THE Inventories of Executors and Administrators, from the Archives
of the Ecclesiastical Courts, and those of attainted individuals,
returned into the Court of Exchequer by the escheator, furnish us
with evidence the most truthful of the wealth and power, the
habits and modes of life of those whose personalities are therein
recorded, often in minutest detail. We seem to be at once admitted
behind the scenes, to witness all that passed there. "Sic
sese ferebant" meets us at every turn, and, in many
instances, much illustration, even of the very character of the
party, is thereby revealed.
Many of us must have frequently experienced this, in
rambling through the rooms where the furniture and chattels of one
lately dead are exposed to sale, in the precise state in which
they were standing at the moment of departure. It is always a
melancholy spectacle, and ought to be an instructive one.
In this point of view, the early Inventories of
contrariant and deceased magnates, on which we frequently stumble
in our researches, possess the greatest interest; they throw light
on the domestic habits of an age of which only the general public
history is known, and that often but imperfectly. I have therefore
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