Oliver Goldsmith idealized China in ‘The Citizen of the World’, and Dr Johnson was called the Great Cham of Literature.  Look here upon this picture and on this:  look at that row of jerry-built houses, a hundred in a row and all exactly alike, of that new-art villa, all roof and hardly any window, with false bottle glass in its panes; here is the twentieth century for you.  Indeed all the social and very much of the political history of England may be reconstructed from her architecture alone; and so I make no apology for calling Thomas Paycocke’s house first-rate historical evidence.

Of much the same type, though less interesting, is the evidence of monumental brasses, which are to be found in most parts of England and which abound in East Anglia, the Home Counties, and the Thames Valley.[3] Their variety is magnificent; brasses of ecclesiastics in vestments, of doctors of law and divinity and masters of arts in academic dress and of a few abbots and abbesses; brasses of knights in Armour; brasses of ladies, with their little dogs at their feet and dresses which show the changes in fashion from century to century and make clear all the mysteries of kirtles and cotte-hardies, wimples and partlets and farthingales and the head-dresses appropriate to each successive mode.  The brasses also, like the houses, bear witness to the prosperity of the middle class, for in the fourteenth century when merchants began to build themselves fine houses they began also to bury themselves under splendid brasses.  Finest of all, perhaps, are the brasses of the wool staplers, with feet resting on woolpack or sheep; but there are many other merchants too.  Mayors and aldermen abound; they set their merchants’ marks upon their tombs as proudly as gentlemen set their coats of arms, and indeed they had as great cause for pride.  You may see them at their proudest in the famous brass at Lynn, where Robert Braunch lies between his two wives, and at his feet is incised a scene representing the feast at which he entertained Edward III royally and feasted him on peacocks.  There is a tailor with his shears, as glorious as the Crusader’s sword, at Northleach, and a wine merchant with his feet upon a wine cask at Cirencester.  There are smaller folk, too, less dowered with wealth but proud enough of the implements of their craft; two or three public notaries with penhorn and pencase complete, a huntsman with his horn, and in Newland Church one of the free miners of the Forest of Dean, cap and leather breeches tied below the knee, wooden mine-hod over shoulder, a small mattock in his right hand, and a candlestick between his teeth.  This kind of historical evidence will help us with Thomas Paycocke.  His family brasses were set in the north aisle of the parish church of St Peter Ad Vincula.  Several of them have disappeared in the course of the last century and a half, and unluckily no brass of Thomas himself survives; but in the aisle there still lie two—­the brass of his brother John, who died in 1533, and John’s wife, and that of his nephew, another Thomas, who died in 1580; the merchant’s mark may still be seen thereon.