598 and 1604. The income from the lands in each county was greatly increased except for the Tynemouth rents which remained stable at £800. Equally, the delivery from Sussex averaged £460 a year between 1592 and 1596, but between 1598 and 1604 it was as high as £650. These figures are testimony to the good estate management of which the Earl speaks at length in his Advice. By 1609 he was able to state that he had so explained the art of estate management ' by books of surveys, plots of manors, and records, that the fault will be your own, if you understand them not in a very short time better than any servant you have ' 1. This remained a lifelong interest for the Earl and as a result the modern owners of the Percy archives possess a unique collection of plans, surveys and rentals dating from 1590 to 1630. It was the improving of his estate, more even than his marriage, which transformed the Earl from a relatively poor nobleman with a net income of £3,000 a year into the possessor of a secure income from land of more than double that amount. The average total delivery into the household between 1598 and 1604 was as much as £6,650 p.a. The improvements took various forms, all well known to prudent landlords of the seventeenth century, among them purchases of lands and leases to consolidate his inherited holdings. Examples are the purchase of the third part of the seignory of Egremont, Cumberland, from Sir Edward Herbert in 1594 for £3112 and of numerous copyhold tenures and small parcels of land at Petworth, on which the household accounts record an expenditure of £703 between 1592 and 1604. The process was well under way by 1605, when the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot, in which his kinsmen and confidential servant Thomas Percy was implicated, led to the Earl's imprisonment in the Tower. At his trial in Star Chamber in June 1606, the Earl was sentenced to loss of all public offices, imprisonment for life, and a fine of £30,000. In the event, he paid a composition of £11,000 in 1613 and was released in 1621 3. His imprisonment, far from impeding his estate management, permitted him the leisure to study the reports of his officers and to develop a careful policy based on mature judgment. His lands were not sequestrated 4 and the average net income from land as shown on the household accounts for 1607-12 was as high as £7,470. In these years of imprisonment the Earl still busily bought lands and leases. In the later 1610's, for instance, he made extensive purchases in Sussex, notably the manor of Byworth in two moieties in 1617 and 1619, at a cost of over £3,500 for the first and of £800 for the second; Rotherbridge farm in 1618, bought from his

1 Harrison, 77. » S.H.MS. C. IX. 1 b. 3 See G. R. Batho, ' The Payment and Mitigation of a Star Chamber Fine ', The Historical Journal, i (1958), 40-51. 4 The leases were prepared but the sequestration was not executed; see Aln. MSS. L. & P. vol. 10, loose letter endorsed by Sir Julius Caesar, 13 Oct. 1613.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 01 Oct 2021 at 22:20:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2042171000000741 INTRODUCTION li servant, Sir Edward Francis, for £1,250; and the mill at Pagham, from William Morley for £1,817 m 1620 l. Equally, he was granting leases now on carefully calculated principles. Large leaseholds at high rents were being created out of the demesnes; in this way the receipts at Alnwick were nearly trebled between 1581 and 1612 2. Customary tenancies were being replaced by leaseholds for twenty-one years, and as copyhold tenancies fell in, new tenants were being pressed to take out leases at increased rents. Another source of income in this period was the cornmills; in 1607, for example, the Earl thought it worth his while to purchase the lease of Alnwick mills for £220 3. On the other hand, there is little mention of industrial activity on the household accounts; £522 was paid in 1617 to Mr Taylor for his interest in the coal-mines at Newburn, Northumberland, and as much as £277 was received in 1620 from the sale of coal there, but, as James has shown, the mines were never profitable, although the Percies had been conscious of their possible value from at least the 1580's 4. When the Earl's early and misguided leases began to fall in, as they did about 1611-13, he was able to effect great improvements in his income from land. It was in this way, for instance, that he increased his rents in Yorkshire in 1611, sending warrants to his bailiffs telling them ' that now upon his Lordship's new improving of his land in that county it is likely many of the tenants of the worser sort of husbands will be slack in payment of their rents at the days limited in their leases ' and that defaulters should be distrained or ejected 5. Enclosure was another means of adding to the rents. Robert Delaval, his receiver