Margaret's bead bequests

Margaret Paston, PART II

As I mentioned in the first post in this series, I found four clear references to "bedes" or "bedys" (meaning paternoster beads) in the Paston Letters from 15th-century England. I discussed the first one last time; here are the other three.

In 1470 -- almost twenty years later than the first reference -- Margaret Paston's brother-in-law William Paston received a set of coral beads as part of the collateral for a loan. What's particularly interesting here is that the beads are the very first item listed, ahead of such items as twenty silver spoons and several valuable cups. Here's the text:

BILL OF INDENTURE, 1470

This bill endentid [bill of indenture, a record of the loan] made the xv day of August the xth yer of King Edwarde þe iiijte [Edward IV] betwixt William Paston, esquyer, on þe ton partie [on the one part] and Thomas Vyall of Norwich, payntur [painter], witnessith þat þe saide Thomas Vyall hath borowid of þe saide William Paston v li. [five pounds] of lawfull mony, vpon plege of j par of corall bedys with xxj gaudys ["gauds," i.e. marker beads] of siluer and gilte weyng [weighing] vj vnc. [ounces] with þe lace and þe knopp, xx siluer sponys weyng xvj vnc., j standyng pes ["standing piece", probably a covered cup] of siluer with a couer weyng x vnc., a large maseer ["mazer", a type of elaborate wooden cup wil silver fittings] parcell [partly] gilt weyng, þe tymber ["timber", i.e. the wood] and all, xv vnc., j maser siluer and gilt weyng viij vnc., a maser weyng vij vnc. dj. and j quarter and a mase[r] with þe fote [foot] broken, not weyde. And the saide Thomas Vyall byndith hym-silff, his eyres and executours [bindeth himself, his heirs and executors] to pay to þe saide William Paston the saide v li. of lawfull mony at þe fest of þe Natiuité of Our Lorde ["feast of the Nativity of Our Lord", i.e. Christmas] next commyng affter þe date of this present writyng. In witnesse wher-of þe parties beforsaide enterchaungeably haue set to ther seallys. Writen þe day and yer above saide. Wyl[ia]m Paston

The description of the beads is more detailed than most: "j par of corall bedys with xxj gaudys of siluer and gilte weyng vj vnc. with þe lace and þe knopp." This translates as, "One pair [i.e. set] of coral beads with 21 gauds of gilded silver, weighing 6 ounces including the string and the 'knop'." (A "knop" is literally a knot or knob: probably here meaning a large decorative bead or pomander.)

A dozen or so years later, we have the 1482 will of Margaret Paston herself. Several things about it are interesting, and two sets of her beads are mentioned specifically.



(This brass isn't of Margaret Paston, BTW, but it seemed appropriate even though I don't know who it is. I can tell you that it's English, at least.)

MARGARET PASTON'S WILL, 1482

In the name of God, amen. I, Margaret Paston, widowe, late the wiff [wife] of John Paston, squier, doughter and heire to John Mauteby, squier, hole of spirit and mynde, with parfite avisement [perfect awareness] and good deliberacion, the iiijte day of February in the yer of our Lord God a ml cccclxxxj, make my testament and last wille in this fourme folowyng.

Item, I bequeth to Anne, my doughter, wiff of William Yeluerton, my grene [green] hangyng in my parlour at Mauteby, a standing cuppe with a couer gilt with a flatte knoppe, and a flatte pece with a couer gilt withoute [i.e. gilded on the outside], xij siluer spones, a powder boxe with a foot and a knoppe enamelled blewe [blue], my best corse girdill ["coarse girdle," i.e. a large belt], blewe herneised ["harnessed", i.e. decorated] with siluer and gilt, my premer ["primer", i.e. prayerbook], my bedes of siluer enamelled. Item, I bequeth to the seid Anne my fetherbedde with sillour, curteyns, and tester in my parlour at Mauteby... (followed by blankets, sheets, pewter dishes et cetera)

Item, I bequethe to Marie Tendall, my goddoughter, my peir bedys of calcidenys [chalcedony] gaudied with siluer and gilt...

