No. 97. A Table on Trestles.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE OLD ENGLISH HALL.—THE KITCHEN, AND ITS CIRCUMSTANCES.—THE DINNER-TABLE.—MINSTRELSY.
As I have already stated, the hall continued to be the most important part of the house; and in large mansions it was made of proportional dimensions. It was a general place of rendezvous for the household, especially for the retainers and followers, and in the evening it seems usually to have been left entirely to them, and they made their beds and passed the night in it. Strangers or visitors were brought into the hall. In the curious old poem edited by Mr. Halliwell, entitled “The Boke of Curtasye,” we find especial directions on this subject. When a gentleman or yeoman came to the house of another, he was directed to leave his weapons with the porter at the outward gate or wicket, before he entered. It appears to have been the etiquette that if the person thus presenting himself were of higher rank than the person he visited, the latter should go out to receive him at the gate; if the contrary, the visitor was admitted through the gate, and proceeded to the hall. Whanne thou comes to a lordis gate,
The porter thou shalle fynde therate;
Take (give) hym thow shalt thy wepyn tho (then),
And aske hym leve in to go.
* * * * *
... yf he be of logh (low) degré,
Than hym falles to come to the.
At the hall door the visitor was to take off his hood and gloves— When thow come tho halle dor to,
Do of thy hode, thy gloves also.
If, when he entered the hall, the visitor found the family at meat, he stood at the bottom of the apartment in a respectful attitude, till the lord of the house sent a servant to lead him to a place where he was to sit at table. As you descended lower in society, such ceremonies were less observed; and the clergy in general seem to have been allowed a much greater licence than the laity. In the Sompneres Tale, in Chaucer, when the friar, who has received an insult from an inferior inhabitant, goes “to the court” to complain to the lord of the village, he finds the latter in his hall at the dinner table— This frere com, as he were in a rage,
Wher that this lord sat etyng at his bord.
—Chaucer’s Cant. Tales, l. 7748.
The lord, surprised at the agitation in the countenance of the friar, who had come in without any sort of introduction, invites him to sit down, and inquires into his business. There is a scene in the early English metrical romance of Ipomydon, in which this hero and his preceptor Tholoman go to the residence of the heiress of Calabria. At the castle gate they were stopped by the porter, whom they ask to announce them in the hall:— The porter to theyme they gan calle,
And prayd hym, ‘Go into the halle,
And say thy lady gent and fre,
That come ar men of ferre contré,
And, if it plese hyr, we wold hyr prey
That we myght ete with hyr to-day.’
—Weber, Metr. Rom. ii. 290.
The porter “courteously” undertook the message, and, at the immediate order of the lady, who was sitting at her meat, he went back, took charge of their horses and pages, and introduced them into the hall. Then they asked to be taken into the lady’s service, who accepted their offer, and invited them to take their place at the dinner:—
He thankid the lady cortesly,
She comandyth hym to the mete;
But, or he satte in any sete,
He saluted theym grate and smalle,
As a gentille man shuld in halle.
—Weber, ii. 292.
Perhaps, before entering the mediæval hall, we shall do well to give a glance at the kitchen. It is an opinion, which has not unfrequently been entertained, that living in the middle ages was coarse and not elaborate; and that old English fare consisted chiefly in roast beef and plum-pudding. That nothing, however, could be more incorrect, is fully proved by the rather numerous mediæval cookery books which are still preserved, and which contain chiefly directions for made dishes, many of them very complicated, and, to appearance, extremely delicate. The office of cook, indeed, was one of great importance, and was well paid; and the kitchens of the aristocracy were very extensive, and were furnished with a considerable variety of implements of cookery. On account, no doubt, of this importance, Alexander Neckam, although an ecclesiastic, commences his vocabulary (or, as it is commonly entitled, Liber de Utensilibus), compiled in the latter part of the twelfth century, with an account of the kitchen and its furniture. He enumerates, among other objects, a table for chopping and mincing herbs and vegetables; pots, trivets or tripods, an axe, a mortar and pestle, a mover, or pot-stick, for stirring, a crook or pot-hook (uncus), a caldron, a frying-pan, a gridiron, a posnet or saucepan, a dish, a platter, a saucer, or vessel for mixing sauce, a hand-mill, a pepper-mill, a mier, or instrument for reducing bread to crumbs. John de Garlande, in his “Dictionarius,” composed towards the middle of the thirteenth century, gives a similar enumeration; and a comparison of the vocabularies of the fifteenth century, shows that the arrangements of the kitchen had undergone little change during the intervening period. From these vocabularies the following list of kitchen utensils is gathered:—a brandreth, or iron tripod, for supporting the caldron over the fire; a caldron, a dressing-board and dressing-knife, a brass-pot, a posnet, a frying-pan, a gridiron, or, as it is sometimes called, a roasting-iron; a spit, a “gobard,” explained in the MS. by ipegurgium; a mier, a flesh-hook, a scummer, a ladle, a pot-stick, a slice for turning meat in the frying-pan, a pot-hook, a mortar and pestle, a pepper-quern, a platter, a saucer.
