urselves also, have lain
full oft upon straw pallets, on rough mats covered only with a sheet,
under coverlets made of dagswain or hopharlots (I use their own
terms), and a good round log under their heads instead of a bolster
or pillow. If it were so that our fathers--or the good man of the
house had within seven years after his marriage purchased a mattress
or flock bed, and thereto a stack of chaff to rest his head upon, he
thought himself to be as well lodged as the lord of the town, that
peradventure lay seldom in a bed of down or whole feathers, so well
were they content, and with such base kind of furniture: which also
is not very much amended as yet in some parts of Bedfordshire, and
elsewhere, further off from our southern parts. Pillows (said they)
were thought meet only for women in childbed. As for servants, if
they had any sheet above them, it was well, for seldom had they any
under their bodies to keep them from the pricking straws that ran oft
through the canvas of the pallet and rased their hardened hides.

The third thing they tell of is the exchange of vessel, as of treen
platters into pewter, and wooden spoons into silver or tin. For so
common were all sorts of treen stuff in old time that a man should
hardly find four pieces of pewter (of which one was peradventure a
salt) in a good farmer's house, and yet for all this frugality (if it
may so be justly called) they were scarce able to live and pay their
rents at their days without selling of a cow, or a horse or more,[1]
although they paid but four pounds at the uttermost by the year. Such
also was their poverty that, if some one odd farmer or husbandman had
been at the ale-house, a thing greatly used in those days, amongst six
or seven of his neighbours, and there in a bravery, to shew what store
he had, did cast down his purse, and therein a noble or six shillings
in silver, unto them (for few such men then cared for gold, because it
was not so ready payment, and they were oft enforced to give a penny
for the exchange of an angel), it was very likely that all the rest
could not lay down so much against it; whereas in my time, although
peradventure four pounds of old rent be improved to forty, fifty, or a
hundred pounds, yet will the farmer, as another palm of date tree,
think his gains very small toward the end of his term if he have not
six or seven years' rent lying by him, therewith to purchase a new
lease, beside a fair garnish of pewter oft hi