Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill WHITTINGTON (1350-1424) This tale is one of the series which every literature creates and possesses, with the twofold object of supplying the immediate demand for novelties, and of providing historical personages of more or less remote date and antecedents with a biography. The most familiar example of this mode of treatment is the romantic particulars which used to pass current for incidents in the life of Shakespear, even after critics had abandoned in despair the attempt to throw much real light on his career. We cannot wonder therefore that, in the case of a man who died in the first half of the fifteenth century, and whose transactions were chiefly recorded in unpublished civic muniments, we encounter a puzzling miisaic of myth and truth, which on analysis is shewn to contain a very small residuum of trustworthy matter. We may take it as established that Sir Richard Whittington was the son of Sir William Whittington, member of an ancient family in Gloucestershire, and dame Joan his wife, and that he was born in London in or about 1350. He married Alice, daughter of Hugh Fitzwarren. In 1379 we h™ contributing to a City loan, and ten years later giving surety to the chamberlain for £ i o toward a fund for the defence of London. He was successively common-councilman for Coleman Street, and alderman for Broad Street, Ward. In 1393. being then on the court of aldermen, he was chosen to be one of the sheriffs of London ; and at nearly the same time he became a member of the Mercers' Company, incorporated by Richard II. in the year just named, not improbably through his or his father's agency. By letters patent of June Sth, 1397, on the death of Adam Bamme in office, he was appointed by the king Lord Mayor of London ad interim, and at the ensuing Michaelmas was for...