Catherine's Hall.
By the time of my hero, Walter Stoke, the King had not yet decreed
that all scholars of years of discretion should live in the house of
some sufficient principal (1421); so let him lodge at Catte Hall, at
the corner of the street that leads to New College out of the modern
Broad Street, which was then the City Ditch. It is six o'clock on a
summer morning, and the bells waken Stoke, who is sleeping on a flock
bed, in his little camera. His room, though he is not one of the
luxurious clerks whom the University scolds in various statutes, is
pretty well furnished. His bed alone is worth not less than
fifteenpence; he has a "cofer" valued at twopence (we have plenty of
those old valuations), and in his cofer are his black coat, which no
one would think dear at fourpence, his tunic, cheap at tenpence, "a
roll of the seven Psalms," and twelve books only "at his beddes
heed." Stoke has not
"Twenty bookes, clothed in blak and reed,
Of Aristotil and of his philosophie,"
like Chaucer's Undergraduate, who must have been a bibliophile.
There are not many records of "as many as twenty bookes" in the old
valuations. The great ornament of the room is a neat trophy of
buckler, bow, arrows, and two daggers, all hanging conveniently on
the wall. Stoke opens his eyes, yawns, looks round for his clothes,
and sees, with no surprise, that his laundress has not sent home his
clean linen.
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