Why we should read--

by S. P. B. Mais

With every regard for detail even to language Mr Hueffer builds up a picture for us of life in 1326 in a Hampshire castle:

"A great many sounds of trumpets came from the castle below to proclaim that supper was about to be set on the boards. The sun was just down below the hills, for at that harvest time of the year, when all men and women were wont to be in the fields helping to get in the oat crop and the last of the hay, supper, which was usually at four, was not partaken of till after sunset.

"It was not really dark, but blue shadows had fallen over the long valley of the Wiley, mists were arising amongst the heavy foliage of the trees. The castle of Tamworth, farther down the valley, showed enormous and purple, as if it blocked up all the passage way, and the houses of the little town of Wishford, which was beyond the bridge, being visible from that high place, showed their white mud sides all pink in the light reflected from the sky. From the top of the Portmanmote Hall, the gilded effigy of the Dragon of Wiley turned slowly in the capricious air of the evening, sending forth now a stream of light, and again being obscured. The cavalcade of the Lady Dionissia had reached the foot of the green knoll, and her trumpeter blew a turn of notes to demand admission to the castle of Coucy."

We are given every detail of the lives of these mediæval people right down to the odours that pervaded the court.

We see Mr Sorrell sitting down to a first course at dinner of fourteen dishes, eating a piece of dark-looking meat, both salt and sweet and tasting of nutmeg and cinnamon, having the consistency of soft jelly. He finds even his wines spiced with cloves.

The first dish of the first course was a compound of the tongues of rabbits, hedgehogs, deer, geese and wild boars, the breasts of partridges and the livers of pheasants. It contained, moreover, forcemeat balls made of honey, cinnamon and flour boiled in wine, and the same was made of honey, nutmegs, cloves, garlic and mint. Next he had to taste a panade of herring boiled in white wine, covered with a sweet sauce compounded out of cherries, which seemed to Mr Sorrel to be a mixture of strawberry jam and oysters.

"The pages carried away the plates and emptied them into a great tub with two handles which served for the broken meat of the poor waiting outside the castle gates. This was done to the sound of trumpets. And whilst the second course was being brought, a man came in with a bear that danced in a sort of horseshoe formed by the two tables along the wall and the small table on the dais. This man had with him a girl who danced upon her hands with her feet in the air."

Conversation ran on exploits in the Holy Land, strange happenings in the Adriatic and miracles, amid a din of knives, teeth, crying out for more wine, more ale, more metheglin, so that Mr Sorrell could neither hear others nor make himself heard. When he complained orders were given and a man armed with a long stick like a hop-pole began running down the tables striking people on the heads and hands, "upsetting drinking vessels and sending platters of meat skimming on to the rushes, where they were devoured by the many and large dogs that lay beneath all the tables."

In the next part of the book we are shown the young knight of Egerton with his leman, a fifteen-year-old girl who sulked because she had no velvet gloves set with stones, no hawk from Norway, no white horse of her own with trappings of silver, no monkey, or collars of pearls, or a weekly allowance of five pounds of sugar. She had to pour hot water over her capricious master as he sat in his bath and bear with all his queer tantrums.

"In the room in which she had to live the walls were all of bare stone and the young knight was accustomed to lock her in there for days at a time, so that she knew every stone and every patch of damp.... The bed was of walnut wood gone black and very huge, so that it would hold four persons: the hutch at its foot was of a rough oak gone grey." The young knight in the midst of his ablutions suddenly notices spots of rain upon his armour and leaps out of his bath on to his page. "His mantle, blazing red and white and clasped at the neck with a buckle of gleaming beaten gold weighing three ounces, whirled out all round him; the water dripped from his wet and hairy limbs that, white beneath the scarlet and all knotted and distorted, fell like the sails of a windmill about the page's ears."