B xfskll, B xpmbn. Take iij angry : B ffrkfr, B ffpx, B xpmbn. Ther be iiij thyngs take gret betyng: B stpfksch, B mklstpn, B fffdkrbfd, B xpmbn.' Perhaps some of my readers by this time may have read the riddle, which is easier than those tricks by which love-lorn swains and lasses vainly imagine that they secretly correspond in the agony' column of the Standard. The thing is very simple, merely an abolition of vowel-symbols without extinction of vowel-sounds. Each vowel is represented by the following consonant. Thus, the three clatterers are 'a pie, a jay (iai) and a woman'; the three lowerers' a ape, a owle, and a woman '; the three angry, 'a ffrier, a ffox, and a woman.' The roars of laughter with which the right guess would be greeted, with many a sly application to some spinster aunt, mother-in-law, or shrewish wife, had something of the evanescent character of the crackling of thorns under a pot,' as these pleasantries would hardly bear repetition. The mention of the friar among the 'iij angry' is on a level with the estimate of the mendicant Orders a century earlier. 'Merry and wise' is the character of Melton's book. These are Caxton's daily rules, very slightly varied : and there are other rules for conduct, apparently not known elsewhere, ending: 'Yff thow hast lost thy good, Loke thow takyt with myld mood, And sowrow not to sore; Make joy, suffer and abyd, For yt may so betyde That thow shall have mych more.' The play of Abraham and Isaac' in 'The Boke of Brome,' as Melton's book is now entitled, is also of a unique character, and the other poems deserve much more notice than can be allotted to them here. The general conclusion is that life in a yeoman's house at this time was much brightened by the charms of literature, and purified by sentiments of wisdom and kindliness, referred to the Great Example for us all; and that it was not mere talk we have proof in Melton's spending fifteen shillings-what would be now an appalling sum-at Norwich for 'a bonet of welwete' for his mother, with other similar items. The 'Boke of Brome' was privately printed, but it deserves a wide circulation. We come to names better known than Melton's, and first to the Brandon family, sprung, no doubt, from the town on the Little Ouse, but settled afterwards at Westhorpe. William Brandon is mentioned in a letter of Hugh a Fenne to John Paston, in 1456, as late Eschetour, or county officer for certifying into the Exchequer lands which fell to the King from deaths of tenants-inchief, minorities, etc., an office which he served for Norfolk and Suffolk from November, 1454, to November, 1455. In 1469 the same name appears twice in the intrigues about Sir John Fastolf's will; but whether it pertains to the Eschetour of 1454 or to his son is uncertain. Edward IV., with his kingdom honeycombed with plots, and doubtful of the allegiance of those about him, made a progress through East Anglia in the summer of that year. He was at Bury on June 15 and 16, and three days afterwards at Norwich, having probably made his journey by Thetford. Having completed his pilgrimage to Walsingham, he went into the midlands by Lynn and Stamford. Before his departure from Norwich, John Paston (the brother of the Sir John whose correspondence makes the bulk of the well-known Letters') used all possible indirect influence with the King to procure his discountenancing the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk in their attempts on the Norfolk and Suffolk property of the deceased Fastolf. He got at Earl Rivers, the Queen's father, and two of his sons, Thomas Wyngfeld of Letheringham, and others, and had fair words from them. Brandon appears to have gone the other way. Thomas Wyngfeld told me, and swore on to me, that when Brandon meuvyd the Kyng and besowght hym to show my Lord [the Duke of Norfolk] favour in hys maters ayenst yow, that the Kyng seyd on to hym ayen, "Brandon, thow thou canst begyll the Dewk of Norffolk, and bryng hym abow the thombe as thow lyst, I let the wet thow shalt not do me so; for I understand thy fals delyng well enow," ' with more to the encouragement of the Paston interest. But Wingfield was a Mr. Facing-both-Ways; for by September of that year we find him and Brandon, with two other Suffolk knights, Sir John Heveningham and Sir Gilbert Debenham-local magnates conveniently under Mowbray and De la Pole influence-engaged in the siege of Sir John Paston's castle at Caister. On the whole, I think that this William Brandon must be the son of the