“The naturall maister Aristotell saith that euery body be the course of nature is enclyned to here & se all that refressheth & quickeneth the spretys of man[1] / wherfor I haue thus in this boke folowinge[2]” gathered together divers treatises touching the Manners & Meals of Englishmen in former days, & have added therto divers figures of men of old, at meat & in bed,[3] to the end that, to my fellows here & to come, the home life of their forefathers may be somewhat more plain, & their own minds somewhat rejoiced.
The treatises here collected consist of a main one—John Russell’s Boke of Nurture, to which I have written a separate preface[4]—extracts and short books illustrating Russell, like the Booke of Demeanor and Boke of Curtasy, and certain shorter poems addressed partly to those whom Cotgrave calls “Enfans de famille, Yonkers of account, youthes
of good houses, children of rich parents (yet aliue),” partly to carvers and servants, partly to schoolboys, partly to people in general, or at least those of them who were willing to take advice as to how they should mend their manners and live a healthy life.
EDWARD THE FOURTH’S HENCHMEN
The persons to whom the last poems of the present collection are addressed, the
yonge Babees, whome bloode Royalle
Withe grace, feture, and hyhe habylite
Hathe enourmyd,
the “Bele Babees” and “swete Children,” may be likened to the “young gentylmen, Henxmen,—VI Enfauntes, or more, as it shall please the Kinge,”—at Edward the Fourth’s Court; and the authors or translators of the Bokes in this volume, somewhat to that sovereign’s Maistyr of Henxmen, whose duty it was