Parenthetically here, those who know the story of this family will appreciate that Margaret's will leaves NOTHING to her youngest daughter Margery, though Margery's sons do get the same bequest as the rest of the grandsons. Young Margery, after many arguments and not a few beatings to discourage the relationship, persisted and secretly married the family's bailiff Richard Call, a descent in social status which her mother strongly disapproved -- in fact, her mother actually went to court to try to have the marriage declared invalid.

The list of valuable items bequeathed to Margery's older sister Anne begins with a green wall hanging (possibly embroidered), a silver "standing cuppe" and covered dish, then smaller items of silver. Next is listed a blue belt, perhaps of silk, with gilded silver fittings (likely a gilded buckle, belt-tip, and several decorative rivets or sewn-on badges). Next come the paternoster beads, and only after all that, bedding and other household stuff, and last of all, money.

This sequence probably means something, and we see similar sequences in other wills and inventories. Some of it is clearly set by custom: a will is a sort of ritual, and things may be listed in a certain order just because that's how it "should" be done in a will. But perhaps this sequence also contains some indications of relative value, whether this means monetary value or perhaps social value or status. By and large, the most costly and precious items seem to be listed first, progressing to those that are more common, practical, and subject to wear and tear.

Anne's beads are gilded silver, clearly a high-status item and quite costly, and they are duly weighed (string and all!) and grouped with the other silver items. Goddaughter Marie's beads are chalcedony, a very hard, semi-translucent stone that could also be quite valuable.

Beads don't appear in exactly the same place in all lists. But the three lists analyzed here make one thing clear: bedes (beads) are definitely worth more than beddes (beds :)

What did Margaret mean?

I'm always grateful for all the blessed souls who have painstakingly typed (or scanned and proofread) long medieval manuscripts so they are available -- and searchable! -- on the Internet.

I recently had occasion to look at the Paston Letters, a famous series of letters and documents from a family of English gentry in the mid to late fifteenth century (1400s). They provide quite a bit of insight into the realities of everyday life for a moderately wealthy family of the period. I'd seen something quoted in translation, and I wanted to see what the original text said.

As usual, I was looking for mentions of prayer beads. At this period, the word "beads" by itself with no qualifiers almost always refers to prayer beads. Once you figure out that "bedys" and "bedes" usually mean "beads", it's fairly easy to do a text search for them and see in what contexts beads are mentioned. I found a couple of citations that were pretty much what I expected, and one that was a surprise. (The search also turned up a few references to "bedes/beddes" that were clearly beds, along with a couple of "fetherbeddes" -- the vagaries of text search and English spelling.)

Here's the surprising one. It's from a 1453 letter by Margaret Paston, the mother of the family, to her husband who is away in London. I love this language, so I'll reproduce as much of this as I have room for.

On the text: The spelling of this period is usually pretty easy to decipher if you try reading the text aloud -- these words may not look like the ones we know, but they do sound like them. The original also spells the word her as "here," which I find entirely too confusing, especially since the word here is spelled identically. I've taken the e's off the ones that mean "her." And I've translated a few things [in brackets].



Right wurshippfull hosbond, I recommand me to yow [you], praying yow to wete ["wit", i.e. to know] that þe [the] man of Knapton þat owyth yow mony [oweth you money] sent me this weke xxxix s. viij d.; and as for þe remenant of þe mony, he hath promysid to bring itt at Wytsontyd [Whitsuntide, i.e. around Pentecost Sunday]. And as for þe prest [the priest], Howardys sone, he yede [went] to Canbryge þe last weke and he shall nomore come hom tyll itt be mydsomer [Midsummer], and therfore I myght not [i.e. could not] do yowr erunde [errand].

