so many pence a day still survived here and there.[1] The Grooms and Pages of the Chamber had also a traditional 'great reward' of £100 among them at Christmas, while the fees payable to the officers of the Chamber by lay and ecclesiastic homagers were not—and are not yet—extinct.[2] Exceptional 'rewards', from foreign visitors of rank and so forth, were naturally forthcoming from time to time, and, as naturally, largesse often became indistinguishable from bribe. The allowances, other than salary, were of several kinds. Firstly, there was diet, that is to say, dinner and supper at the appointed tables in hall or chamber. Most of the officers of the regular Household enjoyed this; a few, whose attendance was not required daily or at all times in the day, received instead a money allowance from the Cofferer known as 'board wages'.[3] Secondly, there was, 'bouche of court', a commons of bread and ale, candles and fuel, served only to those of sufficient rank to be lodged in the palace itself.[4] It is probably an evidence, not of economy, but of change of social habits, that in the sixteenth century ale had replaced the wine of the fourteenth. Originally the 'bouche of court' had to suffice for breakfast, but under Elizabeth the Maids of Honour and a few other favoured groups were allowed to share the queen's breakfast of beef.[5] Thirdly, there was 'livery' in the narrow sense, clothes or the material for clothes from the Great Wardrobe, or a money payment in lieu thereof. Even in the fourteenth century there was already much commutation of livery, which in the case of yeomen and grooms also included an allowance for shoes, known as calciatura. By the end of the fifteenth century it was definitely thought derogatory for men of rank to wear even the sovereign's livery, except in some quite symbolical form.[6] Under Elizabeth some of the salaries seem to have*
- ↑ Thus the curious fee of £11 8s. 1-1/2d. a year represents 7-1/2d. a day, the regular wages of esquires, serjeants, and many clerks under Edward II (Tout, 270).
- ↑ The £100 was 'from the King's privy coffers' c. 1478 (H. O. 41), but by 1508 it was from the Exchequer (Henry, Hist. of Great Britain, xii. 454), and here it was still paid in the seventeenth century (Sullivan, 252, from Pells Order Books).
- ↑ Nichols, Eliz. ii. 47, from return of Board of Green Cloth (1576).
- ↑ Nichols, Eliz. ii. 45, 51. 'Bouche' or 'bouge' of court is clearly from busca, bush, firewood. The allowance was as old as 1290, for Fleta, ii. 7, notes cibus, potus, busca, and candela amongst the Chamberlain's fees (cf. p. 37). It is set out for each officer in 1318 (Tout, 270) and c. 1478 (H. O. 15).
- ↑ Nichols, Eliz. ii. 44.
- ↑ H. O. 34, 'because ray clothinge is not according for the king's knightes, therefore it was left'. But an order of June 1478 (T. R. Misc. 206, f. 11)
