with wine in abundance, poured for each man by
the butler into little earthen jugs from big earthenware flagons. They
eat from trenchers of wood, well scoured with ashes; forks they have
none, and most of the men use their own knives or daggers when they are
not satisfied with the carving done for them by the carver. Each man,
when he has picked a bone, throws it under the table to the house-dogs
lying in wait on the floor, and from time to time a basin is passed and
a little water poured upon the fingers. The Baron has a napkin of his
own; there is one napkin for all the other men; the women generally eat
by themselves in their own apartments, the so-called 'gentlemen' in the
'tinello,' and the men-at-arms and grooms, and all the rest, in the big
lower halls near the kitchens, whence their food is passed out to them
through the wheel.

After dinner, if it be summer and the weather hot, the gates are barred,
the windows shut, and the whole household sleeps. Early or late, as the
case may be, the lords and ladies and children take the air, guarded by
scores of mounted men, riding towards that part of the city where they
may neither meet their enemies nor catch a fever in the warm months. In
rainy weather they pass the time as they can, with telling of many
tales, short, dramatic and strong as the framework of a good play, with
music, sometimes, and with songs, and with discussing of such news as
there may be in such times. And at dusk the great bells ring to
even-song, the oil lamp is swung up in the great staircase, the windows
and gates are shut again, the torches and candles and little lamps are
lit for supper, and at last, with rushlights, each finds the way along
the ghostly corridors to bed and sleep. That was the day's round, and
there was little to vary it in more peaceful times.

Over all life there was the hopeless, resentful dulness that oppressed
men and women till it drove them half mad, to the doing of desperate
things in love and war; there was the everlasting restraint of danger
without and of forced idleness within--danger so constant that it ceased
to be exciting and grew tiresome, idleness so oppressive that battle,
murder and sudden death were a relief from the inactivity of sluggish
peace; a state in which the mind was no longer a moving power in man,
but only by turns the smelting pot and the anvil of half-smothered
passions that now and then broke out with fire and flame and sword to
slash and bu