1 Herbert, William, The History of the Twelve Great Livery Companies of London (London, 1836), II, 217Google Scholar, and Withington, Robert, English Pageantry: An Historical Outline (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1918), 1, 128Google Scholar, n. 4. This conclusion persisted despite the notice in Prideaux's, Walter SherburneMemorials of the Goldsmiths'Company (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1896), 1, 13Google Scholar, which lists among the expenses for the king's coronation “tassels, nails, ropes, and tar for the Castle.”

2 See , Walsingham'sHistoria Anglicana, ed. Riley, H. T. (London, 1863), 1, 331.Google ScholarKingsford, , English Historical Literature in the Fifteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913), p. 13Google Scholar, suggests that beginning in 1377, the Historia Anglicana can be attributed to Walsingham himself. This text, with translation, is reprinted in Wickham, Glynne, Early English Stages, 1300 to 1600 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959), I, 54–55.Google Scholar

3 W. F. Fairholt, quoted in Withington, I, 128.

4 I wish to thank the Wardens and Court of Assistants of the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths for permission to publish these documents, and Miss Susan M. Hare, Librarian to the Company, for her kindness in allowing me access to them.

5 A small, narrow flag or streamer often borne at the head of a lance. Their cost here suggests that these were rather elaborate.

6 Arsedine is a gold-colored alloy of copper and zinc rolled into thin leaf; in this pageant it was undoubtedly used to manufacture the “counterfeit florins” noted by Walsingham.

7 These goblets may have been used again in the Goldsmiths' device for the Reconciliation of Richard with the City of London in 1392. See Maydiston, Richard de, De concordia inter Ricardum Secundum et civitatem London, ed. Wright, Thomas, Political Poems and Songs (London, 1861), II, 33–42Google Scholar, or the detailed introduction, translation, and edition in Charles R. Smith's unpublished 1972 Princeton dissertation, Concordia Facta Inter Regem Riccardum II et Civitatem Londonie.

8 This account is paraphrased from Wickham, I, 55.

9 Galbraith, V. H., ed., The Anonimalle Chronicle 1333–1381, Publications of the University of Manchester, No. CLXXV, Historical Series No. XLV (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1927), p. 108.Google Scholar This chronicle, written at St. Mary's Abbey, York, was completed probably not later than 1400.

10 The “petit clocher” too is an addition to the Walsingham account, although both accounts agree that the angel with the crown merely bows down in Richard's presence, machinery that, from the accounts of 1382 we can infer, I think, undergoes substantial development. This passage may also be translated “and in the middle of the said towers was constructed a small enclosure and in the highest part of the enclosure was set an angel”; such an “enclosure,” with drapes perhaps that could be pulled back to reveal the angel in Richard's presence, may well have developed into the “tower” which in the 1392 pageant supported a young man and woman (see Smith, p. 197). The idea of a small cloth enclosure might be paralleled to the “type” of the much later machinery recorded for the Entry of Anne Boleyn in Holinshed's, Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (London: J. Johnson, 1808)Google Scholar: “The queene from thence passed to Leaden hall, where was a goodlie pageant with an type and a heauenlie roofe, and vnder the type was a roote of gold set on a little mounteine inuironed with red roses and white: out of the type came downe a falcon all white & sat vpon the roote, and incontinent came downe an angell with great melodie and set a close crowne of gold on the falcons head” (III, 782).

11 Records from the Bridge House Rentals (Roll 11, membrane 12, item xlviij) for 1391–1392 relating to the Reconciliation of Richard and the City of London, detail such decoration of permanent city fixtures:

Expen die Item soluter per iij scutis de Armis domini Regis & Regine super tabulas

sabbi xxiiij putater & pendenter supur portam lapideam super Pontem erga aduentu

die august da domini Regis london xxiiijs iiijd Item soluter per Oker & Cole empter per dicta pona ablueud ad tempus predcin vd. Item soluter j al vobatori conducir per ij dies & dimid per vd.

[Expenses for the 24th of August (the King's entry was on the 29th): Also paid for painting three shields of the arms of the lord King and of the Queen on boards and hanging them above the stone gate on the bridge, against the coming of the king to London 13s. 4d. Also paid for ochre and coal purchased for washing over the said gate at the aforesaid period 5d. Also paid to another dauber hired for two and a half days 15d.]

12 On the basis of Walsingham's ambiguous Latin, Wickham, p. 55, is inclined to site the device “on and around rather than adjacent to the conduit.” Walsingham does mention trumpeters stationed both “super Aquaeductum, et super turrim (in eodem foro quae) in honorem Regis facta fuerat.…” Traditionally, the Goldsmiths' stand for Royal Entries, jealously guarded, was at the upper end of Cheap, past the conduit; as a guild symbol, the castle may well have stood nearer to the upper end of Cheap where the Goldsmiths had their stalls and were in the habit of attending on the king.

13 I can find no other instance of “silver-skins” meaning “leather,” and suggest very tentatively that “seluer” in this context may be a form of “celure,” which the MED under celure sb. 2. defines as “paneling or some other ornamental covering for walls or ceilings.”

