rules for his buying and selling, and saw that he had justice in its court.  It was in this setting of hard and withal of interesting work that Thomas Betson’s love story flowered into a happy marriage.  He was not destined to live long after his recovery from the serious illness of 1479; perhaps it left him permanently delicate, for he died some six years later, in 1486.  During her seven years of married life (beginning, be it remembered, at the age of fifteen), the diligent Katherine had borne him five children, two sons, Thomas and John, and three daughters, Elizabeth, Agnes, and Alice.  Fortunately Thomas died very comfortably off, as his will (still preserved in Somerset House) informs us.  He had become a member of the Fishmongers’ Company as well as a Merchant of the Staple, for by his time the great city companies were no longer confined to persons actually engaged in the trade which each represented.  In his will[73] Thomas Betson leaves money for the repair of the roof loft in his parish church of All Hallows, Barking, where he was buried, and ’thirty pounds to the garnishing of the Staple Chapel in Our Lady Church at Calais, to buy some jewel’, and twenty pounds to the ‘Stockfishmongers’ to buy plate.  He makes the latter company the guardian of his children, leaves his house to his wife, and a legacy of 40_s_. to Thomas Henham, his colleague in Stonor’s service, and characteristically gives directions ’for the costs of my burying to be done not outrageously, but soberly and discreetly and in a mean [moderate, medium] manner, that it may be unto the worship and laud of Almighty God.’  Katherine, a widow with five children at the age of twenty-two, married as her second husband William Welbech, haberdasher (the Haberdashers were a wealthy company), by whom she had another son.  But her heart stayed with the husband who wrote her her first playful love-letter when she was a child, and on her death in 1510 she directed that she should be laid by the side of Thomas Betson at All Hallows, Barking, where three staplers still lie beneath their brasses, although no trace of him remains.[74] There let them lie, long forgotten, and yet worthier of memory than many of the armoured knights who sleep under carved sepulchres in our beautiful medieval churches.

The garlands wither on your brow;
Then boast no more your mighty deeds! 
Upon Death’s purple altar now
See where the victor-victim bleeds. 
Your heads must come
To the cold tomb: 
Only the actions of the just
Smell sweet and blossom in their dust.

CHAPTER VII

Thomas Paycocke of Coggeshall

AN ESSEX CLOTHIER IN THE DAYS OF HENRY VII

This was a gallant cloathier sure
Whose fame for ever shall endure. 
—­THOMAS DELONEY