“There is a kind of swish swash made also in Essex, and diverse other places, with honicombs and water, which the homelie countrie wives, putting some pepper and a little other spice among, call mead, verie good in mine opinion for such as love to be loose bodied at large, or a little eased of the cough, otherwise it differeth so much from the true metheglin, as chalke from cheese. Truelie it is nothing else but the washing of the combes, when the honie is wroong out, and one of the best things that I know belonging thereto is, that they spend but little labour and lesse cost in making of the same, and therefore no great losse if it were never occupied.” (Holinshed, vol. i. p. 170.) An oyster feast in the morning seems unusual and unexpected in a town of working men. We may read, however, how, on 30th July 1557, a company of citizens met in the cellar of Master Smyth and Master Gytton in Amber Lane, at eight o’clock in the morning. They devoured between them half a bushel of oysters, sitting upon hogsheads by candlelight; the oysters were accompanied by onions—was there no bread, or bread-and-butter? Only onions? And they drank with their oysters and onions copious bowls of red ale, claret, muscadel, and malmsey. It hardly seems a good beginning of the day so far as concerns work. In these degenerate days a repast of oysters and onions, with ale and muscadel, claret and malmsey, would prove a fatal feast indeed. [Illustration: _Walker & Cockerell._ MARRIAGE FEAST OF SIR H. UNTON A detail from a painting in the National Portrait Gallery, London.] Here is a note on an Elizabethan ordinary:— “It seemed that all who came thither had clocks in their bellies, for they all strucke into the dyning-roome much at aboute the very minute of feeding. Our traveller had all the eyes (that came in) throwne upon him (as being a stranger), and he as much tooke especiall notice of them. In obseruing of whom and of the place, he found that an ordinary was the onely Rendeuouz for the most ingenious, most terse, most trauaild and most phantastick gallant: the very Exchange for newes out of all countries; the only booke-sellers’ shop for conference of the best editions, that if a woman (to be a Lady) would cast away herselfe upon a knight, there a man should heare a catalogue of most of the richest London widowes; and last that it was a schoole where they were all fellowes of one forme, and that a country gentleman was of as great comming as the proudest justice that sat there on the bench aboue him; for hee that had the graine of the table with his bencher payd no more then he that placed himselfe beneath the salt.