The Percy family documents seldom provide much information about named performers, but for Thomas Wigen or Wyggen, the references suggest an eventful, perhaps harrowing life. He appears first in 1605 in a menial role, paid 6 s 8 d ‘for taking up foundations in the garden May the 13˹th˺’.[1] More interesting is a taylor’s bill […]
The pre-edited Records of Early English Drama drawn from the substantial family accounts of the Percys (the Medieval & Early Modern Earls of Northumberland) may now be viewed and searched on our ‘Percy Papers’ page. Check out the latest batch of Percy records here: The Percy Papers Thanks to REED editor Robert Alexander, assisted by […]
This month’s Flower comes from the Northumberland border town of Berwick-upon-Tweed. The borough account book records some youthful shenanigans in the streets of Berwick in the early 1540s. An undated order from 5 Edward VI (1541/42) records that children in the town are ‘suffered’ (allowed) ‘to run abroad and make cryings’ and cause mayhem in […]
The East Yorkshire port of Kingston upon Hull – though now gearing up to be UK City of Culture for 2017 – is probably not thought of as an avant-garde cultural centre in the medieval and early modern periods. It was bought from Meaux Abbey by Edward I for the specific purpose of establishing a […]
This record of a local court case of 1522 from the Beverley Great Guild Book (East Riding Archives BC/II/3, f. 27) illuminates not only the contemporary spectator sport of bear-baiting but the political tensions (and often open war) between English and Scots at that period. It shows us that John of Grene, the Earl of […]