by Joseph Gies
At mealtimes, servants set up the trestle tables and spread the cloths, setting steel knives, silver spoons, dishes for salt, silver cups, and mazers—shallow silver-rimmed wooden bowls. At each place was a trencher or manchet, a thick slice of day-old bread serving as a plate for the roast meat. Meals were announced by a horn blown to signal time for washing hands. Servants with ewers, basins, and towels attended the guests.
At the table, seating followed status: The most important guests were at the high table, with the loftiest place reserved for an ecclesiastical dignitary, the second for the ranking layman. After grace, the procession of servants bearing food began. First came the pantler with the bread and butter, followed by the butler and his assistants with the wine and beer. Wine, in thirteenth-century England mostly imported from English-ruled Bordeaux, was drunk young in the absence of an effective technique for stoppering containers. Wine kept a year became undrinkable. No attention was paid to vintage, and often what was served even at rich tables was of poor quality. Peter of Blois described in a letter wine served at Henry II’s court: “The wine is turned sour or mouldy—thick, greasy, stale, flat and smacking of pitch. I have sometimes seen even great lords served with wine so muddy that a man must needs close his eyes and clench his teeth, wry-mouthed and shuddering, and filtering the stuff rather than drinking.”
The castle bought wine by the barrel and decanted it into jugs. Some was spiced and sweetened by the butlers to go with the final course. Ale, made from barley, wheat, or oats, or all three, was drunk mainly by the servants. A castle household brewed its own, hiring an ale-wife for the task and using grain from its own stores. At the royal court, according to Peter of Blois, the ale was not much better than the wine—it was “horrid to the taste and abominable to the sight.”
Ceremony marked the service at table. There was a correct way to do everything, from the laying of cloths to the cutting of trenchers and carving of meat. Part of a squire’s training was learning how to serve his lord at meals: the order in which dishes should be presented, where they should be placed, how many fingers to use in holding the joint for the lord to carve, how to cut the trenchers and place them on the table.
The solid parts of soups and stews were eaten with a spoon, the broth sipped. Meat was cut up with the knife and eaten with the fingers. Two persons shared a dish, the lesser helping the more important, the younger the older, the man the woman. The former in each case broke the bread, cut the meat, and passed the cup.
Etiquette books admonished diners not to leave the spoon in the dish or put elbows on the table, not to belch, not to drink or eat with their mouths full, not to stuff their mouths or take overly large helpings. Not surprisingly, in the light of the finger-eating and dish-sharing, stress was laid on keeping hands and nails scrupulously clean, wiping spoon and knife after use, wiping the mouth before drinking, and not dipping meat in the salt dish.
The lord and lady were at pains to see their guests amply served. Bishop Robert Grosseteste advised the countess of Lincoln to make sure that her servants were judiciously distributed during dinner, that they entered the room in an orderly way and avoided quarreling. “Especially do you yourself keep watch over the service until the meats are placed in the hall, and then…command that your dish be so refilled and heaped up, and especially with the light dishes, that you may courteously give from your dish to all the high table on the right and on the left.” At his own house, he reminded the countess, guests were served at dinner with two meats and two lighter dishes. Between courses, the steward should send the servers into the kitchen and see to it that they brought in the meats quietly and without confusion.
An everyday dinner, served between 10:00 A.M. and noon, comprised two or three courses, each of several separate dishes, all repeating the same kinds of food except the last course, which consisted of fruits, nuts, cheese, wafers, and spiced wine.
On such festive occasions as holidays and weddings, fantastic quantities of food were consumed. When Henry III’s daughter married the king of Scotland on Christmas Day 1252 at York, Matthew Paris reported that “more than
Musicians. Clockwise from upper left: a psaltery, a harp, an oliphant, and a viele. (Trustees of the British Museum. MS. Ar. 157, f. 71v)
sixty pasture cattle formed the first and principal course at table…the gift of the archbishop. The guests feasted by turns with one king at one time, at another time with the other, who vied with one another in preparing costly meals.” As for the entertainment, the number and apparel of the guests, the variety of foods: “If I were more fully to describe [them]…the relation would appear hyperbolical in the ears of those not present, and would give rise to ironical remarks.” Such feasts included boars’ heads, venison, peacocks, swans, suckling pigs, cranes, plovers, and larks.
During dinner, even on ordinary days, the party might be entertained with music or jokes and stories. Many households regularly employed harpers and minstrels. Adam the harper was a member of Bogo de Clare’s household, and on occasion Bogo hired ystriones (“actors”) and at least once a ioculator (“jester”), William Pilk of Salisbury. When the meal was over, one of the guests might regale the company with a song; many a knight and baron composed songs in the tradition of the trouvères, the knightly poets who were the troubadours of the North (although in some cases the tunes for their verses seem to have been written by the traveling professional minstrels known as jongleurs). They might be accompanied by the harp, the lute, or the viele, ancestor of the violin. Sometimes the accompanist played chords as a prelude to the song and as background to an occasional phrase; sometimes the singer accompanied himself in unison on the viele and played the tune over once more when he had finished singing, as a coda. The verses—in French—were sophisticated in form and stylized in subject matter, usually falling into established categories: dawn songs, spinning songs, political satires (sirventes), laments, debates, love songs. They might be May songs, like the following celebrated poem by Bernard de Ventadour, protégé of Eleanor of Aquitaine (the notation is modern;
medieval music was normally recorded without division into measures, the rhythm being supplied by the words—except in part-singing or polyphonic music, where more precise time was necessary for synchronization):
(When the flower appears beside the green leaf, when I see the weather bright and serene and hear in the wood the song of the birds which brings sweetness to my heart and pleases me, the more the birds sing to merit praise, the more joy I have in my heart and I must sing, as all my days are full of joy and song and I think of nothing else.)
