Neville was mnde, in 1466, Archbishop of York, was on an 

 enormous scale, one thousand sheep and two thousand pi^s being 

 but a small item in the accounts. 



The mediaeval cooks were grent in "solteltes" or devices in 

 pastry, gorgeously decorated with gold and siUer foil, but these 

 belong rather to the service of the table, than of the palate, so 

 I merely mention them en passant. 



To this luxurious sciiool of living, political changes dealt heavy 

 blows. The barons exhausted themselves and their resources in 

 the wars of the Roses ; the Reformation knocked on the head the 

 monasteries and their great kitchen establishments : thus it came 

 about that the habit of profuse and luxurious living gradually 

 declined during the i6th and the first half of the 17th century, 

 until it was extinguished in the great convulsions which preceded 

 the interregnum. After the Restoration, we find that the table 

 among all classes was furnished more soberly and with plainer and 

 more substantial dishes, and a new and plainer and bulkier school 

 of cookery came to the front. It is hard to say where it came 

 from. Many assert it was an ui)heaval from below : from the 

 Anglo-Saxon element in the nation, which had retained its original 

 weakness for lumps of meat, though it had grafted thereon the 

 hriw, a distincdy Apician dish. The poorer classes, however, in 

 mediaeval times, seem to have lived mainly on bread, cheese, 

 butter, and vegetables, as proved (among other ways.) by the fact 

 of the names thereof being English, while mutton, veal, pork, and 

 bacon are Norman. The plainer living seems to have been a 

 middle-class upheaval in the i6th and 17th centuries. It had 

 commenced before the days of Queen Elizabeth, but it was 

 Charles II. who knighted the Sirloin of Beef The change was 

 great : a few great lords adhered to the Apician style of cookery, 

 or Old English : French it now began to be called. A traveller 

 from the continent, in 1698, says of England : — 



" There are some gi-eat lords who have French and English cooks, 

 and where you are served much in the French fashion ; but among 

 persons of the middle condition, they have ten or twelve sorts of common 

 meat, which infallibly come round again in their turns at different times. 



