Words - skip - Brewer’s

Meals

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In the fourteenth century breakfast hour was five; dinner, nine; supper, four. (Chaucer’s Works.)

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the breakfast hour was seven; dinner, eleven; supper, six. (Wright: Domestic Manners.)

Towards the close of the sixteenth century dinner advanced to noon.

In Ireland the gentry dined at between two or three in the early part of the eighteenth century. (Swift: Country Life.)

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Entry taken from Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, edited by the Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D. and revised in 1895.