No. 60. A Knife.
We see in these dinner scenes that the Anglo-Normans used horns and cups for drinking, as the Anglo-Saxons did; but the use of the horn is becoming rare, and the bowl-shaped vessels appear to have been now the usual drinking cup. Among the wealthy these cups seem to have been made of glass. Reginald of Durham describes one of the monks as bringing water for a sick man to drink in a glass cup (vase vitreo), which was accidentally broken. In a splendidly illuminated manuscript of the Psalms, of the earlier half of the twelfth century, written by Eadwine, one of the monks of Canterbury, and which will afford much illustration for this period,[18] we find a figure of a servant giving to drink, who holds one of the same description of drinking cups which were so popular at an earlier period among the Anglo-Saxons (see our cut [No. 61]). He holds in the left hand the jug, which had now become the usual vessel for carrying the liquor in any quantity. In our cut No. 62, furnished by the same manuscript as the preceding, the servant is taking the jug of liquor from the barrel. Our next cut, [No. 63], also taken from the Cambridge MS., represents several forms of vessels for the table. Some of these are new to us; and they are on the whole more elegant than most of the forms we meet with in common pictures.
| No. 61. A Cup-bearer. | No. 62. The Servant in the Cellar. |
No. 63. Anglo-Norman Pottery.
Wine appears to have been now more frequently used than among the Anglo-Saxons. Neckam, in the latter part of the twelfth century, has given us a rather playful enumeration of the qualities of good wine; which he says should be as clear as the tears of a penitent, so that a man may see distinctly to the bottom of his glass; its colour “should represent the greenness of a buffalo’s horn; when drunk, it should descend impetuously like thunder, sweet-tasted as an almond, creeping like a squirrel, leaping like a roebuck, strong like the building of a Cistercian monastery, glittering like a spark of fire, subtle as the logic of the schools of Paris, delicate as fine silk, and colder than crystal.” Yet still ale and mead continued to be the usual drinks. The innumerable entries in Domesday Book show us how large a proportion of the productions of the country, in the reign of William the Conqueror, still consisted in honey, which was used chiefly for the manufacture of mead. The manuscript in Trinity College Library, gives us a group of bee-hives (cut [No. 64]), with peasants attending to them; and is chiefly curious for the extraordinary forms which the artist, evidently no naturalist, has given to the bees.
No. 64. Anglo-Norman Bee-keepers.
We have hardly any information on the cookery during the period we are now describing. It is clear that numerous delicacies were served to the tables of the noble and wealthy, but their culinary receipts are not preserved. We read in William of Malmesbury, incidentally, that a great prince ate garlick with a goose, from which we are led to suppose that the Normans were fond of highly-seasoned dishes. Neckam tells us that pork, roasted or broiled on red embers, required no other sauce than salt or garlick; that a capon done in gobbets should be well peppered; that a goose, roasted on the spit, required a strong garlick-sauce, mixed with wine or “the green juice of grapes or crabs;” that a hen, if boiled, should be cut up and seasoned with cummin, but, if roasted, it should be basted with lard, and might be seasoned with garlick-sauce, though it would be more savoury with simple sauce; that fish should be cooked in a sauce composed of wine and water, and that they should afterwards be served with a sauce composed of sage, parsley, cost, ditany, wild thyme, and garlick, with pepper and salt. We learn from other incidental allusions of contemporary, or nearly contemporary, writers, that bread, butter, and cheese, were the ordinary food of the common people, probably with little else besides vegetables. It is interesting to remark that the three articles just mentioned, have preserved their Anglo-Saxon names to the present times, while all kinds of meat, beef, veal, mutton, pork, even bacon, have retained only the names given to them by the Normans, which seems to imply that flesh-meat was not in general use for food among the lower classes of society.
Bread seems almost always to have been formed in cakes, like our buns, round in the earlier pictures, and in later ones (as in our cut [No. 63]), shaped more fancifully. We see it generally marked with a cross, perhaps a superstitious precaution of the baker. The bread seems to have been in general made for the occasion, and eaten fresh, perhaps warm. In one of Reginald of Durham’s stories, we are told of a priest in the forest of Arden, who, having nothing but a peck of corn left, and receiving a large number of visitors on a sacred festival, gave it out to be baked to provide for them. The corn was immediately ground, perhaps with querns, and having been mixed with “dewy” water, in the usual manner, was made into twelve loaves, and immediately placed in the hot oven.[19] Cheese and butter seem also to have been tolerably abundant. An illuminator of the Cambridge MS., given in our cut [No. 65], represents a man milking and another churning; he who churns appears, to use a vulgar phrase, to be “taking it at his ease.” The milking-pail, too, is rather extraordinary in its form.