[Sca-cooks] pantler knife/chaffer knife

[Johnna Holloway]

I am still catching up on e-mails and haven't done much more with this
subject.
I did check and for what it is worth  Cosman does include chaffer
in her volume titled Medieval Wordbook (Facts on File, 1996).
There she says:
chaffer
A knife for cutting large bread loaves; in a PANTRY, it was generally 
wielded
in association with a parer and TRENCHER knife for smoothing edges of
edible bread platters.

pantry
A room, closet, or cabinet for storing bread and creating TRENCHERS.

trenchers is a long definition that goes into what is served upon the bread.

No sources listed as to where she got this exact definition. She 
mentions only
a few sources in the  acknowledgements, but somehow looking in Anglo-Indian
coolquial words, Black' Law Dictionary, or the others mentioned seems 
unlikely
to aid us in this question regarding "chaffers."

Johnnae


>>>
>>> Is there any known source for the terms "chaffer" or "mensal knife" 
>>> other than Fabulous Feasts and copies therefrom?
>>>
>>> If not, then we have two possibilities: those terms appear only in 
>>> some obscure primary source that Cosman read thirty years ago but 
>>> nobody since has checked into, or those terms appear only in 
>>> Cosman's imagination. snipped  Fortunately, Cosman does give a list 
>>> of primary sources she checked; unfortunately, there are hundreds of 
>>> them, the citations aren't tied to any particular chapter of the 
>>> book, and many of them are (or were) in obscure collections.
>>>
>>> -- 
>>>                                     John Elys
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