United States or Comoros ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
That Thomas Paycocke had many friends, not only in Coggeshall but in the villages round, the number of his legacies bears witness. His will also shows that he was a man of deep religious feeling.
She was the daughter of one Thomas Horrold, for whose memory Paycocke retained a lively affection and respect, for in founding a chantry in Coggeshall Church he desired specially that it should be for the souls of himself and his wife, his mother and father, and his father-in-law, Thomas Horrold of Clare.
A few days later the cottages were deserted again, and a concourse of weeping people followed Thomas Paycocke to his last rest. The ceremony of his burial befitted his dignity: it comprised services, not only on burial day itself, but on the seventh day after it, and then again after a month had passed.
It is Thomas Paycocke, clothier, round whom the whole manufacture revolves.
His first wife was that Margaret whose initials, together with his own, decorate the woodwork of the house, and indeed it is probable that old John Paycocke built the house for the young couple on their wedding.
Here is something very different from the modest Thomas Betson's injunction: 'The costes of my burying to be don not outrageously, but sobrely and discretly and in a meane maner, that it may be unto the worship and laude of Almyghty God. The worthy old clothier was not unmindful of the worship and laud of Thomas Paycocke also, and over £500 in modern money was expended upon his burial ceremonies, over and above the cost of founding his new chantry.
Your heads must come To the cold tomb: Only the actions of the just Smell sweet and blossom in their dust. Thomas Paycocke of Coggeshall This was a gallant cloathier sure Whose fame for ever shall endure. The great and noble trade of cloth-making has left many traces upon the life of England, architectural, literary, and social.
It is a class of whom we have already met typical examples in Thomas Betson and the anonymous Ménagier de Paris, and we must now see what his house, his will, and his family brasses tell us about the clothier Thomas Paycocke. First and foremost, they tell us a great deal about the noble industry which supported him. Paycocke's house is full of relics of the cloth industry.
The middle class liked some show for its money; but again it was the ostentation without the vulgarity of wealth. Looking upon his beautiful house, or worshipping beside his family tombs, with the merchant's mark on the brasses, in St Katherine's aisle, Thomas Paycocke must often have blessed the noble industry which supported him. The wills of the Paycockes tell the same story.
R.R. Sharpe, 2 vols. ; The Fifty Earliest English Wills in the Court of Probate, London, ed. F.W. Weaver, 3 vols. The will of the other Thomas Paycocke 'cloathemaker', who died in 1580, also refers to the family business.
Word Of The Day