Old cookery books and ancient cuisine / by W. Carew Hazlitt.

  • William Carew Hazlitt
Date:
1893
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Old cookery books and ancient cuisine / by W. Carew Hazlitt. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    conditions and titles which to ourselves may appear incongruous and obscure, but which were in tolerable keeping with the financial and commercial organisation of the period, with a restricted currency, a revenue chiefly payable in kind, scanty facilities for transit, and an absence of trading centres. These steward-ships, butler-ships, and cook- ships, in the hands of the most trusted vassals of the Crown, constituted a rudimentary vehicle for in-gathering the dues of all kinds renderable by the king’s tenants; and as an administrative scheme gradually unfolded itself, they became titular and honorary, like our own reduced menagerie of nondescripts. But while they lasted in their substance and reality, they answered the wants and notions erf a primitive people; nor is it for this practical age to lift up its hands or its voice too high; for mediaeval England is still legible without much excavation in our Court, our Church, nay, in our Laws. There lurk our cunning spoilers ! Mr. Fairholt, in the “Archaeological Album,” 1845, has depicted for our benefit