HISTORY OF BRITISH FOOD - ANARCHY AND HAUTE CUISINE 1300-1500

‘War is probably the single most powerful instrument of dietary change in human experience.’1 When a nation survives through periods of violence – civil wars and revolutions – that traverse geography and class, one of the results is that the diet dramatically changes. In the 200 years that complete the medieval epoch we can discern the birth of national cuisines all over Europe.

Though there are many diverse factors that contribute to the birth of a national cuisine, a social climate that allows a synthesis to begin, which crosses all classes and regions, succeeds in uniting discordant elements. A social milieu that encouraged the elitist and rarefied cooking for the royal table to filter down to the simplest farmstead began to occur in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; while just as importantly the ideas that stimulated rustic cooking at the lowest economic level, with its reliance on wild herbs and intense flavourings, could also rise through differing classes until that inspiration too found its way to the noblest of kitchens. Sumptuary legislation is a graphic illustration of this process, in which lesser classes emulate their superiors, and we shall examine it later. Civil war, also, is an ideal battleground for the mixing of regions, bringing ideas from north to south and west to east, showing populations new ideas and flavours and influencing them.

For the peasant the fourteenth century was a terrifying and tormented one, but ironically at the end of it, peasants were in a stronger social position. Many of them had become small landowners, and their daily diet was much improved. Indeed, from the end of the century one could date the beginnings of a rural cuisine, our own version of French country cooking, a cuisine redolent of the earth, its herbs and produce, which would later be destroyed by a series of Enclosure Acts.

We have seen how the harvest workers would espy, smell and occasionally taste those dishes served to the top table at the three-yearly celebrations of Easter, Harvest and Christmas. We know that the less impoverished would have tried out such dishes at home, experimenting possibly with more economic versions. The food at the manor merely aped the food at the castle, just as the castle aped that of the royal kitchens. This food, as it continued downwards in society, might well have been more and more a shadow of its original self, but in that transformation it also became stronger and heartier. Sometimes the food did not change at all, it was merely lusted after for its pure sensual pleasure and for its symbolism of belonging to the upper classes.

The best white wheaten bread, made from the finest flour, which had been two or three times sieved through woollen and linen bolting cloths, was made for the nobility and the very wealthy, while the poor still ate coarse dark bread made from rye with added pea or bean flour. The white bread stamped with a cross, called wastel or pandemain (from panis domini, the sacramental bread) was never intended for the peasant, yet as the beggars and the poor waited outside the doors of manor kitchens for the scraps, some of that bread got thrown out with the trenchers and bones. The poor knew the feel of it upon their tongues; that silky luxuriousness was entirely foreign to their palates, but they loved it. White bread, they discovered, was what they wanted to eat; besides, to be seen to be eating white bread was a clear example of status in society. In 1375 the poet, John Gower (1330-1408) seemed horrified that the peasants were demanding food that was above their station in life. ‘Labourers of old were not wont to eat of wheaten bread; their meat was of beans or coarser corn and their drink of water alone …’2

As the peasant class began to be destroyed by famine and plague and then redefine itself as small landowners, some of whom became anarchists and rebels, the rise in consumption of white bread was a potent symbol of how articulate and aware the peasant class had become. In London in 1304 there were thirty-two bakers of brown bread and twenty-one bakers of white; by 1574 there were thirty-six bakers of brown bread and sixty-two of white.

What makes this period crucial is that there was a widespread breakdown of authority which brought to the fore a new class of nobles enriched by war, enclosures (for they began early)3, and sheep-farming, who kept private armies with which they backed their dubious and illegal claims to other people’s land; this feudal gangsterism was to lead to great social upheaval and the Wars of the Roses. Because of the former, society was turned into a stewpot of ideas and influences, a rich, fertile, inventive atmosphere which was to revolutionise art and society; this helped to fuse opposing elements in the food eaten into the beginnings of a cuisine that we recognise as being our own and one that was recognisable internationally.

Famine and Feast

The failed harvests in 1293-95 were followed by more failed harvests in 1310-12, and disastrous weather from 1315-18, when unceasing rain seemed like a biblical deluge with ruinous floods, caused the Great Famine in which ten to fifteen per cent of the people died. There was a sheep plague in 1313 and a cattle plague in 1319, which caused the worst agrarian crisis since the Norman Conquest. At least 600,000 people died in these years, and, adding the toll from the other years, nearly a million people died from starvation. An inevitable outcome was high food prices from 1290 to 1325. If the harvests failed there was no wheat, rye, barley or oats, nothing to make the bread that was the daily staple. Bread had to be made from bean or pea flour augmented with whatever scraps of cereals could be garnered from the fields. Throughout these years there was a rise in crime as people stole to eat. The chronicler of the Annals of Bermondsey told of how the poor ate dogs, cats, the dung of doves and their own children. Alms were reduced and the supply of charity dried up. Grain and livestock prices almost doubled between 1305 and 1310.

Nor was there any help given to alleviate the suffering of the peasants at the beginning of these years by an ageing Edward I, obsessed with winning the war with Scotland, nor after his death in 1307 by his son, Edward II. He was equally obsessed, but this time by love for Piers Gaveston and by his quarrels with a belligerent group of barons, and could give no time or thought to a dwindling and starving populace. The country was split between monarch and nobility and civil war broke out several times, adding to the peasants’ misery and discontent. By 1327 Edward had been murdered and his son Edward III gave stable government, until he in turn became obsessed4 with French territories and the beginnings of the Hundred Years War.

Throughout these bleak times the royal feast remained a pre-eminent ritual of significance. It is astonishing to us in a more cohesive society where one class is aware of its obligations to another less fortunate, that the elite of Edward II’s court feasted without caring about the poor and the starving. The King, an aesthete born before his time, who designed a string instrument which was the forerunner of the violin – the crwth – loved music, theatricals, rowing, swimming, jewels, clothes and food. So it is highly likely that in his troubled reign from 1307 to 1327 his interest and enjoyment of gastronomy would have spurred royal cooks on to produce dishes of ever greater delicacy.

In his childhood Edward, brought up with his five sisters, must have had a sweet tooth, for one of the most common foods appearing in the royal accounts was sugar loaves and sugar candy with fresh fruit, spices, nuts and baskets of dried fruit, figs and raisins imported from Spain. Later, as a youth in his own modest royal palace at Langley, the chronicler of St Peter’s Priory, Dunstable, twelve miles away, complains that 200 dishes a day were not enough for the Prince of Wales’ kitchen, that his officials took all the supplies of the market, even the cheese and eggs without paying for it. ‘They took bread from the bakers and beer from the ale-wives or, if they had none, they forced them to make bread and beer.’6 As a child Edward was engaged to Margaret, the daughter of the King of Norway, and called the Maid of Norway or the Damsel of Scotland, since she was also the heiress to the throne of Scotland. A great ship was built and provisioned at Great Yarmouth to collect the princess; its supplies included casks of wine, beer, salted beef, dried fish, peas, beans, nuts, dried fruits, sugar and spices. But Margaret, aged seven, died when she reached Orkney and her body was taken back to Bergen for burial.

For Edward’s coronation in the spring of 1308, one thousand tons of good wine were ordered from Gascony and Bordeaux (paid for by Frescobaldi, the King’s moneylenders). London merchants supplied the ale and large cattle, boars, wood, large and small fish, while lampreys were brought from Gloucester. Great attention was paid to fashion in these years. Piers Gaveston’s clothes for Edward’s coronation were considered far too sumptuous for his station; he wore purple embroidered with pearls outshining the King. An element of transvestism was even celebrated. Henry Knighton, the chronicler of the abbey at Leicester, says that when tournaments were held women would come to join the sport dressed in the most sumptuous of male costumes. ‘They used to wear partly coloured tunics, one colour or pattern on the right side and another on the left, with short hoods and pendants like ropes wound round their necks and belts thickly studded in gold and silver... there they wearied their bodies with fooleries and wanton buffoonery.’7 We can suppose that the same attention was given to the food.

Even in the midst of war when Edward was campaigning against Scotland, the court ate well, for we know that sturgeon were especially sent to the court from Germany. Later, in 1322, we can see how the economic effects of the war were disastrous for the nation: in order to feed the army provisions poured into Newcastle from all parts of the country. The county sheriffs were responsible for supplying the army, and the sheriff of Surrey and Sussex was ordered to organise the collection of large amounts of grain, salted meat and fish which were packed into barrels and sent by sea from Seaford and Shoreham to Newcastle.8 Few ships reached their destination. Even in war, however, there was no privation at court; during Christmas 1322 Edward resided at York and his clerk of the kitchens ordered supplies of beef, mutton and pork, wild boar, veal, venison, rabbits, bream, salmon, pike, lampreys, eels, porpoise, sturgeon, crabs, swans, peacocks, capons, herons and pigeons. There was so much plenty, in fact, that the King sent presents of twenty pieces of sturgeon to the Queen and thirteen pieces of sturgeon to the wife of his new lover, Henry Despenser.

Other close friends received gifts of deer and venison and the Dominicans at his home at Langley were not forgotten, for they were sent eleven pike.

However life was very different out of court. Before the worst ravages of the early famine years in 1314 Stow’s Annals record: ‘No flesh could be had, capons and geese could not be found, eggs were hard to come by, sheep died of rot, swine were out of the way, a quarter of wheat beans and peas were sold for 20 shillings, a quarter of malt for a mark, a quarter of salt for 35 shillings.’ For the following year Stow goes on: ‘Horseflesh was counted a great delicacy, the poor stole fat dogs to eat, some, it was said, were compelled through famine to eat the flesh of their own children and some stole others which they devoured.’

The King’s quarrels with the barons and their efforts to restrain his excesses coupled with famine and Scottish victories led to economic disaster. There was a decline in landlords’ revenues, a fall in agricultural income and a shortage of coin due to a falling output of silver itself. However, the pepperers had now become important people in the city of London; the spice trade was lucrative and flourishing, so rich traders liked to apprentice their sons in the business. Pepperers, among fishmongers and wool merchants, were now aldermen, part of the city council and had become mayors of London. So rich and influential were they that at times of civil war each warring side wanted their support. Alien traders were taking much of their profit, however, and they wanted legislation to halt it; both King and barons made promises which they broke, and the pepperers saw that in order to protect their interests they must possess more power as a governing body. The beginnings of mercantile power through spices and the wool trade laid the foundations for the new middle classes, a force that would grow ever greater, but one which throughout the fourteenth century would be constantly threatened by the new powers of the rebellious peasant.

The Black Death

In 1348 the Black Death reached the shores of England and raged for two years. At the end of it almost half the population was dead and it was, of course, the peasants, the lowest class of all in town and country, who suffered the greatest loss. It is estimated that a population of 43/4 million before the Black Death fell to 2 million by the end of the century. There is an inscription on the walls of the tower in Ashwell Church in Hertfordshire which reads: ‘miserable … wild … distracted … dregs of a people alone survive to witness’. The plague was known as the Great Mortality; it was thought that God had become deaf and could not hear the anguish of His people.

For a population well versed in Old Testament dramas, this was their own Sodom and Gomorrah; they knew how deep in sin they were, how decadent the Church was, how full of avarice, greed, envy, lechery and gluttony they had become and God had no mercy or forgiveness for them. He slew them in the fields, at the hearth, at the very altar where they clung calling out for mercy.

