“Whose liberal board doth flow
With all that hospitality doth know!
Where comes no guest but is allow’d to eat,
Without his fear, and of thy Lord’s own meat.
Where the same beer and bread, and self-same wine,
That is His Lordship’s, shall be also mine.”
Gifford’s Ben Jonson, vol. viii. p. 254.
The practice of making a distinction at the table by means of a salt-cellar was very proper in early times, when the servants as well as the master of a family with his wife and children dined at one long table. It became odious, however, when a baron made this mark of servility separate his gentle from his noble friends. This was feudal pride, whereas chivalric courtesy would rather have placed the guests in generous equality about a round table.
[120] Spenser, Colin Clout’s come Home again.
[121] Nicholls’s Progresses of Queen Elizabeth, vol. iii. p. 41, &c.
[122] Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, book ii. c. 9. & 19.
[123] Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, p. 271. This passage brings to mind a corresponding one in Wilson’s Arte of Rhetoricke, printed in 1553. “If there be any old tale or strange history, well and wittily applied to some man living, all men love to hear it. As if one were called Arthur, some good fellow that were well acquainted with King Arthur’s book, and the knights of his Round Table, would want no matter to make good sport, and for a need would dub him knight of the Round Table, or else prove him to be one of his kin, or else (which were much) prove him to be Arthur himself.”
[124] “The Two angry Women of Abingdon.” The sword and buckler fighting was the degeneracy of the ancient chivalry; and Smithfield, which had shone as the chief tilting ground of London, was in the sixteenth century, according to Stow, “called Ruffians’ Hall,” by reason it was the usual place of frays and common fighting, during the time that sword and bucklers were in use. “When every serving-man, from the base to the best, carried a buckler at his back, which hung by the hilt or pommel of his sword.” Alas, for the honor of chivalry!
[125] Wilson’s Life of James, p. 52.
[126] Ben Jonson, Masque of Prince Henry’s Barriers.
[127] G. Wither. Prince Henry’s Obsequies. El. 31.