Saturday 27 December 1662
Up, and while I am dressing I sent for my boy’s brother, William, that lives in town here as a groom, to whom and their sister Jane I told my resolution to keep the boy no longer. So upon the whole they desire to have him stay a week longer, and then he shall go. So to the office, and there Mr. Coventry and I sat till noon, and then I stept to the Exchange, and so home to dinner, and after dinner with my wife to the Duke’s Theatre, and saw the second part of “Rhodes,” done with the new Roxalana; which do it rather better in all respects for person, voice, and judgment, then the first Roxalana. Home with great content with my wife, not so well pleased with the company at the house to-day, which was full of citizens, there hardly being a gentleman or woman in the house; a couple of pretty ladies by us that made sport in it, being jostled and crowded by prentices. So home, and I to my study making up my monthly accounts, which is now fallen again to 630l. or thereabouts, which not long since was 680l., at which I am sorry, but I trust in God I shall get it up again, and in the meantime will live sparingly. So home to supper and to bed.
27 Annotations
First Reading
Terry F • Link
"my monthly accounts,...which not long since was 680l."
Sam'l found himself worth 680l. on 30 September http://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1… after having taken his wife to the Duke's House and seen "The Duchess of Malfi" co-starring his favorite "Ianthe," Mary Betterton.
Todd Bernhardt • Link
"not so well pleased with the company at the house to-day, which was full of citizens, there hardly being a gentleman or woman in the house"
Different times, when the word "citizen" was used as a slight...
in Aqua Scripto • Link
Oh! hoi polloi "... not so well pleased with the company at the house to-day, which was full of citizens, there hardly being a gentleman or woman in the house; a couple of pretty ladies by us that made sport in it, being jostled and crowded by prentices. ..." These be the Carlofian Fab concursi discipularum, having time between merry and happy, no Maifter to curb their enthufiasm. The graffes of Finfbury be a wee bit soggy, good for mud pies.
Jesse • Link
"I trust in God I shall get it up again"
Sorry. Anyway I assume many of us might see a drop in the monthly accounts this time of year. Though our drop be not for the same reason(s), we (at least I) still have the same trust.
Wim van der Meij • Link
So Wayneman overstepped the line a bit too often. He has been beaten eight times by Sam these last two years.
jeannine • Link
"So Wayneman overstepped the line a bit too often"...still, sort of sad to see him go, as he's probably still just a "kid". The household help turnover of late has given a new cook (Sarah's replacement) who is hardly ever mentioned, and no replacement for Gosnell. Hopefully the trend for good quiet repectable help won't continue. We need a replacement with some spunk to give us something to write about next year.
Robert Gertz • Link
Something tells me it's the Wrath of sister Jane Wayneman needs to fear.
A. De Araujo • Link
"Wayneman"
His brother the Groom will have a saying also.
celtcahill • Link
We see now too, that Sam is in the way of no longer regarding himself as a mere 'citizen'.
Terry F • Link
Sam's regarded himself as a "gentleman" for a while.
October 30: "So I went; and the guard at the Tower Gate, making me leave my sword at the gate, I was forced to stay so long in the ale-house hard by, till my boy run home for my cloak"
L&M noted that when out and about a gentleman was properly dressed only if he carried a sword or wore some outerware.
Australian Susan • Link
I think it is to Sam's credit that he went to some trouble over Wayneman. Although we as 21st century people dislike the beatings which Sam inflicted on the boy (he's 12), it was normal practice for the time. Never specified, Wayneman misbehaved himself very badly when at Brampton, but Sam seems to have put that down to being in the country and Elizabeth's poor managing of him. He gives Wayneman another chance, but now seems to think he can do no more. Sam makes sure there is some kind of family conference over this: ensuring the facts (as Sam lays them down of course!) are known to the family before Wayneman is sent back to his parents. Do we ever know what happened to him? Did he turn out bad?
Bradford • Link
Neither we nor Pepys have seen the last of Wayneman yet, Susan; and it will be November 1663 before he passes out of the story (at least according to the index in "The Shorter Pepys").
A. De Araujo • Link
"Do we ever know what happened to him"
I thought about that also, thinking if I were in his shoes I would have emigrated to America,but (SPOILER) methinks with the catastrophes to come it would be difficult to trace him.