No. 98. Making the Pot boil.
The older illuminated manuscripts are rarely so elaborate as to furnish us with representations of all these kitchen implements; and, in fact, it is not in the more elaborately illuminated manuscripts that kitchen scenes are often found. But we meet with representations of some of them in artistic sketches of a less elaborate character, though these are generally connected with the less refined processes of cookery. The mediæval landlords were obliged to consume the produce of the land on their own estates, and, for this and other very cogent reasons, a large proportion of the provisions in ordinary use consisted of salted meat, which was laid up in store in vast quantities in the baronial larders. Hence boiling was a much more common method of cooking meat than roasting, for which, indeed, the mediæval fire, placed on the ground, was much less convenient; it is, no doubt, for this reason that the cook is most frequently represented in the mediæval drawings with the caldron on the fire. In some instances, chiefly of the fifteenth century, the caldron is supported from above by a pot-hook, but more usually it stands over the fire upon three legs of its own, or upon a three-legged frame. A manuscript in the British Museum of the fourteenth century (MS. Reg. 10, E. iv.), belonging formerly to the monastery of St. Bartholomew in Smithfield, contains a series of such illustrations, from which the following are selected. In the first of these ([No. 98]) it is evidently a three-legged caldron which stands over the fire, to increase the heat of which the cook makes use of a pair of bellows, which bears a remarkably close resemblance to the similar articles made in modern times. Bellows were certainly in common use in Anglo-Saxon times, for the name is Anglo-Saxon, bælg, bælig, and bylig; but as the original meaning of this word was merely a bag, it is probable that the early Anglo-Saxon bellows was of very rude character: it was sometimes distinguished by the compound name, blast-bælg, a blast-bag, or bellows. Our second example from this MS. (cut [No. 99]) is one of a series of designs belonging to some mediæval story or legend, with which I am not acquainted. A young man carrying the vessel for the holy water, and the aspersoir with which it was sprinkled over the people, and who may therefore be supposed to be the holy-water clerc, is making acquaintance with the female cook. The latter seems to have been interrupted in the act of taking some object out of the caldron with a flesh-hook. The caldron here again is three-legged. In the sequel, the acquaintance between the cook and the holy-water clerc appears to have ripened into love; but we may presume from the manner in which it was represented ([No. 100]), that this love was not of a very disinterested character on the part of the clerc, for he is taking advantage of her affection to steal the animal which she is boiling in the caldron. The conventional manner in which the animal seems to be drawn, renders it difficult to decide what that animal is. The mediæval artists show a taste for playful delineations of this kind, which occur not unfrequently in illuminated manuscripts, and in carvings and sculptures. One of the stalls in Hereford cathedral, copied in the accompanying cut ([No. 101]), represents a scene of this description. A man is attempting to take liberties with the cook, who has in return thrown a platter at his head. In our next cut ([No. 102]), taken from another MS. in the British Museum, also of the fourteenth century (MS. Reg. 16, E. viii.), the object cooked in the caldron is a boar’s head, which the cook, an ill-favoured and hump-backed man, is placing on a dish to be carried to the table. The caldron, in this instance, appears to be intended to have been of more ornamental character than the others.
No. 99. The Holy-Water Clerc and the Cook.