Or they might be songs of the Crusade, like the following, by the early thirteenth-century trouvère Guiot de Dijon:
(I shall sing to cheer my heart, for fear lest I die of my great grief or go mad, when I see none return from that wild land where he is who brings comfort to my heart when I hear news of him. O God, when they cry “Forward,” help the pilgrim for whom I am so fearful, for the Saracens are evil.)
Or lively picaresque songs like one by Colin Muset, another thirteenth-century poet:
(When I see winter return, then would I find lodging, if I could discover a generous host who would charge me nothing, who would have pork and beef and mutton, ducks, pheasants, and venison, fat hens and capons and good cheeses in baskets.)
Sometimes songs were sung with refrains to be repeated by a chorus; there were also lays, in which each verse had a different structure and musical setting.
The meal finished, tables were cleared, the company washed hands again, and turned to the afternoon’s tasks and amusements. “The ladies and the bachelors danced and sang caroles after dinner,” on a festive occasion in The
Left: Musician with bells. (Trustees of the British Museum. MS. Harl. 4951, f. 299v)
Right: Jester with bladder-slapstick. (Trustees of the British Museum. MS. Add. 42130, f. 167)
Castellan of Coucy. A carole was a kind of round dance in which the dancers joined hands as they sang and circled. Guests coul
d be entertained with parlor games such as hot cockles, in which one player knelt blindfolded and was struck by the other players, whose identity he had to guess, or a variety of blind man’s bluff called hoodman blind, in which a player reversed his hood to cover his face and tried to catch the others. In The Castellan of Coucy, “after dinner there were wine, apples, ginger; some played backgammon and chess, others went to snare falcons.” Chess, widely popular, was played in two versions, one similar to the modern game, the other a simpler form played with dice. Either was commonly accompanied by gambling—the household accounts of John of Brabant on one occasion recorded two shillings lost at chess. Dice games were played in all ranks of society, and even the clergy indulged. Bogo de Clare’s accounts reported three shillings handed to him on Whitsunday 1285 to play at dice. Bowls, a favorite outdoor pastime, also was accompanied by betting.
Recreation included horseplay. Matthew Paris described disapprovingly how Henry III, his half brother Geoffrey de Lusignan, and other nobles, while strolling in an orchard, were pelted with turf, stones, and green apples by one of Geoffrey’s chaplains, a man “who served as a fool and buffoon to the king…and whose sayings, like those of a silly jester…excited their laughter.” In the course of his buffoonery, the chaplain went so far as to press “the juice of unripe grapes in their eyes, like one devoid of sense.”
Supper was served in the late afternoon. Robert Grosseteste recommended “one dish not so substantial, and also light dishes, and then cheese.”
There were also late suppers, just before bedtime, drawing suspicion from such moralists as Robert Mannyng, who described midnight “rere suppers” of knights, “when their lords have gone to bed,” as giving rise to gluttony and waste, not to mention lechery.
The romance L’Escoufle (“The Kite”) pictures an evening in a castle, after supper: The count goes to relax in front of the fire in the damsels’ chamber, taking off his shirt to have his back scratched and resting his head in the lap of the heroine, Aelis, while the servants stew fruits over the hearth.
The household of the castle retired early. Manuals for household management describe the activities of the chamberlain in preparing his lord for bed:
Take off his robe and bring him a mantle to keep him from cold, then bring him to the fire and take off his shoes and his hose…then comb his head, then spread down his bed, lay the head sheet and the pillows, and when your
Juggler. (Trustees of the British Museum. MS. Harl. 4951, f. 298v)
The end of the day. (Trinity College, Cambridge. MS. 0.9.34, f. 37r)
sovereign is in bed, draw the curtains…Then drive out dog or cat, and see that there be basin and urinal set near your sovereign, then take your leave mannerly that your sovereign may take his rest merrily.
VII
Hunting as a Way of Life
AT DAWN ON A SUMMER DAY, when the deer were at their fattest, the lord, his household, and guests loved to set out into the forest. While the huntsman, a professional and often a regular member of the lord’s staff, stalked the quarry with the leashed dogs and their handlers, the hunting party breakfasted in a clearing on a picnic meal of meat, wine, and bread.
When the dogs found a deer’s spoor, the huntsman estimated the animal’s size and age by measuring the tracks with his fingers and by studying the scratches made by the horns on bushes, the height of the rubbed-off velvet of the antlers on trees, and the “fumes” (droppings), some of which he gathered in his hunting horn to show his master. The lord made the decision as to whether it was a quarry worth hunting. Sometimes the huntsman, by silently climbing a tree, could get a sight of the deer.
