It has been noted that for a great length of time two meals were made to suffice the requirements of all classes. Our own experience shows how immaterial the names are which people from age to age choose to bestow on their feeding intervals. Some call supper dinner, and others call dinner luncheon. First comes the prevailing mode instituted by fashionable society, and then a foolish subscription to it by a section of the community who are too poor to follow it, and too proud not to seem to do so. Formerly it was usual for the Great to dine and sup earlier than the Little; but now the rule is reversed, and the later a man dines the more distinguished he argues himself. We have multiplied our daily seasons of refreshment, and eat and drink far oftener than our ancestors; but the truly genteel Briton never sups; the word is scarcely in his vocabulary — like Beau Brummel and the farthing —“Fellow, I do not know the coin!”

In a glossary of the tenth-eleventh century only two meals are quoted: undermeat = prandium, and even-meat = coena. That is to say, our Saxon precursors were satisfied as a rule with two repasts daily, but to this in more luxurious times were added the supper and even the rear-supper, the latter being, so far as we know, a second course or dessert and the bipartite collation corresponding to the modern late dinner. But it is one of those strange survivals of ancient manners which people practise without any consciousness of the fact, which is at the root of the fashion, which still occasionally prevails, of dividing the chief meal of the day by an interval of repose, and taking the wine and dessert an hour or two after the other courses; and the usage in our colleges and inns of court of retiring to another apartment to “wine” may claim the same origin. It is obvious that the rear-supper was susceptible of becoming the most important and costly part of an entertainment; and that it frequently assumed extravagant proportions, many passages from our early poets might be adduced to prove.

In the “Book of Cookery,” 1500, we have the menu at the installation of Archbishop Nevill in York in 1467; but the bill of fare of a feast given by him in 1452 at Oxford, where he is mentioned as Master Nevill, son of the Earl of Salisbury, is inserted from the Cotton Ms. Titus, in “Reliquiae Antiquae,” 1841. It consisted of three courses, which seem to have been the customary limit. Of course, however, the usage varied, as in the “Song of the Boar’s Head,” of which there are two or three versions, two courses only are specified in what has the air of having been a rather sumptuous entertainment.

The old low-Latin term for the noonday meal was merenda, which suggests the idea of food to be earned before it was enjoyed. So in “Friar Bacon’s Prophesie,” 1604, a poem, it is declared that, in the good old days, he that wrought not, till he sweated, was held unworthy of his meat. This reminds one of Abernethy’s maxim for the preservation of health — to live on sixpence a day, and earn it.

The “Song of the Boar’s Head,” just cited, and printed from the Porkington Ms. in “Reliquiae Antiquae” (ii, 30), refers to larks for ladies to pick as part of the second course in a banquet. On special occasions, in the middle ages, after the dessert, hippocras was served, as they have liqueurs to this day on the Continent both after dinner and after the mid-day breakfast.

The writer of “Piers of Fulham” lived to see this fashion of introducing a third meal, and that again split into two for luxury’s sake; for his metrical biographer tells us, that he refused rear-suppers, from a fear of surfeiting.

I collect that in the time of Henry VIII. the supper was a well-established institution, and that the abuse of postponing it to a too advanced hour had crept in; for the writer of a poem of this period especially counsels his readers not to sup late.

Rear-suppers were not only held in private establishments, but in taverns; and in the early interlude of the “Four Elements,” given in my edition of Dodsley, and originally published about 1519, a very graphic and edifying scene occurs of a party of roisterers ordering and enjoying an entertainment of this kind. About seventy years later, Robert Greene, the playwright, fell a victim to a surfeit of pickled herrings and Rhenish wine, at some merry gathering of his intimates falling under this denomination. Who will venture to deny that the first person who kept unreasonable hours was an author and a poet? Even Shakespeare is not exempt from the suspicion of having hastened his end by indulgence with one or two friends in a gay carouse of this kind.

The author of the “Description of England” enlightens us somewhat on the sort of kitchen which the middle class and yeomanry of his time deemed fit and sufficient. The merchant or private gentleman had usually from one to three dishes on the table when there were no visitors, and from four to six when there was company. What the yeoman’s every-day diet was Harrison does not express; but at Christmas he had brawn, pudding and souse, with mustard; beef, mutton, and pork; shred pies, goose, pig, capon, turkey, veal, cheese, apples, etc., with good drink, and a blazing fire in the hall. The farmer’s bill of fare varied according to the season: in Lent, red herrings and salt fish; at Easter, veal and bacon; at Martinmas, salted beef; at Midsummer, fresh beef, peas, and salad; at Michaelmas, fresh herrings and fat mutton; at All Saints’, pork and peas and fish; and at Christmas, the same dainties as our yeoman, with good cheer and pastime.

The modern luncheon or nuncheon was the archaic prandium, or under-meat, displaced by the breakfast, and modified in its character by the different distribution of the daily repasts, so that, instead of being the earliest regular meal, like the grand déjeuner of the French, or coming, like our luncheon, between breakfast and dinner, it interposed itself between the noontide dinner and the evening supper. Now, with an increasing proportion of the community, the universal luncheon, postponed to a later hour, is the actual dinner; and our under-meal is the afternoon tea.

In those not-wholly-to-be-discommended days, the residue of the meal was consumed in the servants’ hall, and the scraps bestowed on the poor at the gate; and the last part of the business was carried out, not as a matter of chance or caprice, but on as methodical a principle as the payment of a poor-rate. At the servants’ table, besides the waiters and other attendants on the principal board, mentioned by Harrison, sat the master-cook, the pantler, the steward or major-domo, the butler, the cellarman, the waferer, and others. It was not till comparatively recent times that the wafery, a special department of the royal kitchen, where the confectionery and pastry were prepared, was discontinued.

There was necessarily a very large section of the community in all the large towns, especially in London, which was destitute of culinary appliances, and at the same time of any charitable or eleemosynary privileges. A multitude of persons, of both sexes and all ages, gradually developed itself, having no feudal ties, but attached to an endless variety of more or less humble employments.

How did all these men, women, boys, girls, get their daily food? The answer is, in the public eating-houses. Fitzstephen tells us that in the reign of Henry II. (1154-89), besides the wine-vaults and the shops which sold liquors, there was on the banks of the river a public eating-house or cook’s-shop, where, according to the time of year, you could get every kind of victuals, roasted, boiled, baked, or fried; and even, says he, if a friend should arrive at a citizen’s house, and not care to wait, they go to the shop, where there were viands always kept ready to suit every purse and palate, even including venison, sturgeon, and Guinea-fowls. For all classes frequented the City; and before Bardolph’s day noblemen and gentlemen came to Smithfield to buy their horses, as they did to the waterside near the Tower to embark for a voyage.

One of the characters in the “Canterbury Tales”— the Cook of London — was, in fact the keeper of a cook’s-shop; and in the Prologue to the Tale, with which his name is associated, the charming story of “Gamelin,” the poet makes the Reeve charge h............