Introduction

Alice de Bryene was born around 1360, the only child of a prosperous Suffolk knight and his lady. Her father, Sir Robert de Bures, died in 1361 and two years later her mother remarried Sir Richard Waldegrave, another prominent knight from Northampton who settled in East Anglia. By the early 1400s she had established her home at Acton, near Sudbury in Suffolk, where she lived until her death in 1435. The household accounts were translated by Marion Dale and edited by Vincent Redstone in 1931.1 Though they have frequently been used to analyse consumption, marketing and gentry lifestyles, most notably by Christopher Dyer,2 no work has yet been published which focuses on Alice de Bryene herself, nor attempts made to describe her social and business relationships by identifying the numerous named and unnamed visitors mentioned in the daily accounts as guests at Acton.