Joan, having switched to another big earthenware pot which she held in one hand, brought a wooden bowl and a spoon to Grandpa Miller with the other, and filled the bowl with bits of the calf’s liver and breadcrumbs and gravy. Marion stirred it up for him, and with a trembling hand and spilling bits into his beard, he concentrated greedily with many sucking noises, on his great meal of the year.

Marion picked up her portion of hot veal, and gnawed at it, juicy, greasy, rich and satisfying. The pot of ale came her way and she held it to her father’s lips and he gulped a lot though how much he actually swallowed she did not know. Then she took a long drink herself of the refreshing, sustaining enlivening stuff. She gave Alice a drink too, and fed her with bits of meat and bread from her own trencher. She looked down the length of the table to where Peterkin was sitting with some of the Fletcher boys – all silent, all serious, all holding long veal ribs to their mouths, the candlelight glistening on their smooth greasy cheeks and in their solemn eyes. Eating such food was an important matter.

The pots of ale went round again and needed more frequent refilling at the bucket. Fresh slices of bread were brought by Joan, and more pieces of meat – though in less neat slices than before – were offered, dangling from the point of Tom’s knife. The warmth penetrated, the hot meat satisfied, the ale loosened tongues. Talk increased. The Rockwells’ loud voices from the other side of the Hall dominated, and one of them spoke of some shortage of corn. Marion saw her father pick up the phrase, but not the context, and he raised his head.

‘Short of corn?’ he echoed, the familiar words overcoming his usual deafness. ‘Shortage of corn? You young men don’t know what shortage is.’ A child giggled at hearing his father addressed as ‘young’, and so drew the old man’s attention to him. ‘Yes, you too – given everything you could want from the time you left your mother’s breast. Bread, every day, all ground by my hands at the Mill.’ Marion, to her amazement, saw that her father was standing up so as to get a better view of his audience. ‘And good fat bacon all though the winter. Rabbit,’ he threw out the word as if it were a curse, ‘and not a month goes by from September to Christmas and beyond that there is not a feast of one sort at which you stuff yourselves at Sir Hugh’s generosity. You boys don’t know what it is to go hungry – ’

‘We do,’ interrupted a husky breaking voice. Seemingly the speaker realized he would never have a better opportunity for public speaking. ‘We feels hungry every day, us boys all do. It’s only because you sit still all day and do nothing that you don’t feel hungry.’ The old man did not seem to hear and went rambling on, and the boy’s concluding remark, ‘And you haven’t any teeth to eat with if you were hungry,’ brought laughter from his companions.