in Northumberland, wrote to him in 1617 to point out the advantages of it: Where there are 20 tenants, more or less in a town, that occupy in common it follows that they are forced to keep in tillage for their cornfields two thirds part of the whole town, by which means that part that lies furthest from the situation of their homes, is the poorest land, being by reason it is furthest off, seldomest manured, and so proves neither kindly for grass nor corn. Therefore, to divide these farms, in four several quarters, would be the best means, to cause enclosure, which breeds both warrens to cattle and hastens the spring, and in time may cause tenants [to] remove their houses to the midst of their several farms, and that part they now have most barren may be thereby as fertile and good as their best. And as leases may expire, by the means of this division, your Lordship may keep one part so divided or more to demesne, which is then fit for your Lordship's use, either to be employed with a store for your necessary provision as for corn growing or cattle feeding or increase of rent6. It was the last alternative which most attracted the Earl. Personal supervision could do more than any one of these measures, however, 1 Byworth, [163], Part III, document no. 4, and Leconfield MS. D.1/D.1, Dec. 1619; Rotherbridge, [175]; Pagham, [179]. 2 James, xli. 3 Part III, document no. 3. 4 Part III, document no. 4; [183]; see James, xliv-xlviii, ' A Mr Taylor, of Tower Hill, London ' (James, xlvi) is Mr Henry Taylor, the servant. 5Aln. MSS. L. & P. vol. 9A, fo. 146, 6 Dec. 1611. •S.H.MS. P. II. 2 u.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 01 Oct 2021 at 22:20:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2042171000000741 Hi INTRODUCTION to raise income, and this was a lesson which the ninth Earl of Northumberland had learnt well. His correspondence with the estate officers shows time and again his intervention in small matters and large; in December 1614, for instance, he discovered that Edward Errington, a bailiff in Tynedale, had for four years been withholding a rent of four nobles and wrote that ' his Lordship wonders that he being a servant and an officer can have the boldness to detain from him such a trifle, only because he could not be charged with it; such tricks . . . breed greater jealousies in masters than they do officers good ' 1. He knew that the constant vigilance of the master over officers was necessary and he equally demanded it of his officers over his tenants. In 1620, he removed George Whitehead, deputy captain of Warkworth Castle, because he had left the district; ' for anything I see you can do little good amongst them [the copyholders], since you live so far off as you will seldom be able to draw any by your persuasions ' 2. When he wrote to offer Mr Stapleton the receivership of his estates in Yorkshire in the same year, he commented: ' you will do it better that liveth in the country than any that cometh but by starts ' 3. The consequence of this kind of active estate management was that the Earl's income increased markedly after 1611. The extraordinarily large delivery into the household in 1614 of £13,302 is probably to be explained by the collection of fines on the renewal of leases then falling in, but in 1616 and 1617 the income had settled and the very satisfactory sum of £11,100 was being yielded by the estates. In 1620, the rents and revenues were as much as £12,330 4. In the years of the Earl's retirement, 1621-32, which he spent largely at Pet- worth, the income, especially from the North Parts, suffered a temporary decline. A series of sharp letters from the Earl to his officers testifies to his troubles. Typical of them is one to John Melton, receiver in the North, in 1623: Melton, though my former loss hath already made me feel the decay of my Northern revenue, yet I am made the more sensible of the general poverty of those parts by the poor reckonings which I -in my particular have received of those demesnes which rest in my hands and the ill proof of the stock upon them. You are best acquainted with the disease and, therefore, use your best means to cure it. For those lands which now lie upon my hands, I approve your advice rather to let them out at such yearly rates as at the present you can make of them, than to grant leases of them in so flat a time. I also like your course for putting out of such as you think will not be able [to] pay their rents, not doubting but you will be well advised of the best means to effect it5. Again, he writes to Robert Stapleton about Yorkshire revenues in the next year: By Melton's letters I understand too much of the poverty of the northern parts, by means whereof, together with the slackness of some who (though able enough) want a spur, I am likely to suffer deeply in my revenue if there be not the quicker means used to prevent it 6.