As for tydyngys, þe Quene come in-to þis town on Tewysday last past after none [last Tuesday afternoon] and abode here tyll itt was Thursday iij after none, and she sent after my cosyn Elysabeth Clere be [i.e. "at"] Sharynborn to come to her. And she durst not dysabey [disobey] her commandment, and come to her. And when she come in þe Quenys presens þe Quene made ryght meche [much] of her, and desyrid her to have an hosbond, þe which ye shall know of here-after; but as for that, he is non nerrere [no nearer] than he was before. The Quene was right well pleasid wyth her answere, and reportyht of her in þe best wyse, and seyth be her trowth ["by her troth", an exclamation] she sey [saw] no jantylwomman [gentlewoman] syn [since] she come into Norffolk þat she lykyth better þan she doth her...

I pray yow þat ye woll do yowr cost ["do your cost" i.e. spend some money] on me ayens Witsontyd ["against," i.e. before, Whitsuntide], þat I may haue somme thyng for my nekke [neck]. When þe Quene was here I borowd my cosyn Elysabet Cleres devys ["device," i.e. probably an enameled necklace or pendant], for I durst [dared] not for shame go wyth my bedys [with my beads] among so many fresch jantylwomman as here were at þat tym. The blissid Trinyté have yow in his kepyng. Wretyn [written] at Norwych on þe Fryday next before Seynt George. Be yowrys [yours], M. Paston.

Clearly, she is thinking of her paternoster beads here simply as an item of personal jewelry. Displaying her wealth and good taste in the Queen's company, including being well dressed and appropriately jeweled, is simply what she owes to her station in life. She concludes that if she is going to be in the royal presence again, she needs more jewelry.

But what I find most interesting about this is that she mentions needing "something for my neck" in one breath, and in the next, says she felt ashamed to go before the Queen with only her "beads." This clearly implies (though it doesn't prove) that she was wearing her paternoster beads around her neck. Is that what she meant?

Today wearing a rosary around your neck is regarded as irreverent -- which is probably why some modern entertainers do it. But in the 15th and 16th centuries, it was apparently fairly common. I've mentioned some examples in an earlier article here.

I'm told it was a practice that was discouraged at the time, but I still haven't found any reference saying so. If anyone has more specifics on this, I'd love to hear them.

(Footnote: the portrait I've reproduced above is not Margaret Paston; I haven't found any surviving portraits from the family. And it's about a generation later. But it fits my image of her perfectly. It's actually a portrait of an unknown woman from the early 1500s, probably painted by Jacobsz Dirk, and is in the Musée de Beaux-Arts in Lille, France.)

(to be continued)

Chatsworth paternoster

I finally have a GOOD photo of the "Chatsworth paternoster," otherwise known as Henry VIII's rosary.

It's actually a "tenner", a string of ten large beads. There is a ring at one end, a cross, the usual ten beads, and then an eleventh, larger bead which is a "prayer nut," carved on the outside and opening to show more carving on the inside.

Actually, the whole thing is an amazing, minutely and intricately carved work in boxwood -- a wood often used for such virtuoso exhibitions of carving, since it's very hard and close-grained. To quote the catalog:

"The Cross is carved with the Crucifixion and the Four Evangelists on one side and the four Latin fathers on the other. The Ave beads are each divided into five roundels, and carved with figures of ten of the the Apostles, with the Sentences of the Creed, the Prophets and Sibyls with appropriate texts, and scenes from the Old and New Testaments. The Pater bead [5.4cm diameter] has three rows of eight roundels with further scenes, including the royal arms of England and the letters 'he 8' (for King Henry VIII) and 'k.a.' (for Queen Catherine of Aragon), and the two remaining Apostles; it is hinged and has another two scenes inside of the Mass of Saint Gregory and the Virgin and Child Adored by Angels."

The entire string is 58cm (almost 23 inches) long. It was bought by the sixth Duke of Devonshire (1790-1858) for 200 pounds, from Rundell and Bridge (the Court jewelers), after being in the keeping of the Jesuits at Paris for many years, and then in a private collection.

