Peckham

“ Bernard Langdon to Philip Staples. MY DEAR PHILIP,—
I have been for some months established in this place, turning the main crank of the machinery for the manufactory of accomplishments superintended by, or rather worked to the profit of, a certain Mr. Silas Peckham. He is a poor wretch, with a little thin fishy blood in his body, lean and flat, long-armed and large-handed, thick-jointed and thin-muscled,—you know those unwholesome, weak-eyed, half-fed creatures, that look not fit to be round among live folks, and yet not quite dead enough to bury. ”

“ PECKHAM, JOHN (d. 1292) , archbishop of Canterbury, is stated by Bartholomew Cotton (De Archiepiscopis Cantuariæ, p. 371) to have been a native of Kent. Peckham, however, seems to have been connected with Sussex, and he himself says that he had been brought up in the neighbourhood of Lewes from a boy (Registrum, p. 902) ; from this it has been assumed that he was born at Lewes. But the connection may be merely due to the fact that the rectory of Peckham in Sussex belonged to Lewes priory (Dugdale, Monast. Angl. v. 16) . ”

“ During 1280 a further subject of dispute arose with the king, owing to Peckham's claim to visit Wolverhampton and other royal chapels in the diocese of Lichfield as a matter of right; Edward contested the archbishop's pretensions, and Peckham, after some demur, had to substantially yield the point (Registrum, pp. 109, 178–84) . Peckham was not daunted by his failure, and in a council at Lambeth in 1281 the bishops proposed to exclude the royal courts from determining suits on patronage, and from intervention in causes touching the chattels of the spiritualty (Ann. Mon. iv. 285) . ”

“ Thompson filling all the front windows with choice and costly flowers, which he carefully tended and watered with his own hands.
“People at Peckham are beginning to be a trifle impatient with inquisitive strangers who want to know about their most famous character. On my first visit to Peckham I looked in on the gentleman who combines the duties connected with her Majesty’s mails with dispensing flour and other household necessities to her Majesty’s females. ”

“ Hillerton declared, flinging away a cigar-stump and taking his legs down from the desk.
Then Peckham turned himself round to face the crowd, and said, in a tone of quiet conviction:
"The man was all right. If you only want anything bad enough, no price is too high to pay for it."
This was a sentiment which every one was bound to respect—every one, at least, excepting Hillerton.
"Sounds very well, Peckham," he said, "but it won't hold water."
The most surprising thing about Peckham's little speculations was that they all succeeded. It made the other men rather mad because he did not care more. ”

“ With so many hard feelings to cherish against his two immediate superiors—namely, Hillerton and Fate—it is no wonder that Peckham had the reputation of being of a morose disposition.
He was perhaps the most solitary man in Springtown. Not only did he live in lodgings, and pick up his meals at cheap restaurants; he had wilfully denied himself the compensations which club life offers. Living, too, in a singularly hospitable community, he never put himself in the way of receiving invitations, and he consequently was allowed to do without them. He did not keep a horse ”

“ The abbot of Westminster seems to have held out, and the relations of that abbey with the archbishop were never friendly. In 1282 Peckham rebuked the abbot for extortion at his ferry at Lambeth, and in 1283 interfered on behalf of the priory of Malvern, which was a cell of Westminster (ib. Pref. ii. pp. lxxvii–lxxxii) . In 1290 Peckham supported the Franciscans in a quarrel with the monks of Westminster, and laid the abbey under an interdict, in consequence of which he took no part in the funeral of Queen Eleanor on 17 Dec. ”

“ Peckham," he said, in a grave, calm voice, "there is a great deal of work to be done in the school; but perhaps we can distribute the duties a little more evenly after a time. I shall look over the girls' themes myself, after this week. Perhaps there will be some other parts of her labor that I can take on myself. We can arrange a new programme of studies and recitations."
"We can do that," said Mr. Silas Peckham. "But I don't propose mater'lly alterin' Miss Darley's dooties. I don't think she works to hurt herself. ”