Robert Gertz • Link
Rhodes II! Bigger and better than Ever!
This preview is rated PG-13...
The fiendish Archenemy of all Christendom...Backed by the greatest fleet and army of all time.
"Rhodes has not yet fallen?!" Suleyman the Magnificent fumes with narrow look at trembling Admiral of the Fleet.
"You've failed me for the last time, Admiral." Sound of whizzing swords, plunk of falling head.
***
The virtuous, wronged Christian heroine, Ianthe...
***
The courageous, if dim-witted Duke, Defender of Christendom...
***
The sly and treacherous betrayer would lead the Duke and his forces to disaster...
(Hey there always is one...)
***
And the usual comic relief frightened soldiers and idiot peasants...
***
The fate of all Christian Europe hangs in the balance. Don't miss "Siege of Rhodes, II!"
***
dirk • Link
"making up my monthly accounts, which is now fallen again to 630l. or thereabouts, which not long since was 680l."
Just for the record:
£630 in 1662 would now be £51,579.58
£680 in 1662 would now be £55,673.20
[based on historical retail price index data, calculation for the year 2002 -- later years not available]
http://eh.net/hmit/ppowerbp/
dirk • Link
the above index calculations
To convert the calculated value for 2002 to the year 2005, multiply by 1.09
This gives
£630 = 56221.74
£680 = 60683.79
Why?
191.8 = average r.p.i. for 2005 (11 months)
176.2 = average r.p.i. for 2002
This gives a factor of 1.09
[Based on data found on:
http://www.devon.gov.uk/dris/econ… ]
As has been mentioned on earlier occasions, these figures should be taken as a reasonable approximation only -- as retail price index (r.p.i.) data from the 17th century are not up to modern standards -- and even if they were, the r.p.i. is only one way to put a average value on income and expenses...
in Aqua Scripto • Link
Remember this 630 quid be 185 % of his annual income, the bonus be?
How many can accomplish all of this, purchases, have Maids, entertainment and more, own thy income.
Patricia • Link
Re Pepys' household accounts: he eats at M'Lord's and others' houses so often, that should be saving him a pretty penny.
Second Reading
Louise Hudson • Link
I am amazed at how differently people viewed 12-year-olds in Pepys' time compared to today. Imagine expecting a 12-year-old to work what amounted then to a full-time job and to be beaten if he failed! 12-year-olds, by today's standards, are nowhere near adulthood or any kind of maturity. I don't suppose they were actually any different then--expectations were just harsher. I can't imagine my own three boys (now adults) being expected to support themselves and being treated as Wayneman was in Pepys' time when they were a mere 12 years old! They were children, doing what children do--playing instead of working, often forgetting what they were supposed to do, still needing warm hugs and parental understanding. I see Wayneman as no different from my own 12-year-olds, despite more than 400 years between them. Boys will be boys! It's society's attitudes and expectations that have changed (for which we should be eternally grateful) not the boys (or the girls), themselves.
Christopher David Robin Williams • Link
Your amazement depends on your experience and knowledge of the world concerning children. I am a victim of WW II my father, in the Royal Marines died of dysentery in Tripoli in 1943. I was then sent to the Royal Naval children' s home in Waterlooville until the end of the war. My mother emigrated to Australia in 1947 to be with her brother who had also emigrated there in 1923. From 1948 to 1954 I was placed in 4 orphanages. The attitude of staff in those homes about children was they were to be seen and not heard. Punishment was metered out with canes and other types of punishment work such as filling wheat bags with cow manure, kitchen duties e.g peeling basins full of potatoes, rising at 5 .am to milk cows before school. In some homes we could only wear shoes on a Sunday to church even walking to school on gravel roads and suffering stone bruises was not an excuse to wear shoes. There's not enough space here for me to tell you everything, but suffice to say I was filling manure bags as large as myself at 10 years of age. My experience has taught me that if the child is not your own then the love experienced by parents didn't exist for children under care. I'm not bitter about my experiences although I do believe that a child's early life experiences do have a lasting effect on the rest of his/her life.
Tonyel • Link
Imagine expecting a 12-year-old to work what amounted then to a full-time job and to be beaten if he failed!
Easy to imagine, unfortunately. You can go to many parts of the world and find kids of half that age doing a full-time job.
