racter of a "Miserable old
Gentlewoman," inserted among his "Enigmatical Characters," 1658,
speaks of her letting her prayer-book fall into the dripping-pan, and
the dog and the cat quarrelling over it, and at last agreeing to pray
on it!

But this is a branch of the subject I cannot afford further to
penetrate. Yet I must say a word about the polished maple-wood bowl,
or _maser_, with its mottoes and quaint devices, which figured on the
side-board of the yeoman and the franklin, and which Chaucer must have
often seen in their homes. Like everything else which becomes popular,
it was copied in the precious metals, with costly and elaborate
goldsmith's work; but its interest for us is local, and does not lend
itself to change of material and neighbourhood. The habits of the poor
and middle classes are apt to awaken a keener curiosity in our minds
from the comparatively slender information which has come to us upon
them; and as in the case of the maser, the laver which was employed in
humble circles for washing the hands before and after a meal was, not
of gold or silver, as in the houses of the nobility, but of brass
or laten, nor was it in either instance a ceremonious form, but a
necessary process. The modern finger-glass and rose-water dish, which
are an incidence of every entertainment of pretension, and in higher
society as much a parcel of the dinner-table as knives and forks, are,
from a mediaeval standpoint, luxurious anachronisms.

In Archbishop Alfric's "Colloquy," originally written in the tenth
century, and subsequently augmented and enriched with a Saxon gloss
by one of his pupils, the cook is one of the persons introduced
and interrogated. He is asked what his profession is worth to the
community; and he replies that without him people would have to eat
their greens and flesh raw; whereupon it is rejoined that they might
readily dress them themselves; to which the cook can only answer, that
in such case all men would be reduced to the position of servants.

The kitchen had its _chef_ or master-cook (archimacherus),
under-cooks, a waferer or maker of sweets, a scullion or swiller
(who is otherwise described as a _quistron_), and knaves, or boys
for preparing the meat; and all these had their special functions and
implements.

Even in the fifteenth century the appliances for cookery were
evidently far more numerous than they had been. An illustrated
vocabulary portrays, among other items, the dressing-bo