(2) _The administrative officials._ These varied in number with the size of the house and the extent of its possessions. The chief administrative official was the _steward_, who is not, however, found at all houses. Sometimes the office of steward was complimentary and the fee attached was nominal. The _Valor Ecclesiasticus_ shows that great men did not disdain the post; Andrew Lord Windsor was steward of the Minoresses without Aldgate, of Burnham and of Ankerwyke[395]. Henry Lord Daubeney was steward of Shaftesbury[396], George Earl of Shrewsbury of Wilton[397], Henry Marquess of Dorset of Nuneaton[398], Sir Thomas Wyatt of Malling[399], Sir W. Percy of Hampole, Handale and Thicket[400], Lord Darcy of Swine[401], the Earl of Derby of St Mary's Chester[402], and Mr Thomas Cromwell himself of Syon and Catesby[403]. Some houses, such as Wilton, had more than one steward, and Syon maintained stewards as well as bailiffs in most of the counties in which it had land. Some of these great men were obviously not working officials; but many of the houses maintained stewards at a good salary, who superintended their business affairs, kept the courts of their manors, and were sometimes lodged on the premises[404]. The larger houses also paid one or more receivers and rent-collectors and sometimes an auditor, but in the average house the most important administrative official was the bailiff. While large landowners kept bailiffs at each of the different manors which they held, most nunneries employed a single bailiff, an invaluable factotum who performed a great variety of business for them, besides collecting rents from their tenants and superintending the home farm. Thomas Key, the bailiff of St Radegund's Cambridge, 1449-51, is an active person; he receives a stipend of 13_s._ 4_d._ per annum and an occasional gift from the nuns; he rides about collecting their rents in Cambridgeshire; he accompanies them to Lynn on the annual journey to buy the winter stock of salt fish, or sometimes goes alone; he can turn his hand to mending rakes and ladders (for which he gets 8_d._ for four days' work), or to making the barley mows at harvest time, taking 3_d._ a day for his pains; and indeed he is regularly hired to work during harvest, at a fee of 6_s._ 8_d._ and two bushels of malt[405]. Often the bailiff's wife was also employed by the nuns; the nuns of Sheppey paid their bailiff, his wife and his servant all substantial salaries[406]. Some nunneries had a lodging set apart for him in the convent buildings, outside the nuns' cloister[407].