Though I believe that after the Norman Conquest a peak of English gastronomy was achieved, such cooking used a bedrock of Anglo-Saxon culinary inventiveness which has remained a strong thread within our food. The Normans appropriated for themselves a land that, as we have seen, was rich in produce. The peasants had learned to live using wild foods, and the Anglo-Saxons were learned in herbal lore and adroit in their use of herbal essences. Sadly, this too would later be taken from them by their Norman rulers, for wild game and plants would be sequestered by forestry laws, and herbal knowledge in a vulnerable person would become evidence of witchcraft.
Food and Fasts
One of the great suppositions about our diet is that it was based upon meat-eating. There were certainly great carnivores in our past. Tacitus gives us a clue as to who they are when he talks of the Germanic peoples placing no value on elaborate forms of cookery but preferring simple food: wild fruit, fresh game and curdled milk.1 Meateating took a central role in the Anglo-Saxon and German aristocracy. In the Icelandic sagas a Hollywood vision of the past is given credence by scenes in which drunken warriors throw large animal bones at each other in the hall. The inference is that whole ox or mutton carcasses had been roasted then presented well nigh whole to the table for the warriors to hack and carve themselves. There is an Homeric pride in this kind of consumption; the larger the animal eaten the greater the grandeur and wealth of the provider. We can discern this attitude in Aelfric’s Colloquy when a cook is confronted with the statement: ‘We don’t care about your art; it isn’t necessary to us, because we can boil things that need boiling and roast things that need roasting.’2 This exchange tells us that cooking was recognised as being an art even if it was not always pursued – a valuable clue to Anglo-Saxon gastronomy.
However, the Church’s teaching confused natural appetites. Both the concept of gastronomy and the idea of asceticism (the control, selection and censoring of foods) come from a basic unease in the early medieval sensibility over the function of eating at all. The anxiety stemmed from how human beings differ from beasts: in the need to consume and defecate there appeared no difference, yet the religious sensibility stated that man was blessed by being created in the image of God and was in control of all the beasts of the field (so could kill and eat them) as well as being in control of the beast within himself. Cooking, spicing and saucing raised food to a level which is beyond that of the beast. Dishes fit for the divine spark within man; fasting and starving the body of nutrients proved that man could become a more rarefied being, more worthy of God’s love. In fact, from 960-1216 there was a complete abstinence from meat as a rule throughout the monasteries of England. The rule might be broken in a case of definite illness and poultry was allowed to be eaten.3
We obtain glimpses of the monastic diet from the conversations created by the monk Aelfric Bata, and from these lively and colourful exchanges we know the diet was far from monotonous with a large amount of drinking allowed. These conversations are pre-Conquest but the basic life within the monastery would have remained well-nigh unchanged for centuries, except for a gradual erosion of the rules and an accompanying rise in the quality and luxury of the food until the Reformation finally destroyed it all. However, Aelfric Bata at the beginning of the eleventh century gives us a picture that is not in the least austere. They drank good beer or mulled drink, mead or wine, they had hams, poultry and fish, for a monk stole morsels of those from his fellow novices. When the teacher prepared himself for a journey he asked the novice to go to the cellarer and to ask him for a prepared meal, detailing what he wants: ‘Wheat bread and a measure of honey and fish, butter and milk, lard and cheese and eggs and toast and whipped cream and beef, pork and mutton, vegetables, peppered dishes, and good beer, and wine and mulled mead and every good thing and a napkin.’4 This sounds like an ambitious picnic, but the journey by river and road is of several days and the teacher would have been accompanied by two or three others to wait on him. As we will learn from the public cookshops of later years, travellers liked to take their own produce with them, such as their own fish from their rivers and lakes, and their own butchered carcasses, for they knew they could trust the quality of these, while on the road they feared being either swindled or poisoned.
