CLOTH, ETC. 567 



Now these pieces of cloth contained by law twenty-four 

 yards. That the statute was obeyed is I think fairly proved 

 by the fact that the allowance made to each official, and 

 valued in money, gives, when made the divisor of the whole 

 payment for each kind of cloth, a product which has no 

 fraction in the result. From this calculation I find that the 

 establishment to which Christ Church priory gave annual 

 liveries was as follows : the seneschal and clerks twenty-four, 

 the gentlemen twenty, the higher servants sixteen, the lower 

 twenty, eighty persons in all, maintained by this great and 

 ancient monastery, in whose custody was the shrine of 

 Becket, the most highly venerated place of pilgrimage in the 

 Western world, for the due maintenance of which the prior 

 and monks, among other objects, provided and supported 

 this costly service. Many of these officials were also pro- 

 vided with silk hoods, lined or trimmed with fur, some of 

 which is miniver or ermine, the costliest fur known to our 

 ancestors, while more were supplied with bugey, which seems 

 to have been squirrel, and most with lambskin. 



I need not excuse this digression, for my reader will find 

 that in vol. i. p. 589, I have only been able to give one entry 

 of best cloth during the thirteen years, and six of inferior, 

 while in the present case four kinds are given for each of 

 the thirteen years. I may add that on dividing the quantity 

 of cloth under each head by the number of persons in each 

 department of the prior's service, I find that, in the same 

 way, without fractions, the allowance made was four yards 

 to the seneschal and clerks, and six to each person in the 

 other three classes. The origin of the cloth is not mentioned, 

 but some of the fur is bought in London. 



The second of these supplements is extracted from the 

 archives of the Grocers' Company, a few of the earliest of 

 which have recently been photographed and printed by that 

 ancient guild. They belong to the last year of the fourteenth 

 and the first few years of the fifteenth century, when the 

 guild numbered among its members some of the most con- 



