Page:A History of Domestic Manners and Sentiments in England During the Middle Ages.djvu/41

 and Se?2tments. 21 from a manufcript calendar of the beginning of the eleventh century (MS. Cotton. Julius, A. iv.). The material for feeding the iire is wood, which the man to the left is bringing from a heap, while his companion is adminiftering to the fire with a pair of Saxon tongs {tangan). The vocabularies give tange, tongs, and lyJig, bellows j and they fpeak of col, coal (ex- plained by the Latin carlo), and fynder, a cinder (fcorium). As all thefe are Saxon words, and not 3 . ^ Party at the Fire. derived from the Latin, we may fuppofe that they reprefent things known to the Anglo-Saxon race from an early period; and as charcoal does not produce fcorium, or cinder, it is perhaps not going too far to fuppofe that the Anglo-Saxons were acquainted with the ufe of mineral coal. We know nothing of any other fire utenfils, except that the Anglo-Saxons ufed a fyr-fcoji, or fire-fliovel. The place in which the fire was made was the hearth, or hearth. The furniture of the hall appears to have been very fimple, for it confifted chiefly of benches. Thefe had carpets and cufliions ; the former are often mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon wills. The Anglo-Saxon poems fpeak of the hall as being "adorned with treafures," from which we are perhaps juftified in believing that it was cuftomary to difplay there in fome manner or other the richer and more ornamental of the houfehold vefTels. Perhaps one end of the hall was raifed higher than the reft for the lord of the houfehold, like the dais of later times, as Anglo-Saxon writers fpeak of the heah-fetl, or high feat. The table can hardly be confidered as furniture, in the ordinary fenfe of the word : it was literally, according to its Anglo-Saxon name lord, a board that was brought out for the occafion, and placed upon trelTels, and taken away as foon as the meal was ended. Among the inedited Latin cenigmata, or riddles, of the Anglo-Saxon writer Tahtwin, who flourilhed at the beginning of the eighth century, is one on a talk, which is curious enough to be given here, from the manufcript in the Britifli Mufeum (MS. Reg. 12, C. xxiii.). The