fast should reach but to the hour of noon; all the
remainder of that day was at our disposure, freely to eat and feed at any
time thereof. In ancient times there were but few that dined, as you would
say, some church men, monks and canons; for they have little other
occupation. Each day is a festival unto them, who diligently heed the
claustral proverb, De missa ad mensam. They do not use to linger and defer
their sitting down and placing of themselves at table, only so long as they
have a mind in waiting for the coming of the abbot; so they fell to without
ceremony, terms, or conditions; and everybody supped, unless it were some
vain, conceited, dreaming dotard. Hence was a supper called coena, which
showeth that it is common to all sorts of people. Thou knowest it well,
Friar John. Come, let us go, my dear friend, in the name of all the devils
of the infernal regions, let us go. The gnawings of my stomach in this
rage of hunger are so tearing, that they make it bark like a mastiff. Let
us throw some bread and beef into his throat to pacify him, as once the
sibyl did to Cerberus. Thou likest best monastical brewis, the prime, the
flower of the pot. I am for the solid, principal verb that comes after
--the good brown loaf, always accompanied with a round slice of the
nine-lecture-powdered labourer. I know thy meaning, answered Friar John;
this metaphor is extracted out of the claustral kettle. The labourer is the
ox that hath wrought and done the labour; after the fashion of nine
lectures, that is to say, most exquisitely well and thoroughly boiled.
These holy religious fathers, by a certain cabalistic institution of the
ancients, not written, but carefully by tradition conveyed from hand to
hand, rising betimes to go to morning prayers, were wont to flourish that
their matutinal devotion with some certain notable preambles before their
entry into the church, viz., they dunged in the dungeries, pissed in the
pisseries, spit in the spitteries, melodiously coughed in the cougheries,
and doted in their dotaries, that to the divine service they might not bring
anything that was unclean or foul. These things thus done, they very
zealously made their repair to the Holy Chapel, for so was in their canting
language termed the convent kitchen, where they with no small earnestness
had care that the beef-pot should be put on the crook for the breakfast of
the religious brothers of our Lord and Saviour; and the fire they w