The Story of Ancient Irish Civilization

by P. W. Joyce

All the various kinds of meal and flour were baked into cakes or loaves of different shapes. Flour was usually mixed with water to make dough: but bread made of flour and milk was also much in use. Honey was often kneaded up with cakes as a delicacy: and occasionally the roe of a salmon was similarly used. Wheaten bread was considered the best, as at present: barley-bread was poor. Yeast, or barm, or leaven was used both in baking and in brewing.

The management of Bees was universally understood, and every comfortable householder kept hives in his garden. Wild bees, too, swarmed everywhere—much more plentifully than at present, on account of the extent of woodland. Accordingly honey was very plentiful, and was used with all sorts of dishes. Often at meals each person had placed before him on the table a little dish, sometimes of silver, filled with honey; and each morsel whether of meat, fish, or bread was dipped into it before being conveyed to the mouth. Honey was the chief ingredient in the making of mead.

As the country abounded in forests, thickets, and brakes, the most common Fuel for domestic use was wood: but peat or turf was also much used, cut from a bank with a slaan or turf-spade as at present. Founders and other workers in metal used wood-charcoal, of which that made from birch-wood gave the greatest heat.

Flint and steel with tinder (or spunk) were used for striking and kindling fire. The whole kindling-gear—flint, steel, and tinder—was carried in the girdle-pocket, so as to be ready to hand; and accordingly, fire struck in this way was called tinnĕ-crassa, ‘girdle-fire.’

For Light, dipped candles were used in the better class of houses. Poor people used dipped rushes, which gave a feeble light and burned out quickly. In the houses of the rich they used beeswax candles, as indeed we might expect from the great abundance of bees.

Hospitality and generosity were virtues highly esteemed in ancient Ireland; in the old Irish Christian writings indeed they are everywhere praised and inculcated as religious duties; and in the secular literature they are equally prominent. The higher the rank of the person the more was expected from him, and a king should be hospitable without limit. There were all over the country Public Hostels for the free lodging and entertainment of travellers. At the head of each was an officer called a Brewy or Beetagh, a public hospitaller or hosteller, who was held in high honour.

In order to be at all times ready to receive visitors, a brewy was bound to have three kinds of meat cooked and ready to be served up to all who came; three kinds of raw meat ready for cooking; besides animals ready for killing. In one of the law tracts a brewy is quaintly described as “a man of three snouts”:—viz. the snout of a live hog rooting in the fields; the snout of a dead hog on the hooks cooking; and the pointed snout of a plough: meaning that he had plenty of live animals and of meat cooked and uncooked, with a plough and all other tillage appliances.

There should be a number of open roads leading to the house of a brewy, so that it might be readily accessible: and on each road a man was stationed to make sure that no traveller should pass by without calling to be entertained; besides which a light was to be kept burning on the lawn at night to guide travellers from a distance. To enable him to meet this great expense and to pay himself into the bargain, a brewy was allowed a great tract of land free.

Besides the hostels, there were the monasteries, too, where travellers were also boarded and lodged free for the time. And along with all this the people were kind and hospitable in their own houses to strangers and visitors. So we see that travellers were quite as well off then as now: indeed in one respect much better off: for whereas we have to pay a smart charge in an inn or hotel, there was in those times a hearty welcome and no charge at all.

The Irish missionaries carried this fine custom to the Continent in early ages, as they did many others: for they established free hostels in France and Germany, in places where there were no monasteries, chiefly for the use of pilgrims on their way to Rome.