<Soap.> A Bristow-man living in Castile in Spain learn't their art of making soape, which he did first set up in Bristowe about the yeare 1600. By this, alderman Rogers there gott a great estate, and Mr. ... Broughton[1354] was the first that improved barren ground there with the soape-ashes, now not uncommon.—MS. Aubr. 26, page 18.
A Bristow-man living in Castile in Spaine learnt their art of makeing soape, which he first sett-up in Bristow, now (1681) 80 + yeares since.—MS. Aubr. 8, fol. 28v.
<The Fishmongers' Company, London.> To discover[1355] and find out the lands concealed and embezilled by the Fishmongers' company, which was to maintain so many scholars in Oxford and for the ease of poor Catholiques in Lent. Mr. Fabian Philips tells me I may find out the donation in Stow's Survey of London: he can put me in a way to help me to a third or fourth part for the discoverie. J. Collins, who enformed me of this discovery, sayd the lands are worth some thousands per annum, scil. two or three thousand pounds per annum, which devout Catholiques in ancient times gave to this company for their pious and charitable use. My lord Hunsdon would be a good instrument herein. Memorandum in the records of the Tower are to be found many graunts, etc., to the Fishmongers' company. Edmund Wyld; esq., saith that the old Parliament did intend to have had an inspection into charitable uses. See Sir Richard Baker's Chronicle pag. 267 G, anno 22 Henry VII <1507>, scil. Thomas Knesworth, mayor of London, gave to the Fishmongers' company, certain tenements for which they are bound to allow fower scholars, that is to say, two at Oxon, and two at Cambridge, to each of them fower pounds per annum, as also to poor people prisoners in Ludgate something yeerely. Quaere Anthony Wood de hiis.—MS. Aubr. 26, page 1.
APPENDIX II
AUBREY'S COMEDY OF RESTORATION MANNERS
<While hiding from the bailiffs in 1671 at Broad Chalk, Aubrey (see i. 52) set himself to compose a comedy descriptive of country life as he had seen it, abating nothing of its grossness, and concealing nothing of its immorality. The rude draft of this comedy is found in MS. Aubrey 21, written in the blank spaces and between the lines of a long legal document.
Although few of the scenes are sketched, and fewer completed, it is possible to form an idea of the scope and plot of the piece.
The jumbling together of all classes of society in the rude merriment of a country wake was designed to bring out the follies and vices of them all. A few gentlemen and ladies of the old school, of courtly manners and decent carriage, were brought in to set out by contrast the boorishness, the insolence, and the mad drunken bouts of Aubrey's contemporaries. A mixed company of sow-gelders, carters, dairy-maids, gypsies, were to give evidence, in dialogue and song, of the coarse talk and the vile ideas of the vulgar. And a still more disreputable rout of squires who had left their wives and taken up with cook-maids, and of heiresses who had run away with grooms, was to exemplify the degradation of the gentry. In several cases, over the names of his Dramatis Personae, Aubrey has jotted the names or initials of the real persons he was copying.
The plot was to have a double movement; on the one hand, the innocent loves of a boy and girl of gentle birth, living in disguise as shepherd and dairy-maid, the 'Lord and Lady of the Maypole,' and, on the other hand, the fortunes of an adulteress, pursued by her husband, following her paramour in page's attire, jealous of his attentions to other women, ending in murder all round—'Raynes[1356] comes and invades Sir Fastidious Overween, and is slayne by him; and then Sir Fastidious neglects her; she comes and stabbes him, and then herselfe.'