It is Henry Knighton who gives us the most vivid picture of the Black Death. The first English city to be affected was Bristol, which lost 10,000 inhabitants. ‘There died suddenly overwhelmed by death almost the whole strength of the town, for few were sick for more than three days, or two days or half a day even.’ Knighton also records the effect on the countryside:

"A great number of sheep died throughout the whole country, so much so that in one field alone more than five thousand sheep were slain. Their bodies were so corrupted by the plague that neither beast nor bird would touch them. The price of every commodity fell heavily since, because of their death, men seemed to have lost their interest in wealth or in worldly goods … sheep and cattle were left to wander through the fields and among the standing crops, since there was no one to drive them off or collect them; for want of people to look after them they died in untold numbers in the hedgerows and ditches all over the country. So few labourers and servants were left that nobody knew where to turn for help".9

There were further outbreaks of plague in 1361, which were called the Pestilence of the Children for they appeared to strike the infants most; there were more in 1368-9, 1371, 1375, 1390 and 1405, but the 1348 outbreak was the most traumatic and it changed society forever, leading to a complete revolution in the occupation of the land. For by far the greatest percentage of fatalities was among the most vulnerable, the poorest, the agricultural labourer. This helped the few that were left, so that the lord’s vassal became a free man working for a wage. For the first time it placed the landlord in a weak position. The peasant who worked for wages before now demanded more, and those who worked in return for a hovel and a scrap of land could now demand more wages and their own land. With almost half the population dead and the same amount of land to cultivate, the landlord was forced to pay higher wages, even though, because of reduced demand, he now obtained lower prices for his produce. Government legislation attempted to put the clock back, to check increased wages and the free movement of labour, but on the whole failed. Cases such as the Lincolnshire ploughman who refused to serve except by the day and unless he had fresh meat instead of salt and if he did not get what he wanted would offer his services elsewhere, had become commonplace.10

Wages rose rapidly and substantially, in some areas they doubled, in others they rose by a third. At the same time the price of wool, because of lack of demand, fell, while the cost of manufactured products rose, because though everyone knew how to cut hay, few were competent to make a nail or shoe a horse. What emerged from this painful chaos of new changes was that the peasant was possessed of a new awareness of his worth; he now had a say in the terms of his employment and he could seek his fortune elsewhere if such rights were denied him. He also had more land, for land was now plentiful and labour scarce to grow food; he also had silver and copper coins to buy manufactured goods such as kitchen equipment to cook the food with. What is more, because there was a grave shortage of people qualified to teach French, the language of the nobility, the vernacular now became commonplace within bureaucratic society, so that the business of life for the first time, in the law courts and elsewhere, was communicated in the everyday language of the medieval labourer. He was now part of society with the power to rise and better himself.

There is, of course, no quicker way to show to others new social status than in the clothes one wears and the food one eats. Society as well as the economy was deeply disturbed, for the biggest increase in wages went to the humblest citizen, which struck at the very heart of the class system. To the lord and the merchant this state of affairs was unjust, for the poor were expected to keep their place. In time this feeling of grievance grew so that new sumptuary laws were constantly passed which built on and extended statutes such as the one of 1336 which reads: ‘No man of what state or condition soever he be, shall cause himself to be served in his house or elsewhere, at dinner, meal or supper, or at any other time, with more than two courses and each mess of two sorts of victuals at the utmost, be it Flesh or Fish, with the common sorts of pottage, without sauce or any sort of victuals … except only on the principal feasts of the year …, on which days every man may be served with three courses at the utmost, after the manner aforesaid.’5

A law that attempts to control how many courses a man may have at a meal seems extraordinary to us now. How on earth would such a law be enforced? Why the need for such a law? The preamble to the statute gives us some clues as to the anxieties of government: ‘Whereas heretofor, through the excessive and over many sorts of costly meats which the people of this Realm have used more than elsewhere, many mischiefs have happened to the people of this Realm: for the great men by these excesses have been sore grieved, and the lesser people who only endeavour to imitate the greater ones in such sorts of meat are much impoverished; whereby they are not able to air themselves nor their liege Lord, in times of need, as they ought.’ So these people who had wealth but no nobility were aping the nobles, and the nobles feared that they would have no financial resources on which to call. It was merely, of course, that the elite could not endure the challenge of new money; Gower spoke for them. Food dearths and famine also haunted this edict: if all the people ate too much then surely there would not be enough food to go around? The sumptuary laws continued throughout the century and concerned themselves with dress, apparel and livery as well as food. They attempted to provide restraints upon the competitive struggle between classes, but were only ineffectual acts in a century of torment and chaos. As we have seen, this disturbed the poet, John Gower: ‘It seems to me that lethargy has put the lords to sleep so they do not guard against the folly of the common people, but they allow that nettle to grow which is too violent in its nature.’

Because working men and women on the lord’s manor had always eaten celebratory meals in the manor house at Harvest suppers, Christmas and Easter, they were familiar with the cooking of the nobility. They would not have been given delicate dishes of great complexity, or with expensive spices and other ingredients, which were kept for the elite, but they would have caught glimpses of them, smelt the aromas, seen something of their colour and gilding. Nevertheless, they could now begin to replicate at home the pies and roasts they ate at the manor house, even if in a much more modest manner. They were also bound to have added the touches of additional herbs and greens from the wild, with which they had always augmented their diet.

Throughout this time of horror and privation Edward III was waging war in France over his French possessions and for a while the French king was imprisoned in England. For the peasant it must have seemed that not only had the Church deserted them, for no amount of prayer and sacrifice saved them from plague or starvation, but also the monarch with his unending battles across the Channel was unconcerned with their fate. No wonder their feelings of resentment and anger at the injustice of their lives led in the last quarter of the century to what was known as the Peasants’ Revolt. It was misnamed, because the leaders of the protest were mostly all small landowners who had acquired their plots after the Black Death.

The government had attempted to prop up the status quo by legislation. An Ordinance of Labourers (1349) and a Statute of Labourers (1351) tried to peg prices down to what they had been before the plague, and attempted to stop labourers from travelling and selling their labour to the highest bidder, but these laws only succeeded in engendering great resentment. A popular slogan asked: ‘When Adam delved and Eve span/Who was then the gentleman?’ A proposal that gained great popularity was that the lands held by the Church should be confiscated and distributed among the peasants. The government ignored much of this by increasing fines and attempting to levy a poll tax. In 1380 to pay for the war in France a poll tax was set up at one shilling per head with the proviso that the rich should help the poor to pay it. It was hopelessly inequitable and impossible to collect, and in 1381 the whole of south-east England was on the edge of rebellion. The rebels marched on London to attack the King’s councillors and to demand redress. The young Richard II (1377-99) rode out to meet the rebels and promised them charters to liberate them from serfdom. On the following day he promised to redress all of their grievances. As their leader, Wat Tyler, had been killed they agreed to return home. Thomas of Walsingham wrote that the ‘Serfs went in and out like lords; and swineherds set themselves above soldiers, although not knights but rustics.’

There was great irony in the Black Death and the further plagues of the fourteenth century, however. In decimating the peasant population it had greatly improved the material rewards of those left. Now they could demand, and in the end they received, a small cottage instead of a hovel, and perhaps greatest of all, built into the wall a brick oven shaped like a beehive inside. Now, they no longer had to take their dough to the Manor House and leave a tenth of it behind in payment for the baking. All the bread was baked at home on one day in the week when the oven was hottest; the smaller items followed afterwards. The Black Death, in fact, instigated rural cooking, the beginnings of a peasant cuisine based on baking, and the produce of the small farmhouse had now begun.

The Forme of Cury

Despite turmoil, the royal banquets continued throughout the fourteenth century. The four-course feasts with fifty or so different dishes, full of fantasy, music and gastronomic invention, dedicated to display at its most splendid and grandiose, flourished. Surely no nobility since ancient Rome had lived and eaten with such excessive indulgence? It is from the end of the fourteenth century that the first cookery book exists: The Forme of Cury (the proper method of cookery) was compiled by the master cooks to Richard II,11 that same king who had confronted the peasants’ revolt, made them promises and quickly broke them all.

There are around 200 recipes, ranging from simple soups and broad beans served in a sauce made from almond milk and butter, rabbits in onion sauce, meat balls fried in batter and served with a Saracen sauce (almond milk, white wine, spices and egg yolks to thicken) to a choice of sixteen different stews (called bruets) to a veal dish which is simply a medieval version of Blanquette de Veau. How interesting that so many dishes bear the names of their North African origin even though the Crusades had long ended, and that in a society renowned for its devotion to Christianity and its erection of the most magnificent cathedrals ever created, its daily diet should recall and celebrate heathen tastes. Of course, the imprint of the Saracen upon its food had long been forgotten; these influences had been absorbed into the celebratory dishes of the feast and were thought of as English, as they still are. They were ablaze with colour, and a table crammed with dishes at a feast would have looked like a stained glass window or the bejewelled robe of a monarch. The cathedrals too were full of colour and decoration, nearly all of it lost to us now, though the restored Sanctuary roof of Tewkesbury Cathedral gives us some idea of their vividness and intensity.

The recipes of The Forme of Cury are practical, efficient and craftsmanslike and we shall look more closely at them later. What impresses one on first glance is the sheer range of ingredients cooked in the royal kitchens at this time. There are hens, capons, partridge, curlew, pigeon, cranes, heron, duck, goose, chicken. Of other birds there are quail, lark, bittern, plover, rail, dove, cygnet, peacock, egret, woodcock, snipe, dotterel, gull and teal. These were occasionally boiled first and then always spitroasted and generally endored (basted with a paste of saffron, egg yolks and flour to give a gilded appearance). Alternatively, they were sometimes stewed in a thick, spicy sweet and sour sauce.

Of the meats there are roasted oxen, mutton, beef, kid, deer and pork, which were all sliced by the carver and served with a pungent vinegar or verjuice-based sauce, or one of the sauces listed on page 43. Boiled pork was often minced or ground and mixed with spices to stuff a pie or encased in pastry shells for tartlettes. (These are like won-tons, tiny parcels cooked in a broth.)

Of the fish you could eat porpoise, haddock, codling, hake, salmon, tench, pike, eel, turbot, plaice, roach, rays, mackerel, gurnard, oysters, mussels and lampreys. Other recipe sources mention: bream, flounder, gudgeon, marling, halibut, whelks, perch, sturgeon, trout, crab and carp. The fish was either fried and served with a spicy sauce or if lightly pickled served always with a green parsley sauce (we still serve jellied eels with a similar sauce today) or baked in a pie, boiled in a stew, or prepared and set beneath its jelly.

We know that salads were grown and eaten, as no manor or abbey was without its garden. Herbs and leaves were divided in the garden into those used for soup, just over fifty different kinds are listed, including alexanders (now growing rampant over the coast in my native Sussex), basil, borage, chervil, chives, caraway, fennel, leek, lettuce, nettle, orach, spinach and thyme. These, of course, include those much used herbs, parsley, mint and sage. Other herbs are listed to make sauces: dittander, hartstongue, masterwort, pellitory, sorrel, violet, garlic and mustard. Over twenty other herbs are used for salad, among them are calamint, chickweed, cress, daisies, dandelion, primrose buds, purslane, rampion, ransoms, rocket and violets.12 These show an enthusiastic love of fresh leaves in the diet, and are selected, one feels, for their aesthetic visual appeal as much as their flavour, texture, impact upon the palate and medicinal qualities. In fact, one of the recipes given shows all of these aspects: a salad made up of finely chopped garlic, shallots, onions and leeks, moistened with oil, vinegar and salt, with parsley, sage, borage, fennel, cress, rue, rosemary, mint and purslane then added.

