FOR A ROYAL MEAL

Hokitika Guardian, 26 October 1928, Page 7

FOR A ROYAL MEAL

ENTERTAINING THE PRINCE OF WALES.

When the Prince of Wales dined with the Vintners’ Company recently musicians playing “All in a Garden Green” led in a procession of watermen and cooks, which bought four roast cygnets to table. For the Vintners have been patrons of swans for time immemorial, and they eat a swan dinner every year. The swan is, of course, a bird highly connected. Before the days of the Vintners it moved in the best circles with Lohengrin and Jupiter. In England the Grown h.,s been very particular about swans (says the London Daily Telegraph.) Only a substantial freeholder was allowed to keep any. Stealing a swan’s egg. was punished with a year’s imprisonment; stealing a swan itself, setting snares for it, driving it, whether a white swan or grey, was even more severly provided for. The thing went so far that no one could appoint a new swanherd for birds on Thames water without license of the King’s swanherd, and that official kept a firm hand on the varlets. When he called for them they came, or were fined; they must not mark a bird unless he saw them do it; he had a record of all marks, and allowed no new ones except by special favour and license. The reason for all this fuss is not to he found in the divine, romantic, or poetical reputation of the swan. He was a royal bird, not because of his beauty or prowess, or even his rarity, but because he was thought uncommon good toi eat. Most of us, not being Vintners, are without experience in this matter. But when King Henry IV married, cygnets were in the first course at the wedding breakfast. In those days swans had so regular a place at the tables of the great that there was a particular phrase for carving them: “Lyft that swanne.” If we value birds by their prices, a cygnet was much better liked than ducks, wild or domestic, but not as well as a goose.

The Vintners have to do with swans as dwelling from of old on Thames bank, where their hall is to-day. “Bordeaux merchants” were shipping Gascon wine to London 700 or 800 years ago, and “craned the barells out of lighters and landed them,” in the riparian region which came to be called the Vintry. Chaucer’s father traded as a vintner is Upper Thames street. There was an opulent guild five centuries ago. A vintner, Henry Picard, in his year as Mayor of London, had five kings to' dinner, Edward 111, and the sovereigns of Scotland, France (hut he was a prisoner,) Denmark, and Cyprus. Whether lie gave them swans does not record, but after dinner he threw dice with them and won, and his Majesty of Cyprus did not like it at all. The magnificent vi finer gave him his money back: “My Lord and King, be not aggrieved. I court npt your gold, but your play, for I have not bidden you hither that won might grieve.” A guild, the members of which could do things in this style, deserved its share of the royal birds.

Every year for three centuries at the least the “swan uppers” of the Vintners Company have been marking the bills of the cygnets on the Thames, which they share with the Dyers’ Company and the Grown. Two nicks, one each side of the mandible, is the mark of the Vintners, whence, as men say, conies the tavern sign, “ Swan With Two Necks.” Some have guessed that the nicks represent the chevron which, with three tuns, makes the Victners’ arms. Or they may stand for a V. An ancient toast of the guild is “The Worshipful Company of Vintners with Five.” Such was the witty ingenuity of our ancestors.