These, then, are the three sources from which the life and times of Thomas Paycocke may be drawn.  All three—­houses, brasses, and wills—­contain much evidence for the increasingly rapid growth during the last two centuries of the Middle Ages of a large and prosperous middle class, whose wealth was based not upon landed property but upon industry and trade.  It is a class of whom we have already met typical examples in Thomas Betson and the anonymous Menagier de Paris, and we must now see what his house, his will, and his family brasses tell us about the clothier Thomas Paycocke.  First and foremost, they tell us a great deal about the noble industry which supported him.  Paycocke’s house is full of relics of the cloth industry.  The merchant mark of the Paycockes, an ermine tail, looking like a two-stemmed clover leaf, is to be found on the carved beams of the chimney, on the breastsummers of the fire-places, and set in the midst of the strip of carving along the front of the house.  Thomas marked his bales of cloth thus, and what other armorial bearings did he need?  The whole house is essentially middle class-the house of a man who was nouveau riche in an age when to be nouveau riche was not yet to be vulgar.  His prosperity has blossomed out into exquisitely ornate decoration.  A band of carving runs along the front of the house, and from the curved stem of it branch out a hundred charming devices—­leaves, tendrils, strange flowers, human heads, Tudor roses, a crowned king and queen lying hand in hand, a baby diving with a kick of fat legs into the bowl of an arum lily, and in the midst the merchant’s mark upon a shield and the initials of the master of the house.  In the hall is a beautiful ceiling of carved oakwork, exceedingly elaborate and bearing at intervals the merchant’s mark again.  Upstairs in the big bedchamber is a ceiling of beams worked in bold roll mouldings; and there is an exquisite little parlour, lined with linen fold panels, with a breastsummer carved with strange animals.  This elaboration is characteristic.  It is all of a piece with Coggeshall Church, and with all those other spacious East Anglian churches, Lavenham, Long Melford, Thaxted, Saffron Walden, Lynn, Snettisham, lofty and spacious, which the clothiers built out of their newly won wealth.  The very architecture is characteristic, nouveau riche again, like those who paid for it, the elaborate ornament and sumptuous detail of the Perpendicular taking the place of the simple majesty of the Early English style.  It is just the sort of architecture that a merchant with a fortune would pay for.  The middle class liked some show for its money; but again it was the ostentation without the vulgarity of wealth.  Looking upon his beautiful house, or worshipping beside his family tombs, with the merchant’s mark on the brasses, in St Katherine’s aisle, Thomas Paycocke must often have blessed the noble industry which supported him.