performed before
the carving by every man present. The carver had to be a man of
undaunted courage and untarnished reputation.

Next in honor at the feast was the peacock. It was sometimes served as
a pie with its head protruding from one side of the crust and its
wide-spread tail from the other; more often the bird was skinned,
stuffed with herbs and sweet spices, roasted, and then put into its
skin again, when with head erect and tail outspread it was borne into
the hall by a lady--as was singularly appropriate--and given the
second place on the table.

The feudal system gave scope for much magnificence at Yule-tide. At a
time when several thousand retainers[4] were fed daily at a single
castle or on a baron's estate, preparations for the Yule feast--the
great feast of the year--were necessarily on a large scale, and the
quantity of food reported to have been prepared on such occasions is
perfectly appalling to Twentieth-Century feasters.

[Footnote 4: The Earl of Warwick had some thirty thousand.]

Massinger wrote:

"Men may talk of Country Christmasses,
Their thirty-pound butter'd eggs, their pies of carp's tongue,
Their pheasants drench'd with ambergris, the carcasses
Of three fat wethers bruis'd for gravy, to
Make sauces for a single peacock; yet their feasts
Were fasts, compared with the City's."

In 1248 King Henry III held a feast in Westminster Hall for the poor
which lasted a week. Four years later he entertained one thousand
knights, peers, and other nobles, who came to attend the marriage of
Princess Margaret with Alexander, King of the Scots. He was generously
assisted by the Archbishop of York who gave L2700, besides six hundred
fat oxen. A truly royal Christmas present whether extorted or given of
free will!

More than a century later Richard II held Christmas at Litchfield and
two thousand oxen and two hundred tuns of wine were consumed. This
monarch was accustomed to providing for a large family, as he kept two
thousand cooks to prepare the food for the ten thousand persons who
dined every day at his expense.

Henry VIII, not to be outdone by his predecessors, kept one Yule-tide
at which the cost of the cloth of gold that was used alone amounted to
L600. Tents were erected within the spacious hall from which came the
knights to joust in tournament; beautiful artificial gardens were
arranged out of which came the fantastically dressed dancers. The
Morris (Moresque) Da