When the sun rose on England of olden time, its faint red light stirred every sleeper from the sack of straw, which formed the only bed of the age. Springing from this rustling couch, where he had lain naked, and throwing off the coarse coverlets, usually of sheepskin, the subject of King Alfred donned the day's dress. Gentlemen wore linen or woollen tunics, which reached to the knee; and, over these, long fur-lined cloaks, fastened with a brooch of ivory or gold. Strips of cloth or leather, bandaged crosswise from the ankle to the knee over red and blue stockings; and black, pointed shoes, slit along the instep almost to the toes and fastened with two thongs, completed the costume of an Anglo-Saxon gentleman. The ladies, wrapping a veil of linen or silk upon their delicate curls, laced a loose-flowing gown over a tight-sleeved bodice, and pinned the graceful folds of their mantles with golden butterflies and other tasteful trinkets.

Breakfast consisted probably of bread, meat, and ale, but was a lighter repast than that taken when the hurry of the day lay behind. Often it was eaten in the bower or private apartment.

The central picture in Old English life—the great event of the day—was Noon-meat, or dinner in the great hall. A little before three, the chief and all his household, with any stray guests who might have dropped in, met in the hall, which stood in the centre of its encircling bowers—the principal apartment of every Old English house. Clouds of wood smoke, rolling up from a fire which blazed in the middle of the floor, blackened the carved rafters of the arched roof before they found their way out of the hole above which did duty as a chimney.

Tapestries, dyed purple, or glowing with variegated pictures of saints and heroes, hung, and if the day was stormy, flapped upon the chinky walls. In palaces and in earls' mansions coloured tiles, wrought into a mosaic, formed a clean and pretty pavement; but the common flooring of the time was clay, baked dry with the heat of winter evenings and summer noons. The only articles of furniture always in the hall were wooden benches; some of which, especially the high settle or seat of the chieftain, boasted cushions, or at least a rug.

While the hungry crowd, fresh from woodland and furrow, were lounging near the fire or hanging up their weapons on the pegs and hooks that jutted from the wall, a number of slaves, dragging in a long, flat, heavy board, placed it on movable legs, and spread on its upper half a handsome cloth. Then were arranged with other utensils for the meal some flattish dishes, baskets of ash-wood for holding bread, a scanty sprinkling of steel knives shaped like our modern razors, platters of wood, and bowls for the universal broth.

The ceremony of "laying the board," as the Old English phrased it, being completed, the work of demolition began. Great round cakes of bread—huge junks of boiled bacon—vast rolls of broiled eel—cups of milk—horns of ale—wedges of cheese—lumps of salt butter—and smoking piles of cabbages and beans, melted like magic from the board under the united attack of greasy fingers and grinding jaws. Kneeling slaves offered to the lord and his honoured guests long skewers or spits, on which steaks of beef or venison smoked and sputtered, ready for the hacking blade.

Poultry, too, and game of every variety, filled the spaces of the upper board; but the crowd of loaf-eaters, as old English domestics were suggestively called, saw little of these daintier kinds of food, except the naked bones. Nor did they much care, if, to their innumerable hunches of bread, they could add enough pig to appease their hunger. Hounds, sitting eager-eyed by their masters, snapped with sudden jaws at scraps of fat flung to them, or retired into private life below the board with some sweet bone that fortune sent them.

The solid part of the banquet ended with the washing of hands, performed for the honoured occupants of the high settle by officious slaves. The board was then dragged out of the hall; the loaf-eaters slunk away to have a nap in the byre, or sat drowsily in corners of the hall; and the drinking began. During the progress of the meal, Welsh ale had flowed freely in horns or vessels of twisted glass. Mead and, in very grand houses, wine now began to circle in goblets of gold and silver, or of wood inlaid with those precious metals. In humbler houses, story-telling and songs, sung to the music of the harp by each guest in turn, formed the principal amusement of the drinking-bout.

Meantime the music and the mead did their work in maddening brains; the revelry grew louder; riddles, which had flown thick around the board at first, gave place to banter, taunts, and fierce boasts of prowess; angry eyes gleamed defiance; and it was well if, in the morning, the household slaves had not to wash blood-stains from the pavement of the hall, or in the still night, when the drunken brawlers lay stupid on the floor, to drag a dead man from the red plash in which he lay.

From the reek and riot of the hall the ladies of the household soon withdrew to the bower, where they reigned supreme. There, in the earlier part of the day, they had arrayed themselves in their bright-coloured robes, plying tweezers and crisping-irons on their yellow hair, and often heightening the blush that Nature gave them with a shade of rouge. There, too, they used to scold their female slaves, and beat them, with a violence which said more for their strength of lung and muscle than for the gentleness of their womanhood.

When their needles were fairly set a-going upon those pieces of delicate embroidery, known and prized over all Europe as "English work," some gentlemen dropped in, perhaps harp in hand, to chat and play for their amusement, or to engage in games of hazard and skill, which seem to have resembled modern dice and chess. When in later days supper came into fashion, the round table of the bower was usually spread for Evening-food, as this meal was called. And not long afterwards, those bags of straw, from which they sprang at sunrise, received for another night their human burden, worn out with the labours and the revels of the day.

W.F. Collier
(Adapted)