The dinner was always accompanied by music, and itinerant minstrels, mountebanks, and performers of all descriptions, were allowed free access to the hall to amuse the guests by their performances. These were intermixed with dancing and tumbling, and often with exhibitions of a very gross character, which, however, amid the looseness of mediæval manners, appear to have excited no disgust. These practices are curiously illustrated in some of the mediæval illuminations. In the account of the death of John the Baptist, as given in the gospels (Matthew xiv. 6, and Mark vi. 21), we are told, that at the feast given by Herod on his birthday, his daughter Herodias came into the feasting-hall, and (according to our English version) danced before him and his guests. The Latin vulgate has _saltasset_, which is equivalent to the English word but the mediæval writers took the lady’s performances to be those of a regular wandering jougleur; and in two illuminated manuscripts of the early part of the fourteenth century, in the British Museum, she is pictured as performing tricks very similar to those exhibited by the modern beggar-boys in our streets. In the first of these (No. 119), taken from MS. Reg. 2 B. vii., the princess is supporting herself upon her hands with her legs in the air, to the evident admiration of the king, though the guests seem to be paying less attention to her feats of activity. In the second (No. 120), from the Harleian MS. No. 1527, she is represented in a similar position, but more evidently making a somersault. She is here accompanied by a female attendant, who expresses no less delight at her skill than the king and his guests.
[Illustration: _No. 119. King Herod and his Daughter Herodias._]
[Illustration: _No. 120. Herod and Herodias._]
It would appear from various accounts that it was not, unless perhaps at an early period, the custom in France to sit long after dinner at table drinking wine, as it certainly was in England, where, no doubt, the practice was derived from the Anglo-Saxons. Numerous allusions might be pointed out, which show how much our Anglo-Saxon forefathers were addicted to this practice of sitting in their halls and drinking during the latter part of their day; and it was then that they listened to the minstrel’s song, told stories of their own feats and adventures, and made proof of their powers in hard drinking. From some of these allusions, which we have quoted in an earlier chapter, it is equally clear, that these drinking-bouts often ended in sanguinary, and not unfrequently in fatal, brawls. Such scenes of discord in the hall occur also in the early French metrical romances, but they take place usually at the beginning of dinner, when the guests are taking their places, or during the meal. In “Parise la Duchesse,” a scene of this description occurs, in which the great feudal barons and knights fight with the provisions which had been served at the tables: “There,” says the poet, “you might see them throw cheeses, and quartern-loaves, and great pieces of flesh, and great steel knives”--