The Art in Middle Ages

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SOME OF THE CHAPTERS ARE:-

1. FURNITURE: HOUSEHOLD AND ECCLESIASTICAL

2. TAPESTRY

3. CERAMIC ART

More plain, but also more useful, were the abace and the crédence, other kinds of sideboards which generally stood at a little distance from the table; on one of these were placed the dishes and plates for removes, on the other the goblets, glasses, and cups. It may be added that the crédence, before it was introduced in the dining-halls, had from very remote times been used in churches, where it was placed near the altar to receive the sacred vessels during the sacrifice of mass.

Posidonius, the Stoic philosopher, who wrote about a hundred years before the Christian era, tells us that, at the feasts of the Gauls, a slave used to bring to table an earthenware, or a silver, jug filled with wine, from which every guest quaffed in turn, and allayed his thirst. We thus see the practice of using goblets of silver, as well as of earthenware, established among the Gauls at a period we consider primitive. In truth, those vessels of silver were probably not the productions of local industry, but the spoil which those martial tribes had acquired in their wars against more civilised nations. With regard to the vases of baked clay, the majority of those frequently exhumed from burial-grounds prove how coarse they were, though they seem to have been made with the help of the potter’s wheel, as among the Romans. However that may be, we think it best to omit the consideration of the question in this place, and to resume it in the chapter on the Ceramic Art. But we must not forget to notice the custom which prevailed among the earliest inhabitants of our country, of offering to those most renowned for their valour beverages in a horn of the urus, which was either gilt or ornamented with bands of gold or silver. The urus was a species of ox, now extinct, that existed in a wild state in the forests with which Gaul was then partly covered. This horn goblet long continued to be the emblem of the highest warlike dignity among the nations who succeeded the Gauls. William of Poitiers relates, in his “Histoire de Guillaume le Conquérant,” that towards the end of the eleventh century, this Duke of Normandy still drank out of the horn of a bull, when he held his full court at Fécamp.

Our ancient kings, whose tables were made of the most precious metals, failed not also to display rare magnificence in the plate that stood on those superb tables. Chroniclers relate, for example, that Chilperic, “on the pretext of doing honour to the people whom he governed, had a dish made of solid gold, ornamented all over with precious stones, and weighing fifty pounds;” and again, that Lothaire one day distributed among his soldiers the fragments of an enormous silver basin, on which was designed “the world, with the courses of the stars and the planets.”