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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 October 2016
Thomas Bourchier, the Franciscan martyrologist, writing of the Venerable Thomas Belchiam (d. 3 August 1537) gives the following curious fragment of information: after Belchiam’s death, he says, a congenital idiot named William Sommer went running about the court shouting “The simplicity of one mendicant breaks the pride of the King” (1). In view of Bourchier’s general unsatisfactoriness as a historian one is disposed fo regard with suspicion any of his statements which cannot be corroborated, buk in this instance there i s good reason to believe that his information i s correct, or at least founded on fact.
1) “Delirus quidam qui a nativitate rationis usu privatus fuit, Guilelmus Soramer nomine”.
2) The History of the Life and Death of Will Summers, King Henry VIII's Jester (1676, 40; 1794, 80.
3) The play had been performed earlier, in Michaelmas term, 1593.
4) Cited in A Select Collection of Old English Plays, ed. W. Carew Hazlitt (4th ed. 1874) pp. 15–16.
5) Fanfare for Elizabeth by Edith Sitwell (1946) p. 42.
6) The Chronicle of St. Monica's, Louvain, ed. Dom Adam Hamilton, vol. 2 (1906) pp. 19–20.