Your browser is not supported. This might affect how the content is displayed.
The manuscript containing the account of the ‘Foot Voyage’ was deposited in the Record Office at Chester in 1985 by Mrs Beatrice Aldersey, as just one item in a large collection of papers ranging in date from the 16th to the 20th centuries (ref. CR 469). This supplemented an earlier collection (ref. DAL) deposited in March 1954 by Mrs Aldersey’s late husband, Captain Ralph Aldersey. The Alderseys had for some generations been based at Aldersey Hall, just over seven miles south east of Chester, though the grand house itself had clearly become more of a burden than an asset by the early twentieth century; it had for a while been adapted for use as a horticultural college before being demolished some years after the end of the second world war.
The manuscript containing the ‘Foot Voyage’ account is in many ways an unremarkable document. It is an unpaginated, unfoliated quarto, 20.2 cm by 15.5 cm, bound presumably early in its history using a basic stitch along the fold. This binding remained intact until the manuscript was disbound for conservation in December 2012. Gatherings 1 and 8 are each formed from a sheet of paper watermarked with a single-handled, crowned pot, initialled ‘I VA’; a sheet of paper from a stock with a watermark of very similar design, but different proportions and dimensions, was used in a letter to Nathaniel Bacon dated 30 January 1615 (Folger MS L. d. 203). The four leaves of the first quire are blank and still unopened, though substantially damaged, while the final leaf of the eighth has been reduced to a stub. Quires 2-7 are formed from sheets of a higher quality paper with a Basel crozier, post horn and fleur de lis watermark, which also incorporates the letters R, G and D. The watermarks for sheets 2, 4 and 6 are close to identical in size, shape and positioning in the sheet; those of sheets 3, 5 and 7, however, while featuring the same elements, not only differ in the detail of proportion and arrangement but also show a pronounced stretching of the right hand edge and a flattening of the lower section. In its undistorted portions, this watermark very closely resembles that of a paper stock used for a letter from John Hunt to Walter Bagot dated 6 September 1619 (Folger MS L. a. 544). Despite their differences, however, in both of the batches of this paper used in the Aldersey manuscript the G is contiguous with the framing shield, whereas in the Bagot letter it connects to the central crozier itself. Basel crozier watermarks of this sort are associated with paper manufactured in France as well as in Switzerland, and many with these elements originated with the Durand papermakers of western France (Gaudriault, 1995, 120-1). Heawood judged paper with such watermarks to be ‘much used in England, for both books and writing, between 1620 and 1650’, though as the Bagot letter shows it was clearly available and in use before then (Heawood, 1930, 273).
The persistence of a residual tie connecting the inner and outer bifolia of each gathering, evident when the manuscript was disbound in 2012, showed that the six sheets of Basel crozier paper were folded into individual quires and then opened, and that the arrangement of each quire was preserved by the scribe as he wrote. The outermost gatherings of pot paper were perhaps added at this point to act as makeshift boards, and the fact that some characters in the text are obscured by the rudimentary stitching applied to the manuscript confirms that this took place after the writer had done his work. It seems likely that the manuscript first circulated in this form, and a clear pattern of folding around the spine suggests that it was reasonably well read, or at least thumbed, by its early possessors.
The account of the walk begins with a title, ‘My Gossip Iohson his Foot Voyage and Myne into Scotland’, on 2.1, the first leaf of the second gathering (though the first of crozier paper), then continues over 18 leaves to 6.2v. It is followed by some brief additional passages on 6.3, comprised of snatches of dialect, a jest and some supplementary notes on the properties of the healing well which the travellers visited at Pettycur in Fife (see ‘Foot Voyage’, Appendix 1). Leaf 6.3v is blank, then followed by ‘Canesco or the sleu doggs Language’, a carefully titled and intriguing account of the commands used by masters of bloodhounds in the Scottish and English borders, on both sides of 6.4 (Appendix 2); this in turn is followed on 7.1 by antiquarian observations concerning two prominent events in York’s ceremonial history and some heraldic details at the west door of the Minster there (Appendix 3). The single hand in which the account and these additional sections are written is assured and accomplished, with regular and consistent flourishes, while many of the proper names and some important, unusual or Latin words – ‘Tomb’, ‘Epitaph’, ‘poetica licentia’ – are written in full or in part in an elegant italic. Although there is no sign of the paper being ruled, and the neatness of the writing fluctuates somewhat, the text is for the most part consistently organised on the page. Spacing between lines is regular throughout; a wide left hand, and negligible right hand, margin are constant between 2.1 and 4.1v, after which a narrower left margin and slightly more generous right are consistently used. The use of catchwords, of customary contractions including ‘lre’ for ‘letter’, the relative infrequency of corrections or overwriting, and the recurrent deployment of line fillers also indicate the well-trained hand of a practised, quite probably professional, copyist.
Consistent with this interpretation, several instances of eyeskip, ‘reverse’ eyeskip and other transcription errors strongly suggest that the text of the ‘Foot Voyage’ preserved in the Aldersey manuscript is a fair copy; coupled with the evidence of the hand itself, this might reinforce the view that we are looking at a scribal rather than authorial rendering of the account. While other textual evidence is not completely conclusive, on balance it supports the former hypothesis. For example, the text includes some marginal and interlineal additions in the same hand that might at first appear to be authorial emendations. The three marginal notes, however, lack insertion points or carets in the main text, and so might instead be faithfully and scribally reproduced from a precedent version or copy in which they were already marginal. (In this edition we have incorporated them at an appropriate point into the main body of the text, while noting their original position in the collations.) Some of the interlineal additions clearly supply omissions made by the copyist, but while others are not inconsistent with the possibility of authorial intervention, they are also usually susceptible of other interpretations. On 2.4v, for example, a passage that concludes ‘And carryed down the Markhams etc.’ is followed by the abbreviated note, ‘Mr Richardson, Mr Carnaby; m. & n. etc’ (113-14). This could plausibly be read either as an authorial addition, or the subsequent revision of a deliberate exclusion; however, it also makes sense as the scribal correction of an accidental omission. On only one occasion, in the appended ‘Canesco’, do we have strong evidence for our writer acting as more than a copyist. On 6.4, the ungrammatical phrase ‘then he goeth pisses, or doeth his businesse’ has been altered by erasures and interlineal additions to the somewhat less euphemistic, and still ungrammatical, ‘then he goe pisse, and shitt’ (App. 2, 3). Yet while such intervention might suggest an authorial hand at work, and is certainly more difficult to explain as a scribal correction of merely scribal error, it is also consistent with a scribe assuming, on this occasion, an editorial role. On its own, it provides insufficient support for the suggestion that the Aldersey manuscript contains a holograph copy of the ‘Foot Voyage’. If further evidence were needed, we could point to errors in the surviving text that its author would surely have been unlikely to make – perhaps the most spectacular of these is the phrase ‘Galeard of maw’ (5.4v; 456), which substitutes an intriguing dance for John Gall or Gaw, laird of Maw.
