No. 294. Drinking Vessels.
From what has been said, it will be seen that our popular saying of “the roast beef of old England,” is not so literally true as we are accustomed to suppose. While, however, the style of living we have been describing prevailed generally among the higher ranks and the richer portion of the middle classes, particularly in towns, that of the less affluent classes remained simple and even scanty, and a large portion of the population of the country probably indulged in flesh meat only at intervals, or on occasions when they received it in their lord’s kitchen or hall. A few plain jugs, such as those represented in our cut [No. 294], taken from a wooden sculpture in the church of Kirby Thorpe, in Yorkshire, with platters or trenchers in pewter or wood, formed the whole table service of the inferior classes. It was the revolution in the middle of the seventeenth century which first abolished this extravagant ostentation, and brought into fashion a plainer table and more substantial meats. A foreigner, who had been much in England in the latter part of the seventeenth century, and published his observations in French at the Hague in 1698, tells us that the English of that period were great eaters of meat—“I have heard,” says he, “of many people in England who have never eaten bread, and ordinarily they eat very little; they nibble sometimes a little bit, while they eat flesh by great mouthfuls. Generally speaking, the tables are not served with delicacy in England. There are some great lords who have French and English cooks, and where you are served much in the French fashion; but among persons of the middle condition of which I am speaking, they have ten or twelve sorts of common meat, which infallibly come round again in their turns at different times, and of two dishes of which their dinner is composed, as for instance, a pudding, and a piece of roast beef. Sometimes they will have a piece boiled, and then it has always lain in salt some days, and is flanked all round with five or six mounds of cabbage, carrots, turnips, or some other herbs or roots, seasoned with salt and pepper, with melted butter poured over them. At other times they will have a leg of mutton, roasted or boiled, and accompanied with the same delicacies; poultry, sucking pigs, tripe, and beef tongues, rabbits, pigeons, all well soaked with butter, without bacon. Two of these dishes, always served one after the other, make the ordinary dinner of a good gentleman, or of a good burgher. When they have boiled meat, there is sometimes somebody who takes a fancy to broth, which consists of the water in which the meat has been boiled, mixed with a little oatmeal, with some leaves of thyme, or sage, or other such small herbs. The pudding is a thing which it would be difficult to describe, on account of the diversity of sorts. Flour, milk, eggs, butter, sugar, fat, marrow, rasins, &c. &c., are the more common ingredients of a pudding. It is baked in an oven; or boiled with the meat; or cooked in fifty other fashions. And they are grateful for the invention of puddings, for it is a manna to everybody’s taste, and a better manna than that of the dessert, inasmuch as they are never tired of it. Oh! what an excellent thing is an English pudding! To come in pudding time, is a proverbial phrase, meaning, to come at the happiest moment in the world. Make a pudding for an Englishman, and you will regale him be he where he will. Their dessert needs no mention, for it consists only of a bit of cheese. Fruit is only found at the houses of great people, and only among few of them.” The phrase, “to come in pudding time,” occurs as early as the beginning of the seventeenth century.
The absence of the dessert at the English table, of which the writer just quoted complains, arose from the abandonment in the middle of the seventeenth century of an old custom. In the earlier part of that century, and in the century previous, when the company rose from the dinner-table, they proceeded to what was then called the banquet, which was held in another apartment, and often in an arbour in the garden, or, as it was called, the garden-house. The banquet of an earlier period, the fifteenth century, was, as we have already seen, a meal after supper. In Massinger’s play of the “City Madam,” a sumptuous dinner is described as follows:— The dishes were raised one upon another,
As woodmongers do billets, for the first,
The second, and third course; and most of the shops
Of the best confectioners in London ransack’d
To furnish out a banquet.
In another of Massinger’s dramas, one of the characters says:— We’ll dine in the great room, but let the musick
And banquet be prepared here.
It appears, therefore, that the banquet was often accompanied with music. At the banquet the choice wines were brought forth, and the table was covered with pastry and sweetmeats, of which our forefathers at this period appear to have been extremely fond. A usual article at the banquet was marchpanes, or biscuits made of sugar and almonds, in different fanciful forms, such as men, animals, houses, &c. There was generally one at least in the form of a castle, which the ladies and gentlemen were to batter to pieces in frolic, by attacking it with sugar-plums. Taylor, the water-poet, calls them— Castles for ladies, and for carpet knights,
Unmercifully spoil’d at feasting fights,
Where battering bullets are fine sugred plums.
