Virtual Grub Street: Mawthers, Drag Nets, Loiterers and more!

It's that time, again!!!
It's Tudor Trivia Tuesday!!!

1) In the early part of the sixteenth century Coventry became famous for the manufacture of blue thread, but the art seems somehow to have been lost before the year 1581.

2) Modern readers are not the only readers that often find the irregular Tudor spellings difficult to follow. The printer Robert Copland has the interlocutor in his book The seuen sorowes that women haue when theyr husbandes be deade say:

By my soule ye prynters make such englyshe

So yll spelled, so yll poynted, and so peuyshe

That scantly one cane rede lynes tow

3) Upon the passage of 1 Edw. VI., c. 3, 1547 all former Acts against vagabonds and beggars were repealed. ‘Henceforth every master who has previously offered a vagrant service and labour was entitled to bring him before two justices of the peace, who " shall imediatelye cawse the saide loyterer to be marked with an whott Iron in the brest the marke of V. and adjudge the saide parsone living so Idelye to such presentor to be his Slave, to have and to holde the said Slave to him his executors or assignes for the space of twoo yeres then next following." The statute was Draconian even by Medieval standards.’ [Ribton-Turner, Vagrancy]

4) “March 20th, [1594,] I did before Barthilmew Hikman pay Letice her full yere's wagis ending the 7th day of Aprill next; her wagis being four nobles, an apron, a payr of hose and shoes.” This entry from the diary of John Dee informs us of the wage rate for a house maid at the time. Also that Dee, at least, thought it wise to pay her before a witness.

5) In 1586, the population of the city of Coventry was counted at 6,502.

6) ‘In the morning the haunt of the gallants was St. Paul's Cathedral…. They walked up and down the middle of the nave, called then the “Mediterranean," exhibiting their new cloaks and their new feathers. After a few turns up and down, or when the clock struck eleven, they left the place and disappeared, going to some of the shops, the tobacconist's, or the bookseller's, where they took tobacco and talked about the new books. They then repaired to an ordinary and spent two or three hours over dinner, after which they went back to St. Paul's and spent there the whole afternoon.’ [Besant’s London]

7) The banquet which each of the mayors gave one month after his election was held on St. Simon and Jude's day. The feast day was October 28 on the New Style calendar. In Tudor time it may have been held on November 8. After the mayor had been sworn into office at the Guildhall, and had been presented to the King/Queen or his representative at the exchequer, he was conducted back in triumph to the Guildhall. At the Exchequer the mayor was dubbed knight by the Lord Chamberlain, acting as the King's/Queen’s representative. [Kollock, Lord Mayor]

8) Over fishing of rivers in populated areas was a problem since at least Henry IV. By the statutes of the city of Northampton, no farmer [null fermour] of the Nene River was permitted to use "any kind of net called drag trammels nor blocks having a smaller mesh in the same net than aforesaid a man could easily draw a grote of silver through the mesh and this for the safety of the same fish and to increase the stock in the said waters". [Liber Custumarum]

9) According to Wright’s study of English dialect, Rustic Speech, “the geographical distribution of the words for girl, or young woman. Ellis states it roughly thus: 'mouther in Norfolk, maid in the South, wench in no bad sense in the Midlands, and lass generally in the North, girl,' he adds, ' is rather an educated word.' The word mawther occurs in the Promptorium Parvulorum (circa 1440), the compiler of which was a Norfolk man. Sir Thomas Browne (1605-82) mentions it as one of the words ‘of common use in Norfolk, or peculiar to the East Angle countries’. It occurs in Ben Jonson's Alchymist, 1610; and Tusser, who was an Essex man, uses it two or three times in his Fiue Hundred Pointes of Husbandry:

No sooner a sowing, but out by and by

With mawther or boy that alarum can cry:

And let them be armed with sling or a bowe

to skare away piggen, the rooke and the crowe.”

10) According to Steevens, the following passage in A Midsummer-Night's Dream (III.i.), "and when she [i.e., the moon] weeps, weeps every little flower," says that Shakespeare "means that every little flower is moistened with dew, as if with tears; and not that the flower itself drizzles dew." [Dyer, Lore]