ume (Babees' Book) edited for the Early English Text
Society, etc.

There is rather too general a dislike on the part of antiquaries
to take cognisance of matter inserted in popular periodicals upon
subjects of an archaeological character; but of course the loose and
flimsy treatment which this class of topics as a rule receives in the
light literature of the day makes it perilous to use information
so forthcoming in evidence or quotation. Articles must be rendered
palatable to the general reader, and thus become worthless for all
readers alike.

Most of the early descriptions and handbooks of instruction turn,
naturally enough, on the demands and enjoyments of the great. There
is in the treatise of Walter de Bibblesworth (14th century) a very
interesting and edifying account of the arrangement of courses for
some important banquet. The boar's head holds the place of honour in
the list, and venison follows, and various dishes of roast. Among the
birds to be served up we see cranes, peacocks, swans, and wild geese;
and of the smaller varieties, fieldfares, plovers, and larks. There
were wines; but the writer only particularises them as white and red.
The haunch of venison was then an ordinary dish, as well as kid. They
seem to have sometimes roasted and sometimes boiled them. Not only
the pheasant and partridge appear, but the quail,--which is at present
scarcer in this country, though so plentiful abroad,--the duck, and
the mallard.

In connection with venison, it is worth while to draw attention to a
passage in the "Privy Purse Expenses of Henry VII" where, under date
of August 8, 1505, a woman receives 3s. _d_. for clarifying deer suet
for the King. This was not for culinary but for medicinal purposes, as
it was then, and much later, employed as an ointment.

Both William I. and his son the Red King maintained, as Warner shews
us, a splendid table; and we have particulars of the princely scale on
which an Abbot of Canterbury celebrated his installation in 1309. The
archbishops of those times, if they exercised inordinate authority, at
any rate dispensed in a magnificent manner among the poor and infirm
a large portion of their revenues. They stood in the place of
corporations and Poor Law Guardians. Their very vices were not without
a certain fascinating grandeur; and the pleasures of the table in
which our Plantagenet rulers outstripped even their precursors, the
earlier sovereigns of that line, were enhanced an