Previous to the age of Elizabeth, even the Monarch, well as he might fare, and gloriously as he shone in pageants, was but simply lodged. The furniture of the bed-room of Henry VIII. was of the very simplest; and the magnificent Wolsey was content with deal for the material of most of the furniture of his palace. But the community generally was, from this period, both boarded and bedded more comfortably and refinedly than before. The hours for meals were eight, noon, and six; but “after-meats,” and “after-suppers,” filled up the intervals. It was chiefly at the “after-supper” that wine was used. The dinner, however, had become the principal meal of the day. It was abundant; but the jester and harper were no longer tolerated at it, with their lively sauce of mirth and music. It was the fashion to be sad, and ceremonious dinners were celebrated in stately silence, or a dignified sotto voce. Each guest took his place according to a properly marshalled order of precedence; and, before sitting down to dinner, they washed with rose-water and perfumes, like the parochial boards of half a century ago, who used also to deduct the expenses of both dinners and rose-water from the rates levied for the relief of the poor; this, too, at a time when men who were not parish authorities were being hanged for stealing to the amount of a few shillings.
By the reign of Elizabeth, napkins had been added to table-cloths. The wealthy ate the manchet, or fine wheaten bread; the middle classes were content with a bread of coarser quality called “chete;” and the ravelled, brown, or maslin bread was consumed by those who could afford to procure no better. There was a passion for strong wines at this time. Of this, France sent more than half a hundred different sorts, and thirty-six various kinds were imported from other parts of Europe. About 30,000 tuns were imported yearly, exclusive of what the nobility imported free of duty. The compound wines were in great request; and ladies did not disdain to put their lips to distilled liquors, such as rosa-solis and aqua-vitæ. Ale was brewed stronger than these distillations; and our ancestors drank thereof to an extent that is terrific only to think of. Camden ascribes the prevailing drunkenness to the long wars in the Netherlands, previous to which, we had been held, “of all the northern nations, the most commended for sobriety.” The barbarous terms formerly used in drinking matches, are all of Dutch, German, or Danish origin, and this serves to confirm Camden’s assertion. The statutes passed to correct the evil were disregarded. James I. was particularly desirous to enforce these statutes; but his chief difficulty lay in the fact, that he was the first to infringe them.
In Elizabeth’s reign the “watching candles” of Alfred (to mark the time) were in use in many houses. This is a curious trait of in-door life. We have an “exterior” one, in the fact that the Vicar of Hurly, who served Maidenhead, had an addition of stipend on account of the danger he ran, in crossing the thicket, when he passed to or from the church—and his inn. It was not a delicate period, and if caraways always appeared at dessert, every one knew that they were there for the kind purpose of curing expected flatulence in the guests.
In James the First’s reign, the fashion of Malmsey had passed away, and the Hungarian red wine (Ofener) had taken its place. It came by Breslau to Hamburg, where it was shipped to England. It is a strong wine, and bears some resemblance to port.
In country-houses in the seventeenth century, the Knight or Squire was head of a host of retainers, three-fourths of whom consumed the substance of the master on whose estate they were born, without rendering him much other service than drinking his ale, eating his beef, and wearing his livery. Brief family prayers, and heavy family breakfasts, a run with the hounds, and an early dinner, followed by long and heavy drinking, till supper-time, when more feeding and imbibing went on until each man finished his posset, or carried it with him to bed,—such was the ordinary course: but it admitted of exceptions where the master was a man of intellect, and then the country-house was a temple of hospitality rather than of riot; and good sense and ripe wit took the place of the sensuality, obscurity, and ignorance that distinguished the boards where the Squire was simply a “brute.”
Of the table traits of this century, the best examples are to be found in Pepys and Evelyn. In the Diary of the former, may be seen what a jolly tavern life could be led by a grave official, and no scandal given. Evelyn takes us into better company. We find him at the Spanish Ambassador’s, when his Excellency, by way of dessert, endeavoured to convert him to the Roman Catholic Church. We go with him to the feast where the Envoy from the Emperor of Morocco figured as so civilized a gentleman, while the representative of the Czar of Muscovy comported himself like a rude clown; and we dine with him at Lady Sunderland’s, where the noble hostess had engaged, for the amusement of the guests, a man who swallowed stones, and who not only performed the feat in presence of the company, but convinced them there was no cheat, by making the stones rattle in his stomach. But, nous avons changé tout cela, and not only changed in taste, but improved in manners.
Pepys gives a curious account of a Lord Mayor’s dinner in 1663. It was served in the Guildhall, at one o’clock in the day. A bill of fare was placed with every salt-cellar, and at the end of each table was a list of “the persons proper” there to be seated. Here is a mixture of abundance and barbarism. “Many were the tables, but none in the hall, but the Mayor’s and the Lords’ of the Privy Council, that had napkins or knives, which was very strange. I sat at the merchant-strangers’ table, where ten good dishes to a mess, with plenty of wine of all sorts; but it was very unpleasing that we had no napkins, nor change of trenchers, and drank out of earthen pitchers and wooden dishes. The dinner, it seems, is made by the Mayor and two Sheriffs for the time being, and the whole is reckoned to come to £700 or £800 at most.” Pepys took his spoon and fork with him, as was the custom of those days with guests invited to great entertainments. “Forks” came in with Tom Coryat, in the reign of James I.; but they were not “familiar” till after the Restoration. The “laying of napkins,” as it was called, was a profession of itself. Pepys mentions, the day before one of his dinner-parties, that he went home, and “there found one laying of my napkins against to-morrow, in figures of all sorts, which is mighty pretty, and, it seems, is his trade, and he gets much money by it.” The age of Pepys, we may further notice, was the great “supping age.” Pepys himself supped heartily on venison pasty; but his occasional “next-morning” remark was like that of Scrub: “My head aches consumedly!” The dashing Duchess of Cleveland supped off such substantials as roast chine of beef; much more solid fare than that of the Squires in a succeeding reign, who were content, with Sir Roger de Coverley, to wind up the day with “good Cheshire cheese, best mustard, a golden pippin, and a pipe of John Sly’s best.”
A few years earlier, Laud had leisure to write anxiously to Strafford on the subject of Ulster eels. “Your Ulster eels are the fattest and fairest that ever I saw, and it’s a thousand pities there should be any error in their salting, or any thing else about them; for how the carriage should hurt them I do not see, considering that other salted eels are brought as far, and retain their goodness; but the dried fish was exceeding good.” There was a good deal of error in the preserving of other things besides eels, if Laud had only known as much.
It may be mentioned as something of a “Table Trait,” illustrating the popular appetite in the reign of Charles II., that he sent sea stores to the people encamped in Moorfields; but they were so well provisioned by the liberality of the nation, that they turned up their noses at the King’s biscuits, and sent them back, “not having been used to the same.” There was some ungrateful impertinence in this; but there was less meanness in it than was shown by the great ladies of Queen Anne’s reign, who were curious in old china, and who indulged their passion by “swopping” their old clothes for fragile cups and saucers, instead of giving the former to the poor.
Dryden speaks, in the Preface to his “Love Triumphant,” of a remarkable trait of the time of William III. “It is the usual practice,” he says, “of our decayed gentry, to look about them for some illustrious family, and then endeavour to fix their young darling, where he may be both well educated and supported.”