UTENSILS. ORGANS. 62$ 



potash or soda ash, imported from abroad. It is bought at 

 Stoke in Essex, and, if the former, is possibly the raw material 

 of saltpetre. 



The forementioned items are a general summary of the 

 particulars derived from the extensive and numerous records of 

 fifteenth and sixteenth century housekeeping. My reader will 

 recognise that the articles of furniture in fairly opulent corpora- 

 tions and in wealthy private houses, were few, cheap, and 

 mean. The corporation and the rich man possessed hand- 

 some buildings, expensive clothing the former only in eccle- 

 siastical vestments, plate, and jewels, the jocalia of the 

 accounts including handsomely chased silver and gold orna- 

 ments, as well as precious stones. But household furniture in 

 our modern sense was scanty and poor. There was no comfort 

 in domestic life, though there was no little magnificence in 

 stone, brick, and timber. The King of Scotland, said ^Eneas 

 Sylvius, was worse lodged than a Nuremberg citizen. No doubt 

 he had a finer house, for Scotch architecture in the middle 

 ages was as handsome as English, and was indeed the work 

 of the same artisans. But the Italian traveller was comment- 

 ing on the bareness of the rooms, the poverty of the furniture, 

 and the meanness of the appointments. The most valuable 

 articles of domestic use were in the kitchen, and it would not 

 be difficult to construct a list, priced with fair accuracy, of the 

 particulars which constituted the necessary furniture of hall, 

 kitchen, and bedchamber. 



I have not yet exhausted my list. I have still to deal with 

 some of the furniture of churches, with a few common materials, 

 with colours, with certain munitions of war, with thread and 

 twine, and a few notes of boats and fishing-nets. 



My accounts supply me with five purchases of organs. They 

 are bought by the 'pair.' The first must have been a very 

 modest affair, the organs which the prior of Selborne bought 

 at Alton in 1448 for z6s. %d. The next, in 1514, is a purchase 

 in London, when 10 was paid for a pair. In 1531 a new 

 pair is bought at Warwick for 8 6s. 8d. In 1537 the New 



VOL. IV. S s 