The order of serving the dishes prevailed from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries with little change. Meals began with pottages, the standard dish for everyone, soups made of vegetables, or fish for fast days, thickened with dried peas or beans, or made with different meats on other days; cabbage, leeks and onions were the vegetables most used, for they withstand hard winters, while onions could be stored in dry barns. These soups were never coarse: a leek, parsley and mussel soup that became a smooth purée (pounded and sieved) would have looked vibrant and tasted fragrant. Greens were also served as a vegetable side dish; they were boiled then thoroughly drained, any water was squeezed out of them, and then they were tossed in butter and diced white bread. Another side dish of greens would cook them in a meat broth with bacon, and then mince them into a purée. Another serves dried broad beans, well soaked with their skins removed, cooked thoroughly then served in a sauce of almond milk and butter thickened with breadcrumbs. It is delicious for the earthiness of the bean is lightened by the almond milk, enriched by the butter and made velvety by the white bread thickener. These were recipes for highly cultured palates.

After the soups come the substantial dishes: the roast meats, the venison, oxen, mutton, the swans, peacocks and pheasants dressed in their own plumage, but this course was lightened by egg and fish dishes, followed by pies and pasties. These were often small, to be eaten easily with the fingers. Then came fried dishes like the meat balls in batter served with a sharp sauce. Then followed small game birds, counting as part of a dessert (the source of our savoury) with sweet wafers, tarts, fritters, preserved fruits and cakes made of nuts and dried fruits (not unlike panforte) for this dish can be traced back to Cyprus. In the sixteenth century, this last sweet course was to become a separate one altogether and to be called a ‘banquet’; special buildings where it would all be eaten were built for it in the gardens or upon the roof of grand houses, as in Longleat.

It stemmed from the French ceremony of voidée or void, because the spiced wine and sweet comfits were given after the tables had been cleared. Voidée is derived from voider, to clear the table, but it also means to make empty and so refers to the departure of guests. We are told that Edward IV never ‘taketh a voyd of comfittes and other spices but standing.’13 Standing was perhaps necessary as tables were cleared and moved; the spiced wine and sugar comfits were delicate finger food, which could be taken while moving around, walking in the gardens, dancing or playing games. This also enabled the servants to sit down and eat their dinner, as the sugar course could be laid out enticingly well before the main meal.

In The Forme of Cury is the original recipe for Beef Olives, that last mysterious word being a corruption of the Old French aloues, meaning larks. Here a piece of beefsteak was hammered thin; over it was strewn beef suet and bone marrow, finely chopped onions, parsley, thyme, marjoram, then salt and pepper; it was rolled up, then tied and grilled or braised in wine and broth. If grilled it was suggested that a batter is poured over; once the top is set the Olives were turned and more batter poured until that too was set.14 These would have made excellent finger food. Pieces of chicken were stewed in white wine and broth flavoured with cloves, mace and mixed spices, the liquor was thickened with ground almonds and rice flour. Chunks of veal were cooked in chicken broth with ginger thickened with ground almonds. Pieces of kid were stewed in white wine and beef broth with onions, parsley, sage, mint, thyme, marjoram, rosemary, cloves, mace, cinnamon, ginger and a pinch of saffron; it was thickened with breadcrumbs. Turbot was baked in white wine flavoured with ginger and orange juice. Sole was served with a sauce of onions, saffron, honey and salt, plaice with a sauce of ginger, pepper and cinnamon thickened with bread.

Favourite recipes appear in various versions: the source of what later came to be called blancmange or ‘shape’ went under various names, Blaunche de sorre , Blaw Maungere or Blaunch doucet to name but three. This was a cold chicken pudding which could be flavoured with ginger, almonds, sugar and spices; the chicken flesh was poached and then shredded along the grain; one Italian recipe advises that the shreds should be as fine as hair; then it was mixed with almond milk, sugar and flavourings and thickened with rice flour, poured into a mould and left to cool. When unmoulded it was decorated with candied fruits and violets. On fast days the dish was made with fish instead of chicken.

It was felt to be natural to eat the most substantial foods first, saving the more delicate dishes until later. In households that were more spartan due to excessive religious devotion, delicate cooking was renounced and and only the roast was eaten. That first course was all that the more lowly members of the household were entitled to; on fast days one dish of salt fish and one of fresh fish with only the roast was eaten. That first course was all that the more lowly members of the household were entitled to; on fast days one dish of salt fish and one of fresh fish with butter was all that was allowed.

At the court of the young King, Richard II, 10,000 people were fed each day. His person was guarded by 200 men, which included thirteen bishops as well as barons, knights, esquires and others. We hear of the ‘Doctoure of Physique’ who must counsel the King and his cooks as to what dishes would suit the King best. Of course, from the concept of humours (what was cold, warm, wet or dry), came much of the stimulus for the imaginative sauces and methods of cooking. A household of 10,000 seems an outrageous number; farms and market gardens around and within medieval London supplied the daily produce. Only the royal nucleus of nobility and advisors would benefit from the expensive dishes; the food was carefully graded as the social eminence of the diner fell15. Grooms and blacksmiths would be eating pottage and a chunk of bread and cheese with the chance of gnawing on any meat bones that were thrown out. Nor is it likely that when large roasts of meat or fowl were carved up that the portions would be generous. We know this from the records of Alice de Bryene who was born in Suffolk around 1360, and kept detailed accounts of her estate at Acton. She died in 1435 aged 75.

A Country Household

In the year 1412-1413 Alice de Bryene served more than 16,500 meals in her manor house, roughly forty-five meals a day. Sometimes, as in her New Year’s feast she had more than 300 people dining with her, at other times there would be only three guests sitting down with Dame Alice and her household. These could be the bailiffs of one of her manors, or important visitors from London who were powerful at court and protective of the widow’s interests, or visiting clerics and quite often her relations. Her household ate per person per day on average a 2 lb loaf of bread, 31/2 pints of ale, 1 lb of meat, several varieties of fish and shellfish, dried and smoked fish and a plentiful supply of dairy produce. Guests of Alice’s class also drank wine from Gascony or the Rhône instead of home-brewed ale. Alice spent sixty-five per cent of her income upon food and drink, higher than the average fifty to sixty per cent. (Now we only spend ten per cent.) The wealthier the establishment the more money seemed to have been spent; at Battle Abbey, for example, food expenditure reached two-thirds of income. But this is not true of the very poor.

Eating in the hall was a communal affair, and it must have been the high point of the day. Dame Alice, friends and family dined on the high table, raised by a dais which crossed the width of the hall, while other tables ran at right angles down the hall, where the retainers, house servants, grooms and agricultural labourers all ate. The food that was served also observed such social differences, the high table being given the more delicate dishes, or the ones that had had expensive spices used in them, though Dame Alice’s expenditure on these items was low – only 1/2 oz of spice was used per day. That most expensive spice of all, saffron, she used with care, making do with 3/4 lb throughout the year of 1418-19; that same year she used 5 lb pepper, 2 1/2 lb ginger, 3 lb cinnamon, 1 1/4 lb cloves and 1 1/4 lb mace. If Dame Alice served the same number of meals that year, her amount of spices works out at a tenth of an ounce in each meal for each person, which is no more than a pinch.

The expense of saffron drove people to experiment with its cultivation in England, and gardening manuals suggested growing it among the pot herbs. Growing just a few crocuses, however, yields such a miniscule amount it is not worth doing; the fiddly business of gathering the stigmas seems to indicate cultivating it on large areas, or not at all. Hence the cultivation began in Cambridgeshire and Essex in the middle of the fourteenth century around the town of Walden, which would soon be renamed. This then flourishing industry was not too far from where Alice lived and we can be certain that her saffron was therefore English in origin, but, wily housekeeper as she was, she would have noticed that there was little difference in the price whether it came from Walden or Spain.

Dame Alice was generous in her hospitality, and her doors were open to all and sundry. Two carpenters who were staying in February to mend a plough dined one evening (and this was considered part of their wage) while Dame Alice’s sister-in-law, Lady Waldegrave, was also there. On that evening the women and friends may well have eaten an English stew of peeled chestnuts, liver, kidneys and hard-boiled eggs flavoured with pepper and saffron, while they all ate, including the carpenters, the roast venison which had supplied the offal. On nearly every day, there was also stewed pigeon and rabbit, both flavoured with the winter herbs easily plucked from the garden, sage, rosemary and thyme. Dame Alice’s tenants from her larger properties would also be asked to dine and one imagines that the richer ones would have been flattered with dishes where time and trouble had been expressed, finishing their meal perhaps with stuffed sweet omelettes flavoured with ginger, or cheese pastries filled with dried fruit and honey. Two friars from Sudbury dined and stayed overnight to commemorate the death of Alice’s parents. They, of course, would have been made a great fuss of, their favourite foods known beforehand, planned for and cooked especially. Chaucer’s Friar is insistent in eating only a capon’s liver and having a roasted pig’s head to follow. One imagines that these Sudbury friars might be given roast goose, pike cooked in wine with ginger sauce, or stewed partridge with dried fruits poached in wine and broth.16

For the New Year’s feast there were two pigs, two swans, twelve geese, two joints of mutton, twenty-four capons, seventeen rabbits, beef, veal, and suckling pig; sweet dishes were made from spices, sugar, twelve gallons of milk and eggs.17 However, when this amount is divided up into 300 portions it is not such a huge amount: it allows one goose to every twenty-five people, and one capon between ten; one rather doubts whether the lower orders would have tasted anything of the swan, suckling pig or veal – they would have dined instead on rabbit and mutton. We are not told how this feast was cooked, but if the capons and rabbits had been stewed with cabbage, onions, garlic and herbs, with plenty of bread to soak up the juices, then the amounts would have stretched more easily. And what of the excessive amount of milk? One imagines those marvellous sweet and spicy desserts that ended the meals, such as the milk turned to curds and flavoured with ginger and sugar, used in tarts, flavoured with elderflowers or eaten with preserved quinces.

Mixed spices were often specified in recipes. The three most popular ones were, firstly, blanch powder, which was pale, made up from white sugar and white ginger, and used to sprinkle over fruit – baked apples, quinces or wardens (a variety of pear that was particularly hard and so excellent for cooking). A white blancmange, for example, would have been sprinkled with blanch powder and fried almonds. Secondly, Powder fort, which was a powerful mixture based on pepper, cloves and ginger.

