Table Carpets, Long Stockings, Balks and more.

It's Tudor Trivia Tuesday!!!

1)  In Tudor times the dinner table was covered in a “table carpet” which was, in turn, covered with a “table cloth,” in preparation for a meal.

2) During the 16^th century, in England, it became ever more common to eat at a single long table rather than multiple tables placed around the hall. A single salt cellar was placed in the middle.  Persons of the higher rank sat “above” it.  The lower rank, “below”.  Thus, in Cynthia’s Revels,  Ben Jonson’s character Mercury says

He never drinks below the salt.

meaning he never drinks to the health of anyone who sits below the salt cellar at table.

3)  At the end of the 16^th century, when short pants [breeches] were in style the exposed male leg was covered with a “long stocking”.

Scads of colorful information and entertainment.

4) A balk was a ridge or bank of earth standing up between two furrows; and to balk was to throw up the earth so as to form those heaps or banks.  Hudson.  Thus Shakespeare’s lines from the First Part of Henry IV:

The Earl of Douglas is discomfited :

Ten thousand bold Scots, two-and-twenty knights,

Balk'd in their own blood,

5) As the rule, the butler’s station when not immediately occupied with serving the meal was to stand alongside the cupboard.

6) As the 16^th century progressed, table-leaves and folding tables begin to be mentioned in wills and other documents.  The Will of Andrew Cranewise, of Bury, in 1558, mentions "one plaine table with one leafe” and “my best folte (fold or folding) table in the hall”.

7) About the year 1570 Bartolomeo Scappi, cook to pope Pius V, gave in his cookbook several recipes for dressing turkeys.

8)  At high tide in the Thames, vessels of 100 tons could come up to the city of London and ships of any size then existing to within five miles of it.

9)  In 1519, in the county of Norfolk, 2 ells of decorative ribbon could be purchased for 20d.

10) According to Master Estienne Perlin (Description d’Angleterre, 1558), the English “consume great quantities of beer double and single [i.e. strong and small], and do not drink it out of glasses, but from earthen pots with silver handles and covers, and this even in houses of persons of middling fortune; for as to the poor, the covers of their pots are merely of pewter, and in some places, such as villages, their beer pots are made only of wood. With their beer they have a custom of eating very soft saffron cakes, in which there are likewise raisins, which give an excellent relish to the beer, some of which I formerly drank at Rye, as good as ever I drank in any country in the world.”

Also at Virtual Grub Street:

• The Fascinating Itinerary of the Gelosi Troupe, 1576.  June 10, 2019.  “The Spanish soldiers had not been paid and unpaid soldiers tend to rob and loot.  The citizens were prepared to give them a fight.  Violent flare ups were occurring everywhere.”
• Lady Southwell on the Final Days of Queen Elizabeth I.  March 24, 2019.  “her majesty told [Lady Scrope] (commanding her to conceal the same ) that she saw, one night, in her bed, her body exceeding lean, and fearful in a light of fire.”
• Hedingham Castle 1485-1562 with Virtual Tour Link.  January 29, 2019. “Mr. Sheffeld told me that afore the old Erle of Oxford tyme, that cam yn with King Henry the vii., the Castelle of Hengham was yn much ruine,…”
• The Battle Over Shakespeare's Early and Late Plays. September 24, 2018. “The answers to the post-Oxford dilemma, of course, are three.”
• Shakespeare on Gravity. August 26, 2018. “So carelessly does Shakespeare throw out such an extraordinary divination. His achievement in thus, as it were, rivalling Newton may seem in a certain sense even more extraordinary than Goethe's botanical and osteological discoveries;…”
• Check out the English Renaissance Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.