There are other features of the text which indicate that it stands at some not easily definable distance from its original. For example, on 2.3v the insertion ‘now Lord Mansfield’ immediately follows the first mention of ‘Sir William Candishe’ (80-1). Since this is seamlessly included in the text as copied here, it would seem plausible that the phrase was added in a previous redaction of the text. Cavendish assumed this title in November 1620 and was elevated to the earldom of Newcastle in 1628, so we are clearly justified in saying that the version in the Aldersey manuscript dates from at least two and perhaps as many as ten years after the events it records. It is, in turn, most probably a copy of an intermediate version itself no older than late 1620. In addition to such an interpolation, the 48 separate instances on which the account resorts to ‘etc’, usually rendered ‘ec’, signal sometimes abrupt elisions. On 2.1, for example, while the travellers are in Hertfordshire, we meet ‘Blitheman Master of Arte who etc’ (6), with no indication of what has here been omitted; on the road between Ayton and Cockburnspath, in southern Scotland, we learn that the travellers ‘hired a guyde, having also Sir William’s man with vs and the king [./] etc’ (409), which makes little sense unless ‘king’ here is a truncated possessive – the king’s huntsman, or something similar. More usually, these elisions do not cut across syntax or sense in quite so disruptive a fashion, and can come to seem more like an authorial tic than indicators of significant cuts to the text; nonetheless, they are plentiful enough to suggest that a fuller or more extensive redaction stands behind the surviving account. It is not possible to say whether this is a faithful copy of an already abbreviated text, or one in which some abbreviation has been undertaken.
In its general adherence to chronological order, and the proximity of narrative standpoint to the daily rhythm of events, the ‘Foot Voyage’ is similar to other more or less unheralded travel writings of the era which were not printed at the time. Lexically, stylistically, and in its choice of interests, it is perhaps closest to the surviving travel journals of Sir William Brereton, which record a journey undertaken through the Low Countries in 1634, and a voyage through northern England, Scotland and Ireland the following year. Brereton was a Cheshire baronet, and at times his phrasings and tone are suggestively similar to those of the ‘Foot Voyage’ – his journal, too, for the most part, is ‘a plain, unimpassioned statement of what he saw and observed’ (Brereton, 1844, vi). Both journals share some stylistic and grammatical irregularities, such as ‘abrupt changes of construction’ (Brereton, 1844, vi). However, unlike the author of the ‘Foot Voyage’ Brereton is loquacious and detailed, while his judgements of Scotland tend to the severe.
Brereton’s journals and the ‘Foot Voyage’ differ significantly from both well-known and other more obscure accounts of domestic travel in the early seventeenth century – John Taylor’s prose narratives, for example, or the ‘Relation of a Short Survey of 26 Counties’ undertaken by three members of ‘the Military Company’ at Norwich in the summer of 1634 – in their general lack of rhetorical self-consciousness (Legg, 1904). The latter, for example, sports with the military metaphors licenced by its author’s soldierly status. But while rare, such rhetorical flourishes are not entirely absent from the writing of Jonson’s companion. When he resorts to simile in describing the appearance of onlookers gazing down on the poet’s formal entry into Edinburgh – ‘The wyndowes also being full every one peeping out of a round hole lyke a head out of a pillory’ (439-40) – the use of a comically effective figurative ornament is all the more striking for being infrequent. (Compare, too, Brereton’s more prosaic remarking of the ‘boards’ lining the fronts of houses on the High Street, ‘wherein are round holes shaped to the proportion of men’s heads’. (Brereton, 1844, 102)) Similarly, the stylistic élan and wry humour with which episodes of clerical drunkenness at Bottesford and Tollerton are recounted suggests a literary talent that is elsewhere suppressed or absent, and with which Taylor and the author of the ‘Short Survey’ are either better endowed or more liberal and confident in deploying.
For all its differences, the ‘Short Survey’ does offer an insight into how such travel journals were composed in its description of the three travellers taking notes in Lincoln, ‘for feare our memories should beguile vs of our mornings sight’. As its editor remarks, ‘appeal is frequently had to “day-notes,” ... in case the reader should be dissatisfied with the information given in the completed work’ (Legg, 1904, 8, xx). Brereton’s journals, too, include ‘references to another book, which may have been the original journal, or possibly a different work altogether’ (Brereton, 1844, vi). It is reasonable to suppose that the author of the ‘Foot Voyage’ also relied on such aides-mémoires, and that the stylistic and syntactical irregularities it shares with Brereton’s journal derive from a similarly unpolished compositional process. Given that they are mentioned in the narrative, both Brereton’s and the military travellers’ notes were intended for preservation, and there is some evidence that the same was true of the ‘Foot Voyage’. The additional passages included in the Aldersey manuscript, clearly copied at the same time and presumably from the same or a closely related source, preserve observations and details from the journey which were not incorporated, or even drawn on, in the narrative itself. It was perhaps this supplementary quality that ensured their preservation: they show the diversity of what could catch the travellers’ attention, and raise the question of exactly whose attention was being caught. Although the account is mostly silent on the companion’s activities during Jonson’s sojourn with Tobie Matthew at Bishopthorpe, one of the appended passages consists substantially of details from York’s history of archiepiscopal hospitality – it is perhaps probable that these were gleaned by the companion from his own sources, or from an unrecorded visit to the minster, but the possibility that Jonson himself garnered them from his learned and generous host should not be ruled out. It is, in fact, this double perspective that truly sets the ‘Foot Voyage’ apart from other journals of the time. It is a traveller’s tale, to be sure, but unusually it keeps a sustained focus on another traveller rather than recounting, as its primary subject matter, the narrator’s own experiences and impressions of the places visited. Hence, perhaps, the relative paucity of local detail in the main account, and its relative brevity – hence, too, its silence when Jonson leaves the picture at York and, again, during the companion’s final week in Edinburgh.
If the central presence of ‘my gossip’ serves to organise the account, the picture of Jonson that emerges from it is nevertheless a product of the companion’s own emphases. It is striking how little attention is paid to Jonson’s conversations or to any ‘informations’ – to use Drummond’s term – that he might have imparted along the way. There are no direct quotations, and only some fragments of reported speech. Jonson’s comment on Sir William Cavendish’s exceptional riding ability is the most compelling of these, given its relation to Underwood 53 (discussed below), but otherwise we learn only of the occasional toast uttered: dining at Durham, Jonson ‘etreated [sic] that poetica licentia hee might propose a health, which which [sic] was the kings etc’ (311-12), a repetition of a performance he had previously given at Welbeck, and probably a version of the grace that survives in a number of manuscript copies and is dated in one to 1618.