Thirdly, Powder douce, which was a mild mixture containing sugar. There was also Powder marchant, which was a little like quatre épices and the mixture we call pickling spices. All of these were ground and ready mixed, bought from the market, and in the store cupboard ready for use in the kitchen. Other popular spices that have fallen into disuse were two cousins of the ginger family, zedoary and galingale, as well as cubebs which the herbalist John Parkinson described as ‘small berries somewhat sweete, no bigger than pepper cornes but more rugged and crested not so black nor solid … and having each a small short stalke at them like a taile.’18

Grains of paradise were also enormously popular; they are indigenous to West Africa along the Gulf of Guinea and are related to cardamom. They have a hot peppery taste and show the medieval addiction to really strong hot flavours in their cooking. They would have been an ingredient in many of the sauces used with roasted meats. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries their cultivation was of such economic importance that the coastline became renamed as the Grain Coast or Melegueta Coast, the alternative name for the spice. The production of the spice must have been abundant for its price in 1284 was no more than fourpence a pound. That price of course was far too expensive for any peasant whose yearly income would only have been just over £3.

Alice sent her groom to Colchester every Sunday throughout Lent to buy oysters and mussels. The shellfish were then cooked in a little broth or ale with spices, mace and cloves. Mussels could be stewed in wine with pepper and minced onions until ‘they beginneth to gape’. They were then served up in their shells.19 (Moules Marinières, of course.) Alice also bought four barrels of white herrings and a quarter of a barrel of salted sturgeon to last through a year; this latter was a luxury. One wonders whether it would be saved for the friars or given to the visiting courtiers. Whoever enjoyed it, the salted sturgeon would have been sliced thinly, soaked to get rid of excess salt, dried and served with a green sauce, made from parsley and other green herbs and mixed with honey, verjuice or vinegar.

On meat days they ate pigeon almost every day; one entry records for May ‘a quarter of bacon, one capon, two chickens and twenty pigeons’. They came from the manor’s dovecote and pigeons being obligingly fecund, as I know from personal experience, they would need constant culling. On Easter Day they ate boiled eggs with green sauce, for eggs were banned throughout the whole of Lent. Cream was regularly used, turned into egg custards with spices, sugar and breadcrumbs. One of the greatest treats for all manor and farmhouses with cows that were calving was what they did with the beistyn.20 This was the first milk that the calf received which was every well run manor house. She also bought 40 lb of almonds. Her most favoured spice was mustard, for in the year 1418-19 the household consumed 84 lb of mustard seed. They ate mustard with almost everything, with fresh and salt meat, with brawn, both fresh fish and stock. The seed was ground up in a mortar with added vinegar and honey. Mustard is another example of a food that originally came from the Anglo-Saxon peasant diet. Dame Alice’s household brewed its own ale with equal parts of barley, malt and drage (a mixture of barley and oats) every week except in January and February when barley malt alone was used.

In the year 1418-19 the household consumed forty-six beef cattle, ninety-seven sheep, eighty-seven pigs, 1,584 poultry birds, but only twenty-six game birds and 102 rabbits, although this list does not include the vast numbers of pigeons. Dame Alice seemed to have managed to keep some of her cattle throughout the winter on hay and pasture, so that fresh meat could be eaten throughout the year. Only seventeen cattle were killed between October and November, the rest at other times of the year. Of the sheep, thirty-one were killed before June and fifty after shearing in the summer and late autumn.23 This reflects the fact that in the fifteenth century more pasture was enclosed and much less livestock was slaughtered at Martinmas. It is apparent from these accounts that a meal at the manor house was a significant part of the social custom of the time; it marked a business meeting, or for the workmen was part of the overall wage for a job, or it could mark religious observance of a festival or a saint’s day. Dame Alice was at the centre of a nucleus of people who were nourished and sustained by her farm and the produce grown there. The manor was at the centre of rural life.

The Medieval Housewife

We have the details of another efficient housekeeper, Margaret Paston, for her letters to her husband and her son (both called John) have survived. Margaret married around 1440, when the English were suffering a series of military defeats in the closing years of the Hundred Years War with France, due, among other factors, to the incompetence and later the imbecility of King Henry VI.

We must remember that the marriage contract in the medieval world was a commercial arrangement. When a man chose his wife he chose her for the size of her dowry and the social standing of her family. To marry for love could occur among the poor, one surmises, but because of widespread illiteracy we have, alas, no love letters or poems to cite examples. One also imagines that the struggle simply to survive would be of such grinding exhaustion that though the bonds of sexual desire and parenthood would be strong, affectionate love tokens would hardly have room or time to bloom. Love occurred outside marriage and belonged to concepts of romance and knightly heroism sung by troubadours. Marriage contracts were a method of social climbing, to enlarge one’s properties and lands and therefore the income from rent. In the Pastons’ story territory plays the most important role: they inherited properties from Sir John Falstaff, which were later fought over; they lost some, sold some and disputed others through the courts. Their story illustrates the reckless lawlessness of the century, but throughout, of course, food was of paramount importance.

Margaret raised eight children; she also supervised the breadmaking, ale-brewing, winemaking, dairy, poultry and pigs, and oversaw the spinning, weaving, sewing and needlework; in preparing for the long winter season she organized the smoking of the ham and bacon, the drying of fruit, the storage of onions, garlic and grain.

A wife was there to manage the estates and from a tender age and was taught by her own mother the range of duties expected of her. The first essential was to plan ahead, to preserve, store and spin. The kitchen and pantry had to be well supplied with produce to keep family and servants well fed. The daily breakfast that Margaret Paston supplied for her family was ‘a manchet a quarte of beer a dysch of butter a pece of saltfisch a dysch of sproitts or white herrying’.24 The beer, butter and bread were, of course, all made on the estate. The sprats would have been salted and bought in a barrel, while the white herring was fresh and plentiful, because the Pastons lived in Norfolk and so were close to Yarmouth, the centre of the herring industry. Richard Calle, the Pastons’ bailiff, notified her: ‘I have got me a friend in Lowestoft to help to buy me seven or eight barrel of herring and shall not cost me above 6 shillings and eightpence a barrel.’ Margaret wrote to her husband: ‘As for herring, I have bought a horseload for 4/6. I can get no eels yet.’

The herrings that were not eaten on the day (a portion was four to five fish, according to the monks at Westminster who based their food habits upon the affluent)25 would have been all preserved in one way or another. There were 215 fast days in the year, so fish had a high priority in the stores; they were preserved by being either salted, dried, smoked or pickled in brine. About half of the fish eaten came from the preserved stores, the rest were sea fish or freshwater fish from the household’s rivers, lakes or ponds. The most popular fish by far was the cod family. Conger eel was a delicacy and with pike and salmon was thought suitable for a grand meal. For fifty two people to dine a cook needed 40-48 lb of fish for a dish of stewed eel and 20-24 lb for a dish of baked eel.26

On meat days they had mutton bones and boiled beef, while the bailiff writes to Margaret Paston that he has now bought enough beef to last the household from late autumn until Lent. In a letter to her son, Margaret asks him to enquire about the price of pepper, cloves, ginger, cynamon, almonds, rice, saffron, ‘raysons of Corons, and galingal’. Currants were called ‘raisons of Corinth’ and hence became referred to just as Corinth. We can see that from this list Margaret Paston, unlike Dame Alice some twenty years before, kept up with the very latest trends and fashions dictated by the court and nobility. She frequently asked for loaves of sugar: ‘I pray you that you will vouchsafe to send me another sugar loaf for my old one is done.’ Treacle, which was a medicinal electuary, was very popular, often mentioned and ordered from town. She writes to her son:

"I have sent my Uncle Berney the pot of treacle that you did buy for him. Also, I pray you heartily that you will send me a pot with treacle in haste for I have been right evil at ease, and your daughter both, since you rode hence ..."

Sir John then sent three pots of treacle from Genoa, explaining to his mother which of the three pots would be the best. Dates and oranges were a favourite food for pregnant women; they were accepted as a recognisable fad at such times and the women should be indulged, so much so that John Paston felt he should apologise when he asked for dates and oranges to be sent to Elizabeth Calthorpe, ‘who longed for them even though she be not with child’. Margaret Paston constantly enquired about the price of food in London and compared it to the prices at her local market in Norwich, often finding the London prices cheaper.

In every fifteenth-century manor house there was a brewhouse, a bakehouse, a dairy and other buildings of like nature. Bishop Latimer, in his first sermon to Edward IV, mentioned that his mother milked thirty cows every day. The housewife of this time worked hard from dawn to dusk. We can see from the Paston letters that it is Margaret who negotiates with the farmers, it is she who receives overtures for leases and threats of lawsuits, who manages every detail on their estate, but she also writes to her husband fully explaining the business that has been transacted. Yet it is not all mercenary business. When Margaret of Anjou, Queen to Henry VI, was staying at Norwich, Margaret begs her husband in London to send her some jewels for her neck; in the end she had to borrow jewellery from her cousin, ‘for I durst not for shame go with my beads among so many fresh gentlewomen as were here at that time’.

Milk Drinking

It is difficult to find exact figures of milk yields in medieval Britain. In cheese-making country, the yield of two cows or twenty ewes in the fourteenth century was set at one stone of cheese and half a gallon of whey butter a week.27 (When full milk was renneted for cheese, the residue was a rich whey, which was then skimmed to make whey butter.) On the one hand we have treatises on husbandry that state what a dairy cow should provide and on the other manor accounts. The anonymous author of Hosebonderie (fourteenth century) claimed that a cow should produce between 1 May and Michaelmas enough milk for 98 lb of cheese and 14 lb of butter. In all the manor accounts a cow produced about a third of this. In the manors of Werrington and Hurdwick a cow was expected to yield only 32 lb cheese and about 4 lb butter.28 It seems very unlikely that any of this milk would have been drunk straight from the cow when the butter and cheese was so prized. In all the manors most of the milk came from the ewes. When the harvest was brought in the peasants were given extra foods to celebrate. These accounts are meticulous and very detailed, so it is interesting to note how rare it is that they were given milk.

Only at five places in Essex was milk drunk at harvest-time and that was not always fresh. In Nettleswell they drank both sour and sweet milk. At Whepstead they drank lac de matutino (See Glossary). At Brightwolton in Berkshire the harvesters were given whey in the years 1283 to 1312. At Hadleigh in Sussex and Aldenham in Hertfordshire, they were given morterel (bread and milk).29

The priority for cows, however, was to bear calves, and the extra milk was a bonus. It was estimated that the ratio between cows and oxen was that every team of eight oxen needed two cows to replenish it, and in some counties this ratio was fewer. This was insufficient for cows to contribute much to the dairy output.30 It was only after the Reformation when almond milk was no longer drunk that the dairy herds begin to grow.

Settlement names throw light upon what crops and livestock were grown and reared. In the Domesday survey very few milk names appear at all; there are Mulbarton in Norfolk, Melchbourne in Bedfordshire and Melksham in Wiltshire, while there are a large number of cheese and butter names and others that derive from goats and swine.31

Once the cows were milked, the cream was skimmed off and sent up to the lord of the manor, his family, friends and guests. Alexander Neckam describes cream and curds brought into the lord’s table on round platters. The more affluent peasant with his one cow could also enjoy cream in the summer months if he did not sell it, but Neckam warned of the risk taken: ‘Raw cream undecocted eaten with strawberries … is a rural man’s banquet. I have known such banquets hath put men in jeopardy of their lives.’32 How interesting it is to note that the lord and his guests were not warned against the cream, only the rural man. Cream and curds were used extensively in the medieval kitchen and hot posset drinks were made with the milk curdled by ale. Andrew Boorde describes one of hot milk and cold ale that is beneficial for a drinker with a hot liver if cold herbs be sodden in it.33 But this is not drinking the milk fresh.