On festive occasions, and among people who loved to pass their time at table, the regular banquet seems to have been followed by a second, or, as it was called, a rere-banquet. These rere-banquets are mentioned by the later Elizabethan writers, generally as extravagances, and sometimes with the epithet of “late,” so that perhaps they took the place of the soberer supper. People are spoken of as taking “somewhat plentifully of wine” at these rere-banquets. The rere-supper was still in use, and appears also to have been a meal distinguished by its profusion both in eating and drinking. It was from the rere-supper that the roaring-boys, and other wild gallants of the earlier part of the seventeenth century, sallied forth to create noise and riot in the streets.
One of the great characteristics of the dinner-table at this period was the formality of drinking, especially that of drinking healths, so much cried down by the Puritans. This formality was enforced with great strictness and ceremony. It was not exactly the modern practice of giving a toast, but each person in turn rose, named some one to whom he individually drank (not one of the persons present), and emptied his cup. “He that begins the health,” we are told in a little book published in 1623, “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, per-adventure, 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 phillip 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 thus it goes round throughout the whole company.” In order to ascertain that each person had fairly drunk off his cup, in turning it up he was to pour all that remained in it on his nail, and if there were too much to remain as a drop on the nail without running off, he was made to drink his cup full again. This was termed drinking on the nail, for which convivialists invented a mock Latin phrase, and called it drinking super nagulum, or super-naculum.
This custom of pledging in drinking was as old as the times of the Anglo-Saxons, when it existed in the “wæs heil” and “drinc heil,” commemorated in the story of the British Vortigern and the Saxon Rowena, and it is alluded to in several ballads of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as in that of “King Edward and the Shepherd,” where the man who drinks pledges his companion with the word “passelodion,” and the other replies by “berafrynde,” and in that of “The Kyng and the Hermyt,” where the words of pledging and reply are “fusty bandyas,” and “stryke pautnere.” Both these ballads are printed in Hartshorne’s “Ancient Metrical Tales.” The drinking of the healths of absent individuals appears to have been introduced at a later period, and was carried to its greatest degree of extravagance on the continent. The person whose health a man gave was usually expected to be his mistress; and in France he was expected, in doing this, to drink as many times his glass or cup full of wine as there were letters in her name. Thus, in Ronsard’s “Bacchanales,” the gallant drinks nine times to his mistress Cassandre, because there were nine letters in her name:— Neuf fois, au nom de Cassandre,
Je vois prendre
Neuf fois du vin du flacon;
Affin de neuf fois le boire
En memoire
Des neuf lettres de son nom.
And a less celebrated poet, of a rather later date, Guillaume Colletet, in a piece entitled “Le Trebuchement de l’Ivrongne,” printed at Paris in 1627, introduces one of his personages drinking six times to his mistress, because her name was Cloris:—
Six fois je m’en vas boire au beau nom de Cloris,
Cloris, le seul desir de ma chaste pensée.
The manner of pledging at table, as it still existed in England, is described rather ludicrously in the “Memoires d’Angleterre,” of the year 1698, already quoted. “While in France,” the author says, “the custom of drinking healths is almost abolished among people of any distinction, as being equally importunate and ridiculous, it exists here in all its ancient force. To drink at table, without drinking to the health of some one in especial, among ordinary people, would be considered as drinking on the sly, and as an act of incivility. There are in this proceeding two principal and singular grimaces, which are universally observed among people of all orders and all sorts. It is, that the person to whose health another drinks, if he be of inferior condition, or even equal, to that of him who drinks, must remain as inactive as a statue while the drinker drinks. If, for instance, he is in the act of taking something from a dish, he must suddenly stop, return his fork or spoon to its place, and wait, without stirring more than a stone, until the other has drunk; after which, the second grimace is to make him an inclinabo, at the risk of dipping his perriwig in the gravy in his plate. I confess that, when a foreigner first sees these manners, he thinks them laughable. Nothing appears so droll as to see a man who is in the act of chewing a morsel which he has in his mouth, of cutting his bread, of wiping his mouth, or of doing anything else, who suddenly takes a serious air, when a person of some respectability drinks to his health, looks fixedly at this person, and becomes as motionless as if a universal paralysis had seized him, or he had been struck by a thunderbolt. It is true that, as good manners absolutely demand this respectful immobility in the patient, it requires also a little circumspection in the agent. When any one will drink to the health of another, he must fix his eye upon him for a moment, and give him the time, if it be possible, to swallow his morsel.” It is hardly necessary to observe that this custom is the origin of our modern practice of “taking wine” with each other at table, which is now also becoming obsolete.
CHAPTER XXII.
HOUSEHOLD FURNITURE.—THE PARLOUR.—THE CHAMBER.
No. 295. Table of Sixteenth Century.