to avoid and come no more there.  I trust to you that he shall amend against mine coming, the which shall be shortly, with all hands and all feet, with God’s grace.  My very faithful Cousin, I trust to you that though all I have not remembered my right worshipful mistress your mother afore in this letter, that ye will of your gentleness recommend me to her mistresship as many times as it shall please you:  and ye may say, if it please you, that in Whitsun week next I intend to the mart ward.  And I trust you will pray for me; for I shall pray for you and, so it may be, none so well.  And Almighty Jesu make you a good woman and send you many good years and long to live in health and virtue to his pleasure.  At great Calais, on this side on the sea, the first day of June, when every man was gone to his dinner, and the clock smote nine, and all your household cried after me and bade me ’Come down, come down to dinner at once!’—­and what answer I gave them, ye know it of old.

[Footnote J:  Possibly an inn with that name (?).]

By your faithful Cousin and lover Thomas Betson.  I send you this ring for a token.

So ending, Thomas Betson smiled, dropped a kiss on the seal and inscribed his letter, ’To my faithful and heartily beloved cousin Katherine Riche at Stonor, this letter be delivered in haste.’[14]

Henceforth there begins a charming triangular correspondence between Betson and Stonor and Dame Elizabeth Stonor, in which family news and business negotiations are pleasantly mingled.  Dame Elizabeth and Betson were on the best of terms, for they had been old friends before her second marriage.  A special chamber was kept for him at Stonor, and by an affectionate anticipation she often refers to him as ‘My son Stonor’.  Almost all her letters to her husband contain news of him—­how he took his barge at 8 a.m. in the morning and God speed him, how no writing has come from him these eight days, how he has now written about the price to be paid for forty sacks of Cotswold wool, how he recommends him to Sir William and came home last Monday.  Sometimes he is entrusted with the delicate business of interviewing Dame Elizabeth’s mother, a difficult old lady with a tongue; ‘God send her,’ says Thomas, mopping his brow, after one of these interviews, ’once a merry countenance or shortly to the Minories[K]!’ After another he writes to Dame Elizabeth:  ’Sith I came home to London I met with my lady your mother and God wot she made me right sullen cheer with her countenance whiles I was with her; methought it long till I was departed.  She break out to me of her old “ffernyeres” and specially she brake to me of the tale I told her between the vicar that was and her; she said the vicar never fared well sith, he took it so much to heart.  I told her a light answer again and so I departed from her.  I had no joy to tarry with her.  She is a fine merry woman, but ye shall not know it nor yet find it, nor none of yours by that I see in