house, and the mead and idromel likewise, were brought from Norfolk and other neighbouring countries; but the abbat, and the officials, and the cloister monks drank better wine than apple-wine, better drink than mead or than pigment, for they drank of the juice of the generous vine, which Noah planted on the first dry hill-side he found. The monks of Glastonbury and Waltham, and of many other houses of the first reputation, cultivated the grape on their own soil, where it seldom would ripen, and drank English grape-wine much too sour and poor. Not so our lordly monks of Ely! They sent the shipmen of Lynn to the Elbe, and to the Rhine, and to the Mosel, to bring them more generous drink; and they sent them to the south even so far as Gasconie and Espaing for the ruby wine expressed from the grapes which grow in the sunniest clime. In the good times four keels, two from the German Ocean and two from the Gulf of Biscaye, steered every year through the sand-banks of the Wash to Lynn,[80] and from Lynn up the Ouse even unto Ely, where the tuns were landed and deposited in the cellars of the abbey, under the charge of the sub-cellarer, a lay-brother from foreign parts, who had been a vintner in his youth. And in this wise it came to be a passant saying with men who would describe anything that was super-excellent—“It is as good as the wine of the monks of Ely!” Maugre the cellarer’s calculation of quantities, the best wine my Lord Abbat had in hand was liberally circulated at the feast in silver cups and in gold-mounted horns. Thus were the drinks equal to the viands, as well in quantity as in quality; and if great was the skill of the vintner, great also was the skill of the cook. In other houses of religion, and in houses, too, of no mean fame, the monks had often to lament that their coquinarius fed them over long on the same sort of dishes; but it was not so with our monks of Ely, who possessed a cook that had the art of giving variety to the selfsame viands, and who also possessed lands, woods, and waters that furnished the most varied materials for the cook to try his skill upon. As Father Adhelm finished his last slice of porpoise,[81] curiously condimented with Eastern spices, as fragrant to the nose as they were savoury to the palate, he lifted up his eyes towards the painted ceiling, and said, “I did not hope, after the death of Oswald our cook at Spalding, to eat of so perfect a dish on this side the grave!”