Page:The Elizabethan stage (Volume 4).pdf/150

 1547 to 1559; are printed by A. Feuillerat in Materialien, xxi and xliv, with accompanying warrants and other subsidiary documents. From 1547 to 1550 the accounts are mainly office copies of 'particular' books, setting out the details and cost of each individual revel, airing, or the like; but for 1550-55, and again for 1555-9, the 'particular paye bookes' are brought together with summaries in two great 'Certificates' (Loseley MSS. 62 and 63), which relate to the Tents as well as the Revels. The second of these includes, as well as money accounts, inventories of the office stuff and notes of its employment in masking and other garments during 1555-60, and a similar record for 1550-5 is in Loseley MS. 112. These Certificates, although signed by the Clerk, Clerk Controller, and Yeoman, are not audited. Probably they are office copies of Original Accounts prepared for audit. (b) Elizabethan Period.

Eleven Original Accounts of the Masters or Acting Masters of the Revels, with annotations by the Auditors, are in R. O. Audit Office, Accounts Various, 3, 907 (formerly 1213). They relate to the periods: (i) Feb. 1571-May 1572; (ii) June 1572-Oct. 1573; (iii) Nov. 1573-Feb. 1574; (iv) March 1574-Feb. 1575; (v) March 1576-Feb. 1577; (vi) Feb. 1578-Oct. 1579; (vii) Nov. 1579-Oct. 1580; (viii) Nov. 1580-Oct. 1581; (ix) Nov. 1582-Oct. 1583; (x) Nov. 1584-Oct. 1585; (xi) Nov. 1587-Oct. 1588. It will be seen that a regular annual system, starting with the opening of the season for revels at All Saints in each year, was ultimately adopted. All these accounts were printed in P. Cunningham, Extracts from the Accounts of the Revels at Court (1842, Sh. Soc.), but (ii) imperfectly and (xi) from an unaudited duplicate in the same bundle. These vagaries are corrected in the text of Feuillerat (1908, Materialien, xxi), who also gives an account for Nov. 1587-Oct. 1589 from ''Lansd. MS. 59, f. 38, which in part duplicates (xi), and much illustrative matter, including an estimate in some detail of the expenditure from Christmas 1563 to Shrovetide 1565 from S. P. Dom. Eliz.'' xxxvi. 22. The Audit Office series of Declared Accounts for the Revels is imperfect, but contains two, printed by Feuillerat, for the years 1581-2 and 1583-4, for which there are no Original Accounts. The Pipe Office series appears to be complete. (c) Jacobean Period.

There are only two Original Accounts, for 1604-5 and 1611-12, which are printed by Cunningham. The Pipe Office Declared Accounts are complete. I have not examined those of the Audit Office. The Original Accounts for 1604-5 and 1611-12, and especially the former, have been the subject of a good deal of controversy. The facts are as follows. They were printed in 1842 by Peter Cunningham, then a clerk in the Audit Office, who described them as a separate discovery from the Elizabethan bundle, which he also printed. Twenty-six years afterwards, in 1868, he attempted to sell them to the British Museum, stating that he had found them some thirty years before 'under the vaults of Somerset House—far under the Quadrangle in a dry and lofty cellar, known by the name of the "Charcoal