The First Great Seal: Elizabeth I Awards Her Chief Clerk of the Kitchen with Land Concessions and Other Assets, Including Tolls for Fairs on Religious Holidays

An unusually detailed document still bearing her first great seal, a remarkable impression

 

The seal is not only wholly intact, but bears four protruding sections on the upper and lower edges where the original matrix accommodated the screws with which the two halves were pushed together.

The Kitchen was one of the largest departments in the Queen’s home. It consisted of three Clerks, three Master Cooks, six Yeomen, six Grooms, eight Pages, and an unspecified number of ‘gallapines’, whose responsibility was to scrub the kitchens and outward galleries twice daily to maintain cleanliness. The Chief Clerk of the Kitchen had two under Clerks, and all three of them were required to oversee the quality of the queen’s food. The clerks would check each department for waste, and the quality of the goods being used. The Chief Clerk of the Kitchen was traditionally responsible for all buyings of foodstuffs and sometimes of spices in the household. The Clerks of the Kitchen supervised the cellar, the buttery, the acatry, the poultry, the bakehouse, the pantry, the kitchen, and other subdivisions of the household.

Thomas Pynner was one of the clerks of the kitchen, becoming chief clerk in 1575.

Document, Westminster, May 27, 1573, with the original First Great Seal attached still, granting and leasing Pynner, who it references as the clerk of the Queen’s kitchen, certain lands and buildings in Wenlingborough, along with rents from certain properties, including the “house, building, structure, barn, statue, house, brewery, called malthouses and kylnes, dovecots, gardens, orchards, gardens, dominical lands, fisheries, fishermen, meadows, pastures, pastures, and hereditaments, whatever vulgarly called les demesne, the lands of the said manors, and all those customary works called Warke places acecian days works called Winter Warkes and Sommer Warkes for divers lands and tenements due to be paid [and made] of the aforesaid manor both of Tokens and Cottessettes and of mills and all rents and solutions paid for the same or any of them of Warkeland.”

The document mentions by name the “possessions of the said late monastery,” which rent the Queen retains.

The document offers a fascinating and unusually detailed glimpse into these financial transactions, discussing tolls collected for fairs and “in the marketplace.”

Pynner is to pay “thenceforth to our heirs and successors yearly from and for the aforesaid rent of the manor of Wendlingborough otherwise Tedlingborough and the farm and land called Wastell free and the other premises belonging to the farm and the farm with their appurtenances forty shillings and from and for the aforesaid rent of les hernes five shillings and I give two pence of the legal money of England for the feasts of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary and of St. Michael the Archangel to the hands of the bailies or receivers of the premises for the time existing by equal portions to be paid during the aforesaid term by the presents granted.”

“Witness me myself at the fifth tenth Westminster [1573] on the twenty-seventh day of May in the year of our reign a brief de privy seal.” In a separate hand: “Signed in the office of Henrici Dynne Auditoris xviii May 1579. On the verso it reads: “A lease granted to Thomas Pynner, one of the Clerkes of the Queen.”

Still attached to the document is the First Great Seal of Elizabeth. Some rubbing of the seal but clearly visible and inact on both sides. The seal is not only wholly intact, but bears four protruding sections on the upper and lower edges where the original matrix accommodated the screws with which the two halves were pushed together.