Tuesday 14 August 1660

To the Privy Seal, and thence to my Lord’s, where Mr. Pim, the tailor, and I agreed upon making me a velvet coat. From thence to the Privy Seal again, where Sir Samuel Morland came in with a Baronet’s grant to pass, which the King had given him to make money of. Here he staid with me a great while; and told me the whole manner of his serving the King in the time of the Protector; and how Thurloe’s bad usage made him to do it; how he discovered Sir R. Willis, and how he hath sunk his fortune for the King; and that now the King hath given him a pension of 500l. per annum out of the Post Office for life, and the benefit of two Baronets; all which do make me begin to think that he is not so much a fool as I took him to be.

Home by water to the Tower, where my father, Mr. Fairbrother, and Cooke dined with me. After dinner in comes young Captain Cuttance of the Speedwell, who is sent up for the gratuity given the seamen that brought the King over. He brought me a firkin of butter for my wife, which is very welcome. My father, after dinner, takes leave, after I had given him 40s. for the last half year for my brother John at Cambridge.

I did also make even with Mr. Fairbrother for my degree of Master of Arts, which cost me about 9l. 16s. To White Hall, and my wife with me by water, where at the Privy Seal and elsewhere all the afternoon. At night home with her by water, where I made good sport with having the girl and the boy to comb my head, before I went to bed, in the kitchen.

23 Annotations

First Reading

Paul Brewster  •  Link

ferkin
OED:
1. A small cask for liquids, fish, butter, etc., originally containing a quarter of a "barrel" or half a"kilderkin".
…
1653 Walton Angler 223 Put them into some tub or firkin.
…
2. Used as a measure of capacity: Half a kilderkin. (The "barrel", "kilderkin", and "firkin" varied in capacity according to the commodity.)
…
1600 T. Hill Arith. i. xiii. 66b, 8 gallons in measure make 1 firkin of ale, sope, herring; 9 gallons, 1 firkin of beere; 10 1 / 2 gallons, 1 firkin of salmon or Eeles. 1668 Denham Second West. Wonder 4 in Poems 107 Another was done with a Firkin of powder.

Paul Brewster  •  Link

for the gratuity given the seamen that brought the King over
per L&M: "One month's wasges were paid to the officers and men of Sanwich's fleet which had brought over the King. ... Pepys later [9 March 1660/61] claimed a gratuity for his own 'labour-extraordinary at sea'."
Now I haven't been keeping track of this but didn't we already settle all this on June 2nd.
http://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1660/06/02/
On second reading, I guess that was just the promise. Now they want the hard cash.

chip  •  Link

L&M note that Morland here acting as broker in the grant of the title to someone else, paid in the fee of L1095 to the Exchequer on 22 October...his own baronetcy dated from 18 July. As for the one month's wages, they also note that Pepys later claimed a gratuity for his own 'labour-extraordinary at sea'. Charming scene at the end, typical of Pepys, he makes it easy to conjure them combing his hair.

Tim Bray  •  Link

Does one normally dine at the Tower? With one's family? Surprised...

Pauline  •  Link

"Does one normally dine at the Tower?"
Sam lives away from the river, but in the Tower neighborhood. I think he just docked at the Tower and found his way home to Seething Lane for dinner. "Home by water to the Tower..."

Mary  •  Link

"having the girl and the boy to comb my head"
If the job takes two of them, we presume that this was not simple pampering but that Sam was having nits and possibly fleas removed. Such infestations were very common at a time when men wore their own hair long. After Charles II made wigs fashionable and men cut their own hair very short, the parasites often took up residence in the wigs themselves, presumably commuting to the shorn pate whenever they felt the need for a snackerel of something.

Mary  •  Link

The Tower
Pauline may well be right, but I believe I'm remembering correctly that whole areas of the land within The Tower walls had developed a commercial life of their own, with shops and even an ale-house or two, perhaps also a tavern where one could eat. From time to time efforts were made to clear this clutter of booths and wooden structures, but they tended to creep back. At this time The Tower also housed a menagerie, which later move to the Regent's Park Zoological Gardens.

