his industry, but only his labour; the master-weaver dwindled to a hired hand.  Certainly the practice was growing in Essex, where, some twenty years after Thomas Paycocke’s death, the weavers petitioned against the clothiers, who had their own looms and weavers and fullers in their own houses, so that the petitioners were rendered destitute; ’for the rich men, the clothiers, be concluded and agreed among themselves to hold and pay one price for weaving the said cloths,’ a price too small to support their households, even if they worked day and night, holiday and work-day, so that many of them lost their independence and were reduced to become other men’s servants.[7] Nevertheless, the outwork system remained the more common, and without doubt the majority of Paycocke’s workers lived in their own cottages, though it is probable also that he had some looms in his house, perhaps in the long, low room at the back, which is traditionally supposed to have been used for weaving, perhaps in a shed or ‘spinning house’.

A highly idyllic picture of work in one of these miniature factories, which we may amuse ourselves by applying to Thomas Paycocke’s, is contained in Deloney’s Pleasant History of Jack of Newbery. Jack of Newbury was an historical character, a very famous clothier named John Winchcomb who died at Newbury only a year later than Paycocke himself, and of whom Paycocke must certainly have heard, for his kersies were famous on the Continent, and old Fuller, who celebrates him among his Worthies of England calls him ’the most considerable clothier (without fancy or fiction) England ever beheld’.[8] The tales of how he had led a hundred of his own ’prentices to Flodden Field, how he had feasted the King and Queen in his house at Newbury, how he had built part of Newbury Church, and how he had refused a knighthood, preferring ’to rest in his russet coat a poor clothier to his dying day,’ spread about England, growing as they spread.  In 1597 Thomas Deloney, the forefather of the novel, enshrined them in a rambling tale, half prose and half verse, which soon became extremely popular.  It is from this tale that we may take an imaginary picture of work in a clothier’s house, being wary to remember, however, that it is an exaggeration, a legend, and that the great John Winchcomb certainly never had as many as two hundred looms in his own house, while our Thomas Paycocke probably had not more than a dozen.  But the poet must have his licence, for, after all, the spirit of the ballad is the thing, and it is always a pleasant diversion to drop into rhyme: 

Within one roome, being large and long
There stood two hundred Loomes full strong. 
Two hundred men, the truth is so,
Wrought in these Loomes all in a row. 
By every one a pretty boy
Sate making quilts with mickle joy,
And in another place hard by
A hundred women merily
Were carding hard with joy full cheere
Who singing sate with voyces cleere,