[157] Piers Ploughman. Pass. vii. 278-285.
[158] Ibid. Pass. xiv. 50-51.
[159] See Ship of Fools, Barclay, 43, st. 4.
[160] Lib. Eng. Pol. Wright’s Political Poems, ii. 178.
[161] Hist. MSS. Com. v. 601-4.
[162] Hunt’s Bristol, 75, 93-5; 126-8.
[163] Hunt’s Bristol, 94-5, 108. A Bristol grocer left 350 ounces of silver plate to be divided among his children. Ibid. 108. The first fork we hear of in England in 1443 belonged to a citizen family in York. “Unum par cultellorum vocat’ ‘karving knyves’ et unum par forpicum argenteorum.” (Plumpton Correspondence, xxxiv.)
[164] Piers Ploughman. Passus, xv. 90. For Wood’s account of Oxford houses, see Boase’s Oxford, 48-9.
[165] Boys’ Sandwich, 149, 185, 186.
[166] The plate of S. Mary’s, Sandwich, amounted to about 724 ounces of silver, and there was a good deal of silver gilt; it had splendid brocade of gold of Venice and of Lucca, and a mass of vestments of white damask powdered with gold of Venice, and blue velvet powdered with fleurs de lis, or with moons and stars, and so on. (Boys’ Sandwich, 375.) A burgess of Wycombe, Redehode, fitted up the church with beautiful screens of carved wood, and added other gifts to its store of jewels and gilt crowns for Our Lady, and other ornaments of amber, silver, jet, turquoises, with rich garments and ermine fur, damasks, velvets, silks, a baldachino bearing green branches with birds of gold, magnificent robes of cloth of gold, &c., and splendid plate. (Hist. MSS. Com. v. 554-5.)