1Aln. MSS. L. & P. vol. 9A, fo. 190, 10 Dec. 1614. 2 Ibid., fo. 266, 13 Dec. 1620. 3 Ibid., fo. 267, 13 Dec. 1620. 4 [152]; [163]; Part III, document no. 4; [183]. 5 S.H.MSS. P. I. 3 n, fo. 12, 25 Apr. 1623. 6 Ibid., fo. I9V, 15 May 1624.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 01 Oct 2021 at 22:20:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2042171000000741 INTRODUCTION liii The average income shown on the household accounts between 1622 and 1627 is only £10,243. By 1627-28 the situation was evidently in hand, for in that year £11,276 was paid into the household from the estate 1. In 1629-30 he sent his heir on a tour of the northern estates, the first visit made by a Percy heir for sixty years. At the ninth Earl's death, the Percy estates were producing just over £12,750 a year and, moreover, a large number of leases were due to fall in within the next two or three years 2. Even in an age of rising prices, the Earl's record must be reckoned a great achievement. He was as active in his pursuit of revenue as he was in his pursuit of knowledge. In his last years, he resorted to no extreme measures to raise ready money, unless his sale of plate in 1623 for £2,069, which possibly accounts for the compilation of the inventory of plate printed in Part IV of this volume, be regarded as one 3. But throughout his life he was constantly borrowing on a considerable scale, despite his husbanding of his revenues from the early 1590's onwards. Accounts alone will not, of course, reveal total indebtedness, since the incurring of a debt does not always involve a financial transaction. Where the complete household accounts for an audit-period survive, however, it is possible by careful analysis to ascertain the amount of money recorded as borrowed in the period and the amount still outstanding at the end of the period; the survival of the greater part of the ninth Earl's accounts permits us, therefore, to glean a fairly full picture of the Earl's indebtedness. The vast majority of the Earl's loans were small sums of between £100 and £500 which were borrowed for six months at a time on bonds. While this is true at all stages of his career, the year 1600 marks a sharp division in both the nature and the extent of his borrowing. Before 1600, there was no accumulation of debts in respect of borrowed money; the largest sum shown by the household accounts as outstanding at the end of an audit-period in these years was £1,625 in March 1594/95, shortly after the Earl's marriage. The debts of the years when he was sowing his wild oats had been cleared by the raising of extraordinary revenue rather than of heavy loans. After 1600, the story is very different. Where previously money had been repaid within a short time, and there is no record of any renewal of loans, now loans were constantly renewed either from the same creditor or by the raising of new loans from other creditors; of £6,610 known to have been outstanding in March 1603/04, for example, at least £4,110 was composed of small sums which had been constantly renewed in the past one to four years. Before 1600, the Earl's loans were from a variety of types of creditor—members of his family, a few of his gentlemen officers, some Court acquaintances, and tradesmen. Occasionally the money was borrowed upon the security of plate or jewels, but the vast majority of the loans were taken out upon bonds, generally of twice the sum owed. The payment of interest in this early period is rarely mentioned; much of the borrowing appears to have been free of interest. In ten of the dozen or so instances in which it is possible to calculate the rate of interest paid it was the legal 10 per cent; in the other instances the interest was 7 and 8 per cent respectively. From 1600 onwards, on the other hand, the Earl's creditors were predominantly men and women (usually widows) with business 1 Part III, document no. 5. 2 S.H.MSS. U. I. 5, the general account for 1632-33. 3 [207]; see Part IV, document no. 4.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 01 Oct 2021 at 22:20:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2042171000000741 liv INTRODUCTION interests in the City of London, loans were stated to be upon the security of bonds in the case of small sums and of mortgages in the case of large, and interest was regularly paid. In the 1600's and 1610's the interest was usually 10 per cent; in the i62o's, 8 per cent. No one livery company and no one group predominated among the City creditors of the Earl, though two men lent him far more money than any others —Peter Van Lore, the famous jeweller and merchant stranger, in the 1600's and 1610's, and Sir Paul, later Viscount, Bayning, in the 1620's. Apart