a vent in noise and practical jokes when the ordinary restraint was removed.  The uproarious joy was a sort of defiance of the semi-slavery to which workmen were doomed; for when they could be impressed by the king’s architect and paid whatever he chose to give them, there could not have been much real contentment, which is generally placid and calm.  There is one thing in which all classes delighted in the fourteenth century, and that was a garden, in which flowers bloomed,—­things of beauty which were as highly valued as the useful.  Moreover, there was a zest in rural sports now seldom seen, especially among the upper classes who could afford to hunt and fish.  There was no excitement more delightful to gentlemen and ladies than that of hawking, and it infinitely surpassed in interest any rural sport whatever in our day, under any circumstances.  Hawks trained to do the work of fowling-pieces were therefore greater pets than any dogs that now are the company of sportsmen.  A lady without a falcon on her wrist, when mounted on her richly caparisoned steed for a morning’s sport, was very rare indeed.

An instructive feature of the “Canterbury Tales” is the view which Chaucer gives us of the food and houses and dresses of the people.  “In the Nonne’s Prestes’ Tale we see the cottage and manner of life of a poor widow.”  She has three daughters, three pigs, three oxen, and a sheep.  Her house had only two rooms,—­an eating-room, which also served for a kitchen and sitting-room, and a bower or bedchamber,—­both without a chimney, with holes pierced to let in the light.  The table was a board put upon trestles, to be removed when the meal of black bread and milk, and perchance an egg with bacon, was over.  The three slept without sheets or blankets on a rude bed, covered only with their ordinary day-clothes.  Their kitchen utensils were a brass pot or two for boiling, a few wooden platters, an iron candlestick, and a knife or two; while the furniture was composed of two or three chairs and stools, with a frame in the wall, with shelves, for clothes and utensils.  The manciple and the cook of the company seem to indicate that living among the well-to-do classes was a very generous and a very serious part of life, on which a high estimate was placed, since food in any variety, though plentiful at times, was not always to be had, and therefore precarious.  “Guests at table were paired, and ate, every pair, out of the same plate or off the same trencher.”  But the bill of fare at a franklin’s feast would be deemed anything but poor, even in our times,—­“bacon and pea-soup, oysters, fish, stewed beef, chickens, capons, roast goose, pig, veal, lamb, kid, pigeon, with custard, apples and pears, cheese and spiced cakes.”  All these with abundance of wine and ale.