I've been looking for a good photo of this for quite a while, since the only ones I've been able to find are small black and white versions, and usually they're from books printed before about 1990, when there seems to have been something of a revolution in photography and color printing that allows more recent books to have bigger, sharper and clearer close-up photos than ever before. (People with over-40 eyes appreciate this a lot.)

This photo is in The Devonshire Inheritance: Five Centuries of Collecting at Chatsworth [Ed. Frances Kianka; Art Services International, 2003, ISBN 0-88397-138-0], printed to accompany a traveling exhibit that's been making the rounds in the U.S. (I think it's currently in Palm Beach, Florida). There's a half-page photo of the whole thing, and a closeup of two of the beads.

That's the good news [grin].

The bad news? The fact that this is, indeed, part of that traveling exhibit means that I did -- as I thought -- miss seeing the thing in person by one (1) day. I was visiting my parents in Boston early in November, and the day that I arrived was the day after the last day of the exhibit at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, not that far away.

Oh, well :)

English rosaries after Henry VIII

The inventory of Henry VIII contains numerous entries describing a string of beads "gauded" with some other kind of bead -- pearls gauded with gold, white beads gauded with blue, et cetera. A fellow jewelry researcher has convinced me these are probably all rosaries, especially since the beaded necklaces in her other research are never described this way.

After Henry VIII's break with Rome, the rosary became suspect as a "Popish practice." In particular, the prayers of the rosary were problematic because they invoke a saint, the Virgin Mary. Article 22 of the Thirty-Nine Articles (which define the Church of England) describes the invocation of saints as "a fond thing vainly invented and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the word of God."

People of a more Puritan way of thinking, of course, regarded crosses, rosaries, the sign of the cross, et cetera as "Popish idols" and universally condemned their use. We have stories of parents snatching their babies out of the priest's arms at baptism in order to prevent him making the sign of the cross on their foreheads!

In 1571, the year after Queen Elizabeth was formally excommunicated by the Pope, a statute was passed declaring rosaries and other Roman Catholic accessories illegal. We have a picture published by Bernard Garter of London in 1579 of "Certaine of the Popes merchandize lately sen[t] over into Englande" which includes two very recognizable five-decade rosaries, along with a rather odd circle of nine striped beads and several plain ones, several religious medals, an "Agnus Dei" (consecrated wax medallion), religious woodblock prints, a pouch of "granum benedictum," and a portable altar.



However there are indications that the rosary did survive, at least in areas where Roman Catholicism remained strong, such as the north of England and the southwest (Devon and Cornwall). Dr. Madeleine Gray wrote a couple of years ago that there's a record of a seventeenth-century Puritan clergyman in south-west Wales who was reduced to imploring his congregation to use their rosaries "prayerfully and with thought." I think the jury is still out on whether the rosary continued to be used by members of the reformed English church, although it's certainly possible that otherwise good members of the Reformed church retained some "superstitious" traditions.

A good deal of comment has been occasioned by the discovery in Jamestown (Virginia) of beads that look like they could be part of a rosary. There is an online article about these beads (and others) in The Journal of the Jamestown Rediscovery Center, a refereed online journal. (See especially section 2.2 and endnote 3.)

If you have the time and inclination, you can also download the 1997 Jamestown excavation report, which includes details of a crucifix found on the site which also might have been part of a rosary. It's a 2.3 megabyte PDF file (which requires Acrobat Reader).

See pages 22 and 23 of the file for a description of the crucifix with a photograph, as well as some discussion of a possible Catholic presence at Jamestown and the survivial of Catholic traditions in Elizabethan England.

Rosaries for RenFaire

I actually got interested in the history of rosaries and paternosters in the first place because someone from my Renaissance guild said to me, "The character I'm portraying was a Catholic. Would she have carried a rosary, and if so, what would it have looked like?"

"I don't know," I answered, and started looking for information. Alas, sources are few and far between. For some reason, nearly everyone who writes about rosaries focuses on the prayers, and completely skips over questions like what the beads were made of, how many there are, and how they are arranged.