GrannieAnnie • Link
I've often thought of my Indiana grandfather's experience in the late 1800s. He was apprenticed to a tailor which moved him away from his small town family around age 12-14 to the "big city" of Indianapolis where he traveled and found his own lodgings. When his master heard where he was living (in the Red Light district) he was horrified and quickly moved him somewhere more socially acceptable. Similarly, my husband's Irish grandmother was set loose early by today's standards and came to America by herself around age 16 to be a nanny. Her twin sister stayed in Ireland since they only had enough money to support one. The one who came to America had only one dress, a woolen one, and landed in Philadelphia in the hot, humid summer.
As a parent I cannot imagine setting a child loose at those tender ages, but necessity drove the decisions.
Christopher David Robin Williams, my heart goes out to you and what you survived during your early years. I hope you've written it all down to share with the overly coddled complaining children of our era which does its own form of harm I do believe.
Robert Harneis • Link
12 year olds can function as adults if they have to. They are physically weak and therefore especially vulnerable. Christopher Robin David Williams is far from being alone in his grim childhood. As late as the 1950s, in France Germany and Switzerland, and elsewhere no doubt, children, either orphaned or too numerous, were placed in farms and sometimes slept in the hay in the barn. They were often beaten and suffered all the usual abuses. I have known some of them in later life. They were clearly marked by their experiences. Some were strengthened by what they had undergone and lead successful adult lives. Beating of course was common place in schools until recent years, particularly in expensive English ones. I have come to believe, on no scientific basis, that children are better treated in societies where birth control has limited the numbers. They are thus less of them so they are more appreciated and hopefully less likely to be born to feckless parents... hopefully. Sam seems to me to have been a pretty good master considering his power over his servants, particularly for those days.
Louise Hudson • Link
Thanks to those who responded. I was writing from my own experience during the later part of the 20th Century in the United States. My own young life and child-raising years were, let's say, unfortunate in many ways, but neither I nor my children had to be sent out to fend for ourselves. I come from a long line of coal miners where many kids younger than 12 worked full time at coal breakers, including my grandfather and great grandfather. I am able to see young kids as vulnerable children because I never had to send mine to work, so I know I can be seen to be wearing blinders of a sort. But I am aware of other societies, other times and grinding poverty. Poor Wayneman's treatment brought this home to me. I was touched by Christopher Williams' experience. Fortunately life is better today for most children at least in Western societies. My point was that no child should have had such a life as Wayneman had, in the 1600s--or now. I wish all children could to be allowed to be children when they are children, as mine were.
Chris Squire UK • Link
OED has:
‘citizen, n. < Anglo-Norman citesain . .
. . 1.c. An ordinary (city- or town-dwelling) person as opposed to a member of the landed nobility or gentry on one hand or an artisan, labourer, etc. on the other . .
a1616 Shakespeare Coriolanus (1623) iii. iii. 54 When he speakes not like a Citizen You finde him like a Soldier.
1723 D. Defoe Hist. Col. Jack (ed. 2) 315, I had Married two Gentle-women, and one Citizen, and they prov'd all three Whores.
1755 Johnson Dict. Eng. Lang. Citizen, a man of trade; not a gentleman . . ‘
...........
The industrial revolution depended on child labour in the cotton mills. It was unregulated until, 150 years after Pepy’s time, came ‘the Cotton Factories Regulation Act of 1819 (which set the minimum working age at 9 and maximum working hours at 12), then the Regulation of Child Labor Law of 1833 (which established paid inspectors to enforce the laws) and finally the Ten Hours Bill of 1847 (which limited working hours to 10 for children and women) . . ’
https://eh.net/encyclopedia/child…
Bill • Link
CITIZEN, an Inhabitant of a City, a Freeman.
FREEMAN, of a City, Corporation or Company.
---An Universal English Dictionary. N. Bailey, 1724.
Terry Foreman • Link
"with my wife to the Duke’s Theatre, and saw the second part of “Rhodes,” done with the new Roxalana;"
L&M: This was Davenant's opera, The siege of Rhodes. Mrs Hester Davenport, who had been a great success in the role of Roxalana, had by this time been beguiled from the theatre by the Earl of Oxford and the part was now being played by Mrs Norton: https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/… and https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/…