Eleanor could not help seeing, however, that her mother was careful not to appear discontented or melancholy, and to do all that a daughter could do for her husband's stern old mother. Both Sir Stephen Giffard and Sir Walter, Eleanor's father, were away most of the time, and if Lady Philippa had been disposed to make herself unhappy she might have been exceedingly miserable. The old chatelaine did not approve of luxury, even such small luxuries as were almost necessities in that vast pile of stone which was the inheritance of the Norman Giffards. The castle hall was as grim and bare as a guard-room except on state occasions, and the food was hardly better on the master's table than below the salt, where the common folk ate. To be sure, there was plenty to eat, such as it was. The old lord, who had been dead for many years now, had married the daughter of a Saxon earl when he was a young knight in England, and Lady Ebba had been used to plentiful provision in the house of her father. In the autumn, when the other castles in the neighborhood sent forth gay hunting parties, and the deep forest, whose trees had never known the ax since Caesar built his bridges in Gaul, rang to the hunting horns, there was no such merrymaking on the Giffard lands. Instead, the folk were salting down beef and fish and pork--particularly pork, from the herds of swine that roamed the woods feeding on the acorns and beech mast. Toward the end of the winter there seemed to be more pork than anything else on the table. Lady Philippa had ruled her father's house when she was a girl of fourteen, and she could have taught the people a different way of living. She knew how to raise and care for the great variety of poultry, water-fowl, pigeons, hares, fish, and delicate small birds of many kinds, such as some of their neighbors had and the southern provinces of France enjoyed in even greater abundance. But Lady Ebba would have none of it. Fowls had to be carefully tended, protected from foxes, hawks and other enemies; the fierce half-wild hogs could take care of themselves. All that they needed was a peasant herdsman with a dog to keep them together and see that thieving neighbors did not help themselves. There was more food in one hog than in a whole covey of game birds, to say nothing of the trouble of catching and cooking the birds.