What does "Below the Salt" even mean?

To be 'worth one's salt' is to be worth one's pay. Our word salary derives from the Latin salarium, (sal is the Latin word for salt). There is some debate over the origin of the word salarium, but most scholars accept that it was the money allowed to Roman soldiers for the purchase of salt.
Other phrases that would have been known to the medieval mind were take with a grain of salt, the salt of the earth and below the salt.
Which has an interesting backstory:
The first objects set on the medieval tablecloth, after grace and the hand-washing, were the “salts”, or containers of salt; the custom is recorded as being recommended by Pythagoras (sixth century BC). There are dozens of superstitions and customs surrounding salt -- a mysterious, powerful, pure, but dangerous substance which people have always treated with respect. At medieval banquets, salt had to be separately poison-tested. Families would prize their inherited cellar (a word, from French sel, which means “salt dispenser”: saying “salt cellar” is strictly tautological. “Standing salts”, stout cylinders of silver with a shallow depression at the top to hold the precious salt, were the custom at formal British banquets. Noble households on the Continent of Europe might possess a nef: a sliver table-top ship which contained, often in a quite small compartment of the whole, some salt. It was occasionally fitted with wheels, and could be rolled along the high table to be admired for its value and splendid craftsmanship - and so that the diners could help themselves to salt. The lord and his special guest sat in the middle of the long side of the high table, as diners sit at high tables today; a standing salt or nef (sometimes several of them) would be set before the lord, and perhaps each of the highest ranking diners, as an “object of prestige” and indication of status. When the lord sat at what we call the “head” of the host’s short end of the table, it became customary to place a standing salt as a marker, dividing the lord’s intimates grouped at his end of the table from those who were not quite accepted into his inner circle and who sat “below the salt”.

[@yelkhan2002]

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[@entozoon]

Informative and entertaining, great job! One tip though, please speak slightly faster

[@HistoricalEats]

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[@cbot3051]

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[@jerrywu5797]

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[@shirleyanne6573]

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[@HistoricalEats]

Thanks for watching