14 A number of John Barons crop up in the Calendar of Inquisitions, 1348–1377, The Calendar of Pleas and Memorandums and Calendar of Close Rolls for 1377 and 1381. The Calendar of Letter Books of the City of London records a John Baroun sent as an archer to the defense of Calais in 1369, and in 1416 a John Baroun was made master of the Founders' guild. None of these, however, seems likely to have been the carpenter noted here, although carpenters capable of building siege machinery must not have been uncommon, as John of Gaunt in 1372 expected to find four carpenters from Tutbury capable not only of building siege machinery but of being good archers as well. See Rickert, Edith, A Mirror of Chaucer's World (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1948), p. 288.Google Scholar

15 Johnston, Alexandra F., “The Medieval English Stage,” University of Toronto Quarterly, 44 (1975), 238–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 The Alliterative Morte Arthure: A Critical Edition, ed. Valerie Krishna (New York: Burt Franklin, 1976), p. 122, 11. 3032–35, and note, pp. 193–94.

17 See OED somer and summer, sb. 2.

18 The Book of Fayttes of Armes and of Chyualrye, ed. A. T. P. Byles, EETS o. s. 189 (London: Oxford Univ. Press, rev. ed. 1937), pp. 166–67.

19 I am indebted to Mr. Scott Gwara, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, Professor Alan Gaylord of Dartmouth College, and Dr. Alfred Büchler, Berkeley, California, for their kind assistance with the manuscript illuminations.

20 See MED castle, sb. 4 and Smith, p. 196.

21 Herbert, II, 218.

22 See, for instance, the last page of The Castle of Perseverance: The Macro Plays. No. 3. ed. John S. Farmer, The Tudor Facsimile Texts (London: T. C. & E. C. Jack, 1907; rprt. AMS Press, 1970).

23 The disappearance of pageant material is not a particularly mysterious affair. London civic records, for instance (Repertory 1, ff. 97b and 100a), record a bit of profiteering connected with the pageants in 1501 for Prince Arthur and Catherine of Aragon: “xiii May/quod that the Comyners wich hadde the ouersight of makyng of the pageants be warnyd to bee at this courte a Thyrsday next commyng / every of theym seuerally to be chaurged with the sellyng of the stuff of the pageantes that they hadde Rule of.”

24 At first glance, fees paid in 1382 to the porter of St. Bartholomew and his servant may be misleading as may costs for portage incurred in 1377 because they suggest the portable stage Wickham finds elsewhere in the Lord Mayor's shows of the fifteenth century: “Evan Davys, porter, agrees to find, with himself, 16 tall and strong men to bear the pageant at 20d. each, and to see it brought safely into the house at night’” (I, 88). There is no suggestion, however, that the Goldsmiths' pageant was a “portable stage,” The fees do suggest that the material for the pageant was collected or stored somewhere near the pageant site and transported there to be assembled. In the fourteenth century, St. Bartholomew the Less stood in Cornhill near the east end of Cheap on Bishopsgate, a location presumably convenient to both the guild hall and the pageant site.

25 The heraldic use of pennoncels in civic pageantry is suggested in Tudor pageantry at the funeral procession for Henry VII: “and the chariot was garnished with banners and Pencells of tharmes of his dominions, titles and genealogies,” in Hall, Edward, The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancastre & Yorke (London: Johnson, 1809), p. 506.Google Scholar

26 Unwin, George, The Guilds and Companies of London, 4th ed. (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1963), p. 178.Google Scholar

27 That the four maidens might represent the four cardinal virtues is suggested indirectly by Withington (I, 128, n.6.), where he quotes from Grosseteste: “pe foure smale toures abouten / pat [witep] pe hei₃e tour wt-outen / Foure had pewes pt aboute hire i-seop / Foure virtues cardinals [pat] beop.” Grosseteste's thirteenth-century Chasteau d'Amour portrays Christ entering a castle which is the Virgin's body; the four towers of it are her four virtues.

28 For example, the tower in the east of the fair field full of folk in Piers Plowman, the castle in The Castle of Perseverance, and “Maudelyn” Castle in the Digby Mysteries. Owst, G. R., Literature and the Pulpit in Medieval England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1961), pp. 84–85Google Scholar, surveys the homiletic symbolism of the castle and tower.

29 Withington, I, 128–29. In later pageantry, at any rate, distinctions are made between forts, watch towers, and castles (see for instance Bergeron, David M., English Civic Pageantry, 1558–1642 [Columbia, South Carolina: Univ. of S. Carolina Press, 1971], pp. 267–68).Google Scholar The Goldsmiths' tower is quite different from later pageant castles, that honoring the entry of the Emperor Charles into London in 1522, for instance, “where satte…Kynge Arthur and 14 other kings with a child who pointed out the resemblances between Charles and Arthur” (Withington, I, 177), a castle whose very size makes its relationship to tournament construction clear.

30 I wish to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities, whose generosity made the research for this paper possible.