From Home Counties Magazine, Volume VI, p256-264, 1904

TANNIS.

THE INVENTORY INDENTED OF HOUSEHOLD STUFF TAKEN THERE THE XXVI DAY OF JUNE IN THE ELEVENTH YERE OF THE REIGNE OF QUENE ELIZABETH ANNO DNI. 1569.

By W. MINET, F.S.A.

ACCOUNTS and statistics of all kinds are notoriously dull and uninteresting documents to those who have no personal concern in them, and an agent's list of the contents of a house may well be placed in the same category, yet let any one of these lie hidden for a sufficient time, it will be found to have gained a secondary interest far eclipsing its original value, an interest which increases in proportion to the time it has lain hidden. For reasons into which this is not the place to enquire, the daily life of our ancestors has for the most of us an abiding charm, and any document which enables us to reconstitute this has to-day a value out of all proportion to that which it may have possessed when first drawn up. I therefore make no excuse for printing what at the time was a mere formal list of the contents of Tannis House in 1569.

Tannis stood in the parish of Aspenden, not far from Buntingford, in Hertfordshire. A farm called Tannis Court still exists, but the house of 1569 is more probably that represented in the illustration, about a quarter of a mile away and surrounded, as were so many Hertfordshire houses, by a still existing moat.

The inventory is signed by Edward Halfehide, and sealed with his seal, having in base, two chevrons conjoined, and in chief three seeded roses; the chevrons we know to have been the then recently acquired blazon of the family, but the origin of the roses is still to seek.¹ We may fairly assume that the furniture was the property of Halfehide, and the house may have been his also, though this point is far from clear. Chauncy, speaking of the manor of Barkesdon in which Tannis would seem to be situated, says that Andrew Judd sold a portion of the manor to Edward Halfe­ hide, then possessor of Tannis, who settled it on his wife for her jointure. He goes on to say that Halfehide afterwards sold it to Andrew Grey, who owned it in 1590. A little more detail appears from another entry in the same work, where  speaking of the manor of Moor Hall adjoining Barkesdon he says that Edward Halfehide purchased it about 1564, and in 1569 joined in 'a recovery to settle the same on his marriage with the daughter of Sir Edward Capell, of Aspenden, and conveyed the manor to Sir E. Capell and Gyles Capell, his son, as a jointure for his wife.; but that about two years after he sold it to one William Gurney.

It begins with the offices, and speaks first of the dairy or "mylke house," where are the usual appliances for butter and cheese making:

One cheese presse, vii bourds for shelves, ii thicke planks, x mylke bourds, vii kymnels, v erthen potts, ii chearnes, vi cheesmoles, iiii tubbs, i forme, ii stooles, one payer of scoles and iiii weigte of leade.

These dairy utensils are all obvious except, perhaps, the kymnels, which seem to have been shallow tubs in which the butter was washed and salted when fresh from the churn (see New Eng. Diet. s. v. Kimnel). Next follows the "sellar," in which were:

One cofer, one cubberd, a rounde table, ii joyned stooles, ii glasse bottelIs, i tynne bottelI, ii pewtr. potele potts, iiii wyne glasse bowles, ii bere glasses, i glasse yeower, ii dozen & viii plate tynne trenchers & frute dishes & vi lyttle sawcers.

In the "buttry" which comes next we find much the same class of article:

A bynne wth. a cover, ii cofers wth locke, iiii basons & iiii yeowers of tynne & five candeIl sticks of tynne, xiiii latten candle­sticks, vii stone crewses wth. tynne covers, iii tynne saltes, a black leather jack, ii dozen rounde trenchers, iiii dozen of greate trenchers, & one lyttle table withe a seate.

The larder contains the usual assortment of "bourds," shelves, and tubbs, with two "mynsing," two chopping knives, and a cleaver. There is also here an "ambry," or cupboard, a word which now survives only in the form "aumbry," limited to ecclesiastical use; it is akin to the French "armoire."

The boulting-house and the bake-house both have to do with the making of bread; the former being where the flour was pre­ pared and sifted through a bolting cloth, probably, I suggest, stretched over the "lynnen wheeles" which we find among the items. Though not dealing here with etymology I cannot help lingering for a moment over this word boulting, as it gives us a key to two words with which few would suspect it to be connected: it comes from the cloth which was used to sift the flour; and can be traced back through a Low Latin word  "burra," to the Greek 'πνρ, the cloth taking its name from its reddish, or fire colour. Far back this cloth was employed for various uses, from two of which we get the "biretta," worn by the priest, and the "beret" worn by the Pyrennean peasant to this day. The boulting-house contained:

A bulting bynne, one longe meale trough, one tonne for flower, a meale tubb, a longe settle for candles, one tallow tubb, one candle mowlde, one brewing tubb, ii skuttels, iiii payles, and iii Iynnen wheeles.

while the bake-house added

One mowlding table wth. a frame, one side table, ii formes & ii benches, iiii brasse pannes, iii washing tubbs, ii tryvetts, and one yron peele,

the last being the flat long-headed shovel used for taking the bread out of the oven. Though lost in English it survives in modern French as the usual name for a spade. The farming stock is given under the heading "The Bayly of husbondry, Wortham," (no doubt the bailiff's name) and includes

vii cart horses, vii payer of carte harnesse, ii paier of carte ropes, iii long carts, ii payer of wheeles, seven paier of plough harnes, ii ploughes wth. cowlters & shares & plough chaynes wth. them, one ox yoke, ii paier of yron harrowes. One payer of wooden harrowes, vi quarter sacks, iii fannes, one busshell, iiii skepps, one draught rake, ii pytcheforks, iii shovells one of them typped wth. yron, ii spades, one mattock, iii wedges, i ax, ii bills, one payer of hedging gloves, vi meade rakes, i shoovel to turn corne, i bushe­ brake, i crow of yron & vii mullen halters.