“ Peckham,” pleaded Kit, “when you were our age, wasn’t there ever anything that you wanted to do or be with all your heart and soul? Didn’t you ever just want to get away from what you had been doing for years, and start something new?”
“Well, come to think of it now,” smiled Mrs. Peckham, “I’d have given my eye-teeth to have left home and gone to be a teacher in some town.”
“Then please let Lucy do this. Becky says she’s willing to keep an eye on everything, and one of us girls will probably be helping her out most of the time, too. ”

“ Peckham was from the West, raised on Indian corn and pork, which give a fuller outline and a more humid temperament, but may perhaps be thought to render people a little coarse-fibred. Her specialty was to look after the feathering, cackling, roosting, rising, and general behavior of these hundred chicks. An honest, ignorant woman, she could not have passed an examination in the youngest class. ”

“ On 1 Jan. 1285 Peckham wrote to certain cardinals in defence of his proceedings (Reg. pp. 840, 852, 862, 864, 870) . The enmity of the Dominicans, however, still continued, and on 1 June 1285 Peckham complained in warm terms of an attack made on him in an anonymous pamphlet, written apparently by a Cambridge Dominican (ib. pp. 896–901) . On 28 March 1287 he ordered the archdeacon of Ely to inquire into certain slanders against him at Cambridge (ib. p. 943) . ”

“ Peckham returned to Oxford about 1270, and there became eleventh lector of his order (Monumenta Franciscana, i. 550) . On 2 May 1275 he was appointed, in conjunction with Oliver de Encourt, prior of the Dominicans, to decide a suit in the chancellor's court at Oxford (Close Roll 3 Edw. I, ap. Little, p. 155) . A little later he was elected ninth provincial minister of the Franciscans in England, and during the first year of his office attended a general council of the order at Padua. ”

“ A more attractive side of Peckham's career is his activity as a writer. The numerous manuscripts of his works to be found in the libraries of Italy, England and France, testify to his industry as a philosopher and commentator. In philosophy he represents the Franciscan school which attacked the teaching of St Thomas Aquinas on the “Unity of Form.” He wrote in a quaint and elaborate style on scientific, scriptural and moral subjects and engaged in much controversy in defence of the Franciscan rule and practice. ”

“ In fact, it was largely owing to Hillerton's inquiry and the hint of resentment it excited, that Peckham put a hundred dollars into the Yankee Doodle Mining and Milling Co. that very day. To be sure, he acted on a "straight tip," but straight tips were as thick as huckleberries in Springtown, and this was the first time he had availed himself of one.
It would be difficult to imagine why Peckham should not have thoroughly liked Hillerton; difficult, that is, to any one not aware of the unusual criterion by which he measured his fellow men. ”

“ It seems that in his daily morning walks from Peckham (or some village thereabouts) where he lived, to his office, it had been his practice for the last twenty years to drop his halfpenny duly into the hat of some blind Bartimeus that sat begging alms by the wayside in the borough. The good old beggar recognised his daily benefactor by the voice only, and when he died left all the amassings of his alms (that had been half a century, perhaps, in the accumulating) to his old bank friend. Was this a story to purse up people's hearts and pennies against giving an alms to the blind? ”

“ It saved trouble and hurt nobody. Not that Lewis Peckham was without opinions of his own; but he took no special interest in them, and rarely put himself to the trouble of defending them.
The young man's countenance had never been an expressive one, and during the three years he had spent in Hillerton's employ, his face had lost what little mobility it had ever possessed. He was a pale, hollow-chested individual, with a bulging forehead, curiously marked eyebrows, and a prominent and sensitive nose. A gentleman, too, as anybody could see, but a gentleman of a singularly unsocial disposition. ”

“ Miss Peckham looks as though she could be horrid without half trying."
"Maybe it's just her way, though," replied Migwan good temperedly. "She may be very nice inside after we get to know her. She's probably never been a councilor before, and thinks she must show her authority."
"Authority!" cried Gladys. "But we're not babies; we're grown up. ”

