24 THE OYSTER. 



CHAPTEU III. 



MODERN HISTORY OF THE OYSTER. 



Fall of the Rutupian Supremacy ; Louis IV. and William of Nor- 

 mandy ; Conquest of England, and Revival of Oyster-eating 

 in England ; The Oyster under Legal Protection ; American 

 Oysters. 



WITH the fall of the Empire came also the fall of the 

 Rutupian supremacy ; and even the Eoman Bri- 

 tons, driven into Brittany and the mountains of Wales 

 by their truculent Saxon persecutors, had to forego 

 these luxuries of the table, unless, perhaps, Prince 

 Arthur and his knights may now and then have opened 

 a bushel when they were seated over their wine in that 

 free and easy circle, which has become so celebrated as 

 to have formed a literature of its own. From the fourth 

 century, to which Macrobius brought us, to the reign of 

 Louis IV. of France, the history of the oyster is a blank ; 

 but that king revived the taste for our favourite, and 

 during his captivity in jS'ormandy brought it again into 

 request with his conqueror, Duke "William; so, when 

 the Normans invaded England under William the Con- 

 queror — the descendant of that Duke William, little 

 more than a century later — they were not long in find- 

 ing out how much Kentish and Essex oysters were 

 preferable to those of France. 



Since then the Oyster has held its own against aU 



