222 The Animal-Lore of Shalcspeare’s Time. 
An attempt was apparently made to utilize these 
feathers in archery. Roger Ascham, in his Toxophilus 
(p. 152), 1551, writes :— 
“ Truly, at a short butt, which some men doth use, the peacock 
feather doth seldom keep up the shaft either right or level, it is so 
rough and heavy; so that many men, which have taken them up for 
gayness, have laid them down again for profit: thus, for our purpose, 
the goose is the best feather for the best shooter.” 
The peacock, probably more on account of the orna¬ 
ment which its gorgeous plumage added to the banquet 
than from any tenderness of its flesh, was a standard dish 
on every great occasion. This royal bird was usually 
“eten with gynger,” and was served up amidst con¬ 
siderable pomp and ceremony. If we may trust the poet, 
the city feasts of this period were sometimes the occasion 
of lavish expenditure. Thus Massinger writes :■— 
f‘ Men may talk of country-Christmasses, and court-gluttony, 
Their thirty-pound butter’d eggs, their pies of carp’s tongues. 
Their pheasants, drench’d with ambergris, the carcasses 
Of three fat wethers bruised for gravy, to 
Make sauce for a single peacock; yet their feasts 
Were fasts, compared with the city’s.” 
(The City Madam , ii. 1.) 
Montaigne refers to the extravagant luxury of these 
banquets : — 
“ I could have been glad, the better to judge of it, to have tasted 
the culinary art of those cooks, who had so rare a way of seasoning 
exotick odours with the relish of meats; as it was particularly observed 
in the service of the King of Tunis, who in our days landed at Naples, 
to have an interview with Charles the Emperour,where his dishes were 
forc’d with odoriferous drugs, to that degree of expence, that the cookery 
of one peacock and two pheasants amounted to a hundred ducats, to 
dress them after their fashion. And when the carver came to break 
them up, not only the dining-room, but all apartments of his palace 
and the adjoining streets were fill’d with an aromatick vapour, which 
did not presently vanish.” (Essay xlii.) 
The custom frequently adopted by knights, of taking 
