A trencher (from Old French tranchier; "to cut") is a type of tableware, commonly used in medieval cuisine. A trencher was originally a piece of stale bread, cut into a square shape by a carver, and used as a plate, upon which the food could be placed before being eaten.[1] At the end of the meal, the trencher could be eaten with sauce, but was more frequently given as alms to the poor. Later the trencher evolved into a small plate of metal or wood. People used this utensil to eat the many stews and porridges that made up their daily diet.
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An individual salt dish or squat open salt cellar placed near a trencher was called a trencher salt (see photograph above).
A "trencherman" is one devoted to eating and drinking, often to excess; one with a hearty appetite. A secondary use, generally archaic, is one who frequents another's table, in essence a pilferer of another's food.
A "trencher-fed pack" is a pack of foxhounds or harriers in which the hounds are kept individually by hunt members and only assembled as a pack to hunt. Usually, a pack of hounds are maintained together as a pack in kennels.[2]
In Virgil's Aeneid, trenchers are the object of a prophecy. In bk.3, Aeneas recounts to Dido how after a battle between the Trojans and the Harpies, Calaeno, chief of the Furies, prophesied to him (claiming to have the knowledge from Apollo) that he would finally arrive in Italy, but
Never shall you build your promised city
Until the injury you did us by this slaughter
Has brought you to a hunger so cruel
That you gnaw your very tables.[3]
The prophecy is fulfilled in bk.7, when the Trojans eat the trenchers after a frugal feast. Aeneas' son Ascanius jokes that they are so hungry they have eaten the tables, at which point Aeneas realises that the prophecy has been fulfilled. However, he reattributes the prophecy to his deceased father, Anchises:
I now can tell you, my father Anchises
Revealed these secrets to me for he said:
"When you have sailed, son, to an unknown shore
And, short of food, are driven to eat your tables,
Then, weary though you are, hope you are home[4]
This episode is alluded to in Allen Tate's poem, "The Mediterranean", although Tate calls them "plates".