tranchoirs and subsequently tailloirs, remained long in fashion even at the most splendid banquets.  Thus, in 1336, the Dauphin of Vienna, Humbert II., had, besides the small white bread, four small loaves to serve as tranchoirs at table.  The “Menagier de Paris” mentions “des pains de tranchouers half a foot in diameter, and four fingers deep,” and Froissart the historian also speaks of tailloirs.

It would be difficult to point out the exact period at which leavening bread was adopted in Europe, but we can assert that in the Middle Ages it was anything but general.  Yeast, which, according to Pliny, was already known to the Gauls, was reserved for pastry, and it was only at the end of the sixteenth century that the bakers of Paris used it for bread.

At first the trades of miller and baker were carried on by the same person (Figs. 74 and 75).  The man who undertook the grinding of the grain had ovens near his mill, which he let to his lord to bake bread, when he did not confine his business to persons who sent him their corn to grind.

[Illustration:  Fig. 75.—­The Baker.—­From an Engraving of the Sixteenth Century, by J. Amman.]

At a later period public bakers established themselves, who not only baked the loaves which were brought to them already kneaded, but also made bread which they sold by weight; and this system was in existence until very recently in the provinces.

Charlemagne, in his “Capitulaires” (statutes), fixed the number of bakers in each city according to the population, and St. Louis relieved them, as well as the millers, from taking their turn at the watch, so that they might have no pretext for stopping or neglecting their work, which he considered of public utility.  Nevertheless bakers as a body never became rich or powerful (Figs. 76 and 77).  It is pretty generally believed that the name of boulanger (baker) originated from the fact that the shape of the loaves made at one time was very like that of a round ball.  But loaves varied so much in form, quality, and consequently in name, that in his “Dictionary of Obscure Words” the learned Du Cange specifies at least twenty sorts made during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and amongst them may be mentioned the court loaf, the pope’s loaf, the knight’s loaf, the squire’s loaf, the peer’s loaf, the varlet’s loaf, &c.

[Illustration:  Fig. 76.—­Banner of the Corporation of Bakers of Paris.]

[Illustration:  Fig. 77.—­Banner of the Corporation, of Bakers of Arras.]

The most celebrated bread was the white bread of Chailly or Chilly, a village four leagues (ten miles) south of Paris, which necessarily appeared at all the tables of the elite of the fourteenth century.  The pain mollet, or soft bread made with milk and butter, although much in use before this, only became fashionable on the arrival of Marie de Medicis in France (1600), on account of this Tuscan princess finding it so much to her taste that she would eat no other.