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 strictly¹ preserved, but the smaller game, the hares, the rabbits, the birds, which swarmed² round the coverts³, found their way readily into the poor man's pot. Ale was very cheap, and cheaper still was the mead⁴ 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 brewed⁵ 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 profusion⁸, great joints⁹ 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 attained¹⁰ 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 dressing¹¹ of the food. It was gilded¹², it was silvered, it was painted, it was surrounded with flame. From the boar and the peacock down to such strange food as the porpoise¹³ and the hedgehog, every dish had its own setting and its own sauce, very strange and very complex, with flavorings of dates, currants,

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