The wills are of all kinds; there are even villeins' wills, though in theory the villein's possessions were his lord's, and there are wills of kings and queens, lords and ladies, bishops and parsons and lawyers and shopkeepers.

Here also is more evidence for the social prosperity of the middle class, details of their trade, the contents of their shops, the inventories of their houses, their estates (sometimes) in the country, their house rents (almost always) in the town, their dressers garnished with plate and their wives' ornaments, their apprentices and their gilds, their philanthropy, their intermarriage with the gentry, their religious opinions.

Such a living picture do men's wills give us of their daily lives.
These, then, are the three sources from which the life and times of Thomas Paycocke may be drawn.

All three--houses, brasses, and wills--contain much evidence for the increasingly rapid growth during the last two centuries of the Middle Ages of a large and prosperous middle class, whose wealth was based not upon landed property but upon industry and trade.

It is a class of whom we have already met typical examples in Thomas Betson and the anonymous Menagier de Paris, and we must now see what his house, his will, and his family brasses tell us about the clothier Thomas Paycocke.