from the turning point at 1600, there were several periods when the Earl's borrowing reached high totals. Where in March 1604 he had outstanding debts amounting to £6,610, by the time of the revelation of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605 the Earl owed as much as £11,090 for money borrowed, made up of £4,400 owing to Van Lore and the rest in small sums of £ioo-£5oo borrowed from twenty- one other City creditors 1. Twelve months later, £10,130 was owing and Van Lore's share had risen to £8,300—£7,000 upon mortgages, £100 upon a bond from Van Lore alone and £1,200 upon a bond from Van Lore and his son-in-law John Delate jointly. The mortgages were upon West Compton, Berkshire, a manor inherited from his mother, for £3,000 and upon leases in Wales and Middlesex, presumably his wife's, for £4,000 2. In 1607-08 the £7,000 was repaid Van Lore 3. Thereafter the Earl's indebtedness declined markedly until 1613, when he borrowed £12,000 from Van Lore in one sum, repaying it in instalments over the years until 1617 4. From 1619, and most particularly from 1623, a further period of heavy borrowing occurred until in 1627 he was owing creditors the unprecedentedly large sum of £22,000 5. But by 1629 his debts had been reduced to £17,250, £10,000 of which was upon indentures between him and Lord Bayning which involved a mortgage of his southern lands; the rest was upon bonds for sums ranging from £100 to £1,300, from City creditors and members or connexions of the Percy household—£1,000 was borrowed from Francis Powton, his seneschal of Petworth, £800 from Willian Mose the younger, his controller of household, and another £1,000 from William Mose's father 6. At the time of his death, he owed £7,850, £2,000 of it upon the mortgage which he had taken up of Lord Bayning and the rest borrowed upon bonds 7. It is clear from the bald statement of his indebtedness, set against our knowledge of his income from land, that the Earl's borrowing was never of such proportions that there could be any question of bankruptcy. He was undoubtedly concerned about the extent of his borrowing in the 1620's. When he took out his first indentures with Bayning in 1623—fresh indentures were entered into in 1628—he wrote to Henry Taylor, his steward, that ' great care must be had amongst you for the paying and providing for these payments; my care shall not be wanting . . . for I mean not to forfeit any of the places, neither do I think Algernon [his heir] will, if it come to his share' 8. It is noticeable that as soon as his revenues improved in 1627 he reduced his indebtedness; the second indentures were entered into with Bayning to provide monies with which to settle smaller debts of some years' standing. At

1 Aln. MSS. L. & P. vol. 7, fo. 208, ' Debts upon interest, 5 December 1605 '. 2 Ibid., fo. 243, ' A note how your Lordship stands indebted ', 1606. 3 Part III, document no. 3. 4[i48]; Part III, document no. 4. 6 [216]. 6 [230]- 7 Part IV, document no. 7. 8 [230]; S.H.MSS. P. I. 3 n, fo. 11, 11 Feb. 1622/23.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 01 Oct 2021 at 22:20:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2042171000000741 INTRODUCTION lv their worst, the debts for borrowed money never amounted to more than twice his landed income, generally agreed to be a crucial figure. For every period when his borrowing increases markedly it is possible to point to an extraordinary expense proportionate to the increase. The first such occasion was in 1600. The Earl's ordinary expenditure upon his household in the audit-period 1600-02 was within the limits of his ordinary income. Where his income from rents and revenues was £12,248, his expenditure upon the household in diet, gross provision, wages, apparel, stable charges, suits in law, reparations and other foreyn payments was £10,597. What caused his financial embarrassment was an extraordinary expense—his visiting the Low Countries in 1600 and 1601. He went first on 28 June 1600, as the bearer of a special message from the Queen to the commander of the English troops there, Sir Francis Vere, and returned upon the royal summons in February 1600/01. He was believed to have a special mission relating to the concessions demanded by Spain on behalf of English Catholics as a condition to the conclusion of peace when he paid a second visit to the Low Countries from 1 June to 29 September 1601 and was present at the sieges of Rheinberg, Meurs and Ostend. This State service cost the Earl a matter of £4,014 and to this he added the purchase of some fifty-three horses ' for his store ' at a price of £1,122 1. It is not surprising that Dudley Carleton wrote in December 1601 that the Earl' is gone to Syon