The ‘Foot Voyage’ account and additional passages are not the only contents of the Aldersey manuscript. While leaves 7.2-7.3 are blank, 7.3v to 8.3v, reversed, contain the first ten chapters from the book of Job written out in the system of ‘short writing’ or ‘tachygraphy’ devised by Thomas Shelton and published in a long succession of works and editions beginning in 1626. The notes from Job are initially written neatly and carefully with ruled margins and title lines, longhand chapter headings and fully numerated verses, though these features are omitted on later pages. There are some idiosyncratic departures from Shelton’s prescribed forms, particularly concerning the placing of the tittle used to indicate a plural ‘s’: in the manuscript this is invariably inscribed to the left of the word it is modifying, instead of to the right, hence enabling the use of a tittle placed on the right of a word to denote a silent terminal ‘e’ – an apparently unique, but hardly helpful, adaptation. Some of the short forms for whole words in the biblical transcription, such as those for ‘affliction’, ‘come’ and ‘one’, for example, are found only in Shelton’s later elaboration of his method, first published in his Tachygraphy in 1635, indicating that these lines were themselves written after 1635. In addition to the biblical verses, on both sides of 7.4 the writer has transcribed a version of the ‘Table’ for short forms of words that was first included in Tachygraphy, and frequently republished after that, corroborating the dating evidence to be derived from the biblical verses. Yet the writer also lapses into longhand for a few words on 8.3v, and his use there of a secretary ‘h’ suggests that this work was not undertaken much more than a few decades, perhaps only a few years, after its terminus a quo. The transcription of Job is then followed on the rest of 7.4 and 7.3v by a further short string of shorthand characters, and a final 15 lines of shorthand notes. All the shorthand verses and notes are penned in a different ink and hand from that in which the ‘Foot Voyage’ account is written. Crucially, too, they are spread across two gatherings – quire 8, one of the two binding sheets of pot paper, and the hitherto blank leaves of quire 7, which on its first leaf contains the last of the passages appended to the ‘Foot Voyage’. And whereas the basic stitching has cut across some of the words of the latter, none of the shorthand text is obscured in this way.
The evidence marshalled so far suggests, therefore, that the Aldersey manuscript was created as a scribal separate containing the ‘Foot Voyage’ account and attendant passages, possibly consisting at first only of the 24 leaves on crozier paper in gatherings 2-7, although the enclosing sheets and stitching were presumably incorporated very soon after. The addition of the shorthand suggests that a seventeenth century owner or possessor reversed it, opened the eighth gathering, and began to use the hitherto unused ‘binding’ leaves of the manuscript for shorthand exercises, going beyond the sheet of pot paper and onto the leaves of crozier paper left blank in the seventh gathering by the ‘Foot Voyage’ scribe. From this, we can also deduce that this copy of the ‘Foot Voyage’ account, although produced as a reasonably high quality scribal separate, sufficiently valued to be given the protection of a pot paper binding, and showing evidence of repeated early handling, came soon enough into the possession of someone who valued its blank leaves more than its contents. While the evidence of damage by water, bookworms and mice suggests that the manuscript was hardly prized thereafter, it was nevertheless preserved in the obscurity into which it had fallen.
This obscurity is not immediately dispelled by an examination of the collection of documents among which the ‘Foot Voyage’ manuscript was presumably kept, and with which it still remains. The bulk of both collections of Aldersey papers deposited at Chester had been calendared some decades prior to their division by J. P. Earwaker and C. G. O. Bridgeman for the extensive Appendix to the latter’s Genealogical Account of the Family of Aldersey of Aldersey and Spurstow Co. Chester, privately published in 1899. The ‘Foot Voyage’ manuscript is not listed in the Appendix, but despite its extent this is clearly not a comprehensive catalogue of all items to be found in the family’s papers. A manuscript containing the antiquarian William Aldersey’s history of the mayors of Chester, for example, is described by Bridgeman in the course of his Genealogical Account (Cheshire Archives and Local Studies, CR 469/542; see Bridgeman and Earwaker, 1899, 36), but not listed in the calendar of family documents, and a number of the other items deposited in 1985, especially those only tangentially related to the history and genealogy of the Aldersey family, are similarly absent. Furthermore, the two deposits now at Cheshire Archives and Local Studies do not constitute the totality of the manuscripts accumulated by the family over the centuries. There are items calendared by Bridgeman and Earwaker, such as the Letters Patent granting the reversion of the Escheatorship of Cheshire to Thomas Aldersey (1600-1675), which were not included among the items deposited in 1954 or 1985 (Bridgeman and Earwaker, 1899, 135-6). Twenty seven books of sermon notes made, for the most part, by the son of this Thomas Aldersey (also called Thomas) in the latter half of the seventeenth century were sold at auction on 18 December 1986 and acquired by the Bodleian; they do not feature in Bridgeman and Earwaker. It is possible that some of the manuscripts were neglected for parts of their history: while, as we have noted, the ‘Foot Voyage’ quarto suffered some minor damage, Mrs Aldersey suggested to David Mills that the manuscript containing the history of the mayors of Chester was rescued ‘from a garden bonfire’ by her father-in-law (Mills, 1989, 10).
In common with many similar collections, the Aldersey papers at Chester are largely an accumulated record of property transactions. The more personal papers surviving from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though, are focused on the lives and activities of the Alderseys of Bunbury and Spurstow, and most of the correspondence from this period belongs to this branch. The Thomas Aldersey responsible for the sermon notes features heavily in the letters preserved; he also left a spiritual meditation written in the professional hand of a scribe he employed elsewhere to write legal documents, and a notebook – misleadingly calendared and catalogued as a commonplace book – containing what would appear to be his own somewhat pedestrian verse, the highlight of which is an acrostic in praise of Cromwell. Into this latter has been inserted a bifolium featuring a hitherto unrecorded copy of the text of Andrew Marvell’s poem ‘Clarendon’s Housewarming’ as it was printed in 1667, written in a precise and neat hand which is also used for fair copies of sermons in one of the Bodleian notebooks (Cheshire Archives and Local Studies, CR 469/546; Bod. MS Don. f.53).
There is little to connect the manuscript containing the ‘Foot Voyage’ with the other contents of the collection in which it is preserved – characteristic evidence of the circulating scribal separate (Heaton, 2010, 77). It would nevertheless be reasonable to hypothesise that it owes its place in the collection to this man or his immediate family, even though the hand in which it is written bears no resemblance to any found elsewhere in the collection. That the ‘Foot Voyage’ manuscript demonstrates the devotional use of shorthand – also in evidence in a few of the sermon notebooks – might, therefore, be imagined to account for its presence in the Aldersey papers, suggesting that this Thomas Aldersey was behind its acquisition and preservation. However, the fragment of longhand on 8.1v of the Aldersey manuscript bears no resemblance to other examples of his writing; furthermore, the use of the earlier Shelton system of shorthand in the sermon notebooks differs in several crucial respects from that in the Aldersey manuscript, featuring neither of the defining idiosyncrasies of the latter and forming a number of common words in a completely different way. There would therefore appear to be no grounds for suggesting that this Thomas Aldersey is responsible for the repurposing of the Aldersey manuscript at some point after 1635; more broadly, such evidence cannot be used to identify the point at which the manuscript entered the family papers.
