t is reserved, and afterwards sent down to
their serving men and waiters, who feed thereon in like sort with
convenient moderation, their reversion also being bestowed upon the poor
which lie ready at their gates in great numbers to receive the same. This
is spoken of the principal tables whereat the nobleman, his lady, and
guests are accustomed to sit; besides which they have a certain ordinary
allowance daily appointed for their halls, where the chief officers and
household servants (for all are not permitted by custom to wait upon their
master), and with them such inferior guests do feed as are not of calling
to associate the nobleman himself; so that, besides those aforementioned,
which are called to the principal table, there are commonly forty or three
score persons fed in those halls, to the great relief of such poor suitors
and strangers also as oft be partakers thereof and otherwise like to dine
hardly. As for drink, it is usually filled in pots, goblets, jugs, bowls
of silver, in noblemen's houses; also in fine Venice glasses of all forms;
and, for want of these elsewhere, in pots of earth of sundry colours and
moulds, whereof many are garnished with silver, or at the leastwise in
pewter, all which notwithstanding are seldom set on the table, but each
one, as necessity urgeth, calleth for a cup of such drink as him listeth
to have, so that, when he has tasted of it, he delivered the cup again to
some one of the standers by, who, making it clean by pouring out the drink
that remaineth, restoreth it to the cupboard from whence he fetched the
same. By this device (a thing brought up at the first by Mnesitheus of
Athens, in conservation of the honour of Orestes, who had not yet made
expiation for the death of his adulterous parents,[133] AEgisthus and
Clytemnestra) much idle tippling is furthermore cut off; for, if the full
pots should continually stand at the elbow or near the trencher, divers
would always be dealing with them, whereas now they drink seldom, and only
when necessity urgeth, and so avoid the note of great drinking, or often
troubling of the servitors with filling of their bowls. Nevertheless in
the noblemen's halls this order is not used, neither is any man's house
commonly under the degree of a knight or esquire of great revenues. It is
a world to see in these our days, wherein gold and silver most aboundeth,
how that our gentility, as loathing those metals (because of the
plenty)[134] do now general