Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [14]
Good manners and good carriage were highly prized in this environment: ‘Be fair of answer, ready to serve, and gentle of cheer, and then men will say: “There goes a gentle officer” . . . Be glad of cheer, courteous of knee, soft of speech; have clean hands and nails and be carefully dressed. Do not cough or spit or retch too loud, or put your fingers into the cups to seek bits of dust.’36
Mr Russell also goes into other similar delicacies of behaviour that would not go amiss in a modern etiquette manual for restaurant waiters: ‘Do not pick your nose or let it drop clear pearls, or sniff, or blow it too loud, lest your lord hear . . . Retch not, nor spit too far, nor laugh or speak too loud. Beware of making faces and scorning; and be no liar with your mouth. Nor yet lick your lips or drivel . . . Good son, do not pick your teeth, or grind, or gnash them, or with puffing and blowing cast foul breath upon your lord.’37
He outlines the duties of pantler and butler, starting with the duties of the first. The pantry in the medieval great house or manor house was the room between the kitchen and hall, from which bread and other perishable food was served: ‘In the pantry you must always keep three sharp knives, one to chop the loaves, another to pare them, and a third, sharp and keen, to smooth and square the trenchers with.’ During this period, the ‘trencher’ bread acted as a plate from which food would be eaten and after the meal distributed to the poor as alms. Mr Russell continues: ‘Always cut your lord’s bread, and see that it be new; and all other bread at the table one day old ere you cut it, all household bread three days old, and trencher-bread four days old.’38
After bread comes the salt, an expensive commodity, the supply of which was regarded as an indication of status; hence the expression ‘below the salt’, which means being a person not invited to sit at the top table. Similarly, we speak of a man being ‘not worth his salt’. The salt cellar itself was then often an elaborate object of some beauty. The mid-fifteenth-century inventory of Sir John Fastolf’s Caister Castle, made after his death, lists two great silver-gilt salts, shaped like towers (one weighing eighty-six ounces).39
Then after the preparation of bread and salt comes the care of napkins and tablecloth. ‘Good son, look that your napery be sweet and clean, and that your table-cloth, towel and napkin be folded neatly, your table-knives brightly polished and your spoons fair washed.’40 Next comes the wine: ‘Look ye have two wine-augers, a greater and a less, some gutters of boxwood that fit them, also a gimlet to pierce with, a tap and a bung, ready to stop the flow when it is time.’41
For the duties of a butler in charge of the buttery – that is to say, the room off the great hall from which beer and wine were served – Russell wrote: ‘See that your cups and pots be clean, both within and without. Serve no ale till it is five days old, for new ale is wasteful. And look that all things about you be sweet and clean . . . Beware that ye give no person stale drink, for fear that ye bring many men into disease for many a year.’42 These instructions remind us that regulations were often inspired by issues of cleanliness and health, just as they are today. Indeed, it is surely the pursuit of hygiene and healthy practices that multiplies the numbers of servants needed in a great household at this date.
Now everything is ready. ‘My son, it is now the time of the day to lay the table. First, wipe it with a cloth ere it be spread, than lay on it a cloth called a cowche. You take one end and your mate the other, and draw it straight; and lay a second cloth with its fold on the outer edge of the table. Lift the upper part and let it hang even. And then lay the third cloth with its fold on the inner edge, making a state half a foot wide, with the top.’43 Thus the table would appear like a long, crisp box of linen.
Side-tables or cupboards were also