House, and means to live privately to recover his last year's expenses in the Low Countries '. Carleton goes on, however, to announce that it was the Earl's intention (never fulfilled) ' to provide for another journey the next' year; proof, if proof were needed, that the Earl's credit was sound2. The £4,500 borrowed by the Earl just before the Gunpowder Plot is not to be explained by any sinister part taken in that conspiracy but by the fact that in the years 1604 and 1605 he chose, as he told the Council soon afterwards, to indulge rather in ' private domestical pleasures' than in affairs of State 3 and spent large sums on both the buildings and the gardens at Syon. The accounts of the clerk of works at Syon for the years 1604-06 show that he spent more than £3,000 on re- building there, apart from the gardens 4. The payment of the composition for his fine, a matter of £11,000, at once ex- plains the Earl's need of extra borrowed money in 1613. In the years after 1619, by contrast, there is not one but many factors to account for his indebtedness. As has been mentioned, the period 1617-25 was a time when the Earl made a number of significant purchases of land; over £10,000 is recorded as spent in this way between 1620 and 1625. £6,000 dowry had to be provided for his elder daughter, Lady Dorothy, in 1617 and 1618, and his heir sent on a long tour of the Continent after he came down from University in 1618—Lord Percy's travels in 1622 alone cost the Earl £1,538, besides his yearly allowance of £1,000 B. His household's ' expenses by diet', which amounted to no more than £1,500 or £1,600 in the last years of his 1 Aln. MSS. L. & P. vol. 7, fo. 29, ' A brief note of his Lordship's charges in the Low Countries, 1600 and 1601 '. 2 Cal. S.P. Bom. Eliz., cclxxxii. 48, 29 Dec. 160:1. 3 Aln. MS. 101, fo. 7, 11 Dec. 1605. 4 S.H.MS. U. I. 13, the book of receipts and disbursements of Christopher Ingram, 1604-05, and S.H.MSS. U. I. 8, the book of disbursements of Christopher Ingram, beginning 4 Apr. 1605. 6 [191].

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 01 Oct 2021 at 22:20:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2042171000000741 lvi INTRODUCTION imprisonment, rose to an average of £2,425 in the years 1621-26 and were about £2,000 a year thereafter. What accounts for his needing to borrow money more than any other factor, however, is the building and repairing which he undertook in these years, especially at Petworth and Goodwood. He had bought the estate at Goodwood of Sir Edward Francis in 1614, for £400 and the lease of the Great Park at Petworth which was valued at £1,400, besides paying £667 for the old house and £480 for the woods. In the next eight years, the Earl spent £2,518 on building a new house there, most of it in 1620-22 1. On Petworth House itself, more than £10,000 was spent in improvements to make it worthy of the Percies' principal seat between 1623 and 1627, and the renovations and new building went on for some years beyond 1627 2. In short, in common with many of his class and age, the Earl found it convenient to borrow money to accommodate him when ready money was short, as for instance when he was awaiting deliveries from the estates and when he had to make large payments in cash. His borrowing must be seen rather as evidence of his good credit than as evidence of his poverty, as an incident and no more in the complex finances of a great nobleman. As early as 1594 he had the reputation of being ' a very good payer '—he was so described by Sir Thomas Tresham who had a bond from him at the time—and apparently he maintained that reputation throughout his career 3. As the years wore on, he may have complained increasingly of his need of spectacles and have repeated more than once what he wrote to his son-in-law, James Hay, Earl of Carlisle,—' I know that the sunshine of my day is drawing fast on to his evening and the moonshine of my night doth turn his horns westward ' 4 —but he never forgot his first maxim to his son in his Advice, written in the Tower in 1609: ' understand your estate generally better than any one of your officers ' 5. He had written in 1606 to William Wycliffe, his trusted servant, about some grants which Wycliffe requested: ' I must know the uttermost value of them, because I will know what I do ' 8. A study of his accounts shortly convinces one that he did know what he was doing. 1 Leconfield MS. H.11/H.12, 'The whole charge of Goodwood'. 2 [207], £3.533; [zi2], £2,182; [214], £2,537; [221], £1,797- 3 H.M.C. Various Collections, iii. 86; the bond is not mentioned on the household accounts. 4S.H.MSS. P. I. 3 n, fo. 15, 7 Oct. 1623. 5 Harrison, 75. 6 Aln. MSS. L. & P. vol. 9A, fo. 26, $ Sept. 1606.