Meat and drink be ordained and convenient to dinners and to feasts, for at feasts first meat is prepared and arrayed, guests be called together, forms and stools be set in the hall, and tables, cloths, and towels be ordained, disposed, and made ready. Guests be set with the lord in the chief place of the board, and they sit not down at the board before the guests wash their hands. Children be set in their place, and servants at a table by themselves. First knives, spoons, and salts be set on the board, and then bread and drink, and many divers messes; household servants busily help each other to do everything diligently, and talk merrily together. The guests be gladded with lutes and harps. Now wine and now messes of meat be brought forth and departed. At the last cometh fruit and spices, and when they have eaten, board, cloths, and relief are borne away, and guests wash and wipe their hands again. Then grace is said, and guests thank the lord. Then for gladness and comfort drink is brought yet again. When all this is done at meat, men take their leave, and some go to bed and sleep, and some go home to their own lodgings.
III
MEDIAEVAL MEDICINE
The seventh book of the "De Proprietatibus" treats of the human body and its ailments. At first glance it might seem that such a subject would be repulsive, either in matter or handling, to the general reader of today, but it will, we think, be found that there are many points of interest in it for us, some of which we proceed to indicate. Mankind has always felt a deep interest in certain diseases, to which we are even now subject, and so parts of the chapters on leprosy and hydrophobia have been reproduced. The accounts given of frenzy and madness interest us both as a picture of the change in manners, as an example of the methods of cure proposed, and as throwing light on many passages. Thus Chaucer, speaking of Arcite, describes his passion as compounded of melancholy which deprives him of reason, overflowing into the foremost cell of his brain, the cell fantastic, and causing him to act as if mad.
"Nought oonly lyke the loveres maladye
Of Hereos, but rather lyk manye,
Engendered of humour malencolyk
Byforen in his selle fantastyk."
K. T., 515, etc.
Physicians recommend music as a cure in mental troubles, but that it is no new discovery is attested by Shakespeare and our author. Compare what Bartholomew says of the voice, with Richard's speech:
"This music mads me, let it sound no more,
For though it have holp madmen to their wits,
In me it seems it will make wise men mad."
The origin of the brutality towards madmen warred against by Charles
Reade, and described in "Romeo and Juliet"—
"Not mad, but bound more than a madman is,
Shut up in prison, kept without my food,
Whipp'd and tormented"—
is seen in our extracts, which recall, too, in their insistence on bleeding the "head vein," Juvenal's remark on his friend about to marry: "O medici, mediam pertundite venam."