The mediæval student took his one meal at ten or eleven in the morning. Soup thickened with oatmeal, baked meat and bread was his diet, varied by unwholesome salt fish in Lent. These viands were served in hall on wooden trenches and washed down by a tankard of college beer. During the meal a chapter of the Bible or of some improving work in Latin was read aloud, and at its conclusion the founder's prayer and a Latin grace would be said. Conversation, it was usually ordained, might only be carried on in Latin; the modern student, on the contrary, is "sconced" (fined a tankard of beer) if he speaks three words of "shop" in hall. After dinner perhaps some disputations or exercises, some repetition and discussion of the morning's lecture would be held in hall, or the students would take the air, walking out two and two, as the founders directed, if they were good; going off singly, or in parties to poach or hawk or spoil for a row, if they were not. Lectures or disputations were resumed about noon. Seated on benches, or more usually and properly, according to the command of Urban V., sitting on the rush-strewn floors of the school-room, the young seekers after knowledge listened to the words of wisdom that flowed from the regent master, who sat above them at a raised desk, dressed in full academical costume. Literally, they sat at the feet of their Gamaliels. In the schools they were enjoined to "sit as quiet as a girl," but they were far from observing this injunction. Old and young were only too ready to quarrel or to play during lectures, to shout and interrupt whilst the master was reading the Sentences of Peter Lombard, and bang the benches with their books to express their approval or disapproval of his comments thereon. Supper came at five, and after that perhaps a visit to the playing fields of Beaumont or a tavern, where wine would be mingled with song, and across the oaken tables would thunder those rousing choruses that students ever love: "Mihi est propositum in taberna mori Vinum sit appositum morientis ori, Ut dicant, quum venerint, angelorum chori, 'Deus sit propitius huic potatori.'" When curfew rang at length, all the students would assemble in hall and have a "drinking" or "collation." Then, before going to bed, they would sing the Antiphon of the Virgin (Salve Regina), and so the day was finished. A dull, monotonous day it seems to us, varied only by sermons--and there was no lack of them--at S. Mary's or S. Peter's in the East, with the chance excitement of hearing a friar recant the unorthodox views he had expressed the previous Sunday; but it was a day that was bright and social compared with the ordinary conditions of the time.