Further caution here is justified by the fact that some of the sixteenth and seventeenth century items in the Aldersey collections were clearly obtained many years later. A 1577 request for expenses from Thomas Shakespeare, messenger of the Queen's chamber, was acquired in 1792: it is endorsed ‘This was given to Mr. Stokes by William Duncan, his hair-dresser; who received it wrapt round some cheese or other necessary’ (Cheshire Archives and Local Studies, CR 469/541). Both the manuscript containing William Aldersey’s history of the mayors of Chester and a sixteenth century alphabetical list of knights’ fees in Cheshire are endorsed ‘J. Price Jes. Coll. Oxford’, suggesting that they were once in the extensive antiquarian collections of John Price, a member of Jesus College from 1754 to 1783 and Bodley’s librarian from 1768 until his death in 1813; the endorsement matches other instances of his signature. The contents of Price’s own library were auctioned in 1814, and although they are not listed individually in the sale catalogue it seems likely that these two items were incorporated into the Aldersey family papers only after that date (King, 1814a; King, 1814b). It is not impossible that the ‘Foot Voyage’ manuscript also entered the family collections as late as the nineteenth century, though the lack of any equivalent endorsement, and indeed of any signs of acquisition or intermediate ownership beyond the seventeenth century shorthand notes, make it more likely that it came into the family’s possession fairly early and remained undisturbed thereafter. To this extent, it is a quietly persistent anomaly, and its origins and earlier existence remain amenable only to conjecture. Nevertheless, the fact that it was preserved in this particular collection necessarily focuses attention on the collectors. If we cannot say precisely when and how it came into their hands, we can still explore the possible overlap between their world and the milieu in which a manuscript account of Jonson’s walk to Edinburgh might be expected to circulate.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a number of branches of the Aldersey family were playing significant roles in the commercial and civic life of Chester, Cheshire and London. Perhaps the most notable member of the family in the later sixteenth century was Thomas (1521/2-1598), a younger son of the Bunbury and Spurstow branch who moved to London and became a richly successful merchant and citizen, a prominent member of the Haberdashers’ company, and sat as an MP in 1572, 1584, 1586 and 1589. He acquired the rectory of Bunbury and endowed a grammar school there, run by the Haberdashers; by the terms of his will he left further money to support a preaching ministry in the parish, perhaps in an effort to counter the persistent recusancy for which the parish was then known, and which encompassed even his elder brother’s heir, Randall Aldersey (Wark, 1971, 84-5, 138-9; Calthrop, 1916, 23-6). He was a client of the elder Cecil, a strong advocate for mercantile interests, and a man with a godly interest in social reform (ODNB; Hasler, 1981).
In 1554 Thomas Aldersey married Alice Calthorpe, whose brother was to serve a term as lord mayor of London in 1589 (ODNB). The couple had no children, however, so Thomas chose his nephew as his heir: not the recusant Randall, but his younger brother, John (c.1541-1616), who had been apprenticed to his uncle in London and was made free of the Haberdashers in 1568 (London Metropolitan Archives, CLC/L/HA/C/007/MS15857/001, f.104v). In 1574 John married Anne Lowe, whose brother, Thomas, had also been apprenticed to Thomas Aldersey and was made free of the company in 1572 (London Metropolitan Archives, CLC/L/HA/C/007/MS15857/001, f.109v). John Aldersey prospered as a London merchant and his uncle’s heir, and his monument in St Mary’s church, Oxted, records that he and his wife had seventeen children; seven – two sons and five daughters – were living when he made his will in January 1614 (NA, PROB 11/128/242). Samuel, their eldest surviving son, was baptised at St Mary Magdalen, Milk Street, on 16 May 1581, and like his father and great uncle became a successful merchant (Clarke, 1942, 21). He was made free of the Haberdashers by patrimony in 1601, and spent the first decade of the seventeenth century trading as a Merchant Adventurer in Germany (London Metropolitan Archives, CLC/L/HA/C/007/MS15857/001, f.146v; Parliamentary Archives, HL/PO/PB/1; HMC Salisbury, 2.138-40, 143, 147, 153, 164-5, 181; Baumann, 1990, 328). In his later life he was one of the founders of the Massachusetts Bay Company and acted as Treasurer for the Feoffees of Impropriations, a company of the godly aiming to acquire church livings in pursuit of their ideal of an effective preaching ministry (Calder, 1934, 13; Calder, 1957, 30, 54 and 79; Grell, 2011, 290-2). Samuel’s surviving sisters married into the London and home counties gentry, with one, Elizabeth, becoming the wife of Thomas Coventry in 1610; in a hagiography of Coventry she is described as ‘a citizen’s widow, beautifull rich yong and of good fame’ (ODNB, Thomas Coventry; BL MS Stowe 619, f.54v). At Samuel’s death in 1633, the family’s civic importance was acknowledged in a suitably grand funeral procession ‘from Haberdasher Hall to St Stephens Church in Coleman streete on Thursday the 25th of July’: among the mourners were Coventry, by now the Lord Keeper, aldermen, divines and physicians, as well as ‘poore men in gownes 2 and 2 to the number of 106’ (BL MS Add. 71131J). He was buried in the chancel of St Stephen’s, the church of a notably godly parish, ‘his Hatchments and Ensignes proper to his name and estate hanging over him’ (Stow, 1633, 869).
By the 1630s, then, the Alderseys of Bunbury and Spurstow had established a prominent place for themselves in the mercantile and civic life of the capital, and were reaping the social rewards. At the same time, the family circuits connecting London merchants and Cheshire gentry were reinforced by participation in the life of the universities and Inns of Court. John Aldersey and his son-in-law, Sir Thomas Hoskins, were specially admitted to the Middle Temple in 1607, ‘by the assent of Mr Jermy, Reader, and other Masters of the Bench’ (Martin, 1904-5, 2.475). In 1622, Thomas Aldersey (1600-75) – grandson of Randall, and heir to the Bunbury and Spurstow estate – was enrolled at Gray’s Inn; he had been admitted as a pensioner to Queens’ College, Cambridge, in 1619 (Foster, 1889, 166; Venn, 1922-7). It would appear that he and his younger brother, another John (1605-56), subsequently capitalised on the family connection to the Lord Keeper, residing in Coventry’s London house during the later 1620s and early 1630s, while Thomas, perhaps with Coventry’s assistance, secured his reversion of the Escheatorship of Cheshire in 1629 (Cheshire Archives and Local Studies, CR 469/379-80; Bridgeman and Earwaker, 1899, 135-6). Thomas’s son, heir and namesake, born in 1635, attended Oxford – where he began the practice of making the sermon notes now held in the Bodleian – before moving to Gray’s Inn to start a career in the law; he was called to the bar in 1663 (Fletcher, 1901, 445).
