The story which follows this in the Gesta, tells of an emperor named “Alexaundre,” “who of great need ordained for a law, that no man should turn the plaice in his dish, but that he should only eat the white side, and in no wise the black side; and if any man did the contrary, he should die!” It is hardly necessary to remark, that fish was a great article of consumption in the middle ages, and especially among the ecclesiastics and monks. The accompanying cut on the following page ([No. 104]), from a manuscript of the fourteenth century in the British Museum (MS. Harl. No. 1527), represents probably the steward of a monastery receiving a present of fish.
| No. 104. A Present of Fish. | No. 105. A Pot and Platter. |
In large houses, and on great occasions, the various meats and dishes were carried from the kitchen to the hall with extraordinary ceremony by the servants of the kitchen, who delivered them at the entrance of the hall to other attendants of a higher class, who alone were allowed to approach the tables. Our cut [No. 105], from MS. Reg. 10, E. iv., represents one of these servants carrying a pot and platter, or stand for the pot, which, perhaps, contained gravy or soup. The roasts appear to have been usually carried into the hall on the spits, which, among people of great rank, were sometimes made of silver; and the guests at table seem to have torn, or cut, from the spit what they wanted. Several early illuminations represent this practice of people helping themselves from the spits, and it is alluded to, not very unfrequently, in the mediæval writers. In the romance of “Parise la Duchesse,” when the servants enter the hall with the meats for the table, one is described as carrying a roasted peacock on a spit:—
Atant ez les serjanz qui portent le mangier;
Li uns porte .i. paon roti en un astier.
—Romans de Parise, p. 172.
In the romance of “Garin le Loherain,” on an occasion when a quarrel began in the hall at the beginning of the dinner, the duke Begon, for want of other weapons, snatched from the hands of one of the attendants a long spit “full of plovers, which were hot and roasted:”—
Li dus avoit un grant hastier saisi,
Plain de ploviers, qui chaut sunt et rosti.
—Romans de Garin, ii. 19.
But the most curious illustration of the universality of this practice is found in a Latin story, probably of the thirteenth century, in which we are told of a man who had a glutton for his wife. One day he roasted for their dinner a fowl, and when they had sat down at the table, the wife said, “Give me a wing?” The husband gave her the wing; and, at her demand, all the other members in succession, until she had devoured the whole fowl herself, at which, no longer able to contain his anger, he said, “Lo, you have eaten the whole fowl yourself, and nothing remains but the spit, which it is but right that you should taste also.” And thereupon he took the spit, and beat her severely with it.
No. 106. Bringing the Dinner into Hall.
