THE central picture in Old English life-the great event of the day-was Noon-meat or dinner in the great hall. A little before three, the chief and all his household, with any stray guests who might have dropped in, met in the hall, which stood in the centre of its encircling bowers-the principal apartment of every Old English house. Clouds of wood-smoke, rolling up from a fire which blazed in the middle of the floor, blackened the carved and gilded rafters of the arched roof before it found its way out of the hole above, which did duty as a chimney.
Tapestries of purple dye, or glowing with variegated pictures of saints and heroes, hung, or, if the day was stormy, flapped upon the chinky walls. In palaces and in earls" mansions coloured tiles, wrought like Roman tesserce ① into a mosaic, formed a clean and pretty pavement; but the common flooring of the time was of clay, baked dry with the heat of winter evenings and summer noons. The only articles of furniture always in the hall were wooden benches; some of which, especially the high settle or seat of the chieftain, boasted cushions, or at least a rug.
While the hungry crowd, fresh from woodland and furrow, were lounging near the fire or hanging up their weapons on the pegs and hooks that jutted from the wall, a number of slaves, dragging in a long, flat, heavy board, placed it on movable legs, and spread on its upper half a handsome cloth. Then were arranged with other utensils for the meal some flattish dishes, baskets of ash-wood for holding bread, a scanty sprinkling of steel knives shaped like our modern razors, platters of wood, and bowls for the universal broth.
The ceremony of "laying the board," as the Old English phrased it, being completed, the work of demolition began. Great round cakes of bread-huge junks of boiled bacon-vast rolls of broiled eel-cups of milk-horns of ale-wedges of cheese-lumps of salt butter-and smoking piles of cabbages and beans, melted like magic from the board under the united attack of greasy fingers and grinding jaws. Kneeling slaves offered to the lord and his honoured guests long skewers or spits, on which steaks of beef or venison smoked and sputtered, ready for the hacking blade.
Poultry, too, and game of every variety, filled the spaces②of the upper board;but, except naked bones, the crowd of
loaf-eaters , as Old English domestics were suggestively called, saw little of these daintier kinds of food. Nor did they much care, if to their innumerable hunches of bread they could add enough pig to appease their hunger. Hounds, sitting eager- eyed by their masters, snapped with sudden jaws at scraps of fat flung to them, or retired into private life below the board with some sweet bone that fortune sent them.
With the washing of hands, performed for the honoured occupants of the high settle by officious slaves, the solid part of the banquet ended. The board was then dragged out of the hall; the loaf-eaters slunk away to have a nap in the byre, or sat drowsily in corners of the hall; and the drinking began. During the progress of the meal, Welsh ale had flowed freely in horns or vessels of twisted glass. Mead, and in very grand houses③wine,now began to circle in goblets of gold and silver, or ofwood inlaid with those precious metals.
Most of the Old English drinking-glasses had rounded bottoms, like our soda-water bottles, so that they could not stand upon the table-a little thing, which then as in later times suggested hard drinking and unceasing rounds. Two attendants, one to pour out the liquor, and the other to hand the cups, waited on the carousers, from whose company theladies of the household soon withdrew. The clinking of cups together, certain words of pledge, and a kiss, opened the revel.