fisherman and the fishmonger—the man who caught the fish and he who sold it—piscator and piscarius; and in the vocabulary itself the leonine line is cited: "Piscator prendit, quod piscarius bene vendit."

The whale was considerably brought into requisition for gastronomic purposes. It was found on the royal table, as well as on that of the Lord Mayor of London. The cook either roasted it, and served it up on the spit, or boiled it and sent it in with peas; the tongue and the tail were favourite parts.

The porpoise, however, was brought into the hall whole, and was carved or under-tranched by the officer in attendance. It was eaten with mustard. The pièce de résistance at a banquet which Wolsey gave to some of his official acquaintances in 1509, was a young porpoise, which had cost eight shillings; it was on the same occasion that His Eminence partook of strawberries and cream, perhaps; he is reported to have been the person who made that pleasant combination fashionable. The grampus, or sea-wolf, was another article of food which bears testimony to the coarse palate of the early Englishman, and at the same time may afford a clue to the partiality for disguising condiments and spices. But it appears from an entry in his Privy Purse Expenses, under September 8, 1498, that Henry the Seventh thought a porpoise a valuable commodity and a fit dish for an ambassador, for on that date twenty-one shillings were paid to Cardinal Morton's servant, who had procured one for some envoy then in London, perhaps the French representative, who is the recipient of a complimentary gratuity of £49 10s. on April 12, 1499, at his departure from England.

In the fifteenth century the existing stock of fish for culinary purposes received, if we may trust the vocabularies, a few accessions; as, for instance, the bream, the skate, the flounder, and the bake.

In "Piers of Fulham (14th century)," we hear of the good store of fat eels imported into England from the Low Countries, and to be had cheap by anyone who watched the tides; but the author reprehends the growing luxury of using the livers of young fish before they were large enough to be brought to the table.

The most comprehensive catalogue of fish brought to table in the time of Charles I. is in a pamphlet of 1644, inserted among my "Fugitive Tracts," 1875; and includes the oyster, which used to be eaten at breakfast with wine, the crab, lobster, sturgeon, salmon, ling, flounder, plaice, whiting, sprat, herring, pike, bream, roach, dace, and eel. The writer states that the sprat and herring were used in Lent. The sound of the stock-fish, boiled in wort or thin ale till they were tender, then laid on a cloth and dried, and finally cut into strips, was thought a good receipt for book-glue.

An acquaintance is in possession of an old cookery-book which exhibits the gamut of the fish as it lies in the frying-pan, reducing its supposed lament to musical notation. Here is an ingenious refinement and a delicate piece of irony, which Walton and Cotton might have liked to forestall.

The 15th century Nominale enriches the catalogue of dishes then in vogue. It specifies almond-milk, rice, gruel, fish-broth or soup, a sort of fricassee of fowl, collops, a pie, a pasty, a tart, a tartlet, a charlet (minced pork), apple-juice, a dish called jussell made of eggs and grated bread with seasoning of sage and saffron, and the three generic heads of sod or boiled, roast, and fried meats. In addition to the fish-soup, they had wine-soup, water-soup, ale-soup; and the flawn is reinforced by the froise. Instead of one Latin equivalent for a pudding, it is of moment to record that there are now three: nor should we overlook the rasher and the sausage. It is the earliest place where we get some of our familiar articles of diet—beef, mutton, pork, veal—under their modern names; and about the same time such terms present themselves as "a broth," "a browis," "a pottage," "a mess."

Of the dishes which have been specified, the froise corresponded to an omelette au lard of modern French cookery, having strips of bacon in it. The tansy was an omelette of another description, made chiefly with eggs and chopped herbs. As the former was a common dish in the monasteries, it is not improbable that it was one grateful to the palate. In Lydgate's "Story of Thebes," a sort of sequel to the "Canterbury Tales," the pilgrims invite the poet to join the supper-table, where there were these tasty omelettes: moile, made of marrow and grated bread, and haggis, which is supposed to be identical with the Scottish dish so called. Lydgate, who belonged to the monastery of Bury St. Edmunds, doubtless set on the table at Canterbury some of the dainties with which he was familiar at home; and this practice, which runs through all romantic and imaginative literature, constitutes, in our appreciation, its principal worth. We love and cherish it for its very sins against chronological and topographical fitness—its contempt of all unities. Men transferred local circumstances and a local colouring to their pictures of distant countries and manners. They argued the unknown from what they saw under their own eyes. They portrayed to us what, so far as the scenes and characters of their story went, was undeceivingly false, but what on the contrary, had it not been so, would never have been unveiled respecting themselves and their time.

The expenditure on festive occasions seems, from some of the entries in the "Northumberland Household Book," to present a strong contrast to the ordinary dietary allowed to the members of a noble and wealthy household, especially on fish days, in the earlier Tudor era (1512). The noontide breakfast provided for the Percy establishment was of a very modest character: my lord and my lady had, for example, a loaf of bread, two manchets (loaves of finer bread), a quart of beer and one of wine, two pieces of salt fish, and six baked herrings or a dish of sprats. My lord Percy and Master Thomas Percy had half a loaf of household bread, a manchet, a pottle of beer, a dish of butter, a piece of salt fish, and a dish of sprats or three white herrings; and the nursery breakfast for my lady Margaret and Master Ingram Percy was much the same. But on flesh days my lord and lady fared better, for they had a loaf of bread, two manchets, a quart of beer and the same of wine, and half a chine of mutton or boiled beef; while the nursery repast consisted of a manchet, a quart of beer, and three boiled mutton breasts; and so on: whence it is deducible that in the Percy family, perhaps in all other great houses, the members and the ladies and gentlemen in waiting partook of their earliest meal apart in their respective chambers, and met only at six to dine or sup.

The beer, which was an invariable part of the menu, was perhaps brewed from hops which, according to Harrison elsewhere quoted, were, after a long discontinuance, again coming into use about this time. But it would be a light-bodied drink which was allotted to the consumption at all events of Masters Thomas and Ingram Percy, and even of my Lady Margaret. It is clearly not irrelevant to my object to correct the general impression that the great families continued throughout the year to support the strain which the system of keeping open house must have involved. For, as Warner has stated, there were intervals during which the aristocracy permitted themselves to unbend, and shook off the trammels imposed on them by their social rank and responsibility. This was known as "keeping secret house," or, in other words, my lord became for a season incognito, and retired to one of his remoter properties for relaxation and repose. Our kings in some measure did the same; for they held their revels only, as a rule, at stated times and places. William I. is said to have kept his Easter at Winchester, his Whitsuntide at Westminster, and his Christmas at Gloucester. Even these antique grandees had to work on some plan. It could not be all mirth and jollity.

A