How many lamprey pies does an archbishop eat, and how often? How many melons and swans are required in an archiepiscopal kitchen? How were the Lambeth bargemen paid, and in what middle seventeenth-century London ecclesiastical household might one discover partialities to strawberries, herring, cheeses, claret, pheasants, oysters, cumin, olives, beans, brooms, geese, candied lemon peel (citterne), salmon, sugar loaves, ‘great carpes’, bergamot pears, trout, veal, and regular donations to the poor as well as gifts to the king? The questions may seem quotidian, but under the deft editorship of Leonie James, the answers play their parts in situating evidence from the household account-book of William Laud (1573–1645, Archbishop of Canterbury 1633–45) in wide networks of patronage, trade, gift-giving and gift-receipt, charity, friendship, and the support of craftsmanship.
The 2019 volume of the Church of England Record Society (coers.org) offers a first publication of Laud’s financial transactions from the early stage of his archiepiscopal tenure until 1642 – transactions stop three years before his 1645 decollation. The book is remarkable for its presentation of a manuscript, the whereabouts of which were unknown between 1642 and 1912, when it found its way into the holdings of the Public Record Office separated significantly from Laud’s other papers at Oxford and Lambeth Palace Library. The manuscript’s obscurity for nearly three centuries, and the minute nature of its daily entries, resulted in its being overlooked until now in earlier Laud scholarship.
During the six years covered by the accounts, Laud was in his early sixties and a close personal advisor to Charles I. The archbishop’s household was divided between two residences: Lambeth Palace during the majority of the year, and Croydon Palace during the summer months. Although some staff remained at each palace in the months when the archbishop was not in residence, most of the household – along with their horses – moved with him. Readers encounter a bustling micro-economy surrounding the archbishop. His charity extends each year to prisoners and the generally destitute who receive, for example, ‘xx wastcostes for 20 poore women in Lambeth’ (£5 4 shillings 8 pence) and specific benefactions to the disabled or stranded foreigners; but Laud also makes major annual gifts to the king himself (£40 in 1641) and as much as £30 a year for unnamed courtiers. A tantalizing dimension of international trade surfaces, too, in the annual support of Crown initiatives such as the levy for ship money. By May 1640, however, the impending collapse of authority for Church and Crown have become impossible to ignore; Laud is purchasing pistols, powder, ‘shott’ and ‘munitioning peeces’ to defend Lambeth Palace against rioting opponents of the Laudian-Caroline caesaropapist project. From February 1641, Laud assumes the cost of his own imprisonment, paying for window repairs, keys, padlocks, food and gratuities to his jailers in the Tower. The Household Accounts are thus a fine-grained and concentrated depiction of an incipient ancien régime just before its bloody transitions toward the Interregnum.
The editorial apparatus is relatively spare, in keeping with the nature of the text as a register rather than a narrative. James expands some abbreviations but retains original spelling, and she translates first instances of Latin phrases that recur throughout. The extensive biographical appendix identifies a substantial number of the more than 400 persons named in the accounts, and herein lies a dimension of the importance of the edition: Laud’s household emerges as part of a constellation of outlay, demand and supply that are not just quantified in pounds, shillings and pence as transactions, but rather as direct moments of personal exchange. Some individuals’ identities are necessarily elusive or conjectural, but even anonymous figures have major roles in the household economy. A regular expense is ‘for the man’ – a tip for the person who delivered a given item. In this scholarly household, there are careful entries for candles and bookbinding costs, but also for harp repair, groundskeeping, servants’ livery, the shoeing of horses, and immense amounts of fodder; ‘bushels of oates for geldings and colts’ appears often in happy scansion.
Dr James’s earlier work on Laud has focused on his controversial career in Scotland, and her first monograph This Great Firebrand: William Laud and Scotland, 1617–1645 was also published by Boydell and Brewer in 2017. The scholarly movement from policy to domestic expenditure is not opaque for long: the extent of Laud’s charity – and his apparent intimacy with pastry cooks, buttery servants and their ilk – has been either unknown or ignored by critics who saw his wider disciplinary and liturgical programs as autocratic or worse. James gives us a new Laud in the ledger ‘as a barometer of [his] personal fortunes, since through it we can trace his career at both its highest and lowest points’. The archbishop’s confinement in the Tower results in a winding-down of palace expenditures, an almost complete cessation of his receipt of gifts from ‘the great and the good’, and the eventual dispersal of servants to other households. The final purchase is a poignant ‘twelve brooms for the stables’ on 14 January 1642. The editor has given scholars of the man and the period an intimate portrait of a career at zenith and nadir.
