fashion.  The furniture of the houses had also grown in a manner “passing delicacy,” and not of the nobility and gentry only, but of the lowest sort.  In noblemen’s houses there was abundance of arras, rich hangings of tapestry, and silver vessels, plate often to the value of one thousand and two thousand pounds.  The knights, gentlemen, and merchants had great provision of tapestry, Turkie work, pewter, brass, fine linen, and cupboards of plate worth perhaps a thousand pounds.  Even the inferior artificers and many farmers had learned also to garnish their cupboards with plate, their joined beds with silk hangings, and their tables with fine linen—­evidences of wealth for which Harrison thanks God and reproaches no man, though he cannot see how it is brought about, when all things are grown to such excessive prices.

Old men of Radwinter noted three things marvelously altered in England within their remembrance.  The first was the multitude of chimneys lately erected; whereas in their young days there were not, always except those in the religious and manor houses, above two or three chimneys in most upland towns of the realm; each one made his fire against a reredos in the hall, where he dined and dressed his meat.  The second was the amendment in lodging.  In their youth they lay upon hard straw pallets covered only with a sheet, and mayhap a dogswain coverlet over them, and a good round log for pillow.  If in seven years after marriage a man could buy a mattress and a sack of chaff to rest his head on, he thought himself as well lodged as a lord.  Pillows were thought meet only for sick women.  As for servants, they were lucky if they had a sheet over them, for there was nothing under them to keep the straw from pricking their hardened hides.  The third notable thing was the exchange of treene (wooden) platters into pewter, and wooden spoons into silver or tin.  Wooden stuff was plenty, but a good farmer would not have above four pieces of pewter in his house; with all his frugality, he was unable to pay his rent of four pounds without selling a cow or horse.  It was a time of idleness, and if a farmer at an alehouse, in a bravery to show what he had, slapped down his purse with six shillings in it, all the rest together could not match it.  But now, says Harrison, though the rent of four pounds has improved to forty, the farmer has six or seven years’ rent, lying by him, to purchase a new term, garnish his cupboard with pewter, buy three or four feather-beds, coverlets, carpets of tapestry, a silver salt, a nest of bowls for wine, and a dozen spoons.  All these things speak of the growing wealth and luxury of the age.  Only a little before this date, in 1568, Lord Buckhurst, who had been ordered to entertain the Cardinal de Chatillon in Queen Elizabeth’s palace at Sheen, complains of the meanness of the furniture of his rooms.  He showed the officers who preceded the cardinal such furniture and stuff as he had, but it did not please