The Aldersey family’s involvement in the central institutions of early Stuart England provides several possible points of contact with the circles in which Ben Jonson moved and thrived. Their increasing immersion in the life of the Inns of Court, for example, must have brought them during Jonson’s later years into contact with many of his friends and connections, as must their growing proximity – via Thomas Coventry – to the hinterland of the royal court. At the same time, Jonson’s sustained relationship with London’s civic institutions, as Bricklayer, citizen, poet and chronologer, would allow for association in that area. On one occasion, the connection becomes temptingly close. In 1604, Jonson was contracted by the Haberdashers’ company to provide some now lost speeches for the lord mayor’s pageant. Since Anthony Munday also received payment ‘for his paines’, it has been suggested that Jonson displaced him as writer of the entertainment (‘The Lord Mayor’s Entertainment’, Introduction; Robertson and Gordon, 1954, 64). Interestingly, Jonson’s speeches were spoken to celebrate the mayoralty of Sir Thomas Lowe, John Aldersey’s brother-in-law – there is, though, no evidence in the surviving records to suggest that the commission either brought Jonson and the Alderseys into direct contact, or arose from an already existing relationship. One might anyway imagine that the family’s predominant religious sympathies over several generations – Randall Aldersey’s recusancy notwithstanding – would have made a friendship between them and Jonson somewhat unlikely, but this is not necessarily an entirely dependable assumption.
Such shared circles mitigate the distance between Jonson’s London and the Cheshire of the Aldersey family. However, it is also possible to trace a more concrete, though still at several points conjectural, association. As Mark Bland has detailed, Jonson had a strong connection early in his career to several individuals and families from North Wales, including Sir John Salusbury of Lleweni, Sir Edward Herbert, and Hugh Holland (Bland, 2000, 44-8). As Bland stresses, these circles also took in other families apparently without a demonstrable or direct connection to Jonson, especially the Thelwalls of Plas Y Ward and Bathafarn; moreover, Jonson’s link with this North Wales milieu extended beyond the last years of Tudor rule (Bland, 2000, 57, 78). Holland, the Salusburys and the Herberts were lifelong connections, and we find the Thelwalls re-entering the picture later, too. Most notably, when Sir Henry Herbert secured a reversion of the Mastership of the Revels in 1629 – behind Jonson in the queue for the formal position, but nevertheless a role he had been exercising in practice since 1623 – he did so in a partnership with one Simon Thelwall. As we have demonstrated at length elsewhere, this man was most probably a member of the Bathafarn branch of the family, a member of Gray’s Inn, and a Woodford neighbour of Sir Henry Herbert (Loxley, Groundwater and Sanders, 2015, 19-21). He was also the writer of an intriguing letter of 22 August 1637 preserved in the Rhual manuscripts at Flintshire Record Office, which was calendared, along with the rest of the correspondence in this collection, by B. E. Howells. It has been cited by Mark Bland, though he mistakenly attributes it to Edward Thelwall (Howells, 1967, 222-3; Bland, 2004, 398). Among other pieces of news and family business, the writer informs his addressee that ‘your ould freind Ben Iohnson the poet died at westminster one friday last’ (Flintshire Record Office, MS Rhual D/HE/457). If this Simon were indeed the joint holder of the reversion of the Mastership of the Revels with Herbert then the news of Jonson’s death would have been of significant personal relevance, as the poet’s reversion had priority over their own. Yet it is just as significant that Thelwall should identify his correspondent as an old friend of Jonson, because this is not someone whom we would otherwise have reason to associate with him.
Thelwall’s letter was addressed to Evan Edwards, a gentleman of some means living at Rhual, near Mold, and perhaps then engaged in building the handsome house still standing there. Edwards was born around 1594; in his late teens he entered Gray’s Inn at the behest of Sir Eubule Thelwall, before becoming secretary to Richard Sackville, third earl of Dorset. His connection to the Thelwalls and, indirectly, to the Herberts, was further reinforced by his marriage in May 1620 to Joan, daughter of Simon Thelwall of Woodford. (This Simon was uncle to his namesake of Gray’s Inn.) With her he had six children, three of whom were baptised at Woodford between 1627 and 1630; three of Sir Henry Herbert’s children were also christened in the same church between May 1626 and December 1628 (Flintshire Record Office, MS Rhual D/HE/658; Bawcutt, 1996a, 6).
How, then, might this Flintshire gentleman have become an ‘old friend’ of Ben Jonson? Clearly, Edwards’ longstanding and intimate connection with the Thelwalls, and their link in turn with the Salusburys and the Herberts, might be thought to provide enough of a route. Edwards’ important place in the household of the earls of Dorset, however, is most likely relevant here too: he served both the third earl, who rewarded him with a bequest of £100 in his will, and Richard’s brother Edward, who succeeded to the earldom in 1624. Jonson addressed the fourth earl, before his elevation, in a fine poem of thanks (Und. 13), so it is plausible that he met and befriended Edwards when he too joined the network of Sackville clients. There is certainly evidence to suggest that another of the poet’s friendships may have begun in this milieu, though it is usually traced to Oxford: Brian Duppa, who was to edit the celebrated volume of elegies, Jonsonus Virbius, in 1638, served as chaplain to the third earl of Dorset in the late 1610s and early 1620s, received books as gifts from him, and derived his first two livings from a stipulation in the earl’s will (Donaldson, 2011, 354-5; Bod MS Rawl. D 1386, f.204; East Sussex Record Office, SAS-RF/12/38). As the earl’s chaplain, he was familiar, if not intimate, with Edwards (Loxley, Groundwater and Sanders, 2015, 23).
Evan Edwards, then, links the North Wales gentry with whom Jonson was acquainted and the Sackville circles within which he also moved. But at what point in their careers did the paths of Jonson and Dorset’s secretary coincide? For Simon Thelwall, writing in 1637, Jonson is Edwards’ old friend, suggesting that any bond would date from the 1620s at the latest. Jonson’s ‘Epistle to Sir Edward Sackville’ has been dated by its most recent editor to the early 1620s, which might be taken to suggest that Jonson’s connection with the family and its household officers was then either fresh or at its strongest (Und. 13, Introduction). This period coincides with Evan Edwards’ deepest involvement with the Sackvilles, and with Duppa’s greatest dependence on the family’s patronage. It also overlaps the period in which the surviving copy of the ‘Foot Voyage’ was written, and – given that the manuscript is probably a scribal separate – was most likely in limited circulation. It would not stretch the bounds of speculation too far to suggest that a copy or two came into Sackville circles, and that one was kept by Jonson’s Flintshire friend. Given this date range we could also tentatively ask whether the characters who populate the antimasque hastily rewritten for performance in February 1618 might not owe something to the Welsh Inns of Court circles with which Edwards was connected – one of these figures, after all, is a Welsh attorney named Evan.
