[86] Walsingham, “Hist. Angl.,” an. 1406, ad fin.
[87] “P. Plowman,” B. Prol., 216. The French words in italics were the first line of a popular song. Gower has an equally picturesque description in his “Mirour de l’Omme,” 25,285 ff.
[88] “London was, in very truth, a city of Palaces. There were, in London itself, more palaces than in Venice and Florence and Verona and Genoa all together.” “Medieval London,” i., 244, where the context shows that the author refers not only to royal residences, but still more to noblemen’s houses.
[89] This was at least the theoretical provision of the regulation of 1189, known as Fitz Alwyne’s Assize, which is fully summarized and annotated in the “Liber Albus,” ed. Riley (R.S.), pp. xxx. ff. We know, however, that similar decrees against roofs of thatch or wooden shingles were not always obeyed.
[90] “Menagier de Paris,” i., 173; Addy, “Evolution of English House,” p. 108; cf. “Piers Plowman’s Creed,” i., 214.
[91] An earthen wall is mentioned in Riley, p. 30. The slight structure of the ordinary house appears from the fact that the rioters of 1381 tore so many down, and that the great storm of 1362 unroofed them wholesale. (Walsingham, an. 1381, and Riley, p. 308.) Compare the hook with wooden handle and two ropes which was kept in each ward for the pulling down of burning houses. (“Liber Albus,” p. xxxiv.)
[92] Cooper, “Annals of Cambridge,” an. 1445; Rashdall, “Universities of Europe,” ii., 413. Cf. the “common nightwalkers” and “roarers” in Riley, pp. 86 ff.
[93] Riley, p. 65. See the specifications for some three-storied houses of a century later quoted by Besant. “Medieval London,” i., 250. The furs here specified may well have come to £3 or £4 more (see Rogers, “Agriculture and Prices,” pp. 536 ff.). The fur for an Oxford warden’s gown varied from 26s. 8d. to 83s.
[94] Besant, loc. cit., i., 257, mistakenly calls Hugh a “craftsman,” and gives from his imagination a quite untrustworthy description of the inquest, the house, and the shop. He had evidently not seen the supplementary notice in Sharpe’s “Letter Book,” F.
[95] Riley, p. 199; cf. Sharpe, “Letter Books,” F, pp. 19, 113. A list of furniture left by a richer citizen, apparently incomplete, is given in Riley, p. 123, and another on p. 283, but this is difficult to separate with certainty from his stock-in-trade. The inventory of a well-to-do Norman peasant-farmer is given by S. Luce, “Du Guesclin,” p. 51. Here the strictly domestic items are only “four frying-pans, two metal pots, four chests, three caskets, two feather-beds, three tables, a bedstead, an iron shovel, a gridiron, a [trough?], and a lantern.” This was in 1333.