“ Peckham told them flatly. "The well's low and everything is dry as tinder. Better start carrying things out, girls, because the best we men-folks can do is to keep the roofs wet down and try to save the barn."
While the fire was confined to the "ell" kitchen, the two older Peckham boys set to work up-stairs, under Jean's direction. Kit had made for her father's room the first thing. When Jean opened the door she found her piling the contents of the desk and chiffonier drawers helter-skelter into blankets. ”

“ Now, who'll be Miss Peckham?"
There was a silence, and all the eligibles looked at one another doubtfully. Nobody quite dared impersonate Miss Peckham—and nobody wanted to, for that matter.
"Jo?" Migwan began hesitatingly. "You're such a good mimic—no—" she broke off decidely, "you have to be Dr. Grayson, of course, because you can play men's parts so beautifully."
She looked from one to the other inquiringly. Her eye fell upon Bengal
Virden. "Bengal, dear—"
Bengal looked up with a jerk and a grimace of distaste. ”

“ Peckham received his earliest instruction at Lewes priory (ib. p. 902) . Afterwards he went to Oxford, but it is of course impossible that he was, as sometimes alleged, a member of Merton College; the statement to this effect appears to be due to a confusion with Gilbert Peckham (fl. 1324) (Little, Grey Friars at Oxford, p. 238; Registrum, Pref. i. p. lviii) . The suggestion that Peckham was the ‘Johannes juvenis’ [see John, fl. 1267] whom Roger Bacon befriended is equally untenable. ”

“ One feels a certain desire to know what became of the Archbishop’s knights whose array had so displeased the King earlier in the year. But we hear nothing of them or of any particular class; all is quite general. In one case indeed it is quite certain that the rule that all Anselm’s acts should be treated as invalid was not carried out. The monks keep Peckham. The monks of Christ Church clearly kept their temporary possession of the manor of Peckham. For they spent the whole income of it on great architectural works which Anselm himself had begun. ”

“ With the aid of a pocket-glass he could make out persons without the risk of being observed himself.
Mr. Silos Peckham's corps of instructors was not expected to be off duty or to stand at ease for any considerable length of time. Sometimes Mr. Bernard, who had more freedom than the rest, would go out for a ramble in the daytime, but more frequently it would be in the evening, after the hour of “retiring,” as bedtime was elegantly termed by the young ladies of the Apollinean Institute. ”

“ Peckham went out of his way to make a specific defence of the practice in 1282, when the Prioress and Convent of Stratford sought to excuse themselves from veiling a little girl called Isabel Bret, by reason of her youth, “since on account of this minority she is the more able and capable to learn and receive those things which concern the discipline of your order” [111] .
It is impossible to make the generalisation that even children professed at such an early age could have had no consciousness of a vocation for the religious life ”

“ In 1282 John Peckham, archbishop of Canterbury, gave him the benefice of Harlaxton, Staffordshire. Having in 1291 received a dispensation for plurality of benefices, he was, in August 1292, instituted to the living of Aylestone, Leicestershire, and also held the rectory of Fen Stanton, Huntingdonshire. ”

“ A large proportion of these little dwellings are tenanted by at least two families, and the district is given over to small shopkeepers and clerks, shop assistants, teachers and those who belong more frankly to the working classes. No one who can afford to live elsewhere chooses to live in Peckham ”

“ How then, asked his opponents, could the individual exist in the non-material world [499] ? Such a doctrine was in contradiction to the mediaeval theory of heaven and the life after death; and the Church rallied to the side of the Franciscans. At Oxford, Archbishop Kilwardby, Dominican though he was, condemned this among many other errors in 1276, but the sentence seems to have had little effect at the time [500] . It was chiefly against this opinion that Peckham’s measures in 1284 were directed [501] . ”

“ About 1284, Archbishop Peckham made a provincial visitation, in which he exercised severe discipline on both clergy and laity. For example, in Lichfield Diocese, the bishop being a foreigner and non-resident, the archbishop sent a public summons to him to reside, on penalty of deprivation, telling him that since he could not preach to his people, he was the rather bound to reside among them, and to spend his revenue in hospitality and relieving the poor. ”