When the cooks were busy in the kitchens, numerous other servants were fully occupied with their own preparations, largely in the rooms beneath and around the Great Hall.
In one small room beneath the screens passage (no. 56), cartloads of manchets and cheat loaves from the bread store in the bakehouse would be unloaded by the pages of the pantry.1 The quality and quantity were then checked by the groom brever, who recorded their number by cutting notches on a split tally-stick, keeping one half for himself, and giving the other to the bakehouse staff. From here the bread was carried up to the pantry on the floor above, where the manchets would be stored in one set of bread bins, and after the pages had used their chipping knives to pare away the tough outer crusts, the cheat loaves into another.2 One page for the King’s mouth pared the cheat loaves from the privy bakehouse and took them with manchets up to the chambers, while the other pantry staff took the ordinary cheat bread into the Great Hall. In order to see that the bread was efficiently and economically served, the yeomen brever and the pages took their meals in the pantry, and the grooms at the tables just inside the Hall. Next morning at eight the brever had to meet the clerk of the kitchens here, and present him with a precise account of how many loaves had been distributed the previous day.
The provision and serving of all the wines, ales and beers was the responsibility of William Abbott, sergeant of the cellar, constable of Cardigan Castle and keeper of the forest of Radnor.3 To carry out his work he had three separate departments, the Cellar itself dealing with wine, the Buttery with ale and beer, and the Pitcher House with jugs, cups and serving. The barrels of wine purchased by the purveyors, or received as gifts, were stored either in the great wine cellar (no. 50), or, if for the King’s use, in the adjacent privy cellar (no. 51), where they were checked and accounted for by the purveyors and set up on their stands, or ‘stillages’.4 Every day the groom grobber checked the barrels, and ensured that none were tapped by the yeoman treyer, unless a clerk comptroller was there to supervise the operation. Using a tarrier, or auger, a hole would be bored, pointing slightly upwards into the vertical end of the barrel, some four fingers’ breadth up from the bottom of the rim, to receive a cannel, or tap. A gimlet was then used to pierce a smaller hole in the top of the barrel, into which a faucet or peg was driven.5 This allowed air to enter as the wine was drawn off by the treyer, before he delivered it to the bar at the cellar door.6
36. The Great Cellar Here, beneath the Great Watching Chamber, ail the wine was kept for the household. A yeoman treyer would tap the casks when needed by boring a hole in the end with his auger and driving in the tap; he would use a gimlet to bore the hole in the top to receive the spile-pin.
The privy cellar was probably used for sweetening and spicing wine to make hippocras, the digestive taken by the King at the end of his meals. For small quantities, the spices were put into a conical filter-bag of felted woollen cloth – its shape supposedly resembled the sleeve of Hippocrates, the celebrated Greek physician. A pint (575ml) of wine was poured into the bag, followed by a pint of sweetened wine – then it was all poured back through the bag until it ran perfectly clear. For larger batches, beaten spices would be mixed in a gallon (4.5 litres) of wine in a pewter basin, and a sample run through the first two filter-bags in a row of six suspended from a bar; then the spicing of the main batch would be corrected as necessary and the whole batch passed through all six filters, after which it was poured into a vessel and sealed down until ready for use.7
The malt liquors served at the palace included ale and beer: ale, the weaker brew, was probably still flavoured with herbs at this time. To ensure that the beer, the stronger, hopped drink, was well brewed, John Pope the King’s beer brewer called upon continental expertise – he was allowed to retain twelve foreigners in his house ‘meet for the said feat of beer brewing’.8 The purveyors tasted the ales and beers at the brewhouse, and supervised the groom versours while they set the barrels on their stillages in the beer cellar (no. 53). From here the liquor was drawn into leather jugs that would then be passed out at the hatches of the privy buttery (no. 57) and the great buttery (no. 58), as called for.
The grooms of the pitcher house would carry the ale and beer from the butteries and the wines from the cellar bars upstairs, where they were served by yeomen of the pitcher house, using cups of the appropriate status issued to them by the sergeant of the cellar.9 Since some of these would have been used to serve the bouche of court the previous evening, the pitcher house staff had to ‘fetch them home’ every morning, and carefully count them to check that none had gone missing and that there were enough for everyone at dinner. They were then washed ready for use, and dried with worn-out linen cloths supplied by the Ewery.
The Ewery was the department that dealt with all the table linen and handwashing equipment. It received its cloth by measure from the Counting House, and its silver or gilt basins and ewers, as well as napkins decorated with these precious metals, from either the Treasurer of the Household or the Jewel House, for use in the chambers and Hall.10
Just to the south of the Lord’s-side kitchen and linked to it by a doorway lay the Scullery Yard (no. 37), the ‘Little Court’ used by the officers of the scullery. Except for the Henrician south wall it was all built by Cardinal Wolsey, probably soon after 1515. The Scullery was essentially the palace’s hardware and tableware department. Its sergeant, clerk and twelve yeomen, grooms and ‘children’ were responsible for the purchase, safekeeping, maintenance and replacement of all the tubs, trays, baskets, flaskets, chests and standards used here, and the brass pots, pans, spits, oven-peels and so forth used by the kitchen staff, which cost an estimated £66 13s 4d each year.11 They also bought in the ‘herbs’ used in the kitchen – this word then including vegetables of all kinds, rather than just the medicinal and flavouring plants we would now call herbs. These cost £40 a year.
Among his various duties, George Stonehouse, the clerk of the scullery at this time, had to record the supply of tableware used in the Hall and chambers.12 Recasting and reworking the pewter vessels used in the Great Hall, incorporating the metal of those that had worn out or broken, reduced the cost of supplying the dishes by about half, but it still came to £40 a year. The pewter scullery (no. 36) was probably located on the west side of the Scullery Yard. From here timber-framed hatches were cut through Wolsey’s brick walls into the hall-place dressers so that the dirty dishes returning from the Great Hall could be efficiently passed inside, all under the watchful eye of the clerks in the dresser office directly opposite.
37. The Scullery Yard Built by Cardinal Wolsey shortly after 1515, this yard lies just to the south of the Lord’s-side kitchen. The pewter scullery is in the building to the left, and the Lord’s-side dresser office in the one to the right.
The silver dishes issued from the Lord’s-side dressers were supplied to the Scullery by the Jewel House. Having been used in the Council and Great Watching Chambers, they may have been returned through the same hatches as the pewter, but this seems unlikely because mixing up cheap pewter with expensive silver would make it very difficult to maintain its security and prevent it being damaged. However, the 1674 lodging survey describes the room at the south-west corner of the Great Space (no. 43) as the Lord Chamberlain’s scullery. Its position in the Great Space, its large dresser hatch and its proximity to the Lord’s-side kitchen dresser hatches would certainly make it most suitable for issuing and receiving the silver dishes as they passed between the kitchens and the chambers.
The dishes would be washed and cleaned in the pewter and silver sculleries, the polishing material most probably being whiting, a soft ground and washed chalk, which was supplied in balls, the Althorpe accounts including payments for ‘12 balls of whiteing to scowre the plate’.13 Made into a paste with a little water, and rubbed on with pieces of worn-out table-linen from the Ewery, it would polish with minimal scratching; the plate would then be rinsed and dried with clean cloths.14