This eBook was produced by Tapio Riikonen
and David Widger, widger@cecomet.net 

BOOK II. 

LANFRANC THE SCHOLAR. 

CHAPTER I. 

Four meals a day, nor those sparing, were not deemed too extravagant
an interpretation of the daily bread for which the Saxon prayed.  Four
meals a day, from earl to ceorl! "Happy times!" may sigh the
descendant of the last, if he read these pages; partly so they were
for the ceorl, but not in all things, for never sweet is the food, and
never gladdening is the drink, of servitude.  Inebriety, the vice of
the warlike nations of the North, had not, perhaps, been the pre-
eminent excess of the earlier Saxons, while yet the active and fiery
Britons, and the subsequent petty wars between the kings of the