Fascinating to learn last week that three seventeenth-century letters that have been found beneath the floorboards in an attic at Knole House in Kent. The National Trust has reproduced the text of one of the letters, which asks for various goods to be brought from London to a house in Essex:

Mr Bilby, I pray p[ro]vide to be sent too morrow in ye Cart some Greenfish, The Lights from my Lady Cranfeild[es] Cham[ber] 2 dozen of Pewter spoon[es]: one greate fireshovell for ye nursery; and ye o[t]hers which were sent to be exchanged for some of a better fashion, a new frying pan together with a note of ye prises of such Commoditie for ye rest.

Your loving friend
Robert Draper

Octobre 1633
Copthall

The Trust knows exactly how this letter came to Knole, since ‘my Lady Cranfeilde’ married Richard Sackville, Earl of Dorset, in 1637, and there are documents showing that trunks full of linen, items of furniture and collections of papers were transferred from Copt Hall to Knole in the early eighteenth century.

What I like about the letter is that, both in its contents and in its later history, it is all about the transfer of stuff–the constant, pleasurable yet headache-inducing exchanges that we have with the things in our lives. I also love those ‘greenfish’. The term refers simply to fresh, unsalted fish, but one can’t help wondering whether they weren’t a bit off-colour when they arrived in the cart.