The family dined together—the heads sat at the old kitchen table—the maids at a side table, called a bouter, the farm men stood in the scullery. With the principals at the table any stranger who happened to come in dined, even if he was a travelling ratcatcher, tinker, or farrier. “My father,” Mr. Crabbe goes on to say, “well describes in the ‘Widow’s Tale,’ my mother’s situation when living in her younger days at Parham:
“But when the men beside their stations took,
The maidens with them, and with these the cook;
When one huge wooden bowl before them stood,
Filled with huge balls of farinaceous food;
With bacon, mass saline! where never lean
Beneath the brown and bristly rind was seen:
When from a single horn the party drew
Their copious draughts of heavy ale and new;
When the coarse cloth, she said, with many a stain,