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I shall lose no time when the season shall come, I promise you.... And, Sir, when I come from the mart I shall send you word of all matters by the mercy of our Lord. At the fairs Betson would meet with a great crowd of merchants from all over Europe, though often enough political disturbances made the roads dangerous and merchants ran some risk of being robbed.
The honest Betson, we may be certain, never cheated, but the Celys knew more than a little about the tricks of the trade, and one year, when the Lieutenant of Calais took out sarpler No. 24, which their agent, William Cely, knew to be poor wool, in order to make a test, he privily substitutes No. 8, which was 'fair wool' and changed the labels, so that he was soon able to write home, 'Your wool is awarded by the sarpler that I cast out last. No wonder Gower said that Trick was regent of the Staple,
But Thomas Betson never fell out with his hosts, whose only complaint of him must have been that he sat long over his love letters and came down late to dinner. There was business enough for him to do at Calais.
Thomas Betson and the Celys travelled very often across the Channel in these ships, which carried passengers and letters, and they were almost as much at home in Calais as in London. When in Calais English merchants were not allowed to live anywhere they liked, all over the town. The Company of the Staple had a list of regular licensed 'hosts', in whose houses they might stay.
My pain is the more; I must needs suffer as I have done in times past, and so will I do for God's sake and hers. However, Katherine was now fifteen years of age and was sufficiently grown up to wed, and the next letter, written a week later to Dame Elizabeth, shows us Thomas Betson beginning to set his house in order and getting exceedingly bothered about laying in her trousseau, a business with which Dame Elizabeth had, it seems, entrusted the future bridegroom.
Consequently he entered into a partnership with a friend of his wife's, a Merchant of the Staple in Calais, named Thomas Betson, who is the subject of this study, and until Elizabeth's death in 1479, he took an active part in the export trade.
On October 10 the 'prentice' Henham writes: 'My master Betson is right well amended, blessed be Jesus, and he is past all doubts of sickness and he takes the sustenance right well, and as for physicians, there come none unto him, for he hath no need of them. But another death was at hand to break the close association between Thomas Betson and the Stonors, for at the end of the year the kind, extravagant, affectionate Dame Elizabeth died.
As to the Celys, Thomas Betson was wont to say that their talk was of nothing but sport and buying hawks, save on one gloomy occasion, when George Cely rode for ten miles in silence and then confided to him that over in England his grey bitch had whelped and had fourteen pups, and then died and the pups with her.
The staplers, however, did not do business at Calais alone, but rode also to the great fairs at Antwerp, Bruges, and the country round. 'Thomas Betson, writes Henham to his master, 'came unto Calais the last day of April and so he departed in good health unto Bruges mart the first day of May.
At great Calais, on this side on the sea, the first day of June, when every man was gone to his dinner, and the clock smote nine, and all your household cried after me and bade me 'Come down, come down to dinner at once! and what answer I gave them, ye know it of old. By your faithful Cousin and lover Thomas Betson. I send you this ring for a token.
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