[Illustration: HOUSE SERVANT AND PORTER, EARLY FOURTEENTH CENTURY] Richard Redman, Bishop of Ely (1500), gave food to the poor wherever he went, and on his departure from a town gave every poor man sixpence at least. Nicholas, Lord Bishop of Ely, gave every day bread and drink and warm meat to 200 persons. The Earl of Derby fed 60 aged persons twice a day, all comers thrice a week, and on Good Friday 2700. Robert Winchesley, in the thirteenth century, fed thousands every day in time of dearth. Henry in 1236 ordered 6000 poor persons to be fed at Westminster on Circumcision Day; and so on, other instances being recorded by the careful Stow. There is a very simple explanation of this profuseness, which seems to us so wasteful and so mischievous. There were no bank investments, no companies, no stocks or shares; a nobleman’s estates brought him in every year so much money; it belonged to his rank to maintain as great a state as his means would allow; to accumulate money was not considered either noble or princely; to accumulate manors—yes—and to spend the rents as they came in every year with a lavish hand, was considered the part of a courteous and noble lord. Henry III., Edward II., and Richard II. are instances where the association of lavish expenditure with true princeliness was carried to a disease. This, however, is a characteristic trait of the mediæval noble. The bourgeois, the merchant, the trader, might save and spare and accumulate. It was his _métier_. The noble must exhibit his wealth by a splendid dress, a splendid following, a splendid table, and a splendid generosity. No doubt had Hugh Spencer the elder been longer spared to an admiring country he would have added many more manors to his long list; but he would not have added much, if anything, to the ready money in the long narrow chest which was carried between two horses as he went with his riding from town to castle. [Illustration: EARL RIVERS PRESENTING HIS BOOK TO EDWARD IV. From MS. Lambeth, 265.] Stories of the banquets and gifts of the great citizens show a command of ready money which the most princely of the nobles never possessed, though probably few of the citizens could compare, as far as wealth went, with the first among the nobles.