Food and Feast in Tudor England by Alison Sim

Author:Alison Sim
Format: epub
Publisher: History Press (Perseus)
Published: 2013-07-10T16:00:00+00:00

SEVEN

TABLEWARE

If you had been invited to dinner in the sixteenth century your host’s tableware would have told you far more about him than it would today. More importantly from your point of view, the specific tableware that you were given would have told you how far up, or indeed far down, the social ladder he thought you were.

By the sixteenth century it was no longer usual for a large household to dine all together in the hall. As early as the fourteenth century William Langland was complaining in Vision of Piers Plowman that lords were no longer dining with their households, and this trend obviously continued. At Henry VIII’s Court everyone was supposed to eat in hall when the Court was staying at the larger palaces. This habit was known as ‘keeping hall’. It was done for the practical reason of making the serving of food so much easier, but Henry VIII’s Household Ordinances note that ‘sundry noblemen, gentlemen and others, doe much delight and use to dyne in corners and secret places, not repairing to the King’s Chamber nor hall, nor to the head officers of the household when the hall is not kept’.1 This change in dining habits naturally affected table manners and the serving of food. However, for a large-scale feast it was still the custom for the host to put on the most impressive display possible. In this case there were certain things to look out for.

The first thing to note would be your host’s buffet. A buffet was a cross between a sideboard and a Welsh dresser, and was also sometimes called a cupboard. It was partially functional and partly for display. It provided storage for certain items that would be in use during the meal, such as the ewers and basins in which the guests would wash their hands. Its other use was to display the host’s plate. As mentioned in chapter one, plate was a very powerful status symbol in the sixteenth century. Wealthy families invested huge sums in it, so obviously they wanted to show it off. The idea was to have enough plate to serve your guests at a meal and to have a separate display sitting on your buffet.

On very grand occasions an especially powerful host might make the point that he had so much plate that he did not need to use his buffet at all. This is how George Cavendish, a courtier at Henry VIII’s Court, described the buffet at Cardinal Wolsey’s Hampton Court at a feast in 1527:

There was a cupboard made for the occasion, in length of the breadth of the lower end of the same chamber, six shelves high, full of gilt plate, very sumptuous and of the newest fashions and upon the lowest shelf, garnished all with plate of clean gold, were two great candlesticks of silver and gilt, most curiously wrought (the workmanship whereof, with the silver, cost three hundred marks)2 and lights of wax as big as torches burning upon the same.

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