A student should also bear in mind that, from the strong Anglo-Gallic
complexion of our society and manners in early days, the accounts
collected by Lacroix are largely applicable to this country, and the
same facilities for administering to the comfort and luxuries of the
table, which he furnishes as illustrative of the gradual outgrowth
from the wood fire and the pot-au-feu among his own countrymen,
or certain classes of them, may be received as something like
counterparts of what we possessed in England at or about the same
period. We keep the phrase _pot luck_; but, for most of those who use
it, it has parted with all its meaning. This said production of
Neckam of St. Albans purports to be a guide to young housekeepers.
It instructs them what they will require, if they desire to see their
establishment well-ordered; but we soon perceive that the author has
in view the arrangements indispensable for a family of high rank and
pretensions; and it may be once for all observed that this kind of
literature seldom proves of much service to us in an investigation
of the state of the poor, until we come to the fifteenth or even
sixteenth century, when the artists of Germany and the Low Countries
began to delineate those scenes in industrial and servile life, which
time and change have rendered so valuable.

Where their superiors in rank regarded them as little more than
mechanical instruments for carrying on the business of life, the poor
have left behind them few records of their mode of sustenance and of
the food which enabled them to follow their daily toil. The anecdotes,
whatever they may be worth, of Alfred and the burnt cakes, and of Tom
Thumb's mamma and her Christmas pudding, made in a bowl, of which the
principal material was pork, stand almost alone; for we get, wherever
we look, nothing but descriptions by learned and educated men of their
equals or betters, how they fed and what they ate--their houses, their
furniture, their weapons, and their dress. Even in the passage of
the old fabliau of the "King and the Hermit" the latter, instead of
admitting us to a cottage interior, has a servant to wait on him,
brings out a tablecloth, lights two candles, and lays before his
disguised guest venison and wine. In most of our own romances, and
in the epics of antiquity, we have to be satisfied with vague and
splendid generalisations. We do not learn much of the dishes which
were on the tables, how they were cooked, and