Page:Leechdoms wortcunning and starcraft of early England volume 2.djvu/21

Rh food, chickens, giblets, pigs trotters, eggs, broth, various preparations of milk, some of the nature of junkets.

From some of their drawings, their cookery of meat seems to have been more Homeric than Roman or modern English, for we see portions of meat brought up on small spits, all hot, to the table. All food that required it was sweetened with honey, before men had betaken themselves to sugar. For fruits, we know they had sweet apples, which are not indigenous to England, pears, peaches, medlars, plums, and cherries.

Saxons, thus well provided with eatables, could satisfy thirst with not a few good and savoury drinks; with beer, with strong beer, with ale, with strong ale, with clear ale, with foreign ale, and with what they called twybrowen, that is, double brewed ale, a luxury, now rare, and rare too then probably. These ales and beers were, of course, to deserve the name, and as we learn from many passages of the present publication, made of malt, and some of them, not all probably, were hopped. I have sufficiently, in the Glossary, established that the hop plant and its use were known to the Saxons, and that they called it by a name, after which I have inquired in vain among hop growers and hop pickers in Worcestershire and Kent, the Hymele. The hop grows wild in our hedges, male and female, and the Saxons in this state called it the hedge hymele; a good valid presumption that they knew it in its fertility. Three of the Saxon legal deeds