"Part must be kept wherewith to tende The Christmas log next yeare, And where 'tis safely kept, the fiend Can do no mischiefe theere." The boar's head held the principal place of honor at the dinner. So during September and October, when the boar's flesh was at its best, hunters with well-trained packs of boar-hounds set out to track this savage animal. They attacked the boar with spears, or surrounded him and drove him into nets. He was a ferocious antagonist to both dogs and men, and when sore pressed would wheel about, prepared to fight to the death. Before the dogs could grip him by the ear, his one weak point, and pin him down, his sharp teeth would often wound or even kill both the hunter and his dogs. The pluckier the animal the louder the praise sung in his honor when his head was brought into the hall. The great head, properly soused, was borne in on an immense salver by the "old blue-coated serving-man" on Christmas day. He was preceded by the trumpeters and followed by the mummers, and thus in state the boar's head was ushered in and assigned to its place on the table. The father of the family or head of the household laid his hand on the dish containing the "boar of atonement," as it was at one time called, swearing to be faithful to his family and to fulfil all his obligations as a man of honor. This solemn act was performed before the carving by every man present. The carver had to be a man of undaunted courage and untarnished reputation. Next in honor at the feast was the peacock. It was sometimes served as a pie with its head protruding from one side of the crust and its wide-spread tail from the other; more often the bird was skinned, stuffed with herbs and sweet spices, roasted, and then put into its skin again, when with head erect and tail outspread it was borne into the hall by a lady--as was singularly appropriate--and given the second place on the table. The feudal system gave scope for much magnificence at Yule-tide. At a time when several thousand retainers[4] were fed daily at a single castle or on a baron's estate, preparations for the Yule feast--the great feast of the year--were necessarily on a large scale, and the quantity of food reported to have been prepared on such occasions is perfectly appalling to Twentieth-Century feasters. [Footnote 4: The Earl of Warwick had some thirty thousand.] Massinger wrote: "Men may talk of Country Christmasses, Their thirty-pound butter'd eggs, their pies of carp's tongue, Their pheasants drench'd with ambergris, the carcasses Of three fat wethers bruis'd for gravy, to Make sauces for a single peacock; yet their feasts Were fasts, compared with the City's."