It turns out that the most useful resources are books on jewelry, since rosaries seem to have generally followed the fashions of ordinary jewelry of the same period. We do have a few surviving rosaries from the 15th, 16th and early 17th centuries, and more evidence from period paintings and other illustrations. What can we conclude from these?

First, 16th-century English rosaries came in a variety of forms, some of which look quite a lot like modern rosaries. The form of the modern rosary, a circle of five groups of ten beads each, with a single bead between "decades" and a short side-chain of five more beads and a cross, was more or less "standardized" by the Council of Trent, which met in the middle of the 16th century, from 1563 to 1569.

Judging from jewelry of the time, it's quite possible to find a modern rosary that is a pretty good approximation of a 16th-century rosary of this type. Here are the major things to look for.

(1) Beads were usually not faceted, but round or oval with a smooth surface.

(2) Materials include -- more or less in order from lowest to highest status -- wood, bone, glass, semiprecious stone such as agate, mother-of-pearl, jet, amber, coral, silver, pearls, or even gold with precious stones. The single beads between decades (called "paters" or "gauds") were usually material of the same or higher status than the decade beads.

Any modern rosary that meets these criteria and doesn't look like it's plastic, machine-made or excessively modern in style is quite a plausible accessory for a 16th-century Catholic. Pay especially close attention to the cross and medals of any rosary you're considering -- this is where modern style shows up most often, and a 1930s Art Deco cross just doesn't make for a believable 16th-century accessory.

I'll write more another day about other types of 16th-century rosaries, but briefly, we also see rosaries that are strung on silk thread rather than being made with metal chain-links like modern ones, circles of five decades with just a cross rather than the whole side-chain, and rosaries that end with a religious medal or plain cross rather than a crucifix (a cross with the figure of Jesus on it).

How would a 16th-century Catholic have worn or used her rosary?

Rosaries were technically illegal in Protestant England, but as far as I know, the extent of active persecution of Catholics was actually rather limited, and in any case only significant after the 1570s. Nobles and gentry who refused to attend the parish church were subject to fines, and occasionally someone of significant social standing who had been reported as a Catholic (often by disgruntled neighbors or rivals) was put in jail to think about it for a while, but really active persecution was mostly confined to the politically suspect -- priests actively trying to win converts and anyone suspected of plotting against the Crown. So an ordinary Catholic would probably not get into any trouble just by openly carrying a rosary.

Probably most rosaries were carried in a pocket, as they usually are today. A rosary might also have been worn as jewelry -- in the 16th century it was not considered sacreligious to wear a rosary as a necklace, or it might be wound around the wrist to wear as a bracelet. (Be aware, though, that wearing a rosary as a necklace is considered shocking or irreverent by many modern Catholics, so if you choose to do this, prepare to deal with the audience's reaction.)

A rosary could also be worn hanging from one's belt -- there's at least one portrait of Mary Queen of Scots that shows her wearing one in this style.

The rosary was and is a form of private prayer, so you would not find people standing around reciting it loudly in public. It also doesn't seem to have been such a "hot" issue that you would expect someone to walk up to you in the street and denounce you for having or using one -- any religious attacks were more often about "Papist practices" in general, rather than rosaries in particular.

You might well, however, find someone sitting or kneeling with one off in a quiet corner, or in the back row at a prayer service. If you want to be completely historically accurate, by the way, you would probably be reciting the prayers in Latin -- available online at http://rosarycreations.com/rosaryprayerslatin.htm among other places, along with general instructions on which prayers to say when. (Googling on "rosary prayers Latin" turns up quite a few sites.)

A few pictures of 16th-century rosaries online:

Small rosary of bone, 15th-16th century. (Re-strung in modern times.)

Wood and silver rosary, strung on silk cord, 16th-17th century.

Rosary belonging to Mary Queen of Scots

Portrait of the 63-year-old Erhard Vöhlin von Frickenhausen, 1552

Portrait of a Young Man (Balthasar Eicheister) with Pomander by Bartholomeus Bruyn, the Elder.

Holbein's portrait of Lady Mary Guildford (1527)