Wright's" Dialect Dictionary" explains a mullen halter as the bridle of a cart horse, but offers no suggestion as to the origin of the word, nor can I find any explanation elsewhere. Of the other articles a skep is a word still in use for a wide open basket, while a bushbrake I take to have been a form of harrow.

Before passing on to the rooms themselves we may perhaps take the pewter, plate, and linen, all of which are set out separately. The latter appears under the heading "the napery wth. Mother Wigg," who must have had charge of it.

We now come to the house, and begin with the kitchen, where the utensils were as simple as were probably the results they produced, boiled or roast being the only alternatives.

iii great beefe potts & ii lyttle brasse potts, iii greate pannes & iiii lyttle pannes, iii posnets, one great chaffer, a morter of brasse wth. a pestle of yron, one latten ladle, one scomer, a grate, ii grudyrons, ii dryppyng pannes. One olde chafyng dyshe, ii plate candlesticks, one stone morter, one payre of greate racks, viii spyttes, iii paier of pothooks and iii payer of pothangers.

All these are too obvious to need much explanation, except perhaps to say that a posnet is a small pot, a scomer a skimmer, while the racks were used to hang the spits on for roasting. Pot-hooks and pot-hangers have now an educational meaning, but were then used to suspend the pots from the "cremaillere," a thing common enough in England, for which I can, however, find no English equivalent. A distinction seems to be drawn between them, and perhaps the pot-hook was the "cremaillere" and the hanger the hook by which the pot was hung on it.

Only two sitting-rooms seem to have existed, the entry, and the parlour. The former I take to have been the hall, which at this date was ceasing to be used as the main living room of the house. Its furniture was simple, though we must remember that we are dealing with movable furniture only, and not with fixtures; it contained,

One longe table standing up agaynst the wall, a wycker skryne and a dexte.

the latter article seems an odd word, but Halliwell gives "dexe" as a form, and its meaning desk, is obvious from a later entry under Mistress Anne's chamber. The parlour was evidently the main living and, teste the toasting fork, eating room of the house. Its furniture consisted in

The hanging of tapestary worke & olde hanging under the same of red & grene say, ix joyned fourmes, one joyned chayer, one longe table, one paier of tressells, one four folding table with carved leggs, one cubberd to set plate upon, one chayer of grene say embroydered, a benche of waynescot with turned leggs, v stooles, a paier of playing tables, a picture of the Quene in a table, one fayre long carpet of tapestary woorke, one carpet of the same for a cubberd, one longe carpet of grene playne cloth, one olde carpet more of frame woorke, vi new quoysshions of tapestary, vi other quoysshions of grene fustian apes and six other quoysshions of carpet woork, one courteyne of silke for the wyndow, i other longe courteyne for ye wyndow of grene buckram, a payer of cobyrons, a fyre panne, a paier of bellowes & a tosting fork of yron.

Another room, not so fully furnished, though with greater magnificence, was the chamber over the parlour; in it we find:

ii trussing bedsteds whereof one of the testers is of white & grene braunched silk myngled wth. gold, iii courteynes of grene sarcenet, and thother tester of turky sylke wth. iii curteynes of chaungeable sarcenet, ii fetherbeds, ii bolsters, ii coverlets, ii paier of blankets, iii pillowes, one chayer of red say, iii paynted pictures in bourds, one fyre panne, one chayer of olde velvet wth. starres of golde, ii wyndow quoysshions one of them embroydred wth. golden byrds, and thother of needle woork wth. caddys, one lyvery cubberd wth. a carpet of frame woorke. The hanging of the same chamber of yeolow and blew say, a longe courteyne to draw over the myddle of the chamber of yeolow & blewe say with a rod of yron to ronne upon, and one iii cornered stoole.

"Braunched" silk was probably embroidered with spriggs, and "chaungeable" is, perhaps, the equivalent of the modern "shot." Our notion of a carpet is that it lies on the floor, but here it is equally applied to something covering a cupboard. As these lines are written I notice an apt confirmation of this old use. In a case recently before some ecclesiastical court, relating to the proper covering for the Communion table, the canons of 1604 were quoted, ordinances yet in force. The eighty-second of these directs that "the Table be covered in Divine service with a carpet of silk or other decent stuff thought meet by the Ordinary, and at the time of the Ministration with a fair linen cloth as becometh that Table."

The number of cupboards in the house is surprising, many of them "livery cubberds": these were originally used for storing the rations of food issued for the day, but the word early came to mean a cupboard of any kind, more especially an ornamental cup­ board or sideboard. A quotation of 1571, given in the "New English Dictionary" (s. v. "livery") is exactly in point, as it speaks of "a carpet for a livery cupboard." Caddys is a word now quite lost, but Halliwell knows it as worsted, or worsted ribbon, the former perfectly suiting its use here.

The beds were of two kinds, trussing and trendle: Halliwell defines the former as a travelling bed, an explanation which the word itself seems to support: but here it is obviously of a more permanent nature, as it is always fitted with a tester, and curtains: while the trendle bed seems to have been of a movable character, what would now be called a truckle bed.