King’s Men and Bum-bailiffs: A Drama of State in Jacobean England

On a cold winter day in January 1619, six men arrived at an inn, in Eynsham, Oxfordshire. Amongst their number was Thomas Boyes, a carpenter and bailiff, Walter Whiting, a miller, and three other men, including John Wight, a sixty-year-old yeoman from Little Coxwell, Berkshire. The sixth man, though, was different. He was their prisoner….