Saxons, was held in proportional derision.

The guests were seated at a table which groaned under the
quantity of good cheer. The numerous cooks who attended on the
Prince's progress, having exerted all their art in varying the
forms in which the ordinary provisions were served up, had
succeeded almost as well as the modern professors of the culinary
art in rendering them perfectly unlike their natural appearance.
Besides these dishes of domestic origin, there were various
delicacies brought from foreign parts, and a quantity of rich
pastry, as well as of the simnel-bread and wastle cakes, which
were only used at the tables of the highest nobility. The
banquet was crowned with the richest wines, both foreign and
domestic.

But, though luxurious, the Norman nobles were not generally
speaking an intemperate race. While indulging themselves in the
pleasures of the table, they aimed at delicacy, but avoided
excess, and were apt to attribute gluttony and drunkenness to the
vanquished Saxons, as vices peculiar to their inferior station.
Prince John, indeed, and those who courted his pleasure by
imitating his foibles, were apt to indulge to excess in the
pleasures of the trencher and the goblet; and indeed it is well
known that his death was occasioned by a surfeit upon peaches and
new ale. His conduct, however, was an exception to the general
manners of his countrymen.

With sly gravity, interrupted only by private signs to each
other, the Norman knights and nobles beheld the ruder demeanour
of Athelstane and Cedric at a banquet, to the form and fashion of