Читать книгу The Child's Pictorial History of England. From the Earliest Period to the Present Time онлайн

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22. The houses of the great men were very like large barns, and each house stood on an open space of ground, enclosed by a wall of earth and a ditch, within which there were stacks of corn, sheds for the horses and cattle, and huts for the thralls to sleep in.

23. The principal room was a great hall, strewed with rushes, and furnished with long oak tables and benches.

24. The windows were square holes crossed with thin laths, called lattices, and the fire-place was a stone hearth in the middle of the earthen floor, on which they used to burn great logs of wood, and let the smoke go out at a hole in the door.

25. But the great people often had merry doings in these halls, for they were fond of feasting, and used to sit at the long wooden tables, without table cloths, and eat out of wooden platters or trenchers with their fingers.

26. Boiled meats and fish, usually salted, were put on the table in great wooden dishes, but roast meats were brought in on the spits on which they were cooked, and handed round by the thralls, to the company, who helped themselves with knives which they carried at their girdles.