The trencher — a flat piece of wood, bread, or later pottery used as a plate for food at medieval and early modern tables — appears in poems about the communal dining of the great hall and the social hierarchy of the shared meal; A poem about a medieval feast might describe the trencher's function: "the bread-trencher soaked with the juices of what it held, eaten at the meal's end by those at the lower tables — the plate itself a course for those who could not afford waste"; In a poem about the social arrangement of the great hall, the trencher marks status: "the lord had pewter, the steward had wood, the lowest had bread — the same feast distributed through different surfaces, the hierarchy legible in the plate"; The transition from bread trencher to wooden trencher to pottery plate gives poems about material history a sequence: "first the bread ate what the bread had held — then came the wood, then the clay, then the china — each century refining the distance between the food and the eater"; A poem about the communal culture of pre-modern dining might mourn the trencher's disappearance: "the plate that was also food, the table's own hospitality — the idea that the vessel itself might feed someone was lost when the pottery arrived"; In a poem about a reconstruction of a Tudor feast, the trencher reappears: "the food placed on its bread foundation — the guest uncertain whether the plate was the beginning or the end of what they had been given."