The History of Thomas Hickathrift

Edited by G. L. Gomme, F.S.A. and H. B. Wheatley, F.S.A.
First Series.
I.
THE HISTORY OF THOMAS HICKATHRIFT.
PRINTED FROM THE EARLIEST EXTANT COPIES, AND EDITED, WITH AN INTRODUCTION, BY GEORGE LAURENCE GOMME, F.S.A.
LONDON: Printed for the Villon Society. 1885.

There seems to be some considerable reason for believing that the hero of this story was a reality. The story tells us that he lived in the marsh of the Isle of Ely, and that he became “a brewer’s man” at Lyn, and traded to Wisbeach. This little piece of geographical evidence enables us to fix the story as belonging to the great Fen District, which occupied the north of Cambridgeshire and Norfolk.
The antiquary Thomas Hearne has gone so far as to identify the hero of tradition with a doughty knight of the Crusaders. Writing in the Quarterly Review (vol. xxi. p. 102), Sir Francis Palgrave says:—
“Mr. Thomas Hickathrift, afterwards Sir Thomas Hickathrift, Knight, is praised by Mr. Thomas Hearne as a ‘famous champion.’ The honest antiquary has identified this well-known knight with the far less celebrated Sir Frederick de Tylney, Baron of Tylney in Norfolk, the ancestor of the Tylney family, who was killed at Acon, in Syria, in the reign of Richard Cœur de Lion. Hycophric, or Hycothrift, as the mister-wight observes, being probably a corruption of Frederick. This happy exertion of etymological acumen is not wholly due to Hearne, who only adopted a hint given by Mr. Philip le Neve, whilome of the College of Arms.”
There does not seem to be the slightest evidence for Hearne’s identification any more than there is for his philological conclusions, and we may pass over this for other and more reliable information.
We must first of all turn to the story itself, as it has come down to us in its chapbook form. It is divided into two parts. The first part of the story is the earliest; the second part being evidently a printer’s or a chapman’s addition. Our reprint of the former is taken from the copy in the Pepysian Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge, and which was printed probably about 1660-1690; the latter is taken from the British Museum copy, the date of which, according to the Museum authorities, is 1780.