the scenes from his life and death by which his portrait, now in the National Portrait Gallery, is surrounded. The wedding party is shown at table in a great chamber, overlooking a hall below, in which sit six minstrels. At each end of the hall are steps, and up and down these and over the floor of the chamber passes the mask procession, a drummer, a 'trounchman' with a paper in his hand, Mercury, Diana, six Nymphs, and ten Cupids, five white and five black, as torch-bearers.[1]
Finally, a curious document of this same year, 1572, indicates the widespread popularity which the mask had acquired, as a form of social entertainment. It is preserved amongst Lord Burghley's papers, and is a complaint by one Thomas Giles against the Yeoman of the Revels, who had the custody of the Queen's masks, and made a practice of letting them out on hire to persons of all degrees, noble and mean, both in the city and in the country.[2] Thomas Giles was a haberdasher, and from time to time supplied goods to the Revels. He bases his complaint mainly on the damage done to the royal property, but at the end he allows it to appear that he himself made a business of letting out masking apparel for hire, and found his prices undercut by those of the Yeoman. He appends a list of a score of occasions during the past year on which loans had taken place. The garments lent appear to have been mostly those made for the Court festivities of the previous winter. One set is described as 'the coper clothe of golde gownes which was last made'. This must have been the mask of Muses given on 15 June. It was lent with another mask, 'into the contre to the maryage of the dowter of my lorde Montague', at some date between 15 September and 6 October. This was the occasion of Gascoigne's verses just described, although it must have been the other mask, a mask of men, which those verses presented.
It may be collected from scattered items of expenditure that the Court masks of 1572-3 were two in number.[3] There*
- ↑ The reproductions in Strutt, Manners and Customs, iii, pl. xi, and Withington, i. 208, omit the wedding table. The pictures must be later than Sir H. Unton's death in 1596. Ashmole, Berks, iii. 313, dates his wedding with Dorothy, daughter of Sir Thomas Wroughton of Broad Hinton, Wilts, in 1580.
- ↑ Feuillerat, Eliz. 409.
- ↑ Ibid., Eliz. 171-81, 'gloves for maskers', 'the lordes gloves', 'the torcheberers gloves', 'ladye maskers', 'women maskers', 'Haunce Eottes for painting of patternes for maskes', 'the masks on New Yeres daye', 'the dubble mask', 'a keye for Janus', 'ffyn white lam to make snoballs', 'spunges for snoballs', 'musk kumfettes . . . corianders . . . clove cumfettes . . . synamon kumfettes . . . rose water . . . spike water . . .
