Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester, 1399—“To the Abbess and Convent of the Sisters Minoresses, near London, without Aldgate, VIl. XIIIs. IIIId. and a tonel of good wine. * * * To my Lady and mother, the Countess of Hereford, a pair of paternosters of coral.”
Thomas Mussenden, 1402—“I will, that all my arms, swords, bastard,[18] and dagger be sold, and disposed of, for my soul.”
William Heron, Lord Say, 1404—“Whereas I have been a soldier, and taken wages from King Richard and the Realm, as well by land as by water, and peradventure received more than my desert, I will that my Executor pay six score marks to the most needful men, unto whom King Richard was debtor, in discharge of his soul.”
Sir Lewis Clifford, Kt.—“I, Lewis Clifford, false and traitor to my Lord God, and to all the blessed company of Heaven, and unworthy to be called a Christian man, make and ordaine my testament and my last will the 17th of September, 1404. At the beginning, I, most unworthy and God’s traitor, recommend my wretched and sinful soul to the grace and to the mercy of the blissful Trinity, and my wretched carrion to be buried in the furthest corner of the churchyard, in which parish my wretched soul departeth from my body. And I pray and charge my executors, as they will answer before God, that on my stinking carrion be neither laid cloth of gold nor of silk, but a black cloth, and a taper at my head and another at my feet; no stone nor other thing, whereby any man may know where my stinking carrion lieth.” In the original, this word is written careyne.
The reader will be amused to know the cause of all this humility. Sir Lewis had joined the Lollards, who rejected the doctrines of the mass, penance for sins, extreme unction, &c.; but was brought back to the church of Rome; and thus records his penitence.
No. CLVII.
“Tell thou the Earl his divination lies.” Shakspeare.
An impertinent desire to pry into the future, by unnatural means—to penetrate the hidden purposes of God—is coeval with the earliest development of man’s finite powers. It is Titanic insolence—and resembles the audacity of the giants, who piled Pelion upon Ossa, to be upon a level with the gods.
Divination, however old it may be, seems not to wear out its welcome with a credulous world, nor to grow bald with time. It has been longer upon the earth, than from the time, when Joseph’s silver cup, “whereby he divineth,” was deposited, in Benjamin’s sack, to the days of Moll Pitcher of Lynn, whose divining cup was of crockery ware.