СНАР. IV. Their Drinks and Cookery. ALE and mead were their favourite drinks, and wine was an occasional luxury. Of the ale three sorts are noticed. In a charter, two tuns of clear ale, and ten mittan or measures of Welsh ale are reserved.' In another, a cumb full of lithes, or mild ale. Warm wine is also mentioned.3 The answer of the lad, in the Saxon colloquy, to the question, what he drank, was, "Ale if I have it, or water if I have not." On being asked why he does not drink wine, he says, "I am not so rich that I can buy me wine, and wine is not the drink of children or the weak-minded, but of the elders and the wise."4 In the ancient calendar of the eleventh century, there are various figures pictured, to accompany the different months. In April three persons appear sitting and drinking: one person is pouring out liquor into a horn; another is holding a horn to his mouth.' We have the list of the liquors used at a great Anglo-Saxon feast, in a passage of Henry of Huntingdon, which describes an atrocious catastrophe. At a feast in the king's hall at Windsor, Harold, the son of Godwin, was serving the Confessor with wine, when Tosti, his brother, stimulated by envy at his possessing a larger portion of the royal favour than himself, seized Harold by the hair in the king's presence. In a rage, Tosti left the company, and went to Hereford, where his brother had ordered a great royal 2 Sax. Chron. 75. Two tuns full of hlutres aloth, a cumb full of lithes aloth, and a cumb full of we lisces aloth, are the gafol reserved in a grant 3 Bede, 257. MS. Tib. A. 3. Ibid. B. 5, CHAP. VIII. BOOK banquet to be prepared. There he seized his brother's attendants, and cutting off their heads and limbs, he placed them in the vessels of wine, mead, ale, pigment, morat, and cyder. He then sent to the king a message, that he was going to his farm, where he should find plenty of salt meat, but had taken care to carry some with him. The pigment was a sweet and odoriferous liquor, made of honey, wine, and spiceries of various kinds. The morat was made of honey, diluted with the juice of mulberries.' As the canons were severe on drunkenness, though the manners of society made all their regulations ineffectual, it was thought necessary to define what was considered to be improper and penal intoxication. "This is drunkenness, when the state of the mind is changed, the tongue stammers, the eyes are disturbed, the head is giddy, the belly is swelled, and pain follows." To atone for this, fasts, proportioned in duration to the quality of the offender, were enjoined. It will not be uninteresting to add the description of a feast, as given in Judith by an Anglo-Saxon poet: Then was Holofernes Enchanted with the wine of men: In the hall of the guests He laughed and shouted, He roared and dinned, That the children of men might hear afar, How the sturdy one Stormed and clamoured, Animated and elated with wine. He admonished amply Those sitting on the bench That they should bear it well. So was the wicked one all day, Drunk with wine; Hen. Hunt. lib. vi. p. 367. 7 Du Cange in voc. and Henry's Hiftory Spelm. Concilia, 286. of England, iv. p. 396. We have a glance of their customs, as to drinking, in this short passage: "When all were satisfied with their dinner, and the tables were removed, they continued drinking till the evening." 9910 They seem to have had places like taverns, or ale-houses, where liquors were sold; for a priest was forbidden by a law to eat or drink at ceapealethelum, literally places where ale was sold." Ethelwold allowed his monastery a great bowl, from which the obbæ of the monks were filled twice a day, for their dinner and supper. On their festivals he allowed them at dinner a sextarium of mead between six, and the same quantity at supper between twelve of the brothers. On certain of the great high feasts of the year, he gave them a measure of wine." They boiled, baked, and broiled their victuals. We read of their meat dressed in a boiling vessel," of their fish having been broiled, and of an oven heated for baking loaves." The term abacan is also applied to meat. In the rule of St. Benedict, two sanda, or dishes of sodden syflian, or soup bouilli, are mentioned.16 Bede mentions a goose that hung on the wall taken down to be boiled." The word seathan, to boil, deserves CHAP. BOOK notice, because the noun, seath, from which it is derivable, VIII. implies a pit. As we read in the South Sea islands of the natives dressing their victuals in little pits lined with stones, the expression may have been originally derived from a similar practice. A cook appears as an appendix to every monastery, and it was a character important enough to be inserted in the laws. In the cloisters it was a male office; elsewhere it was chiefly assumed by the female sex. In the dialogue already They seem to have attended to cookery not merely as a matter of taste, but of indispensable decorum. It was one of their regulations, that if a person eat any thing half dressed, ignorantly, he should fast three days; if knowingly, four days. Perhaps as the uncivilized Northmen were, in their pagan state, addicted to eat raw flesh, the clergy of the Anglo-Saxons were anxious to keep their improved countrymen from relapsing into such barbarous customs. 19 20 In the drawings which accompany some Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, we have some delineation of their customs at table. In one drawing a party is at table, seated with the females by the side of the men in this order: a man, a lady, a man, a lady, two men, and another lady. The two first are looking towards each other, as if talking together; the three in the 13 MS. Tib. 19 Spelm. Concil. 287. The same principle perhaps led them to add these regulations: "For eating or drinking what a cat or dog has spoiled, he shall sing an hun"dred psalms, or fast a day. For giving "another any liquor in which a mouse or a "weazel shall be found dead, a layman shall "do penance for four days; a monk shall "sing three hundred psalms." Spelm. Concil. p. 287.. 20 The industrious and useful Strutt has IV. middle are engaged with each other, and so are the two last; CHAP. cach have a cup or horn in their hand. The table is oblong, and covered with a table-cloth that hangs low down from the table; a knife, a horn, a bowl, a dish, and some loaves appear. The men are uncovered; the women have their usual headdress." In another drawing, the table is a sharp oval, also covered with an ample cloth; upon it, besides a knife and a spoon, there are a bowl, with a fish, some loaves of bread, and two other dishes. Some part of the costume is more like the manners of Homer's heroes than of modern times. At the angles of the tables two attendants are upon their knees, with a dish in one hand, and each holding up a spit with the other, from which the persons feasting are about to cut something. One of these persons, to whom the servants minister with so much respect, is holding a whole fish with one hand, and a knife in the other." In the drawing which accompanies Lot feasting the angels, the table is oblong, rounded at the ends, and covered with a cloth. Upon it is a bowl, with an animal's head like a pig's; another bowl is full of some round things like apples. These, with loaves, or cakes of bread, seem to constitute the repast. There are two horns upon the table, and one of the angels has a knife.” As no forks appear in any of the plates, and are not mentioned elsewhere, we may presume that our ancestors used their hands instead. There is one drawing of men killing and dressing meat. One man is holding a sheep by his horns, while a lad strikes at its neck with an axe; behind him is a young "This is in Strutt's work, plate xvi. fig. 2, and is taken from the Cotton MS. Claud, B. 4. The MS. consists of excerpta from the Pentateuch and the book of Joshua, which are adorned with historical figures, some of 23 Strutt, plate xvi. fig. 3, and Cland. B. 4. |