In medieval towns fresh milk was carried in panniers from a donkey or upon the back of the streetseller. Inevitably in warm summers, with the jostling effect of the movement, the milk curdled. Milk-sellers also too often adulterated the milk by adding water. No wonder almond milk was so popular, not only on fast days (which took up two-thirds of the year) but also for cooking in meat recipes, especially those that used chicken or pork.

The Menagier de Paris advised against the drinking of cows’ milk for invalids. Cows’ milk comes last in the medieval valuation which prizes, as well it might, first of all women’s milk, followed by that of asses, ewes and goats. Though it was recognised that: ‘A man may live with milk alone, and it will serve instead of meat and drink and medicine.’34 A comment that describes all milk, for the type is not thought important enough to mention.

It was known that milk was more nutritious in spring and summer than in winter. In fact many farmers did not milk their ewes at all after the summer for fear of weakening them. All dairy products were referred to as ‘white meats’ and these were considered festive food for the poor. It was meat and spices which distinguished the food of the rich; though dairy foods could be used in its cuisine, they were mixed in with egg yolks, much sugar and spices. The rich were nervous at the thought of drinking milk in its raw state for they had seen slaughtered calves and knew well how milk curdled in the stomach. So physicians constantly warned against it, allowing that milk (and again the type is not specified) might be good for children and the very old, if it is first boiled and then sweetened with sugar.

Of course, the main objection to drinking fresh milk, unless it was straight from the cow, was that it could so easily become dirty and curdle (see Chapter 8). It was noticed that people often got sick, and had stomach upsets with much vomiting; far safer then to avoid the milk in that state and make butter and cheese from it.

Pilgrim Food

In the Prologue of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales three characters are expressly linked with food, the Summoner, the Monk, and the Franklin, although there are brief mentions in other tales, including that of the Cook (whose tale is unfinished.) In his Prologue the Host tells us that he has flies in his cookshop, then goes on to complain that many a pasty is stale with no gravy and that people have felt queasy over eating the parsley stuffing with the stubble-fed goose or twice warmed up Jack-of-Dover pie. Note that the flies are linked with stale food which makes people ill. Also, in the Prologue Chaucer laments that the Cook has an ulcer on his shin for he makes chicken pudding with the best of them.

Madame Eglantine, the Prioress, feeds her little dogs with roast meat, milk and white bread, while showing at table her good breeding. Her manners were exemplary, and we learn something of what must have been expected of the courtier when dining. A far cry indeed from the rough, gauche behaviour depicted so often in the cinema when evoking royal feasts in the past. The Prioress never let a crumb fall from her mouth, while only the piece of food was dipped into the sauce, never her fingers; then when she lifted the food to her lips not a crumb ever dropped upon her breast, nor a spot of grease was ever seen in her cup after drinking from it, for she wiped her lips scrupulously. She always reached daintily for her food, for she took pains to imitate courtly behaviour and cultivate a dignified bearing.

All we know of the Summoner’s tastes in food (he is an unpleasant-looking character, covered in red pustules and pimples) is that he has a great affection for garlic, onions and leeks and for drinking strong red wine. He also carries a great round cake like a shield. These vegetables were still the main flavourings in the peasant diet and the main additions with kale to the daily pottage. Meat, rabbit and poultry stews, cooked slowly in the embers of a fire, were also flavoured with one or more of them.

The Monk was remarkably fine-looking and loved hunting; he was obviously a stylish fellow with bells on his harness and his favourite dish was roast swan. As chicken cost 2 1/2d and swan six or seven shillings, the most expensive bird of all, the Monk was indulging himself. It also shows a certain snobbism for swans were only eaten at feasts given by the rich, even though the flesh was still thought tough and hard to digest; by the sixteenth century only young cygnets were favoured if they were fattened with oats. Swan was always eaten with the sauce chawdron, the black sauce made from the offal and boiled giblets, with added spices thickened with brown breadcrumbs. A recipe for potted swan had the flesh beaten hard then mixed with fat bacon until it was like dough, then well seasoned with salt, pepper and other spices before it was baked. This recipe was only written down in 1727 however, so we cannot tell how far back it goes.35 Swans were also part of other game bird flesh that was mixed together for raised pies.

The Franklin, part of the landed gentry (franklins presided at Sessions of Justice and were often Members of Parliament for their shires) was a true son of Epicurus, his house a source of plenty that snowed food and drink.

The quality of his bread and wine never varied, different dishes were served according to the season of the year, there was every kind of delicacy that you could think of, he had an abundance of fat partridges in his coops, his fishponds were well stocked with bream and pike, his cook found himself in trouble if a sauce was not piquant enough or sharp, and his hall table was kept laid up and ready for guests throughout the day. Here is a picture of a well off and civilised man dispensing hospitality, able to offer a meal at a laid table, where a sauce had to be perfectly seasoned if the cook was not to be chastised.

Sadly, Chaucer does not tell us what the Pilgrims ate on their way to Canterbury. But there were over fifty saints’ shrines dotted over England and catering for pilgrimages was a commercial enterprise. Cookshops gathered around shrines while inns and market stalls sprang up along pilgrim routes to feed and care for pilgrims. The poor peasant believed in miracles and such faith was rewarded by them happening. New saints, like Edward II at Gloucester and his arch-enemy Thomas of Lancaster, became centres for fervent adoration. If a king went on a pilgrimage as they frequently did, supplies had to be more adequate and munificent than cookshops and market stalls. On 6 March 1255 six tuns of wine were sent to King Henry III at St Albans for his breakfast as well as all the fish which came from Winchelsea to London without delay. In the following year he had twelve bucks delivered and twenty-five gallons of nut oil together with 2,000 chestnuts. In the spring during Lent, while at Bury St Edmunds, the King ordered a daily supply of mackerel, some of it salted and some packed in bread.36

The Aristocratic Diet

Great quantities of meat and fish were consumed by the aristocracy in roughly equal amounts, for fish was eaten on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays and for six weeks over Lent, and on the vigils before important feasts. At least half of the total amount of meat eaten came from cattle, and at least half of that were oxen, cows and bulls slaughtered after a lifetime’s labour. So there is little doubt that the consumption of beef became the most important of all the meats early on in the medieval period. Next in preference came pork and mutton and lastly poultry and game birds, though it is difficult to estimate the last as household accounts rarely registered them. Of course, some households showed a marked preference one way or the other. Sir Walter Skipworth of South Ormsby in Lincolnshire ate his way through so much beef it amounted to three-quarters of all the meat consumed, and much of that was young beasts, while at Beaulieu Abbey they ate as little as fifteen per cent. How much venison was eaten corresponded to the amount of hunting enjoyed in a household, and as hunting parties were the principal entertainment for the aristocracy, game, deer, boar and numerous birds were an integral part of their diet. The household of the bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, John Hales, when he was staying in south Staffordshire near Cannock Chase, ate twenty-three deer throughout a four-month summer period as well as eleven cattle. Game birds, swans, herons, pheasants, partridges, plovers, larks and thrushes made their appearance at almost every meal; they represented the food of the elite for they were bred in private parks and protected in forests and chases. At feasts venison was exclusive to the top table.37

An enormous amount of the fish eaten was salted and dried and came from trade with Norway and Iceland, while the freshwater species derived from the manor lakes, ponds and rivers. Herrings, referred to as white, were salted while the red kind were smoked; cod was dried and became stockfish and even salmon, sturgeon and eels were salted and preserved. Of the freshwater fish only pike and bream were thought important enough to make their appearance at feasts, though lampreys were considered a huge delicacy38 (one king – Henry I – died of a surfeit of them); smaller varieties like dace, roach and chub were eaten by the retainers and servants.

The household accounts fail to give us any details of how all this food was cooked and presented; all we can surmise is that recipes eaten at court would have been copied and enjoyed at home, for social emulation was always a driving force and even if the lord arriving home after a hard morning’s hunting wanted nothing but roast venison, one can be almost certain that his wife would have requested and fostered the production of other more delicate dishes. Capons in egg sauce for example, where the capons are poached in wine and broth until tender with the sauce thickened with many egg yolks and white breadcrumbs; or rabbits in onion sauce flavoured with ginger, pepper and cinnamon, or oysters in an onion and almond milk sauce.

There are many recipes for bruets, the stew that required cooked meat; obviously these were a range of recipes which used up the roasted carcasses that had been carved the day before. Much of this meat would also have been eaten by household servants and some of those gnawed bones thrown to the dogs or the beggars in the yard outside. But there were enough economically-run households that must have insisted on leftover meat being carved off the bone and used in these dishes. A Bruet of Lombardy was popular, which is cut up chicken in a sauce of almond milk flavoured with mace, nutmeg, ginger and thickened with egg yolks, white bread, then finished with chopped parsley; or a Bruet of Almayn which is made with poultry, rabbit or veal or a Spanish Bruet which is made from venison in a sweet and sour sauce. Other stews tended to have less sauce than bruets; a Lombard stew made with cooked pork, red wine and onions is flavoured with ginger, saffron, cloves and mace.

Venison was always hung for a few days or more to tenderise the heavily sinewed flesh; if there was a surplus then it was salted. Roast venison was served with the pepper, bread and vinegar sauce peverade, or cinnamon and powdered ginger. When the venison was boiled it was always served with frumenty (the origin of our bread sauce with fowl); this was made by boiling wheat in water until the grains burst, then once cooled they were mixed with cows’ or almond milk, thickened with egg yolks and coloured yellow with saffron. Frumenty was also eaten with porpoise on fish days. Further north it was made from oats and is recognisably the Scots porridge we are familiar with. The use of oats as a cereal is a British characteristic; when oats are mentioned in an Italian cookery book the author qualifies their mention as being ‘in the English tradition’.

Left-over venison flesh was minced and made up into pies and pasties; the flesh was seasoned and spiced, then mixed with butter. Sometimes the venison cold cuts would be marinaded overnight in ale, wine or vinegar, before being used in the pie. Both fresh and salt venison were used, the blood was also saved and used in soups or to enrich the pies. Both hares and rabbits were roasted and used in stews and pies. Hares in talbotays (meaning blood) was where the carcass was cut into chunks then stewed with herbs and pepper in ale, the blood was poured into the sauce which was thickened with bread. A simple enough recipe, which we still use, as in jugged hare. Hare was also cooked in onion sauce, a recipe that Hieatt points out is similar to the French recipe for Civet de Lièvres. Wild boar was roasted, but the head was often used for brawn: pine nuts, currants, onions and the meat were boiled in wine to make a soup called boor in brasey, which would be decorated with slices of brawn.

The pastry cook must have been a favoured person in the household for his skills were called upon daily; apprentice cooks would have followed the master cook’s craft with close attention. There were various types of paste. A strong dough was made from wholemeal flour, beef suet and boiling water for the standing crust for great pies or coffins; these shells were baked blind, four of them joined together to make a fifth in the centre, and their tops cut into castellations. Then they could be filled with different coloured mixtures, so that when cut the various colours would show. One of the triumphs of the pastrymaker’s art was the numerous small pies that were constantly served at meals and eaten as finger food. There were chewettes with a filling of pork, onion, chicken and spices or for fish days, a filling of haddock, cod, cream and herbs, or the darioles, filled with egg, cream, chopped dates, figs, prunes and sugar. These pasties were sometimes fried instead of baked. By the later part of the fifteenth century these pasties, filled with minced pork or veal, spices and herbs, were given the name of ‘hats’. Then later the shape changed again to one of peasecods. In the reign of Richard II a flour paste was also used for making pasta, both, as we have seen earlier, a form of ravioli and another flat noodle called macrows which appears to be the birth of macaroni. Both recipes after boiling the pasta serve it with cheese and butter.