Arbor  •  Link

The Tower Lions were famous... some quite long-lived even though they lived in pretty dire surroundings. Imprisoned in the Tower. Sam mentions them somewhere I think...

Matthew  •  Link

The lions in the tower:
"Seeing the lions" came to mean doing the sights of London and is used in that sense in "David Copperfield".

Pauline  •  Link

"To White Hall, where I found my Lord gone with the King by water to dine at the Tower with Sir J. Robinson, Lieutenant."
(August 4 entry)
I'm not saying you couldn't dine at the Tower or in the ale houses at the Tower, just that I think Sam in this instance just landed there and went home to dine.

dan nixon  •  Link

Were the lions at the tower just past the refreshment room?

vincent  •  Link

Dining at the Tower: Food was not provided by the state. Family and friends had to do their bit. The Tower being a rather more Elegant place of residing at the Kings Pleasure and therefore the Londener's being an enterprising group, an Industry was set up to provide the victuals, available for visitors and friends to dine while taking grapes to their kin. . Not so at the lesser places of detention,unlike the Fleet and Bridewell et al. At these establishments for poorer sort,in order to eat one had to provide some entertainment for the Keeper of detainees.

language hat  •  Link

menagerie in The Tower:
This reminds me irresistibly of Baudelaire's great poem "The Swan," which begins by addressing Andromache (taken, like the swan, far from her homeland), moves on to the recently demolished slum area behind the Louvre, a "clutter of booths and wooden structures" much like that in the Tower of Sam's day:

"Old Paris is no more (a town, alas,
Changes more quickly than man's heart may change);
Yet in my mind I still can see the booths;
The heaps of brick and rough-hewn capitals;
The grass; the stones all over-green with moss;
The débris, and the square-set heaps of tiles.”

And proceeds to the unforgettable image:

“There a menagerie was once outspread;
And there I saw, one morning at the hour
When toil awakes beneath the cold, clear sky,
And the road roars upon the silent air,
A swan who had escaped his cage, and walked
On the dry pavement with his webby feet,
And trailed his spotless plumage on the ground.”

Here’s the whole poem:
http://www.poetry-archive.com/b/the_swan.html

And of course it’s even better in French, if you’re master of that domain:
http://www.literatureclassics.com/etexts/756/1202…

Ian  •  Link

Dining at the Tower: still today a lot of people live (unimprisoned) in the Tower, especially the Yeomen Warders and their families, as well as the Governor (usually a retired general) and his family. The casemates (the outer walls of the Tower on the non-river side) contain most of the Yeoman Warders' houses, as well as their own pub. I imagine that the wooden structures referred to previously would have been in the (by then dry) outer moat leaning against the casemates.

Second Reading

Terry Foreman  •  Link

Today Commons is told the Lords concur in Order, &c. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?comp…

The Lord Bruce reports, that the Lords concur to the Order for Money for Payment of the Army; and also that their Committee will be ready to accompany the Committee of this House, at Four of the Clock this Afternoon, into the City, for borrowing the One hundred thousand Pounds.

[ Parade!! ]

Bill  •  Link

Every kilderkin of butter shall contain one hundred and twelve pounds, and every firkin fifty six pounds neat, or above; every pound containing sixteen ounces, besides the tare of the cask, of good and merchantable butter.
---A New and Complete Law-dictionary. T. Cunningham, 1764.

Tonyel  •  Link

Fifty six pounds of butter in mid-summer would go off quite quickly unless they had a very cold cellar. Perhaps Elisabeth and "the girl" would have to be busy making cakes, etc to preserve it.

Chris Squire UK  •  Link

Moreland was no fool: ‘ . . an English academic, diplomat, spy, inventor and mathematician of the 17th century, a polymath credited with early developments in relation to computing, hydraulics and steam power ..’ [wikipedia] but: ‘ . . his politics [were] . . shifty . . he was a place-hunter and careerist . . his personality does seem to have attracted the particular abhorrence of his fellows.

[However he had a] talent for innovation . . over a wide field, from mechanical water-pumps for domestic and industrial use, to a mechanical glister machine for giving himself enemas while in bed, to the speaking trumpet, and a proto-steam engine . . ’ [DNB]

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