Note 1436 — Chapter XVII · MASKS AND MISRULE
Reading edition
They are in Trin. Coll. Camb. MS. R. iii. 20 (Shirley’s; cf. E. P. Hammond, Lydgate’s Mumming at Hertford in Anglia, xxii. 364), and copied by or for Stowe ‘out of þe boke of John Sherley’ in B. M. Add. MS. 29729, f. 132 (cf. E. Sieper, Lydgate’s Reson and Sensuallyte, E. E. T. S. i. xvi). The Hertford verses have been printed by Miss Hammond (loc. cit.) and the others by Brotanek, 306. I do not find any notice of disguisings when Henry VI spent the Christmas of 1433 at Lydgate’s own monastery of Bury St. Edmunds (F. A. Gasquet. A Royal Christmas in The Old English Bible, 226). Devon, Issues of the Exchequer, 473, notes a payment for the king’s ‘plays and recreations’ at Christmas, 1449.