The abbey garden is full of medicinal herbs and plants as well as vegetables to eat, which he lists: ‘Growing there are the vegetables that can be eaten just about every day: cabbage, celery, mallow, parsley, thyme, garlic, mint, dill and savory.’ They divided the vegetables into those that were eaten cooked and those eaten raw; all of these were eaten cooked and the herbs used in cooking. The rest of his list is of herbs eaten raw or used medicinally: ‘Also growing there are lovage, woad, sorrel, feverfew, henbane, rubia, rape, mullein, wormwood, hemlock, groundsel, fennel, lupine, violet, ravensfoot, daisy, heliotrope, clary, comfrey, rue, vervain, tansy, milfoil, yarrow, saxifrage, iris, poppy, nettle, angelica, plantain, cinquefoil, periwinkle, horehound, strawberry, cumin, elecampane, watercress, pennyroyal, marjoram, mugwort, sage, thistle, carrot, lily, rose, clover, agrimony, radish, fern and sedge.’5 A formidable list, any of these would also have been used as flavouring herbs in cooking; they were certainly all used in lotions, potions, ointments and salves as well as warming drinks and in salads.
In a further Colloquy (27), the tools and ironware in the kitchen are listed for the cooking and preparing of the daily meals: ‘Practically every day there will be a hearth with coal, flaming logs and brands, hatchets for cutting wood, andiron, a cauldron, frying pan, hook, crocks, bellows for blowing on the fire, spits for roasting, a dish or dishes, a tray, vessel, pitcher, bowl or basin, saw, a vessel of lead, bucket, utensils, wicker basket, barrow, tin vessel, oven, dough, flour, meal, sieve, barrel, vat, bottle, flask, tongs, shears, candlesnuffer and countless other ironware.’ Lastly, the teacher asked the novice, ‘Oh dear boy, spread my tablecloth, because we don’t have a cloth except on feast days. Get my fork, my knife, my spoon, my utensil, my wine jug and my dish. Go quickly and bring some pottage and tasty foods from the kitchen.’6 Although forks were not widely adopted in northern Europe until the seventeenth century, here is a very early mention of one, as if it is an essential tool with which to eat a meal.
The women and children were kept busy throughout the year, gathering food from the wild, such as innumerable fungi for drying in autumn, as well as sage, rosemary and thyme. Wild celery and alexanders could be picked; greens such as wild spinach or Good King Henry would be tough by then, but with long slow cooking would add a flavour to the stew. Other herbs would be harvested before the frosts destroyed their leaves: dandelion, borage, swinecress, red nettle, orach, scarlet pimpernel, chickweed and plantain. From their plot around the dwelling fenced in by a dead hedge, the women and children would have grown onions, garlic and shallots, which would have been strung earlier. Leeks, kale and cabbages, green onions, hyssop and second-year parsley (which would now seed itself for the next year) could all be left in the ground. Peas and beans had to be podded; they were left on the plants until dried, then stored in earthenware jars and pots.
Peas were slow to become accepted as a field crop, which considering their high nutritive value and the fact that both man and beast can eat them, at first strikes one as puzzling. As late as the thirteenth century there were still some manors not growing them at all. However, dried pulses were basic to the daily pottage (stew-like soup) and I suspect these were grown near the living quarters with the pot herbs. It was the grey pea or field pea (Pisum arvense) that was grown, which has an attractive purple flower and grows rapidly to about five feet. It has little taste fresh, but dried it is astonishingly full of a rich, almost meaty flavour, making a purée that is thick and filling. It is then that the colour turns grey and in gastronomic terms it is unappealing, but the flavour and food value are enormous.
Early medieval bye-laws seem eager to protect the harvesting of the peas (‘coddling’, as it was called), for as they grow to five feet, a person or even a child is hidden when picking them and the open field system was vulnerable to the pods being stolen. One law directs that the poor must not gather the peas on the plough strip but only on the verge. Other laws say that coddling must be done between sunrise and sunset and that people coddling must all enter and leave the field at the same time. The growing peas were being policed, in fact.
Growing the pea just outside the dwellings would solve these problems: two 6 ft x 3 ft beds would give about 12 lb of dried peas; with the dried beans also grown nearby there would have been enough pulses to see a small family through a winter and for seed in early spring. The beans they grew would have been one of ten different varieties of the broad bean (Vicia cracca), probably either narbonne vetch (Vicia narbonensis) or white vetch (Vicia sativa) which was later grown all over northern Europe as a feed for animals.
