birds to be served up we see cranes, peacocks, swans, and wild geese;
and of the smaller varieties, fieldfares, plovers, and larks. There
were wines; but the writer only particularises them as white and red.
The haunch of venison was then an ordinary dish, as well as kid. They
seem to have sometimes roasted and sometimes boiled them. Not only
the pheasant and partridge appear, but the quail,--which is at present
scarcer in this country, though so plentiful abroad,--the duck, and
the mallard.

In connection with venison, it is worth while to draw attention to a
passage in the "Privy Purse Expenses of Henry VII" where, under date
of August 8, 1505, a woman receives 3s. _d_. for clarifying deer suet
for the King. This was not for culinary but for medicinal purposes, as
it was then, and much later, employed as an ointment.

Both William I. and his son the Red King maintained, as Warner shews
us, a splendid table; and we have particulars of the princely scale on
which an Abbot of Canterbury celebrated his installation in 1309. The
archbishops of those times, if they exercised inordinate authority, at
any rate dispensed in a magnificent manner among the poor and infirm
a large portion of their revenues. They stood in the place of
corporations and Poor Law Guardians. Their very vices were not without
a certain fascinating grandeur; and the pleasures of the table in
which our Plantagenet rulers outstripped even their precursors, the
earlier sovereigns of that line, were enhanced and multiplied by the
Crusades, by the commencing spirit of discovery, and by the foreign
intermarriages, which became so frequent.

A far more thorough conquest than that which the day of Hastings
signalised was accomplished by an army of a more pacific kind, which