Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 8.djvu/366

 274 KEXT-ROLL OF THE DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM. pensions to gentry could have been conferred, Whitaker remarks, it is not easy to conceive, unless for past services, or that they are given to them in the character of retainers, when those services should be required in a military or civil capacity. Henry, Earl of Northumberland, in the reign of Henry VII., addressed a brief notice to Sir Randall Pygot, Sir William Stapleton, and five other knights and esquires, " to be ready upon an ower warninf)!' These were the Earl's fee'd- men, receiving his wages. When the king made his progress in the north, the Earl met him a little beyond Robin Hood's Stone, with thirty-three knights of his fee'd-men, besides esquires and yeomen.^ No feature is more pleasing than the practice which then prevailed, of the English nobility and gentry placing their children as pages in the households of distinguished indi- viduals. In the Lives of the Lindsays, Lord Lindsay has grouped the society at one of the Castles of his ancestors in the fifteenth century, as consisting of the Earl and his immediate family, guests, ladies attendant upon the wife and daughter, pages of noble or gentle birth — these last are described as gentleman-cadets (generally the younger branches of the family, who were attached to its head as servitors or feudal followers) — the Earl's own domestic ofiicers, being gentlemen of quality, cha23lains and secretary- chamberlain, marischall and armour-bearer.^ Ben Jonson, in his play, " The New Inn," has perhaps given us the best idea of this judicious regulation, when every house became an academy of honour, and tended to supply the existing want of Eton and Westminster, then, perhaps, almost entirely devoted to the education of ecclesiastics : " Call you that desperate, which, by a line Of institution, from our ancestors, Hath been derived down to us, and received In a succession, for the noblest way Of breeding up our youth, in letters, arms, Fair mien, discourses, civil exercise. And all the blazon of a Gentleman ? Where can he learn to vault, to ride, to fence, To move his body gracefuller, to speak His language purer, or to tune his mind, Or manners, more to the hai'mony of nature, Than in these nurseries of uobihty ? " — Ben Jonson. Nevj Inn, Act i., Scene 1. 2 Plumptou Correspondence, p. 53. ^ Lives of the Lindsays, vol. i. p. 114.