[Bryn-gwlad] trenchers and plateware

[Tim McDaniel]

On Mon, 4 Sep 2006, Dora Smith <villandra at austin.rr.com> wrote:
> Since the Romans ate from plates and bowls, why would not the European
> nobility have done so in medieval times?

The early Imperial Romans also ate while reclining on couches, wore
togas, and based their armies on infantry, all of which went out of
style (though infantry as mainstays of the army eventually came back
for a time).  That a group of people did something at a given time
doesn't mean that their successors did.  In the field of names, which
I know something about, I could probably find dozens of Irish names
known only early, but that just lost popularity -- or the 12th Century
explosion of odd names that just went away in the 13th.

It's not even true that if a people did something at time A and time
B, that they did it at all times in between.  The easiest example is
concrete: used extensively in the Roman Empire, lost, rediscovered in
the 19th Century.

DdL
-- 
Tim McDaniel, tmcd at panix.com