ANGLO-SAXON PAST - THE ENGLISH DIET

,By sundown on Saturday, 14 October 1066, events on a previously obscure Sussex hillside had decisively altered the course of English history, as indeed of world history. Surveying the scene of carnage, even those eyewitnesses who could hope to gain most from the day’s events were appalled by what they saw. As William of Poitiers, in all likelihood a chaplain attached to the army of the Duke of Normandy, later put it, ‘Far and wide the earth was covered with the flower of the English nobility and youth, drenched in blood.’ Pitched battles were rare events in the Middle Ages. Too much could turn upon a single moment’s hesitation, upon false rumour or an imperfectly executed manoeuvre. Only if prepared to gamble with fate, or absolutely certain of victory, would a general commit himself to battle. William of Normandy did precisely this in October 1066, not because he commanded overwhelming odds or could be certain of God’s favour, but because he had just staked the wager of a lifetime. By crossing the Channel with a vast army of Frenchmen, not only his own Norman followers but large numbers of knights and mercenaries from as far north as Flanders and as far south as Aquitaine, he risked everything on a single roll of the dice. Should his army fail in battle, should the enemy refuse combat, cut off the possibility of retreat and leave the French to stew in their own mutual recriminations, then William would go down in history as one of the most reckless gamblers of all time. As it was, his outrageous manoeuvre succeeded not so much through his own skills but because of the hubris of his enemies.

The English commander, Harold Godwinson, had just celebrated victory in the north of England, having butchered an entire army of Norwegian invaders at the Yorkshire settlement of Stamford Bridge on 25 September. Clearly, God was an Englishman, and Harold was God’s appointed instrument. In these circumstances, when news reached him of the landing of William’s army at Pevensey, three days after his victory, Harold packed up his troubles and marched his army southwards for what he clearly expected to be yet another great celebration of English martial superiority. Not for the first time, nor the last, a sense of manifold destiny and of the invincibility of England in the face of foreign threat, lured an English army onwards to disaster.

Yet the battle about to be fought at Hastings would be a disaster unprecedented even on the scale of other such events, for example the English defeat at Maldon in 991 (when an English commander, once again convinced of his destiny and of the impossibility of negotiating with foreign terrorists, preferred his entire army to be massacred by Viking raiders rather than surrender to the heathens), or in Essex, at ‘Assendon’ in 1016 (when the English King Edmund ‘Ironside’ had been decisively defeated by Cnut of Denmark). In the whole of European history, Hastings finds few parallels either in the scale of the slaughter or the finality of the consequences. Like all such epics, it was fought on a scale and over a period of time that were appropriately vast. Like Waterloo, it was a close-run thing, lasting from about nine in the morning until dusk, nearly nine hours of fighting. At Hastings died not just Harold Godwinson but an entire civilization. Not just Harold’s army but the whole 500-year-old panoply of Anglo-Saxon England went down before the swords of a new Norman invader. Why was this so, and what were the consequences?

From ships came trade and a navy. The sea also fed the English. As one historian has remarked, the herring served as the potato of medieval England. Vast quantities of fish supplemented a diet from which red meat, the ‘roast beef of old England’, was almost entirely absent. Visitors from France to England in the nineteenth century came to regard the English countryside as one vast meat factory for the production of beef. But beef, in the Middle Ages, was a luxury encountered more rarely than venison or herring or eel.

Cattle were expensive to feed, especially in the winter months when, before the introduction of the turnip as a common winter crop, there was very little save hay upon which they could be fed. Those that were kept were as often used to pull ploughs and carts as for milk or meat. Oxen were the tractors and trucks of medieval England. There was also perhaps a sense, once again inherited from Bede, that there was something rather awful and un-Christian about the eating of beef. As early as the sixth century, Pope Gregory the Great, writing to Augustine of Canterbury on the conversion of the English to Christianity, had associated the eating of the flesh of cattle with the feasts of the pagan rather than with the Christian calendar.

Christianity was a Mediterranean religion, from a region where the diet was principally vegetarian. Meat eating was both a characteristic of the barbarian tribes and a symbol of Germanic pagan allegiance. Only in the Celtic regions of Christendom, in Wales and in Cumbria, did cattle remain a staple element of diet,albeit prized as much for their milk as for their meat. Rents in Cumberland were still paid in ‘cornage’, as so many horns of cattle. The Welsh, in the 1260s, serving alongside Englishmen in the armies of the rebel baron Simon de Montfort, were horrified by the greed of the English for grain with which to make bread, just as the English craved to escape from the endless but breadless Welsh diet of cheese, milk and meat. As with modern commercial catering, poultry represented a compromise acceptable to most. Chickens and eggs were consumed in vast numbers. Church rents were sometimes payable as so many chickens, particularly at Christmas, and hard-boiled eggs were blessed in church before the Easter Mass, for distribution amongst the village community, a practice that by the fourteenth century was being condemned in some dioceses as a pagan superstition, but which together with the Christmas fowl has perhaps bequeathed both the modern phenomenon of the Christmas turkey and the Easter egg.

By Nicholas Vincent in "A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485", Robinson, London, 2011. Excerpts from "The Anglo-Saxon Past".Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.

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