1215: The Year of Magna Carta Ebook Read Online Free PDF

Don’t fill your spoon too full; don’t share it; don’t leave it in the soup plate; don’t soak bits of bread in it. If the soup is too hot don’t blow on it, although you can stir it with a crust or a spoon or put croutons into it. There were lots of other rules, many familiar today. Don’t get food on the table-cloth, or over your lips. Don’t pick your teeth. Wipe your hands discreetly with a napkin. Don’t stare, don’t point at people, or make big gestures with your arms. Don’t play with your knife and spoon. Don’t grumble about what you’re given. Sit up straight. Don’t put your elbows on the table. Don’t talk with your mouth full. Don’t pick your nose at table. Other rules remind us that notions of politeness change with time and place. If you feel the need to spit, then turn round and spit behind you so that you don’t offend others at your table. If you belch, look up at the ceiling.
    After lunch was over, and you had washed your hands, and the left-over food had been distributed as alms for the poor, there was free time. You might retire to your chamber for a nap, or take part in a throwing-the-javelin or heaving-the-stone contest in the courtyard. Then you might expect to receive visitors for drinks. This was a crucial moment in the fabric of neighbourliness and networking. By now those who had gone hunting should have returned. Daniel of Beccles had plenty to say about visits, on how, for example, to accept or refuse invitations. Accepting all invitations shows, he insisted, a lamentable lack of discrimination.
    After drinks it was time to attend evensong before going into the hall for supper at what we might call tea-time, four o’clock or thereabouts, perhaps again in two shifts. In winter the hall would be lit, chiefly by tallow candles. These would most probably have been made on the premises, from the by-product of animals slaughtered for the larder. In the early fourteenth century the Bishop of Bath’s household used six pounds of tallow candles a day in winter. Supper was always a lighter meal than lunch, perhaps just one main course, a dessert and cheese. But by the time it was over, the lord and his lady might have spent as much as five or six hours eating and drinking. After supper, the lord’s clerks were expected to go through the accounts for the day, but for everyone else it was time for recreation: backgammon, usually called ‘tables’, music, story-telling, dancing and flirting.
    Anyone wanting to listen today to music sounding something like that played in King John’s time would have to go to Turkey or to parts of the Balkans where Ottoman influence used to be strong, and where strident reed pipes can still be heard. Or listen to the unforgettably colossal noise made by the bagpipes of Sardinia. In the West, industrial manufacture and nineteenth-century standardisation has brought about the demise of the old sound world. Although there were many kinds of bowed instruments in those days, none of them was held under the chin like a modern violin. Rather they were held – much as many folk instruments of the fiddle type still are – further down the body, or sometimes played on the lap with an underhand bow made from a hank of horsehair. A musical instrument coming into fashion at this time was the lute; its name is derived from an Arabic word meaning ‘the wooden thing’. Then there was the zither-like psaltery, the harpsichord, and a rich variety of harps; instruments such as the organ, confined to major churches, and those more suitable for outdoors or ceremonial occasions such as drums and trumpets. On feast days the sound of a trumpet might well have summoned the household to the hall for lunch and supper.
    Entertainment of a bawdy kind was popular. Roland le Pettour (the Farter) was rewarded with an estate in Suffolk in return for entertaining the royal court at Christmas by ‘leaping, whistling and farting before the king’. Daniel of Beccles would not have