If we compare these clerical inventories with those of contemporary laymen of the same degree, we shall find that a country parson's house was furnished like a small manor house, and that his domestic economy was very like that of the gentry of a like income. Matthew Paris tells us an anecdote of a certain handsome clerk, the rector of a rich church, who surpassed all the knights living around him in giving repeated entertainments and acts of hospitality.[315] But usually it was a rude kind of life which the country squire or parson led, very like that which was led by the substantial farmers of a few generations ago, when it was the fashion for the unmarried farm labourers to live in the farm-house, and for the farmer and his household all to sit down to meals together. These were their hours:-- "Rise at five, dine at nine, Sup at five, and bed at nine, Will make a man live to ninety-and-nine." The master of the house sat in the sole arm-chair, in the middle of the high table on the dais, with his family on either side of him; and his men sat at the movable tables of boards and trestles, with a bench on each side, which we find mentioned in the inventories: or the master sat at the same table with his men, only he sat above the salt and they below; he drank his ale out of a silver cup while they drank it out of horn; he ate white bread while they ate brown, and he a capon out of his curtilage while they had pork or mutton ham; he retired to his great chamber when he desired privacy, which was not often perhaps; and he slept in a tester bed in the great chamber, while they slept on truckle beds in the hall.