Alexander Neckam, in his Dictionarius (written in the latter part of the twelfth century), begins with the kitchen, as though he considered it as the most important part of a mansion, and describes its furniture rather minutely. There is good reason, however, for believing that the cooking was very commonly performed in the court of the house in the open air and perhaps it was intended to be represented so in the scene given above from the Bayeux tapestry. The cooks are there delivering the food through a door into the hall. The Norman dinner-table, as shown in the Bayeux tapestry, differs not much from that of the Anglo-Saxons. A few dishes and basins contain viands which are not easy to be recognised, except the fish and the fowls. Most of the smaller articles seem to have been given by the cooks into the hands of the guests from the spits on which they had been roasted. Another dinner scene is represented in our cut No. 59, taken from the Cottonian manuscript already mentioned (Nero, C. iv.). We see again similarly formed vessels to those used at table by the Anglo-Saxons. The bread is still made in round flat cakes, and is marked with a cross, and with a flower in the middle. The guests use no forks; their knives are different and more varied in their forms than under the Anglo-Saxons. Sometimes, indeed, the shape of the knives is almost grotesque. The one represented below, in our cut No. 60, is taken from a group in the same manuscript which furnished the preceding cut; it is very singularly notched at the point. [Illustration: _No. 59. An Anglo-Saxon Dinner Party._] [Illustration: _No. 60. A Knife._] We see in these dinner scenes that the Anglo-Normans used horns and cups for drinking, as the Anglo-Saxons did; but the use of the horn is becoming rare, and the bowl-shaped vessels appear to have been now the usual drinking cup. Among the wealthy these cups seem to have been made of glass. Reginald of Durham describes one of the monks as bringing water for a sick man to drink in a glass cup (_vase vitreo_), which was accidentally broken. In a splendidly illuminated manuscript of the Psalms, of the earlier half of the twelfth century, written by Eadwine, one of the monks of Canterbury, and which will afford much illustration for this period,[18] we find a figure of a servant giving to drink, who holds one of the same description of drinking cups which were so popular at an earlier period among the Anglo-Saxons (see our cut No. 61). He holds in the left hand the jug, which had now become the usual vessel for carrying the liquor in any quantity. In our cut No. 62, furnished by the same manuscript as the preceding, the servant is taking the jug of liquor from the barrel. Our next cut, No. 63, also taken from the Cambridge MS., represents several forms of vessels for the table. Some of these are new to us; and they are on the whole more elegant than most of the forms we meet with in common pictures. [Illustration: _No. 61. A Cup-bearer._]