No evidence has yet been found of a direct link between Edwards or his Thelwall relatives and the Aldersey family among whose papers the manuscript containing the ‘Foot Voyage’ eventually came to rest, though there undoubtedly would have been contact. As we have seen, Thomas Aldersey, the Bunbury and Spurstow heir, attended Gray’s Inn in the early 1620s, while his son of the same name, who accumulated the bulk of the seventeenth century papers in the collection, was admitted in 1654 and made his legal career there (Foster, 1889, 269). Throughout this period, the Thelwalls were a permanent fixture at the Inn. Yet any interaction need not have occurred only in London. As his autobiographical notes relate, Edwards secured a reversion of the post of Baron of the Exchequer at Chester in the first year of Charles’s reign, and he had returned to Rhual – itself only 11 miles west of the city – to take up this role by 1633 (Flintshire Record Office, D/HE/658, D/HE/455). Around the same time, Thomas Aldersey returned home to become, eventually, Escheator of Cheshire, and it is more than plausible to imagine their lives, in these palatinate offices, intertwining. What is more, Evan Edwards’ younger brother, William, was a Chester merchant, serving as alderman, sheriff and mayor for the city from the 1620s to the 1640s (Cheshire Archives and Local Studies, CR 469/542). Throughout William’s career, members of the extended Aldersey family maintained their presence, too, in Chester’s civic life, coming into regular contact and, indeed, occasional dispute, with him (NA, CHES 14/52, ff.4v, 7). If the county roles of Escheator and Baron of the Exchequer undertaken by their respective heads did not foster communication between the families, their joint participation in Chester’s civic life certainly did. Here too, then, we have a variety of routes along which the manuscript account of Jonson’s ‘Foot Voyage’ might have travelled. It is worth noting, though, that tracing such routes would still leave us needing to find a place in the history of the manuscript’s transmission for the addition of the shorthand biblical verses, which cannot be securely associated with any of the Alderseys or, indeed, any other potential agent in this process.
Much of the preceding discussion has assumed that this third person narrative of his grand walk was initially of interest to, and circulated among, Jonson’s own network of friends, patrons, followers and acquaintances, and that one copy, at least, emerged from those circles to find an eventual home in Cheshire. It might be objected, however, that the processes of editing, copying, circulation and preservation which have left the surviving artefact where it now is could have gone on independently of any such network, and that the writer’s intimacy with Jonson need not have extended even to a subset of the poet’s many contacts. If this was the case, it would be pointless to plot plausible channels along which the manuscript might have been passed between Jonson’s immediate circle and the Alderseys. However, the assumption of an origin within Jonson’s orbit for the account is not unreasonable, nor obviously unwarranted. Who more than such people would have a direct interest in the details of the expedition? And from where did Jonson’s companion, the account’s author, come, if not such a network?
There is also some further, though far from robust, evidence that might be cited in support of the hypothesis of a Jonsonian origin. The hand in which the surviving copy of the account is written, as we have said, is accomplished, and probably professional; it provides some of the evidentiary support for the suggestion that the manuscript is a scribal separate. It is also a fairly distinctive hand, featuring as it does some relatively unusual features. Most prominent amongst these is the consistent use of an elaborate, leftward curling, often looped otiose initial stroke for the letters ‘w’ and ‘v’. These flourishes are at their most expansive in obviously majuscule forms, but they are clearly apparent throughout. Interestingly, such distinctive forms are also deployed in a very well-known presentation manuscript of The Masque of Blackness, now in the British Library, which Jonson has signed but is otherwise in the hand of an unknown amanuensis (BL MS Royal 17B xxxi). There are in fact a number of consistent similarities between the two hands, encompassing the obvious – and potentially misleading – areas of letter forms and ligatures and the less immediate aspects of proportion, spacing and the spatial relationship to each other of adjacent letters. Such a range of similarities might encourage us to the view that the same scribe was responsible for both texts, were significant differences between the hands not also evident. The picture is further complicated by the evidence presented by another manuscript containing a copy of a Jonson poem written in a similar hand. The likeness between the presentation manuscript of The Masque of Blackness and the scribal copy of Jonson’s commendatory poem for Thomas Palmer’s The Sprite of Trees and Herbs was first pointed out by Percy Simpson in an article of 1895 and mentioned in the subsequent Oxford edition, but has not been the subject of further scholarly attention; the resemblances are indeed strong, and the suggestion that the same scribe was responsible for both appears sound. There are, though, some significant differences between the hands – most strikingly, the formation of ‘sl’ and ‘st’ ligatures. But if such differences can occur within the same hand across these two manuscripts – and if they are, in that case, evidence of a single scribe’s flexibility and capability – then might the differences between the Blackness manuscript and the Aldersey manuscript be similarly interpreted?
It is not easy, perhaps even possible, to settle such a question on the available evidence. The presumption of identity between the hand of the Palmer manuscript and that of The Masque of Blackness depends on the balance of similarities and dissimilarities, which can itself be more easily assessed given the fact that these are both presentation copies of works by Jonson and can be dated to within seven years of each other. By contrast, at least sixteen years separate The Masque of Blackness and the Aldersey manuscript, and the latter does not have the typical features of a presentation copy; it is also, of course, not a work by Jonson. Consequently, the significance of likenesses and differences between them becomes harder to assess. So although we might reasonably entertain the possibility that the same scribe was responsible for both, we should do so only with the fragility of the evidence for such a view duly acknowledged.
The thought, nonetheless, gives rise to possible implications. It might support the view that the Aldersey manuscript emerged from Jonson’s milieu, or suggest that Jonson himself knew the ‘Foot Voyage’ text and was even in some way involved in the production of this and perhaps other copies. If either of these latter possibilities were the case, then a rather striking moment in the account, noted above, might appear especially significant. One morning with the Cavendishes at Welbeck, we are told, ‘Sir William ridd his great horse which hee did with that readines and steadinesse, as my gossip say they were both one piece’ (166-7). This directly parallels Jonson’s own rather more erudite and elegant recollection of the moment, as it appears in Underwood 53:
When first, my Lord, I saw you back your horse,
Provoke his mettle, and command his force
To all the uses of the field and race,
Methought I read the ancient art of Thrace,
And saw a centaur, past those tales of Greece;
So seemed your horse and you both of a piece! (1-6)
Perhaps the likeness here is simply a matter of two separate recollections of Jonson’s reaction to a display of equestrian mastery, but it is also possible that this is an instance of direct influence. The poem might just predate, and so shape, this moment in the ‘Foot Voyage’, though the surviving text of the latter was, as we have established, probably written before 1628 and the former cannot have been written until 1625, when the grand ‘stable’ at Welbeck mentioned in line 13 was completed; the poem, moreover, was not printed until the posthumous second folio of Jonson’s Works and does not appear to have had a wide manuscript circulation. But the influence, if any, might actually run the other way: if Jonson was familiar with the ‘Foot Voyage’, then he could have taken his cue for the address to Cavendish from his erstwhile companion’s recollection of his conceit. He apparently told Drummond that he composed his verses ‘first in prose, for so his master, Camden, taught him’ (Informations, 293), so it would not seem implausible, in this instance, for him to have begun this poem from a prose note of his observations made by his fellow walker. Given that he lost his own account of his grand pilgrimage in the study fire of 1623, he might then have sought out or commissioned a copy of the version written by his companion, or one he possessed already could then have assumed a new importance for him. His description of the lost work in his ‘Execration Upon Vulcan’, which identifies it specifically as ‘my journey into Scotland sung’ (Und. 43, 94; emphasis ours), might, indeed, implicitly distinguish it from the more rudimentary prose account produced by his companion.
