The housekeeping of Edward, late Earl of Derby, is not to be forgotten, who had two hundred and twenty men in check roll: his feeding aged persons twice every day, sixty and odd, besides all comers, thrice a week, appointed for his dealing days, and every Good Friday two thousand seven hundred, with meat, drink, and money. Thomas Audley, lord chancellor, his family of gentlemen before him, in coats garded with velvet, and chains of gold; his yeomen after him in the same livery, not garded. William Powlet, lord great master, Marquis of Winchester, kept the like number of gentlemen and yeomen in a livery[106] of Reading tawny, and great relief at his gate. Thomas Lord Cromwell, Earl of Essex, kept the like or greater number in a livery of grey marble; the gentlemen garded with velvet, the yeomen with the same cloth, yet their skirts large enough for their friends to sit upon them. Edward, Duke of Sommerset, was not inferior in keeping a number of tall and comely gentlemen and yeomen, though his house was then in building, and most of his men were lodged abroad. The late Earl of Oxford, father to him that now liveth, hath been noted within these forty years to have ridden into this city, and so to his house by London stone, with eighty gentlemen in a livery of Reading tawny, and chains of gold about their necks, before him, and one hundred tall yeomen, in the like livery, to follow him without chains, but all having his cognisance of the blue boar embroidered on their left shoulder. FOOTNOTES: [92] Thus Lydgate, in his ballad of _London Lackpenny_: “Then to the Chepe I began me drawne, Where much people I saw for to stande: One offered me velvet, sylke and lawne, An other he taketh me by the hande, ‘Here is Pary’s thred the fynest in the lande,’” etc. [93] The cooks in Lydgate’s time, as we learn from the same ballad, resided chiefly in Eastcheap: “Then I hyed me into East Chepe; One cryes ribbs of befe, and many a pye: Pewter pottes they clattered on a heape; There was harpe, pype and mynstrelsye,” etc. [94] “Pater noster beade-makers and text-writers are gone out of Paternoster rowe into stationers of Paule’s churchyard.”--_1st edition_, p. 63. [95] Thomas Clifford. [96] Liber Constitutionis. Liber Horne. Liber Clerkenwell. [97] W. Patten. [98] Liber S. Mariæ Eborum. [99] Carts shod or bound with iron. _Carrectæ ferro ligatæ_ are mentioned in the Liber Garderobæ, Edw. I. [100] W. Fitzstephen.