Health-Drinking.
The custom of health-drinking seems to have been at one time or another common to all European nations. The Romans had their commissationes, or drinking bouts, and their “bene te, bene tibi.” Our own immediate ancestors the Saxons, as we have already seen, observed the custom of health-drinking with their “Wacht heil” and “Drinc heil.” {280} The picture of an Anglo-Saxon dinner-party is taken from a MS., supposed to be of the tenth century (Tiberius, c. vi., fol. 5, v.). The peculiar weapons borne by the attendants are, no doubt, spits from which the guests are carving meat. The preceding illustration occurs in Alfric’s version of Genesis (MS. Cotton. Claudius, B. IV., fol. 36, v.) and represents Abraham’s feast at the birth of his child.
Anglo-Saxons Feasting and Health-Drinking.
The Danes, also, were great health-drinkers. It is recorded that previous to the invasion of England by these ravaging pirates of the North, in the reign of Sweyne, that monarch gave a great banquet on his accession to the throne. First, the ale-horns were filled and emptied in memory of the dead King Harold; the next draught was in honour of Christ, and the third of St. Michael the Archangel. A writer of the year 1623 thus describes the ceremonies of health-drinking as practised at that time:—“He that begins the health first uncovering his head, he takes a full cup in his hand, and setting his countenance with a grave aspect, he craves for audience; silence being once obtained, he begins to breathe out the name, peradventure, of some honourable personage, whose health, is drunk to, and he that pledges must likewise off with his cap, kiss his fingers, and bow himself in sign of a reverent acceptance. When the leader sees his follower thus prepared, he sups up his broth, turns the bottom of the cup upward, and, in ostentation of his dexterity, gives the cup a fillip to make it cry twango. And thus the first scene is acted. The cup being newly replenished to the breadth of a hair, he that is the pledger must now begin his part; and {281} thus it goes round throughout the whole company.” To prove that each person had drunk off his measure, he had to turn the glass over his thumb, and if so much liquor remained as to make more than a drop which would stand on the nail of his thumb without running off, he had to drink off another bumper. This latter practice went by the name of supernaculm, and is mentioned in an old ballad, The Winchester Wedding:—
Then Phillip began her health, And turn’d a beer-glass o’er his thumb, But Jenkin was reckoned for drinking, The best in Christendom.
The author of Memoires d’Angleterre (1698) mentions the absolute universality of this practice of health-drinking amongst the English. “To drink at table,” he writes, “without drinking to the health of some one in especial, would be considered drinking on the sly, and as an act of incivility. There are in this proceeding two principal and singular grimaces, which are universally observed. . . .” The person whose health is drunk must remain as inactive as a statue while the drinker drinks, after which the second grimace is “to make him an inclinabo, at the risk of dipping his periwig in the gravy. . . . I confess that when a foreigner first sees these manners he thinks them laughable.” And yet one would have thought that a Frenchman’s familiarity with toasting would have rendered the proceeding not so singular an one after all, for that custom was carried to an extreme in his own nation, among the choice spirits of which it was not unusual to give a toast which necessitated the drinking of a glass to each letter of a mistress’s name, as illustrated in the lines:—
Six fois je m’en vas boire au beau nom de Cloris, Cloris, le seul desire de ma chaste pensée.
Space forbids that we should go very fully into all these old drinking customs, though some of them are fantastic and curious enough. One or two more, however, may be mentioned. In Elizabethan times it was customary for hard drinkers to put some inflammable substance on the surface of their liquor, and so to swallow the draught and the blazing fragment at a gulp. This was called flap-dragoning, and the fiery morsel was known as a flap-dragon. Shakspere has many allusions to this practice. Falstaff says of Prince Hal, that he “drinks off {282} candle-ends for flap-dragons.” And in Winter’s Tale an instance of the verb occurs in the passage, “But to make an end of the ship; to see how the sea flap-dragoned it.” The captain in Rowley’s Match at Midnight asserts that his corporal “was lately choked at Delf by swallowing a flap-dragon.”