Sausages were also a great favourite; indeed from Greek times they appeared to have been a staple of the kitchen in all countries. Perhaps the reason lies in their economical way of using all the odd bits of the carcass and once well seasoned, moistened with tasty fat, the smoking and drying intensifying the flavour; they become almost an addiction in a country’s food, reflecting the tastes of a region in their use of particular flavourings. Some aspects of the Roman Lucanian sausage had remained with the Anglo-Saxons (the word is used in their vocabulary). This was a highly seasoned sausage with pepper, cumin, savory, rue and mixed herbs packed into the cleaned intestine and then smoked. The Normans brought their own varieties of sausage. Neckam names three of them as suitable for provisioning a castle under siege: aundulyes, saucistres, pudingis were all were made when the pig was killed. The latter was made with the animal’s blood mixed with minced onions and diced fat, spiced with ginger, cloves and pepper, then stuffed into long lengths of intestine. We have never lost our love of the sausage, and share this liking with nearly all cuisines. However, the manner of serving may be different; though all the smoked sausages could be boiled or grilled and served with mustard, there are recipes where the sausage is sliced and fried then served in a sauce of butter thickened with egg yolks and flavoured with sage. This appears to be where the humble sausage is elevated into gastronomy.39

Late autumn was the time to make black puddings, which became a delicacy to be eaten on feast days. There could be puddings of porpoise, mixed with oatmeal, seasoning and blood, or of capon’s neck where the stuffing was forced into the neck then roasted with the bird. White puddings were also made from pig’s liver mixed with cream, egg and white wheaten bread, flavoured with raisins, dates, cloves, mace, sugar and saffron. Marrow bones were another medieval preference: the marrow was scraped from the bones and used in pies, mixed with dried fruit, eggs and cream; marrow was also used to enrich stuffings for poultry and sausages. The Normans also had a great liking for a dish they called Jelly of Flesh, a speciality that we have come to know as aspic jelly.40 Pig’s feet, snout and ears were boiled with calves’ feet, capons and rabbits; wine and vinegar were added, then the whole mixture was boiled for hours and left to cool; the fat was then skimmed off and the liquid strained through a fine cloth, it was seasoned and turned gold with saffron. Varieties of cold cuts were then set out on a platter and the rich stock was poured over. It was left to set, then decorated with herbs and painted leaves. Aspic has an erroneous French derivation, but it is undoubtedly a simplification of this Norman speciality, which became so popular in the English medieval kitchen.

How much spice was used in recipes must have been a personal choice partly dictated by economics. The use of dried fruits in many of the meat dishes was universal, but currants, dates, figs, prunes and raisins were fairly cheap, from 1d to 4d per pound. Modest households always had a few pounds as did Alice de Bryene, while nobler establishments kept many hundreds of pounds, in order to feed the hundreds of people each day. Saffron was the most expensive spice, costing 12s to 15s per pound, while cinnamon, cloves, ginger, mace, pepper and sugar cost 1s to 3s per pound. The Duke of Buckingham in 1452-3 got through 2 lb mixed spices every day, though the Bryene household only used half an ounce. With more modest households, the spices tended to be saved up and then used for a special meal, as when Katherine de Norwich celebrated the anniversary of her husband’s death on 20 January 1378.41 The feasts and meals of the nobility were always completed by a final course of fruits, spices and wafers; baked apples and pears with ginger, mace and cloves was a popular dish. Served with this course was Hippocras, a spiced sweet drink that took its name from the apothecary’s bag through which it was strained. Spices such as cinnamon, grain of paradise, nutmeg, mace, galingale, cardamom and cloves were mixed with sugar and added to red wine then simmered for a while, strained and served. More spices were served as comfits, sugared almonds and candied aniseed. Sugar candy and rose- and violet-scented sugars were imported; they were considered to be helpful in curing the common cold. Twisted stems of sugar called penidia, to be renamed later as barley sugar, were popular.

Though sugar was expensive it quickly be came immensely popular because it was eaten in large quantities at court. A spiced sugar paste was imported from the Mediterranean, called paste royale, flavoured with ginger and mace and made more supple by the addition of honey. There was also a spiced almond paste and a spiced quince jelly (chardequynce) and all these pastes became the materials for the making of sotelties, those astonishing sugar confections of landscapes with castles, figures and animals, presented at great feasts to mark the interval between courses. By the end of the fifteenth century gum tragacanth was introduced, a resin obtained from a shrub growing in the eastern Mediterranean, which helped to bond and strengthen the paste so that even more astonishing sugar sculptures could be created. Bitter oranges, lemons and pomegranates were shipped to England from Spain from the thirteenth century. Pots containing orange or lemon peel, or the whole fruits preserved in sugar syrup, were imported from southern Europe, and called succade, while other fruit and vegetable conserves were called wet sucket or sucket candy; though these started out as medicine they were far too delicious to be reserved for the sick, so they came to be eaten at the end of the meal.42

Wafers, which were served with the fruit, were made from batter poured onto a hot iron with another iron covering the top, exactly as we now toast sandwiches. They came over with the Normans, and were called gaufres; and as we have seen, they were a popular food at the cookshops. One such batter might be made from flour, white of egg, sugar and ginger, another could have egg yolks, cream, flour, salt and cheese. When cooked these were sprinkled with blanch powder and served with the fruit. Another flour paste recipe was lozenges, made from flour, water, sugar and spices, made into a dough then cut in a lozenge pattern and fried in oil; these were served in a wine syrup with added dried fruit and spices.

The use of eggs and dairy produce was also very much a personal choice; one imagines again that the lady of the household might have a preference for curd dishes, fried curd or sweetened egg custard tarts stuffed with dried fruits – called crustades. Liquid milk is only mentioned in relation to a child’s diet or when cooked in the kitchen. Cheese in itself seems not to be a major item and one surmises that it was despised as being part of the peasant diet and not for the high table.

There were four types of cheese: hard, made of skimmed milk and stored for a length of time; soft cheese, made from full cream or semi-skimmed milk matured for a time but still retaining moisture; green cheese, which was newly made curd eaten within a few days and a main ingredient for many desserts; and, lastly, there were the full cream milk cheeses, and only these were sent to the lord’s table. Hard cheese was frowned upon by the medical opinion of the time. The yield of two cows or twenty ewes was set at a wey (probably a stone) of cheese and half a gallon of whey butter. Cheese-making was confined to the summer months.

The making of cheese was fraught with problems, however. Hard cheese could be white, dry and too salty, or swollen with its own gas or full of whey, or be tough, spotted and full of hairs. The turning of milk and factors like the temperature and humidity of the air were all improperly understood.43

The Peasant Diet

We know something of what peasants ate from the maintenance agreements between sons and their fathers, for when the head of the family retired a legal agreement was signed setting out the amounts of food provided to him annually. These agreements were a type of annuity for sometimes the peasant exchanged or sold them. The grants reflect the amount of land held. In 1330 Beatrice atte Lane, for example, was surrendering 24 acres and she was promised sufficient cereal for an ample diet of bread and ale, while in the same village (Langtoft in Lincolnshire) Sara Bateman who had had 4 1/2 acres only had enough cereals for bread, pottage and water. The average amounts, however, provide for a daily allowance of about 1 1/2 lb of bread per day. These would have been augmented by eggs from their own poultry and sides of bacon and ham from their pig, while they still had their garden plots and grew brassicas, leeks, onions and garlic; if they were not too frail they could also snare rabbits and small birds.44

Harvest accounts are also another source of information for the peasant diet. In them we see the dramatic improvement in the quality of the diet from the thirteenth compared to that of the fifteenth century. From 1250 for just over a hundred years the bulk of the diet was bread, with meat playing a very small part, and fish, dairy produce and ale remained fairly constant in that time. After the Black Death there was a sudden rise in the amount of meat and ale consumed and a decline in the bread eaten. After 1400 the amount of meat and ale rose still more, while fish and dairy products shrank a little. Peasant workers were now allowed at harvest time 1 lb meat for every 2 lb bread, compared with an ounce or two of meat to 2 lb bread 150 years earlier. What is more, the bread was of much higher quality, made from wheat rather than barley or rye; the meat tended to be fresh beef and mutton rather than bacon, and the fish was fresh and not salt; they drank strong ale, instead of small ale, cider, milk or water.45

We can see that the wheat consumption increased in the maintenance agreements, for the amounts of barley and rye dwindled. Peasants began to bake their own bread, eating cereals in this manner rather than boiling oats in pottages; hence more houses now possessed ovens rather than depending upon a communal one; they also now drank more ale which led to the development of permanent ale houses in villages which were licensed by the lord of the manor and because they now ate more meat, butchery began to be a thriving trade with rural butchers opening up. Here suddenly, at the beginning of the fifteenth century is a recognisable English village, with a peasantry becoming more and more independent.

We have no details of what the peasant ate in the fourteenth century when the diet began to improve, but we know from peasant inventories of household goods that meals were a ceremony. The head of the household sat in a chair at one end of the table, while others in the household had a bench or stools; there would have been a linen or canvas table cloth, hands would have been washed beforehand using a metal basin and ewer then dried with a towel. There were cooking utensils of brass pots and pans with tripods, barrels, vats, tubs; all of which indicate an industrious kitchen, cooking more than just pottage and baking bread.

We know too that the basis of peasant cooking was preservation, necessary to get the peasant family through months of real deprivation which occurred annually after Christmas and through into early summer. Some supplies like corn could be stored in barns and bins; the peas and beans could be dried, the pig could be salted and smoked, much of it made into sausages kept hanging near the hearth, onions and garlic could be stringed and hung, and wild foods like fungi dried. Much of their supplies had to be eaten fresh, however, such as the eggs and green leaf vegetables, poultry and game birds. It would be another hundred or so years before the art of potting meat and fish and sealing with clarified butter was to appear, partly because though the peasant diet had improved there was still no surplus. If a surplus existed, as it did with a slightly more prosperous peasant who cultivated thirty acres instead of four, then the surplus had to be sold to pay rent with only a little over to be saved for years of drought or famine.

The rise in the consumption of wheat and the home oven also tells us that wheat was prized for its gluten content (for barley, rye and oats have little gluten and therefore make a flat dense bread) so dough was worked and yeasty bread baked. The oven also made it possible to make flour pastes, wrap food in them and bake meat and fish in sealed packages, and thus the rural pie was born. It also made possible the packed lunch of meat wrapped in pastry as an edible form of travelling food, fit for pilgrims and field workers. The pie, as we have seen, was a staple of the cookshops, but it was now to become a staple of home cooking in all sizes and shapes.