Who, then, was this companion? If the Aldersey manuscript is a scribal separate, as we have suggested, then any external evidence that can be gleaned from it is of little use in answering such a question. The internal evidence of the account is not overly helpful, either. It is unsigned, and the writer makes no attempt to indicate his identity. His description of Jonson as ‘my gossip’ stresses their intimacy, but does not necessarily help to define it with any real precision. ‘Gossip’ is a term of various signification, included by Thomas Blount among the ‘hard words’ he deemed worthy of a definition in his Glossographia of 1656 (Blount, 1656, sig. [S5]). In its primary sense, it denotes the kinship between parents and the godparents of their children, but could also mean one’s own godparent, or a close friend with whom no formal spiritual association existed; it was also used to speak particularly of female friendship in an often dismissive fashion, and by the early seventeenth century was well on its way to its currently dominant meanings (OED, Gossip n. 2, 3, 4). In the Cavendish Christening Entertainment, for example, the term is used in its proper sense (10, 16, 26); in A Tale of a Tub, though, Clench and Medlay use it to address or speak of other characters without necessarily implying formal kinship (2.2.48 and 140; 3.1.79), while the ‘gossips’ of The Staple of News are characteristic instances of its gendered, and somewhat derogatory, meaning. Sometimes, as with the correspondence between James VI and I and the Duke of Buckingham in the mid-1620s, it appears to be used with other relational terms to invoke an erotic, or eroticised, relationship (Bergeron, 1999, 179-219; 150, 162, 173, 158). The relationship between our writer and his gossip, therefore, might be understood in any of these ways. Only one other personal bond is mentioned in the account: the author records the travellers’ meeting at Tadcaster with ‘my gossip in law’ (255), a Mr Richardson, but neither the name nor the relationship as described constitute strong leads. While there were indeed, and unsurprisingly, residents of Tadcaster with the surname Richardson at this period, little is known of them – one was a brewer (Tadcaster Historical Society, 2005, 105, 130-1, 139). This man may anyway have been travelling himself. It is not impossible that he is the Edward Richardson encountered, in passing, at Welbeck – the fact that the writer appears to be unfamiliar with both the Richardsons of Bawtry and the Richardsons of Durham would seem to rule them out. The very unusual formulation ‘gossip in law’, mingling the languages of spiritual and legal affiliation, complicates rather than clarifies: while it might suggest that he is the husband of one of the writer’s gossips, it is also susceptible of other interpretations. What is more, Edward Richardson married the wife who eventually survived him only after 1626, and his will contains no evidence either of a prior marriage or of any children (Willis, 1755, 55; NA, PROB 11.175).
Nonetheless, further internal evidence does allow us to create some elements for a profile of the author. The fact that both travellers were made honorary burgesses of Dunfermline in September – the relevant burgh records have long since disappeared – suggests that Jonson’s companion was male, and of sufficient age to have such a title conferred upon him. Surviving records show that the honour was bestowed on advocates, courtiers, gentlemen and the higher servants of the nobility in the surrounding years, so we might expect the companion to have been of similar status (Shearer, 1951, 60, 73, 163, 152, 158, 164). His inclusion in most of the festivities along the way and his evident literacy suggest that he may well have been more than a menial retainer, and the fact that Bishop Neile at Durham entreats the companion to prevail on Jonson to dine with him on St Bartholomew’s day indicates that others saw the two men as something better than master and humble servant, too. But the writer appears, nonetheless, to have been in some crucial dimensions Jonson’s inferior: after all, Neile’s kindness to him is remarked because it is remarkable, implying that he was not so generously treated by the travellers’ other hosts. Furthermore, he may not have accompanied Cavendish and Jonson to Bolsover, while he is excluded from the poet’s visit to Archbishop Mathew at Bishopthorpe during their visit to York. Here, he spends some of the time instead with Edmund Sheffield’s steward – perhaps, then, he had a not entirely dissimilar standing in his relationship with Jonson. There is, too, a consistent vein of deference running through the account. The companion’s careful recording of the fact that Jonson ‘discovered his love and care of mee’ at Newark, ‘For hee would not eate till hee hadd sent for Doctor Hunton, and Webster his Apothecary, to conferre [etc/ abut] about an infirmitie I was troubled with’, reveals a degree of deferential regard at the heart of his affective investment: he seeks, but is not assured of, the ‘love and care’ of this charismatic figure. So the fact of their intimacy would appear to be especially valuable, and deserving of record, to the writer – and the proof that Jonson reciprocates in some regard is carefully noted too. By the same token, there is a note of melancholy abandonment, followed by redemption, in his stormy tribulations south of Durham:
Here a great gate was blown ˄Γdowne˥ vpon mee./
By the way I lost my Gossip, and came muck wett to Mr Dirrhams at the kyngs armes where I found my gossip accompanied with Mr Richardson, and other gentlemen... (288-90)
The extraordinarily persistent use of the possessive ‘my gossip’ to denote Jonson appears, from this viewpoint, rather more than an unimaginative tic: each of its 91 iterations – by contrast, the poet’s proper name is used on only seven occasions – frames him through the particular bond to which the account is itself a kind of enduring testimony, however indistinct one party to that bond now is. Whether the source of the deferential investment thus insisted on is a disparity in age or a less quantifiable distinction we are not yet in a position to say.
Such deference could usefully be characterised as filial – we might recall, here, the coupling of ‘gossip’ with such terms in the correspondence of Buckingham and James, which David Bergeron rightly suggests ‘taps into intimate, personal terms, even familial terms’ – and in this sense would be entirely consistent with Jonson’s paternal self-presentation in his later years (Bergeron, 1999, 128). The widespread tendency for parents to seek baptismal sponsors among their elders also meant that the ‘siblings’ thus created could vary substantially in age. We know that Jonson did accrue followers, of course, and eventually cultivated for himself the character of father to a tribe of literary sons. His relationship with Richard Brome appears to have begun with the latter very clearly in Jonson’s service, as the Induction to Bartholomew Fair makes clear (6), but developed into the kind of friendship shaped by pedagogy that he also seems to have had with Nathan Field (Donaldson, 2011, 103, 106; ODNB). In the title of the poem Jonson wrote for the 1632 publication of Brome’s Northern Lass he described him as ‘My Old Faithful Servant, And (by His Continued Virtue) My Loving Friend’, and went on to Brome’s period in service as his ‘prenticeship’ (10). Indeed, Jonson’s status as a Bricklayer enabled him to take apprentices: records show that one young man, John Catlin, was indentured to him for eight years in 1612 (Kathman, 2004, 20).