The dogs were taken by a roundabout route to intercept the deer’s line of retreat. They were usually of three kinds: the lymer, a bloodhound that was kept on a leash and used to finish the stag at bay; the brachet, a smaller hound; and the greyhound or levrier, larger than the modern breed and capable of singly killing a deer.
The huntsman advanced on foot with a pair of lymers to drive the deer toward the hunting party. Meanwhile the lord raised his ivory hunting horn, the olifant, and blew a series of one-pitch notes. This was the signal for the greyhounds. Once begun, the chase continued until the hounds brought the stag to bay, when one of the hunters was given the privilege of killing it with a lance thrust. Sometimes the hunters used bows and arrows. The kill was followed by skinning and dividing up the meat, including the hounds’ share, laid out on the skin.
Although the hart could be a dangerous quarry, the wild boar, usually hunted in the winter, was more formidable. A wily enemy, he would not venture out of cover without first looking, listening, and sniffing, and once his suspicions were aroused no amount of shouting and horn blowing would lure him from his narrow den. The boar-hunting dog was the alaunt, a powerful breed resembling the later German shepherd. Even when dogs and hunters caught the boar in the open, his great tusks were a fearful weapon. “I have seen them kill good knights, squires and servants,” wrote Gaston de la Foix in his fourteenth-century Livre de la Chasse (“Book of the Hunt”). And Edward, duke of York, in the fifteenth-century treatise The Master of Game wrote, “The boar slayeth a man with one stroke, as with a knife. Some have seen him slit a man from knee up to breast and slay him all stark dead with one stroke.” An old boar usually stood his ground and struck desperately about him, but a young boar was capable of rapid maneuvers preceding his deadly slashes.
The huntsman was always well paid, and in a great household might be a knight. Henry I employed no fewer
Hunter with longsword, accompanied by greyhound. (Trustees of the British Museum. MS. Harl. 1585, f. 45v)
than four, at eight pence a day, at the head of a hunting company that included four horn blowers, twenty sergeants (beaters), several assistant huntsmen, a variety of dog handlers, a troop of mounted wolf hunters, and several archers, one of whom carried the king’s own bow. A royal hunting party was a small military expedition.
But the form of hunting that stirred the widest interest throughout medieval Europe was falconry. Hawks were the only means of bringing down birds that flew beyond the range of arrows. Every king, noble, baron, and lord of the manor had his falcons. A favorite bird shared his master’s bedroom and accompanied him daily on his wrist. Proud, fierce, and temperamental, the falcon had a mystique and a mythology. Of many treatises and manuals about falconry, the most famous was the exhaustive De Arte Venandi cum Avibus (“The Art of Falconry”) by the erudite emperor Frederick II (from which most of the following information is drawn).
The birds used in medieval falconry belonged to two main categories. The true falcons, or long-winged hawks, included the gerfalcon, the peregrine, the saker, and the lanner, all used to hunt waterfowl, and the merlin, used for smaller birds. The short-winged hawks included the goshawk and the sparrow hawk, which could be flown in wooded country where long-winged hawks were at a disadvantage. Only the female, larger and more aggressive than the male, was properly called a falcon; the smaller male was called a tiercel, and although sometimes used in hunting was considered inferior.
One of the essential buildings in a castle courtyard was the mews where the hawks roosted and where they took refuge during molting season. It was spacious enough to allow limited flight, had at least one window, and a door large enough for the falconer to pass through with a bird on his wrist. The floor was covered with gravel or coarse sand, changed at regular intervals.
In the semidarkness inside, perches of several sizes were adapted to different kinds of birds, some high and well out from the wall, others just far enough off the floor to keep the bird’s tail feathers from touching. Outside stood low wooden or stone blocks, usually in the form of cones, point down, driven into the ground with sharp iron spikes, on which the falcons “weathered,” that is, became accustomed to the world outside the mews.
A good falcon was expensive chiefly because her training demanded infinite patience and care. The birds were obtained either as eyases—nestlings taken from a tr
ee or a cliff-top—or as branchers, young birds that had just left the nest and were caught in nets. Branchers were put into a “sock,” a close-fitting linen bag open at both ends, so that the bird’s head protruded at one end, feet and tail at the other.
Gerald of Wales reported that once when Henry II was staying at the Clares’ Pembroke Castle and “amusing himself in the country with the sport of hawking,” he saw a falcon perched on a crag, and let loose on it a large
A mews. Center, a falcon is being bathed; on the right, a second falcon is being “weathered” on a block. From De Arte Venandi cum Avibus. (Bibliothèque Nationale. MS. Fr. 12400, f. 158)
high-bred Norway hawk. The falcon, though its flight was at first slower than the Norway hawk’s, finally rose above its adversary, became the assailant, and pouncing on it with great fury, laid the royal bird dead at the king’s feet. “From that time the king used to send every year in the proper season for the young falcons which are bred in the cliffs on the coast of South Wales; for in all his land he could not find better or more noble hawks.”