Will Somers’s notion of cramming himself with salt beef, when on a voyage, may be submitted to travellers for consideration. When he was crossing to Boulogne with his master, Henry, the weather was rough, and he was observed to eat salt beef greedily, and on the king asking him the reason why he preferred salt meat when there was plenty of fresh, he replied, “Don’t blame me for filling my stomach with salt meat, because, if we are cast away, I know what a quantity of water I shall have to drink after it.” These personages, however, did not always enjoy their privileges without drawbacks, and were liable to punishment, even to whipping. George Stone, in the time of James the First, had a sound flogging for saying, when the Earl of Nottingham went ambassador to Spain, that there went sixty fools into Spain, besides my lord admiral and his two sons. Archie Armstrong, as is well known, was sentenced to have his coat pulled over his head, discharged the king’s service, and banished the court, for abuse of Archbishop Laud, having given “great praise to God, but little _laud_ to the devil.” It was not, however, of much consequence to him, for he was a careful man, and by this time— “Archee, by kings and princes grac’d of late, Jested himself into a fair estate.” [Illustration] [Illustration] CHAPTER VII. WE have observed that the churchwardens of St. Margaret’s, Westminster, were fined in 1647 for decorating their church at Christmas. The practice, as before referred to, existed from the earliest times; and in the churchwardens’ accounts of various parishes in the fifteenth and following centuries, entries may be found of payments for holme, holly, and ivy; and even during the Commonwealth the practice was not extinct, although the puritans tried to abolish it; for in ‘Festorum Metropolis,’ 1652, the author, who supports the cause of Christmas, then endeavoured to be suppressed by the puritans, mentions the trimming of churches and houses with bays, rosemary, holly, ivy, box, and privet, and answers the objections made to the practice. Coles also, in his ‘Art of Simpling,’ 1656, says, that in some places setting up holly, ivy, rosemary, bays, &c. in churches at Christmas, was still in use. Aubrey mentions it as the custom in many parts of Oxfordshire for the maid-servant to ask one of the men for ivy to dress the house, and if he refused or neglected it, she was to steal a pair of his breeches, and nail them up to the gate in the yard or highway. Poor Robin, whose Almanac contains many allusions to Christmas customs, in a Christmas song of 1695, sings, “With holly and ivy So green and so gay, We deck up our houses As fresh as the day; With bays and rosemary, And laurel compleate, And every one now Is a king in conceite.”