It is worth considering the possibility, then, that his companion might have come from among this group of younger, deferential writers and actors. A major objection to any such suggestion is that our writer fails to show a developed interest in any literary or intellectual dimension to the social exchanges that took place on their walk, and we might reasonably expect one of Jonson’s literary or theatrical ‘sons’ to have taken greater note of exactly this aspect of his master’s activities. Furthermore, it seems doubtful that a genuinely menial servant or apprentice would be as privy to Jonson’s social exchanges with the nobility and gentry as our writer seems to have been, and someone in such a position would be unlikely to have been made an honorary burgess of Dunfermline. But the condition of service was common, of course, and far from the only determinant of rank: despite his apparent origins in poverty, and his clear status as Jonson’s ‘man’, Brome’s name is still prefixed with the honorific ‘Master’ in the Induction to Bartholomew Fair – an acknowledgment of gentle status which is unlikely to be entirely ironic or mocking. And while the writer of the ‘Foot Voyage’ does not seem, on this evidence, to have possessed an accomplished literary mind, there are – as we noted above – flashes of stylistic and rhetorical talent, which are most evident in the depiction of characters and incidents rich with comic potential. In this connection, it is perhaps worth mentioning that on a few distinctive occasions the phrasal idiosyncrasies of the ‘Foot Voyage’ are replicated, or at least echoed, in Brome’s dramatic works. The punning reference to ‘the Shake-ragg errant, and his two doxes’ (2-3) on the road to Tottenham, for example, resonates with the mention of ‘errant, downright beggars’ in A Jovial Crew, as well as the use, later in the same play, of the relatively uncommon term ‘shake-rag’ itself (Brome, 1968, 2.1.165, 3.1.403). The pun on ‘errant’ is hardly surprising, however, so it would be unwise to make too much of this alignment. More noteworthy, perhaps, is the coinage in the same play of the phrase ‘beggars in law’ to denote the wives of importunate, or beggarly, courtiers (1.1.53), which echoes, in the logic of its formation, the unusual term ‘gossip in law’ found in the ‘Foot Voyage’ (255). Brome also exploited the applicability of the ‘in-law’ suffix to unexpected terms in The New Academy, where Matchill deduces his own status as Valentine’s ‘Master-in-law’ from the latter’s use of ‘Mystresse’ to address Matchill’s wife – though such formulations are far less rare than those involving ungendered or non-relational nouns (Brome, 1659, sig. [K8]). If we were tempted to speculate in this direction, however, Brome’s later relationship with William Cavendish and his use of a Nottinghamshire setting for A Jovial Crew might come to seem significant (Steggle, 150-1, 162-3, 165-7; Sanders, 2011, 109).
Such resemblances and details, however, are ambiguous, indeterminate or fleeting – even advanced together they are very unlikely to provide much support for identifying Brome as Jonson’s walking companion, or for seeing the elder poet not just as his master and teacher but as his gossip. Too little is known of the detail of Brome’s life, and the gulf between the style and focus of the ‘Foot Voyage’ and those of his accomplished dramatic writing might still be thought too wide. Perhaps, then, our writer should be sought instead in the kinds of circles in which Evan Edwards and his Thelwall relatives moved; perhaps – as there is nothing to prove otherwise in the papers he left to his descendants or in the records of the Sackville family – we can even imagine Edwards cementing his friendship with Jonson on the road to Edinburgh in the summer of 1618. As such possibilities multiply, however, any attempt to settle on a more determinate profile inevitably falters. There is the temptation, too, to seek for answers or solutions in places where accessible evidence abounds, rather than where such answers might more plausibly, but less promisingly, be sought – it is possible, of course, that the Edwards connection looks plausible only because it is one that we can document from the surviving sources with a tempting degree of thoroughness. Until new evidence or new lines of enquiry emerge the account looks likely to keep many of its own secrets, and to confine us to speculation or guesswork, however sober or informed, about its origins, occasion and purpose.
The text of the Foot Voyage is reproduced by kind permission of the depositor and Cheshire Archives and Local Studies
1 The copy of Bridgeman and Earwaker, 1899, acquired by the National Library of Scotland contains, among other loosely inserted cuttings and letters relating to the family, a brochure for the horticultural college dating from 1931.
2 As it is unpaginated and unfoliated, we have here assigned numbers to gatherings, and then to leaves within those gatherings, in accordance with the structure of the manuscript.
3 Chandler, 1999, is a useful modern anthology of Taylor’s travel narratives.
4 See ‘A Grace by Ben Jonson Extempore Before King James’.
5 Now Bod. MS Don. e. 155-63, f. 38-55. Cf. Sotheby, 1986.
6 ‘God’s Mercies’, Cheshire Archives and Local Studies, CR 469/549; compare CR 469/289.
7 Cheshire Archives and Local Studies, CR 469/544; ODNB; Price’s signature can be found on the titlepage of the copy of Alexander Luders’s Essay on the Use of the French Language in the library of Trinity College, Oxford, call number U.3.11(3).
8 Unsurprisingly, close links between the families were maintained: the register of St Pancras, Soper Lane, records that Sir Thomas Lowe stood godfather for Thomas, son of Sir Thomas Hoskins and Dorothy Aldersey, in March 1606, while Margaret Hoskins acted as godmother (Bannerman, 1914-15, 146).
9 East Sussex Record Office, SAS-RF/12/38, and see Sackville documents witnessed by Evans and dated 1624 and 1625; East Sussex Record Office, SAS-RF/12/41, SAS/G23/8, and SAS-M/1/234.
10 Some modern biographers erroneously suggest that Duppa’s patronage by the Sackville family began with the fourth earl, or only in the later 1620s; see, e.g., ODNB and Isham, 1954, xx-xxi.
11 For a fuller discussion of the palaeographic evidence, see Loxley, Groundwater and Sanders, 2015, 26-30.
12 The manuscript of Palmer’s treatise is BL MS Add 18040; Jonson’s poem occurs on f.10. See Simpson, 1895, 243-4; H&S, 11.125.
13 ‘The Sprite of Trees and Flowers’ dates from 1598-9, the BL copy of Blackness is a pre-performance script, probably from December 1604: Blackness, Introduction and Textual Essay.
14 Only four ms copies survive, one of which reproduces its text of the poem from John Benson’s 1640 edition of the ‘Execration Upon Vulcan’ and other epigrams. See Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts, JnB 85-8.
15 For Brome’s humble origins, see ODNB and Steggle, 2004, 13-15; in his 1630s lawsuit with Salisbury Court, Brome described himself as a ‘gentleman’. Steggle raises the possibility that the mention of Brome in the Induction to Bartholomew Fair, either in part or in its entirety, might be a later interpolation and cannot be taken as definitive evidence for Brome’s relationship with Jonson or his status in 1614: 2004, 15.