Partying in the eleventh century

For at any time it is a pleasure to a man to contemplate a house that has been decorated internally, to listen to drinkers as they keep up their singing within it, and at the same time to drink wine from gilded horns, and smell flowers that have been scattered through the house, and to handle those flowers, or golden horns, or other things that are pleasant to the touch.

Aliquando enim delectat hominem domum interius ornatam conspicere, ebriosos in ea decantantes audire, ibidem et vinum cornibus deauratis potare, et flores per domum dispersos olfacere, ipsosque, vel cornua aurea, vel alia tactu delectabilia contrectare.

St Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury (c.1033–1109)

Similitudes, XVIII (Opera Omnia, vol II, ed J-P Migne, (1854), col. 610)

This was pure serendipity, a small reward in the course of a fruitless search for the source of the following allusion:

If one's a Subject, one at Helm,
'Tis the same Violence, says Anselm,
To rob a House, or waste a Realm.

Anon, To the Memory of Captain James Hind