Another staple would be the sausage; with the sheep’s stomach as a casing, the mixture was a handy method of using up the bits and pieces of a carcass, the flesh from the pig’s ribs and the chopped entrails with generous bits of fat and ample seasoning of herbs, hung up in the heat and smoke of the fire for five days. When the time came to eat them they were boiled or grilled, or even cut up into slices and fried. When the pig was killed black puddings were also a great mainstay of the peasant kitchen and would remain so for the next 600 years. Out of the annual pig killing came such dishes as brawn, souse46 – the ears, cheeks, snout and trotters all pickled in brine or ale – as well as the puddings, enjoyed as festive food around Christmastide. At the manor house it was the servants who were given the souse. These pieces were pickled until the fat was so soft that a straw could pierce it through; they were then taken from the brine and placed into another pot into a mixture of verjuice and small ale, there the pieces would be left until eaten cold with mustard.

Nothing of the carcass was ever wasted, even the bones, for marrow was much prized. So the bones were used in soup or they were split and the marrow served separately. In the peasant household such bones were only too quickly used.

The Church

Members of the clergy and the monastic orders ate as well as affluent merchants and the minor nobility. The Rules of St Benedict had laid down that monks were to eat two meals per day, dinner and supper, but the second meal should only be allowed from Easter to September and flesh meats were forbidden to all except the sick. This regime was not adhered to, and by the 1150s every form of meat and fowl was eaten, while the second meal of supper was consumed throughout the year.

The monks ate dinner at 11 or 11.30 in the morning; they had been up by then for four to five hours and they had not eaten cooked food since their supper the night before, though most of them would have breakfasted on ale and bread. Dinner began with pottage based on meat or fish depending on whether it was a fast day or not. At Westminster Abbey by 1500, a daily dish of beef had been substituted for the soup, which preceded several other meat dishes, such as boiled mutton, roast pork or fritters, and the meal ended with cheese. The ordinary monk, however, would not partake of the delicate dishes or those that contained pike or small game birds, which were eaten by the abbot and honoured guests. They appeared not to have eaten from bread trenchers, but used pewter plate.

In the years 1495 to 1525 each monk at Westminster cost 7d per day or 4s a week in food and drink. The convent’s outlay represented thirty-seven per cent of its income on food and drink, which is a smaller proportion than many of the nobility, yet they lived well.47 A peasant at this time would have earned about 4d a day, so his standard of living was about half that of an ordinary monk. A bucket cost 6d, a chair 3d and a mattress 1d.

Fish was eaten on average about 215 days in the year. On Fridays there were only two fish dishes but on other fast days there were always three. About half of the fish cooked came from preserved stores, either salted, smoked or dried, the bulk of the fish came from the sea and only a little from the abbey’s pond in the infirmary garden or the River Thames itself. The abbey’s kitchener went by boat up the river two or three times a week to shop at the fish market; small fish like dace and roach were served often but pike served with a cinnamon and ginger sauce was kept for feast days. The monks had a tithe on all the fish caught in the River Thames from Staines to Gravesend and salmon might well have been eaten frequently, but it is only recorded when bought. A tenth part of such a catch must have been a considerable amount of fish, which economically greatly benefited the abbey and would have been much resented by the Thames fishermen. On about fifteen days out of the year the kitchener served shrimps at dinner but never molluscs, which were thought to be food for the poor, a slur which they were to bear for several hundred more years, and from which whelks and cockles still suffer.

The bulk of the fish came from the cod family. A considerable amount of it was pickled and eaten with green sauce, as were also plaice and whiting; the more fatty fish were also eaten, the favourite being eel, followed by herring and mackerel. Herring tended to be despised and eaten only at Lent with salted eels; conger eel was a delicacy, which appeared on feast days eaten with a sauce of bread, herbs, spices, garlic and vinegar. At the abbot’s table they ate turbot, ray, gurnard and sole; gurnards were filleted, fried then pickled in a sweet spiced vinegar, the dish we now know as Escabeche.48

The earliest Catalan recipe (fourteenth century) for this dish requires nuts, raisins and onions to be added to the sauce. Salmon and conger eel appeared often at the abbot’s table and infrequently at the ordinary monks’. The kitchener required 40 lb to 48 lb fish for a dish of stewed eel and 20 lb to 24 lb for a dish of baked eel; these amounts made fifty-two messes; as this was fish, this meant a small mess for one.

A large mess, containing food for four monks, was typical of meat days; meat was eaten seventy-five days of the year for both dinner and supper. Four dishes were eaten at dinner and one of them inevitably was beef while only one would be served at supper. There would be a dish of boiled meat and two of roast, veal, mutton, pork or goose. Boiled mutton would be served every day, killed after four years, the carcass was boiled with bugloss, borage and parsley roots and eaten with mustard. In the course of a year the kitchener provided 600 dishes of meat at dinner and a further 150 at supper, using 136 hundredweight of meat. Barbara Harvey comments: ‘... only an upper-class household could have afforded the sheer quantity of meat placed before the monks. If any proof is needed that Benedictine monks belonged to upper class society, it is found in these proportions.’ A mess of beef for four contained about 3 lb, so monks could eat from three or four dishes at dinner and perhaps another at supper; that has been roughly estimated as one monk eating between 2 1/4 lb and 3 lb meat per day, which is a considerable amount.

Lamb was eaten in spring and early summer, veal throughout the year, poultry appeared at dinner and supper, while on feast days there was swan or cygnet, teal and snipe. Chicken appears to have always been served with mutton as an accompaniment, but if the hens were boiled they were served with a white sauce made from ground almonds, verjuice and ginger. As there were no slaughtering premises in the abbey the meat was bought from local butchers, who could supply various cuts of meat in quantity, so shoulders of mutton might be served to all. Each of the cuts had its own specific method of cooking: chine of pork was boiled, loin and shoulder of mutton roasted. Goose was eaten twice a year in spring and autumn and always roasted. Geese were plucked regularly five times a year to supply quill pens which were in great demand and goosedown for feather beds. As a rich meat it was thought to be indigestible without garlic sauce. Neckam suggested a strong garlic sauce made with wine or verjuice of grapes or crab apples. The winter goose was stuffed with herbs, quinces and pears, garlic and grapes; after roasting this stuffing was removed and combined with wine and spices to make a sauce madame, which was poured over the sliced flesh.

Not only did the abbey consume large amounts of meat, but also of animal fat, though much of this was used for tallow in lighting. On 30 October 1459 when 110 were present for supper at Lambeth Palace, use of tallow candles which was usually around 7 lb per day went up to 16 lb; wax was used for ecclesiastical purposes and feast days always were well lit. The Purification or Candlemas was always marked by the purchase of wax candles and offerings to the Virgin. Sometimes these were specially coloured: Eleanor of Castile had hers coloured green and vermilion.49 The main cooking medium was lard and butter; puddings were made from beef suet, minced veal and dried fruits and boiled in a sheep’s stomach container, thoroughly scalded and washed. Principal Pudding was one such, made as a festal dish for a feast; it used 6 lb of currants, 300 eggs, breadcrumbs and 18 lb of suet. These boiled suet puddings were flavoured with mace, nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger, every kind of dried fruit and ground almonds, and sometimes with rosewater, orangeflower water, musk and ambergris to intensify the perfume.

The monks also consumed every day much bread and ale made by themselves, and every monk received an allowance of a gallon of ale per day. Ale was also used in cooking, sheep’s entrails were cooked in it for instance, and the dish flavoured with spices and thickened with breadcrumbs. On solemn vigils and feast days the monks drank wine. Their bread was made from wheaten flour baked at the abbey, though the abbot of Westminster ate the finer wastel bread, which was bought in; the name stems from the Norman French gastel or cake. The very finest white bread was manchet, which was made in small loaves weighing about 6 oz. Occasionally the monks also ate enriched bread, made with eggs, cream and dried fruit and spices, to celebrate an anniversary.

Both eggs and cheese were eaten regularly; outside Lent the monks ate about five eggs per day. They were very fond of cheese flans made from cream and eggs; they also ate charlet, a milky dish with boiled shredded pork, ginger, sugar and saffron. On fast days charlet could be made with flaked cod or haddock poached in almond milk. Another dish, gravey was ground almonds mixed with broth with diced rabbit, chicken, oysters or eel, flavoured with sugar and ginger; when this pottage was thickened with egg yolks and diced cheeses it was called ‘gravey enforced’. This last dish and others like it, civey, bukkenade and egerdouce, count as pottages or sauces (they could be both) that the abbot was sure to have had made for him, but it is likely that other monks on feast days would have benefited from such rich dishes.

As we have seen earlier, they had been favourite soups ever since the Normans had brought them over to England. Civey was the thick onion soup with diced hare or mallard, and on fast days it could be made with tench, sole and oysters; it was thickened with breadcrumbs and flavoured with pepper and mixed spices. Bukkenade was the meat broth with veal, kid, chicken or rabbit, seasoned with herbs and spices, thickened with egg yolks and sharpened with verjuice or vinegar. Egerdouce was a sweet-sour broth made from wine and honey in which kid and rabbit were poached; it was eaten cold with pieces of sliced brawn floating on the surface. There were also soups where the broth was strained and clarified so that a clear stock was poured over pieces of meat or fish and the surface would be garnished with spice powder.

The abbey grew its own fruit and vegetables and these were much prized so went to the abbot’s table first. In 1510 Abbot John Islip ate quinces, apples and warden pears at the beginning of the year (obviously beautifully stored). He imported oranges three or four times from January to April (could this have been the first import of sweet oranges, which had arrived in the Mediterranean about thirty years before?) and ate homegrown strawberries in June and July. The monks ate fresh peas and beans throughout the short summer season; the dried version they ate throughout the winter in pottages, and the bulk of them would have been fed to pigs. In their gardens at Covent Garden they grew grapes, cabbages, leeks, garlic, herbs and salad leaves.

What is most striking about the abbey’s food consumption is how far away it had moved from the original sixth-century strictures of St Benedict’s Rules. Fast days were an absurdity, for the fish dishes became small gastronomical masterpieces, as did everything made using almond milk; there were no culinary sacrifices at all made by the clergy. This became obvious to the layman, who after the Black Death became scornful and critical of the ecclesiastical population. Food inequalities and food hypocrisy were particularly galling; few other issues set up such anger and resentment. The seeds for the Reformation had all been sown.

However, English clergy were feeling more and more resentful of the demands of Rome; between 1450 and 1530 Rome demanded a subsidy from the English clergy on twelve occasions, but they responded only twice. In this time the number of monks fell, although as we have seen above their standard of living rose. The Cistercians at Whalley Abbey in Lancashire were spending two-thirds of their income on food and drink, much more than at Westminster.

John Wycliffe began preaching in 1378, urging that the Bible should be translated into English and be placed in the hands of every clerk and layman; he condemned monasticism, advocated the marriage of the clergy, questioned the doctrines of the mass and demanded a dissolution of the Church’s corporate wealth. Lollardy50 was born, the most organised of fourteenth-century protests. It was stamped out as an academic heresy in its birthplace Oxford in 1411. But Wycliffe’s ideas had taken root with the Lollards who attracted disciples not only in London but in country districts, in the Chilterns and in Kent; they demanded the disestablishment of the Church and the redistribution of property. This was the time when the legends about Robin Hood are first mentioned, when heroes were upholders of justice seeking not to destroy society but to redress its wrongs. Wycliffe’s translation of the Bible into the vernacular was suppressed, but a hundred copies survived.

