lofty hall, or climbing upon his dresser to find the head, as small as a walnut, hidden in the carving of the ceiling, were his nephews and nieces, Robert and Margaret Uppcher, his sister’s children; John, the son of his brother John; and Thomas, Robert, and Emma, the children of his brother Robert; perhaps also his little godchild Grace Goodday.  It was perhaps in the hope of a son to whom he might leave his house and name that Thomas Paycocke married again a girl called Ann Cotton.  She was the wife of his old age, ‘Anne my good wif’, and her presence must have made bright the beautiful house, silent and lonely since Margaret died.  Her father, George Cotton, is mentioned in the will, and her brothers and sister, Richard, William, and Eleanor, have substantial legacies.  But Thomas and Ann enjoyed only a short term of married life; she brought him his only child, but death overtook him before it was born.  In his will he provides carefully for Ann; she is to have five hundred marks sterling, and as long as she lives the beautiful house is to be hers; for to his elaborate arrangements for its inheritance he adds, ’provided alwey that my wif Ann haue my house that I dwell in while she lyvyth at hir pleyser and my dof house [dove-house] with the garden y’t stoundeth in.’  A gap in the Paycocke records makes it difficult to say whether Thomas Paycocke’s child lived or died; but it seems probable that it either died or was a girl, for Paycocke had bequeathed the house, provided that he had no male heirs, to his nephew John (son of his eldest brother John), and in 1575 we find it in the hands of this John Paycocke, while the house next door was in the hands of another Thomas Paycocke, his brother Robert’s son.  This Thomas died about 1580, leaving only daughters, and after him, in 1584, died John Paycocke, sadly commemorated in the parish register as ’the last of his name in Coxall’.  So the beautiful house passed out of the hands of the great family of clothiers who had held it for nearly a hundred years.[12]

Of Thomas Paycocke’s personal character it is also possible to divine something from his will.  He was obviously a kind and benevolent employer, as his thought for his work-people and their children shows.  He was often asked to stand godfather to the babies of Coggeshall, for in his will he directs that at his burial and the ceremonies which were repeated on the seventh day and ‘month mind’ after it there were to be ’xxiiij or xij smale childryn in Rochettes with tapers in theire hands and as many as may be of them lett them be my god childryn and they to have vj s. viij d. apece and euery oder child iiij d. apece ... and also euery god chyld besyde vj s. viij d. apece.’  All these children were probably little bread-winners, employed at a very early age in sorting Thomas Paycocke’s wool.  ‘Poore people,’ says Thomas Deloney, ’whom God lightly blessed with most children, did by meanes of this occupation so order them, that by the time they were come to be sixe or