castle or on a baron's estate, preparations for the Yule feast--the
great feast of the year--were necessarily on a large scale, and the
quantity of food reported to have been prepared on such occasions is
perfectly appalling to Twentieth-Century feasters.

[Footnote 4: The Earl of Warwick had some thirty thousand.]

Massinger wrote:

"Men may talk of Country Christmasses,
Their thirty-pound butter'd eggs, their pies of carp's tongue,
Their pheasants drench'd with ambergris, the carcasses
Of three fat wethers bruis'd for gravy, to
Make sauces for a single peacock; yet their feasts
Were fasts, compared with the City's."

In 1248 King Henry III held a feast in Westminster Hall for the poor
which lasted a week. Four years later he entertained one thousand
knights, peers, and other nobles, who came to attend the marriage of
Princess Margaret with Alexander, King of the Scots. He was generously
assisted by the Archbishop of York who gave £2700, besides six hundred
fat oxen. A truly royal Christmas present whether extorted or given of
free will!

More than a century later Richard II held Christmas at Litchfield and
two thousand oxen and two hundred tuns of wine were consumed. This
monarch was accustomed to providing for a large family, as he kept two
thousand cooks to prepare the food for the ten thousand persons who
dined every day at his expense.