BOOK Α' CHAP. IV. Their Drinks and Cookery. LE and mead were their favourite drinks, and wine was an occafional luxury. Of the ale three forts are noticed. In a charter, two tuns of clear ale and ten mittan or measures of Welsh ale are referved. In another, a cumb full of lithes, or mild ale. Warm wine is also mentioned 3. THE anfwer 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 fays, "I am not fo 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 wife 4." In the ancient calendar of the eleventh century there are various figures pictured to accompany the different months. In April three perfons appear fitting and drinking: one perfon is pouring out liquor into a horn; another is holding a horn to his mouth 5. We have the lift of the liquors used at a great Anglo-Saxon feast in a paffage of Henry of Huntingdon, which describes an atrocious catastrophe. Sax. Chron. 75. 2 Two tuns full of hlutres aloth, a cumb full of lithes aloth, and a cumb full of welifces aloth, are the gafol referved in a grant of Offa's. Dugd. Mon. P. 126. 4 MS. Tib. A. 3. 3 Bede, 257. • Ibid. B. 5 เ IV. AT a feast in the king's hall at Windfor, Harold, CHAP, the fon of Godwin, was ferving the Confeffor with wine, when Tofti, his brother, ftimulated by envy at his poffeffing a larger portion of the royal favour than himself, seized Harold by the hair in the king's prefence. In a rage Tofti left the company, and went to Hereford, where his brother had ordered a great royal banquet to be prepared. There he feized his brother's attendants, and cutting off their heads and limbs, he placed them in the veffels of wine, mead, ale, pigment, morat, and cyder. He then fent to the king a meffage, that he was going to his farm, where he should find plenty of falt meat, but had taken care to carry fome with him. The pigment was a sweet and odoriferous liquor, made of honey, wine, and fpiceries of various kinds. The morat was made of honey, diluted with the uice of mulberries 7. As the canons were fevere on drunkenness, hough the manners of fociety made all their reguations ineffectual, it was thought neceffary to define what was confidered to be improper and penal inoxication." This is drunkennefs when the state of the mind is changed, the tongue stammers, the eyes are disturbed, the head is giddy, the belly is fwelled, and pain follows." To atone for this, afts, proportioned in duration to the quality of the offender, were enjoined R. • Hen. Hunt. lib. vi. p. 367. ' Du Cange in voc. and Henry's Hiftory of England, . p. 396. * Spelm. Concilia, 286. F 3 Ir will not be uninterefting to add the defcrip tion of a feast as given in Judith by an Angl 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 fitting on the bench That they should bear it well. The stern dispenser of wealth, All his nobility As they were death flain. Their property poured about. So commanded the lord of men Approached the children of men ". WE have a glance of their customs as to dri ing in this fhort paffage: "When all were fatis with their dinner, and the tables were remov they continued drinking till the evening 10." THEY feem to have had places like taverns, ale-houses, where liquors were fold; for a priest • Frag. Judith. 10 Gale Scrip. iii. p. 44 7 forbidden by a law to eat or drink at ceape alethelum, CHA P. literally places where ale was fold ". ETHELWOLD allowed his monaftery a great bowl from which the obbæ of the monks were filled twice a day for their dinner and fupper. On their festivals he allowed them at dinner a fextarium of mead between fix, and the fame quantity at fupper between twelve of the brothers. On certain of the great high feafts of the year he gave them a measure of wine 2. THEY boiled, baked, and broiled their victuals. We read of their meat dreffed in a boiling veffel 3, of their fifh having been broiled 4, and of an oven heated for baking loaves". The term abacan is also applied to meat. In the rule of St. Benedict two fanda, or difhes of fodden fyflian, or foup bouilli, are mentioned ". Bede mentions a goofe that hang on the wall taken down to be boiled". The word feathan to boil deferves notice, because the noun feath, from which it is derivable, implies a pit. As we read in the South Sea iflands of the natives dreffing their victuals in little pits lined with ftones, the expreffion may have been originally derived from a fimilar practice. A cook appears as an appendix to every monaftery, and it was a character important enough to be inferted in the laws. In the cloisters it was a male office; elsewhere it was chiefly affumed by the female fex. In the "Wilk. Leg. Sax. 180. So Egbert exhorts. Spel. Com 260. 3 Bede, p. 255. IV. BOO K dialogue already cited, the cook fays, "If you ex 189 pel me from your fociety you would eat your "herbs green, and your flefh raw." He is anfwered, We can ourselves feethe what is to be feethed, and broil what things are to be broiled "." THEY feem to have attended to cookery not merely as a matter of tafte but of indifpenfable decorum. It was one of their regulations, that if a perfon eat any thing half dreffed, ignorantly, he fhould faft 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 relapfing into fuch bar barous customs 19. In the drawings which accompany fome AngloSaxon manufcripts we have fome delineation of their customs at table 20. In one drawing a party is 18 MS. Tib. 19 Spelm. Concil. 287. The fame principle perhaps led them to add these regulations: "For eating or drinking "what a cat or dog has spoiled he fhall fing an hundred "pfalms 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 fing three "hundred pfalms." Spelm. Concil. p. 287. 20 The industrious and useful Strutt has copied these drawings in the first volume of his Horda Angelcynnan. Nothing can more fatisfactorily illustrate the manners of our ancestors than fuch publications of their ornamental drawing; for, as Strutt truly obferves in his preface, "though these pictures do not bear the least resemblance of the "things they were originally intended to reprefent, yet "they nevertheless are the undoubted characteristics of the "customs of that period in which each illuminator or de figner lived." |