Thou art a carle of mean degree,
Ye salt doth stand twain me and thee.
The following passage from Smyth’s “Lives of the Berkeleys” refers to
Lord Henry Berkeley, who dwelt in Caludon Castle, near Coventry, in
Warwickshire, in the latter part of the sixteenth century, and may serve
to illustrate the importance of the central salt-cellar as a boundary:—
At Christmas and other festivals when his neighbors were
feasted in his hall, he would, in the midst of their dinner,
rise from his own, and going to each of their tables,
cheerfully bid them welcome; and when guests of honor and high
rank filled his own table, he seated himself at the lower
end; and when such guests filled but half his board and those
of meaner degree the other half, he would take his own seat
between them in the midst of his long table _near the salt_,
which gracious considerate acts did much to gain the love that
his people had for him.
And in commenting on this passage a recent writer remarks that his
haughty wife, Lady Katherine, high-born and beautiful and clever though
she was, could hardly be imagined as sitting “below the salt,” out of
consideration for the feelings of an inferior.[343]
In the houses of well-to-do farmers among the Scottish peasantry in the
latter part of the eighteenth century, a linen cloth was sometimes spread
over the upper portion of the dinner-table, where sat the farmer and the
members of his family. Quite commonly, however, a chalk-line divided this
end of the board from the lower portion where the hired laborers were
seated; and in the more pretentious households the salt-dish served as a
boundary.[344]
In “Nares’ Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 763, under the heading “Above or Below
the Salt,” the writer comments on the invidious distinctions formerly
made between guests seated at the same table, and quotes as follows from
Ben Jonson’s “Cynthia’s Revels” in reference to a conceited fop:—
His fashion is not to take knowledge of him that is beneath him
in clothes; he never drinks below the Salt.
The Innholders Company still adheres to the custom of indicating rank and
social position at table by means of a handsome salt-cellar of the time
of James I., to which is assigned the responsible function of dividing
the Court from the Livery at the Livery dinners; the latter occupying the
seats corresponding to those of the retainers in the old-time baron’s
hall.[345]
Among the Puritans in New England “the salt-cellar was the focus of the
old-time board.” Our ancestors brought with them from beyond the sea, not
only the ideas regarding table etiquette prevalent in the old country,
but also such tangible vanities as silver plate. Miss Alice Morse Earle,
in her book on the “Customs and Fashions of Old New England,” says that
the “standing salt” was often the handsomest article of table furniture,
and mentions among the belongings of Comfort Starr, of Boston, in 1659, a
“greate silver-gilt double salt-cellar.” Early in the eighteenth century
these ponderous silver vessels were superseded by the little “trencher
salts,” of various patterns, which are still in use.