Eschetour, and identical with a knight made in the field after the battle of Tewkesbury by Edward IV., for his name is last in the list, as though Edward did not love him too well, and likewise with the standard-bearer of Henry VII., unhorsed by the personal bravery of Richard III. at Bosworth. These Paston quarrels with the Wingfields and Brandons were composed after the death of the last of the Mowbray Dukes of Norfolk; and, indeed, before that time Sir Thomas Wingfield had procured a pardon for the younger of the brothers, John Paston, for being on the Lancastrian side at Barnet. From these early Brandon glimpses we turn to the well-known name of Tyrell. Travellers by the Great Eastern Railway' are aware,' to quote the Robin Hood ballads, of a station called Haughley Road. Indeed, those coming from the west and working nor'-east of an afternoon had better beware of it. The castle in Haughley has already been mentioned. Hard by is a parish called Gipping, at the head of the stream from which Ipswich takes its name, where for many years was settled a family bearing the name Tyrell, to adopt one of numerous spellings, derived possibly from the French tirailler, and thus symbolized by a rebus of three interlaced bows. William Tyrell was Sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk in 1446; and his eldest son, James, was knighted by Edward IV. after the battle of Tewkesbury, a 'goodly personage,' well endowed with natural gifts bodily and mental. Two years afterwards, when the Countess of Warwick came out of sanctuary at Beaulieu, Sir James Tyrell conveyed her northward, and in 1474 he was among the challengers at a tournament held on the occasion of Edward's second son, Richard, being created Duke of York. His next appearance is in Scotland, where, in July, 1482, he was made, by Richard, Duke of Gloucester, then in command, a knight- banneret for personal service rendered at the investment of Berwick and the capture of Edinburgh. Within four months the office of Lord High Constable of England was put in commission, the three viceconstables being Sir William Parr, Sir James Harrington, and Sir James Tyrell. Hitherto his name has been untarnished; but the terrible blot on it, the smothering Edward V. and his brother Richard, Duke of York, aged thirteen years and eleven years respectively, in the Tower of London, abides in the general belief, not much affected by the efforts to clear Richard III. or Sir James. There are not wanting now, as in past generations, those who acquit both; yet the evidence against the King is much stronger than that against Tyrell. Grafton's continuation of Harding's Chronicle contains the earliest printed narrative in English which charges Tyrell with the crime. According to this veracious writer, Richard III. committed himself up to the hilt.' He sent from Gloucester John Grene,' with a letter and credence also,' to Sir Robert Brackenbury, ordering the murder, and on Brackenbury's refusal, as if his situation lacked peril,' he sayed to a secrete page of his, “Ah, whome shall a manne trust? They that I have broughte vp my selfe, they that I went [weened] would haue moste surely serued me, euen those fayle me, and at my comaundement wyll doo nothing for me." "Syr," quoth the page," there lyeth one in yt palet chaumbre without, that I dare well saye, to dooe your grace pleasure, the thing were ryght heard [hard] that he would refuse," meaning by this James Tirell,' etc. This, like the extravagancies of Rous, may be put down to the Lancastrian sycophancy which flourished under the Tudors. Master and man are charged here, and master only by Rous, but the evidence in each case is tainted. Whatever Richard III. was, he was no fool, and would not have blabbed his evil machinations to man and boy, as in Grafton's story. Polydore Vergil, in his Latin History of England,' represents Tyrell as compelled against his will to undertake this horrible office. This is the first mention of Tyrell's name, but, again, his unsupported evidence is valueless:1 The Crowland continuator, John Rastell, and other 1 My friend the Rev. W. H. Sewell, Vicar of Yaxley, whose able paper in the 'Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archæology' (1878) received grateful acknowledgment at the time from many who could not adopt all its conclusions, thus quotes and translates an epigram of John Owen's: 'Vergilii duo sunt: alter Maro: tu Polydore Alter: tu mendax, ille poeta fuit. Two different Vergils both have writ, as every scholar knows : |