The Wars of the Roses51

A preamble to a 1378 statute described how armed bands were taking possession of houses and manors ‘having no consideration of God, nor to the laws of Holy Church, nor of the land, nor to right, nor to justice’. As we know from the Paston letters, the lords behaved as badly as the outlaws; the lords robbed, raped, kidnapped and murdered, getting away with all these crimes if they fought for the King or the Church. Feuding between great magnates loomed larger than peasant protests.52 The dynastic wars (1455-85) between the houses of York and Lancaster over who was the rightful heir to the crown were less bloody and less disruptive than the thirteenth-century civil war between Stephen and Matilda. Towns were not sacked, nor churches desecrated, battles stopped for harvests to be brought in, the food supply was respected, and trade continued struggling on through war and piracy.

England was now one of the nodal points in European trade where north met south. The Hundred Years War had dominated the politics of western Europe. Armies absorbed manpower and resources and the development of the national state made it possible for rulers to exploit their subjects to a far greater degree than had previously been possible. Taxation was constant and heavy, war interfered with trade and incited piracy. England was now an integral part of the North Sea-eastern Atlantic economy linked to the Mediterranean by sea routes; our main market for wool and cloth was still Flanders and the Low Countries, in return came gold, silver and food products, especially fish. In the south-west of France we sold cloth and grain in exchange for wine from Spain and Portugal.

Wages for both farm workers and urban craftsmen remained high throughout this century; cereal prices were low and steady until a series of bad harvests in the 1480s forced up the price of wheat. So food was plentiful for most of the century, in fact the lawyer and writer Sir John Fortescue (1394-1476) described the commons in England as ‘the best fed and best clas of any Natyon crystn or hethen’.53 Sheep-farming had now become highly profitable; seven years after the Black Death, 40,000 sacks of wool were exported annually. Exports of cloth rose. However this trend from arable to pasture saw the beginning of the enclosure of land that was to have such devastating effect upon the farm labourer in the eighteenth century. This was a fact not lost on people then, who were dismayed and horrified at the destruction of hamlets where all the land once used commonly had been fenced in for sheep-rearing. ‘The root of this evil is greed,’ a Warwickshire antiquary rightly claimed.54 The towns that rose to prominence in the fifteenth century, Coventry, Exeter and Southampton, were all cloth towns. The new towns began to have their own problems of overcrowding, noise (iron shod wheels of carts were banned, and there was an injunction not to drive carts too quickly after they were unloaded), smoke pollution, ‘the stink and badness of the air’ and animals. A citizen’s petition of 1444 complained of ‘swannes, gees, herons, and ewes and other pultrie whereof the ordure and standing of them is of grate stenche and so evel savour that it causeth grete and parlous inffecting of the people.’55

Everyday life went on throughout the Wars of the Roses. A French chronicler recorded: ‘England enjoyed this peculiar mercy above all other kingdoms, that neither the country nor the people, nor the houses were wasted, destroyed or demolished; but the calamities and misfortunes of the war fell only upon the soldiers...’56 There were only thirteen weeks of real fighting during the thirty-two years of the war. At St Albans in 1455 when the Duke of York defeated the forces of Henry VI under the Duke of Somerset, he only had 3,000 men under his command, while Somerset’s army comprised 2,000. It was nothing but a brief scuffle in the streets.

When peace came at last under Edward IV, who had secretly married a commoner, Elizabeth Woodville, he turned out to be a bon viveur who encouraged trade, investing himself in imports and exports. He was the first King not to die in debt for nearly 300 years. His Queen, from the evidence of her journal, was alive to the nuances of good cooking; in 1451 aged fourteen and newly married to her first husband, she writes:
"
Six o’clock, breakfasted, the buttock of beef rather too much boiled and the ale a little the stalest. Memorandum: tell the cook about the first fault, and to mend the second myself by tapping a fresh barrel directly. Seven o’clock. Supper at the table, the goose pie too much baked and the loin of pork almost roasted to rags."57

In an age when the Church was heavily criticised and sometimes scorned, Edward (like later Tudor monarchs even after the Reformation, as we shall see) was keen to keep the fast days. Not only was it good for men’s spirits, ‘but that these days,’ he said markedly, ‘considered the fishers and men using the trade of living by fishing in the sea, may thereby rather be set on work, and that by eating of fish much flesh shall be saved and increased.’58

What is extraordinary in this age of conflict and despair is that its architecture was of almost ‘castles in the air’, of lightness and delicacy, though castles themselves were becoming transformed into houses, having huge windows to let in light, for comfort and pleasure was much valued, while churches became symbols of the spirit soaring towards God: King’s College Chapel, Cambridge and Eton College Chapel, Windsor, for instance. We can only imagine what the subtleties spun from sugar must have been like. Yet also within this warring, quarrelsome agitated society there was for the first time a new sense of being English; not only had the cuisine fused together into something recognisably English, but the language and the people had an identity which separated them from the Continent. All the French possessions except Calais had been lost, Henry VI was the last English King to also term himself King of France. A sense of national identity had occurred all over Europe, however; it was a time when writers began to typify nations with characteristics. Erasmus (1466-1536) made Charon say that he did not mind ferrying Spaniards across the Styx because they were abstemious, but the English were so crammed with food that they nearly sank the boat.

The most momentous event which was about to change the world took place in the last decade of the fifteenth century – the discovery of the New World – but did not add much to the English diet in the new century. Yet within that century our diet was to alter dramatically. What combination of factors wrought such huge change?

Notes

1 Mintz, Sidney, Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom (Beacon Press 1996).
2 Quoted in C. Anne Wilson, op.cit.
3 This was public land used by the peasant to graze livestock, grow food and gather wood for his cooking, enclosed by hedges or fences by the local landowner for his sole use, later such acts were legalised by Parliament.
4 The Plantagenet character was an obsessive one; one idea would take hold and everything else would be sacrificed towards it.
5 Hunt, Alan, Governance of the Consuming Passions. A History of Sumptuary Law (Macmillan 1996).
6 Saaler, Mary, Edward II (The Rubicon Press 1997).
7 Ziegler, Philip, The Black Death (Penguin, 1969).
8 Saaler, Mary, op.cit.
9 Quoted in Ziegler, op.cit.
10 Ibid.
11 Constance Hieatt in the Introduction to her An Ordinance of Pottage (Prospect Books 1988) deals with the intricacies of the various manuscripts and the differing interpretations of the recipes by historians throughout the centuries.
12 Landsberg, Sylvia, The Medieval Garden (British Museum Press 1995).
13 Quoted in Stead, Jennifer, ‘Bowers of Bliss: The Banquet Setting’ in Banquetting Stuffe, ed. C. Anne Wilson (Edinburgh University Press 1986).
14 A version of this recipe with others was found in a collection in Samuel Pepys’ library.
15 The amount spent upon food in the royal households was carefully graded dependent on the importance of each person. For example, a duke related to King Edward III with a company of 300 horse was allowed £15 13s 4d per day, every man and horse was allowed 12s per day. A duke who was not of the blood royal was allowed £10 13s 4d, a viscount 55s, while a knight having in his company ten men was only allowed 12s. These amounts rose with inflation throughout the years, but the system remained unchanged for hundreds of years.
16 This is a recipe that I have cooked and the figs, prunes and sultanas poached with the partridge make a delicious sauce.
17 Swabey, ffiona, ‘The Household of Alice de Bryene, 1412-13’, in Food and Eating in Medieval Europe, ed. Carlin, Martha; Rosenthal, Joel T. (Hambledon Press 1998).
18 See Norman, Jill, The Complete Book of Spices (Dorling Kindersley 1990).
19 Wilson, C. Anne, Food and Drink in Britain (Constable 1973).
20 Variously spelt ‘bestys’ or ‘beastlyns’ or also called ‘firstings’.
21 Hartley, Dorothy, Food in England (Macdonald 1954).
22 Marcel Boulestin thought it originated at Trinity College, Sir Harry Luke believed it was Corpus Christi.
23 Dyer, Christopher, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages (CUP 1989).
24 The Paston Letters 1422-1509, ed. J. Gairdner (London 1872).
25 Harvey, Barbara, Living and Dying in England 1100-1540. The Monastic Experience (Clarendon Press, Oxford 1993).
26 Ibid.
27 Wilson, C. Anne, Food and Drink in Britain, op.cit.
28 Hallam. H.E., ed. ‘The Worker’s Diet’, The Agrarian History of England and Wales, Vol. 2, 1042-1350. General ed. Joan Thirsk (CUP 1988).
29 Ibid.
30 Trow-Smith, R. A., History of British Livestock Husbandry to 1700 (London 1957).
31 Hallam, H.E., ed. ‘England before the Norman Conquest.’ The Agrarian History of England and Wales, Vol 2. General ed. Joan Thirsk (CUP 1988).
32 Quoted in Wilson, C. Anne, op.cit.
33 Boorde, Andrewe, A Dyetary of Helth (Kegan Paul, London 1870).
34 Plat, Sir Hugh, Sundrie new and Artificial remedies against Famine (1596). Quoted in Drummond, J.C., The Englishman’s Food (Jonathan Cape 1958).
35 Wilson, C. Anne, op.cit.
36 Webb, Diana, Pilgrimage in Medieval England (Hambledon & London 2000).
37 Dyer, Christopher, op.cit.
38 Lampreys are still eaten in Spain, Portugal and Bordeaux, while they are smoked in Finland. They fell out of favour in the nineteenth century, while pollution in our rivers has now greatly diminished their numbers.
39 Wilson C. Anne, op.cit.
40 The name dates from the eighteenth century and came from France, where the sauce was flavoured with vinegar and bitter herbs and appeared to have an asp-like bite.
41 Dyer, Christopher, op.cit.
42 Wilson C. Anne, ‘The Evolution of the Banquet Course: Some Medicinal, Culinary and Social Aspects’ from Banquetting Stuffe (Edinburgh University Press 1986).
43 Wilson C. Anne, Food and Drink in Britain, op.cit.
44 Dyer, Christopher, op.cit.
45 Ibid.
46 Jane Austen mentions eating it with enjoyment later. See page 255.
47 This account depends on Harvey, Barbara, Living and Dying in England 1100-1540. The Monastic Experience, op.cit.
48 Barbara Santich believes the word to derive from Persian/Arabic sikbaj meaning vinegar stew. See Alan Davidson, The Oxford Companion to Food (OUP 2000).
49 Woolgar, C.M., The Great Household in Late Medieval England (Yale University Press 1999).
50 The name was used pejoratively; it came from Middle Dutch lollaert, meaning mumbler, and applied to heretical sects. Here it was used to mean followers of Wycliffe.
51 A term coined by Sir Walter Scott.
52 Briggs, Asa, A Social History of England (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1983).
53 See Briggs, Asa, op.cit.
54 Ibid.
55 Ibid.
56 Quoted in Strong, Roy, The Story of Britain (Pimlico 1998).
57 Quoted in Curtis-Bennett, Sir Noel, The Food of the People (Faber & Faber 1949).
58 Ibid.

By Colin Spencer in "British Food - An Extraordinary Thousand Years of History", Glub Street, London, 2011, excerpts chapter four. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.

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