552 ON THE PRICE OF TEXTILE FABRICS AND CLOTHING. 



made purchases on behalf of the college or monastery from 

 local manufacturers, sometimes he procured the necessary table 

 linen for the bursars or other officials when on progress to 

 view their estates, and on their coming being duly notified. 

 Some are records of the purchases made by wealthy, noble, and 

 even royal personages, or on their account. Hence there is 

 great variety in the quality of the goods purchased, and unless 

 the facts be distinguished and, as occasion arises, commented 

 on, mere figures taken from the tables and aggregated would be 

 productive of very delusive inferences. 



A corporation supplied its members with all which they 

 wanted, and the resources of the society could afford. The 

 head of the college or monastery was fed and clothed, just 

 as the fellows, senior and junior, scholars, monks, choristers, 

 and servants were. The corporation not only purchases table 

 linen, but shirting and sheeting l . It buys all the linen needed 

 for religious offices, the cloths which cover the altar and the 

 host, the surplices and albs in which those who officiated were 

 clad. As the rank of the several recipients was carefully 

 observed in the doles of clothing, we have all sorts of linen, 

 from the finest which the skill of the age supplied, to the 

 coarsest which poverty or penance put on. The linen too was 

 derived from many sources, and goes under various names. 

 So again outer clothing was served out in the same manner. 

 A distinction is drawn between gentlemen's cloth, valets' cloth, 

 and servants' or boys' cloth. Occasionally the distinctions are 

 more numerous. 



The accounts seldom give the breadth of the linen. But 

 ordinary linen for table and clothing could hardly have been 

 less than an ell or yard wide, and was probably from 6\ to 

 6 quarters in breadth, as various statutes from Edward II to 

 Edward VI prescribed that woollen cloths should be. (See 

 above, p. 206, and Vol. I, p. 575.) But occasionally the width 



1 In the same way, the Wardrobe comptroller buys, in 1546-7, linen and holland 

 for queen Katherine Parr's use, during the short interval between the king's death and 

 her unhappy marriage with Seymour of Sudeley. 





