the gorboduc remembrancer
The post below enticed me to explore the term “remembrancer”, which has a certain existential but sinister ring.
A remembrancer turns out to be a kind of English debt collector. The post of King’s Remembrancer was “created in 1154 by King Henry II as the chief official in the Exchequer Court, whose purpose was ‘to put the Lord Treasurer and the Baron’s of Court in remembrance of such things as were to be called upon and dealt with for the benefit of the Crown’, a primary duty of whom was to keep records of the taxes, paid and unpaid.”
It was only abolished in 1882. The same Wikipedia entry has a fabulous note about the “Quit Rents ceremony”, which could have been invented for Gormenghast.
Thomas Norton, mentioned below in connection with torture, was an interesting character in his own right.
Here’s the 1911 Britannica reference to him:
“THOMAS NORTON (1532-1584), English lawyer, politician and writer of verse, was born in London in 1532. He was educated at Cambridge, and early became a secretary to the Protector Somerset. In 1555 he was admitted a student at the Inner Temple, and married Margery Cranmer, the daughter of the archbishop. From his eighteenth year Norton had begun to compose verse. We find him connected with Jasper Heywood; as a writer of “sonnets” he contributed to Tottel’s Miscellany, and in 1560 he composed, in company with Sackville, the earliest English tragedy, Gorboduc, which was performed before Queen Elizabeth in the Inner Temple on the 18th of January 1561.
He was a theatrical pioneer, though the play is pretty bad. Gorboduc is an early version of the story later used by Shakespeare in King Lear, and shown to the young Queen as a somewhat presumptuous means of political education. Propaganda was part of performance from the very beginning of its development in modern English.
“In 1562 Norton, who had served in an earlier parliament as the representative of Gatton, became M.P. for Berwick, and entered with great activity into politics. In religion he was inspired by the sentiments of his father-in-law, and was in possession of Cranmer’s MS. code of ecclesiastical law; this he permitted John Foxe to publish in 1571. He went to Rome on legal business in 1579, and from 1580 to 1583 frequently visited the Channel Islands as a commissioner to inquire into the status of these possessions.”
Norton was on a long journey into horror. From pioneering theatrics, he swung to a world view that saw performance as a creation of the Devil.
“Norton’s Calvinism grew with years, and towards the end of his career he became a rabid fanatic. His punishment of the Catholics, as their official censor from 1581 onwards, led to his being nicknamed “Rackmaster-General.” At last his turbulent puritanism made him an object of fear even to the English bishops; he was deprived of his office and thrown into the Tower. Walsingham presently released him, but Norton’s health was undermined, and on the Tenth of March 1584 he died in his house at Sharpenhoe, Bedfordshire.”
There was a certain rough justice in this. He had undermined the health of a lot of other people, by design and with specialised instruments. Apparently “Norton’s early lyrics have in the main disappeared”, and I am left to wonder if he burnt them, if he excoriated his younger pleasureful self on his descent into monstrosity.
The Britannica reference is cited with crosslinks here.