His Birthplace and its Influences. 23 



gralloched in the forest of Inglewood. Nor 

 do the men-at-arms below the salt fail to 

 pull their knives from their girdles and help 

 themselves with their fingers (there were no 

 forks in those days) to slices from the baron 

 of beef taken from an ox stolen from the 

 Elliots of Liddesdale, or on the braes of 

 Annandale. The high table lacks not for 

 more refined samples of the culinary art ; 

 highly flavoured pastries, poignant ragouts 

 and stews seasoned hotly with spices and 

 coloured with saffron, for our ancestors were 

 bon vivants in their way. Mead and sack, 

 Malmsey and Rhenish, flagons of high-spiced 

 claret cup and ippocrass, wassail and mazer 

 bowl pass freely from hand to hand, and the 

 obsequious cellarer, with his black jack stoup, 

 makes many a trip to the buttery hatch for 

 the nut brown ale to fill up the horns of his 

 thirsty comrades. And all the while the 

 fool in his motley cracks his ribald jokes, and 

 the band of jongleurs or wandering minstrels 

 in the music gallery strum their merriest airs 

 to divert the company, and sing roundelays 

 narrating how the Scots fell at Halidon Hill, 

 or some Border knight won his spurs at 

 Crecy or Poictiers." 



