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commonly called Christmas day’; thereafter, the
recipients were to hear divine service in Fawkham church and then to
return to the house and there take their dinners. The coats and gowns were
to be supplied by the owner for the time being of the house and some
parcels of land nearby. In case of default, the churchwardens were
empowered to distrain and to keep from the proceeds forty shillings for
each garment that was not forthcoming.3
The effigies in marble of John and Dorcas Walter may be seen
in the chancel of Fawkham church, adorning the memorial that Dorcas set up
there to John’s ‘everlivinge & never dyinge memorie’. As appears
from its inscription, the idea of the coats and gowns was, in the first
place, hers, but found his ready approbation. To the lengthy details of
the charity there recorded she appended its, or his, epitaph: ‘Thus did
this good gentleman blesse & honour his Saviour in his |
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poore members’.
After the deaths of John Walter in 1626 and of his wife in
1630, the provision of the coats and gowns continued, if not for ever, at
least for a very long time. It ended with the advent of clothes rationing
in the Second World War. Thereafter, the total amount leviable by way of
distress fixed the monetary value of the charity at the annual sum of
£24. In a mad inflationary world that is modest enough, but the
contingency estimate made by John Walter in 1623 was not a bad one. As
late as the nineteen-thirties, it was possible to buy a suit of clothes
ready-made for fifty shillings, so no doubt a single garment, whether or
not of good russet, could have been found for forty shillings. Some four
score years before that, Mr Brand, a Dartford tailor, had been willing to
make the coats for from thirty to thirty-two shillings apiece and the
gowns, |