A further touch of grossness was secured by the custom of all hands eating with their hats on, perhaps in winter because of the cold (the floor of the hall was paved with stone[1]). This custom is mentioned with surprise by a visitor from Yale[2] as late as 1784. The final appetizing flavor was wafted in from a vast pigstye, which stood close behind the hall, and in which a score of squealing porkers fought with enormously bloated rats for the tid-bits of the college swill.[3]
Fortunately the English scheme, which was at first so carefully followed, did not compel all meals to be partaken of under these depressing circumstances. Since the hall, as already noted, was much in requisition both as chapel and as lecture-room, the only formal meal served there was the noon dinner. This every student must attend. Breakfast he was expected to eat in his “chamber,” after obtaining the ingredients at the buttery-hatch. Supper seems to have been a rather nebulous meal, a sort of alimentary afterthought. Being of extreme simplicity, it was originally taken in hall, connected with the much more important ceremony of
- ↑ The last relic of this type of flooring is probably to be seen in the much-worn hexagonal tiles still in the entries of University Hall, where Commons were located from 1816 to 1849.
- ↑ Simeon Baldwin, one of the tutors there. But when he dined with President Willard, he found the table “very elegantly furnished with a rich variety.” Cambridge Hist. Soc. Proceedings, xi, 68.
- ↑ Peabody, Harvard Reminiscences, 199.
