On thousands of tables at Christmas-tide the roast beef of Old England smokes with appetising odour. From the lordly baron which always graces the Queen's table, and the goodly sirloin of aristocratic renown, to the humble but far from despicable aitch-bone, all is toothsome, wholesome, and highly esteemed alike by high and low, rich and poor. The wretched inmates of gaol and workhouse look forward to the feast of roast beef and plum-pudding, which is almost sure to be given by the charitable for their delectation at Christmas, and in almost every parish the same substantial fare is provided for the poorer parishioners. At the tables of the rich, it is true, the time-honoured sirloin is now relegated to a subordinate position, its place being usurped by the turkey, which has superseded also the stately peacock, formerly at this season, adorned with all its feathers, introduced with something approaching to religious ceremony, as was also the great boar's head, with its chaplet of rosemary and a lemon between the teeth; but then, as now, the loin of beef, knighted in due form by Charles II., was always the piece de resistance, and from time immemorial the double loin, known as the baron, has always been a royal dish, and one specially selected is always sent from Windsor to Osborne to grace the Queen's dinner table, being accompanied by that other famous Christmas dish, a boar's head, sent of late from Germany.

In olden times great rejoicings were generally accompanied by an ox roasted whole, huge fires and monster spits being required for the purpose; and once history relates that an ox was thus roasted whole on the Thames. This was during the great frost in 1715-16, when the river was frozen over for several weeks. This somewhat barbarous mode of rejoicing is now almost obsolete, yet during the severe frost of the winter of 1890, in which the Thames was again frozen over in places, we heard of sheep being roasted whole on the river at Christmas; but in these days of refinement people in general prefer having their portion of meat to cook in their own way, instead of each slicing a half-cooked morsel from a burning carcase.

The practice of cutting meat from the spit seems to have been common before the invention of forks, and many old Saxon drawings show the cooks, or servers, kneeling by the king's table, holding spits from which the monarch cuts a portion with a huge knife; nor must the cook's useful drudge be forgotten, who, as late as 1800, when smoke-jacks came into fashion, had the chief share in roasting the meat in large establishments - we mean the 'turnspit,' a bandy-legged dog, somewhat resembling the modern dachshund - who was set to turn the spit by means of a wheel, somewhat after the fashion of a squirrel in a cage, and was probably beaten and sorely worried by the cooks whenever the jack stopped. There are many stories told of these useful dogs, who knew their proper turn, and would not be persuaded to work out of it; and if one of their companions got out of the way when it was his day for turning the spit, the one unjustly set to work has been known to find the truant and kill him. The poor turnspits must have hated Christmas, with its huge joints of roast beef, its peacocks and game, all entailing hard work upon the poor kitchen drudges.*

Beef was known and appreciated from the very earliest times, the wild cattle having been hunted and slaughtered long before they were domesticated, and the skulls of many, of a species now extinct, are found all broken in the same way, evidently by a blow with a very heavy stone hammer. But as soon as men began to keep flocks and herds and to till the ground, the ox became doubly valuable, not only as a food but as a beast of burden, and it is continually alluded to by the most ancient writers in this capacity, whilst the earliest of paintings represent the patient kine dragging the plough or wheeled cart, yoked together even as in the present day by a heavy piece of wood bound over the necks of both. The humane laws of Moses forbade the muzzling of the ' ox that treadeth out the corn,' and in several passages of the Bible the yokes of oxen are spoken of. Elisha was ploughing with twelve yoke of oxen when Elijah cast his mantle upon him, and it seems to have been a common act of worship in those days to slay a yoke of oxen and burn them with the implements in use, as a sacrifice of thanksgiving or propitiation. 'Behold,' said Araunah the Jebusite to David, 'here be oxen for burnt sacrifice, and threshing instruments and other instruments of the oxen for wood.' Nor was it only among the Jews that oxen were used for sacrifices: the Greeks and Romans sacrificed white bulls to Jupiter, whilst the cow was sacred to Juno, as it was to Isis in Egypt. In the latter country the bull Apis was, as is well known, an object of idolatry, being distinguished by special marks, and numerous mummies of this sacred bull may be seen in the British Museum. In India, Siva the destroyer rides upon a bull, and the cow is as much venerated among the Brahmins as it was in ancient Egypt, some of the Indian princes being obliged to pass through a golden image of a cow in order to become regenerated, and raised to the Brahminical caste.

* A very interesting article upon the turnspit may be read in Chambers's 'Book of Days.'

There is evidently something of a sacrificial origin in the eating of beef at Christmas, for it has undoubtedly a reference to the birth of Christ in the cow-shed, in remembrance of which event, the old superstition says, all oxen kneel in adoration at twelve o'clock on Christmas Eve.

All through Africa the ox is much in favour as an article of food, and also as a beast of burden. James Bruce's assertion that the Abyssinians sometimes cut steaks from the living animal has been verified by later travellers, but it is to be hoped the practice is not general.