CLOTH, ETC. 569 



buys its cloth is lower than that at which the better qualities 

 of the Canterbury cloth, near a century earlier, were pur- 

 chased. The pomp of attendance in the occasional appear- 

 ances of the Prior of Canterbury, when he quitted the great 

 cloister for the city in which he dwelt, and with which he 

 was quarrelling about the time of the accounts which I have 

 described 1 , must have been that of a great ecclesiastical prince, 

 while in ordinary times his gentlemen must have been em- 

 ployed in marshalling the pilgrims as they crowded to the 

 shrine of the great English saint. 



I now turn to the period immediately before me, and to 

 the information which I am able to give as to the price of 

 clothing during the last years of the sixteenth century and 

 the whole of the seventeenth. The regular sources of in- 

 formation, which are almost continuous, are three the cost 

 incurred for clothing the choristers at King's College, Cam- 

 bridge, the charges for the boys at Eton, and those for the 

 servants at the same place. For a few years the Cambridge 

 College buys by the piece, here plainly of twelve yards. For 

 a considerable time the purchases at Eton are by the pannus, 

 which from several entries I find to have been at an average 

 of thirty-three yards. The cloth of the Eton servants was 

 azure or blue azure, and I am told that this kind of livery 

 is continued to the present day. This purchase is almost 

 invariably by the 'cloth' of twenty-seven yards, and seems 

 to have generally been of good quality. The boys' cloth 

 is frequently changed, but the servants' livery is very steadily 

 kept at the same quality and price, the latter, as will be 

 seen, rising in some degree as time goes on. 



Blue azure only fails me for five years. In 1624 the 

 College account states that it could not be purchased in the 

 time of infection, and that the servants were allowed 148^. in 

 lieu, the average price of the piece at this time being 230^. 

 For the three years 1641-1643 all Eton accounts are lost, the 

 only considerable gap in the archives of the school. By an 

 1 See for this quarrel, Six Centuries of Labour and Wages, p. 363. 



