en and verderers
have not forgotten me yet, and my larder is ever full. Blow three moots
on the horn, Mary, that the varlets may set the table, for the growing
shadow and my loosening belt warn me that it is time."

XII. HOW NIGEL FOUGHT THE TWISTED MAN OF SHALFORD

In the days of which you read all classes, save perhaps the very poor,
fared better in meat and in drink than they have ever done since. The
country was covered with woodlands--there were seventy separate forests
in England alone, some of them covering half a shire. Within these
forests the great beasts of the chase were strictly preserved, but the
smaller game, the hares, the rabbits, the birds, which swarmed round the
coverts, found their way readily into the poor man's pot. Ale was very
cheap, and cheaper still was the mead which every peasant could make
for himself out of the wild honey in the tree-trunks. There were many
tea-like drinks also, which were brewed by the poor at no expense:
mallow tea, tansy tea, and others the secret of which has passed.

Amid the richer classes there was rude profusion, great joints ever on
the sideboard, huge pies, beasts of the field and beasts of the chase,
with ale and rough French or Rhenish wines to wash them down. But the
very rich had attained to a high pitch of luxury in their food, and
cookery was a science in which the ornamentation of the dish was
almost as important as the dressing of the food. It was gilded, it was
silvered, it was painted, it was surrounded with flame. From the boar
and the peacock down to such strange food as the porpoise and the
hedgehog, every dish had its own setting and its own sauce, very strange
and very complex, with flavorings of dates, currants, cloves, vinegar,
sugar and honey, of cinnamon, ground ginger, sandalwood, saffron, brawn
and pines. It was the Norman tradition to eat in moderation, but to have
a great profusion of the best and of the most delicate from which to
choose. From them came this complex cookery, so unlike the rude and
often gluttonous simplicity of the old Teutonic stock.

Sir John Buttesthorn was of that middle class who fared in the old
fashion, and his great oak supper-table groaned beneath the generous
pastries, the mighty joints and the great flagons. Below were the
household, above on a raised dais the family table, with places ever
ready for those frequent guests who dropped in from the high road
outside. Such a one had just come, an old prie