However, there is abundant evidence in place names that beans were planted in the fields and not only around the dwellings, for example, in Benhall, Benacre and Peasenhall in Suffolk, for that county specialised in the growing of legumes, and Banstead in Surrey was growing them as early as 675. In fact, in the east of England they seemed fond of growing both beans and rye.
So what else, apart from either peas or beans, would have been in this daily family stew? This pottage, with its leaden sound and its association with the Biblical ‘mess of pottage’, always conjures up a bland and dreary dish. It has been the mainstay of the majority of the people for thousands of years, however, and people then, as now, however poor they were, had a vested interest in the quality of the food they ate. In the first place, however, this food, spooned onto a flat circle of maslin bread, would have been solid fuel to stifle the growing hunger of their working day. They would also have delighted in flavours that were intense and stimulating, especially on those days and autumn months up to Michaelmas when there were no animal bones, flesh or skin to bequeath a meaty flavour. The main leaf would almost certainly have been a type of kale because it grew abundantly and was very hardy throughout the coldest winter, but every flavouring herb would have been used too. It is unlikely that in the autumn any part of the salted-down pig would be left, but there were the fungi to add richness and the summer’s onions and garlic. Any root vegetables were not yet ready, except possibly wild celeriac, skerrit or the roots of flat leaf parsley. Nevertheless, with freshly baked breads (either from the one communal oven if the village was important enough, or more likely homemade cooked flat on an iron placed over the fire) and after the pottage the cheese preserved in brine, there was a meal which kept hunger at bay. Health and vigour must have been preserved by the daily use of wild plant food, a good source of minerals and vitamins. Through the long winter months, when brassicas and land cress are still in leaf, the threat of scurvy must have been erased by gathering from the wild. The pottage was cooked slowly in or over a low fire; to sharpen the flavour there would be wood sorrel, horseradish and mustard, and there might be pickled rock samphire, or relishes of raw onion, leek and garlic.
The peasants fared far better under Anglo-Saxon rule than later under Norman tyranny. According to an ordinance of Athelstan’s one destitute Englishman on each of the royal estates was to receive one amber of meal (roughly ground cereals) and a shank of bacon or a wether (a castrated ram) worth fourpence every month. The meal would have been consumed as bread or pottage. Even a male slave was to receive among other things about 3½ lb of corn per day and a female slave 2½ lb, which between them was about 4 lb of bread per day. Slaves were, of course, the basic workforce on the land, so it paid to keep them fed and healthy, especially throughout that sparse time in the bleak winter months. So it was decreed that a male slave received two sheep carcasses and a cow for the winter, while the female slave only got one sheep or threepence for winter food. There was also one sester of beans for Lent and whey in summer or one penny. Both received food at Christmas, Easter and harvest time while both also had a strip of land on which to grow vegetables.7
The bread was likely to have been made from maslin flour, which is a mixture of wheat and rye; both cereals were grown together, though the rye ripened at least two weeks before the wheat. The corn would have been milled with a hand quern unless there was a water mill; these first reached Britain in 762 and thereafter proliferated; at the time of Domesday there were 5,624. However, the mill belonged to the landlord, being on the manor’s land, so a proportion of peasant grain was taken as a toll. This added expense meant the hand querns continued, even though it was such hard work.
Not only the mill was owned by the manor, but the bread oven too, so if the peasant took his dough to be baked, a proportion of the dough went to the lord or squire. So home baking thrived as well as home-milling. The unleavened hearthcake was called therf-bread; the sour-dough was placed on a round flat iron which had a long handle, the end of which was wood. The iron was supposed to be the width of a man’s arm from elbow to wrist, and the bread needed to be thick enough to be held at one side as one would a plate. This could hold a thick pottage heaped up in the centre, while bits of the outside of the rim of the bread could be broken off and dipped into the stew. It was a practical way of eating, for nothing was lost, and the juices of the pottage drained into the centre of the bread to be eaten last.
Bread could be also baked at home if the three-legged cauldron was buried upside down in slow burning peat; the dough went in underneath. That of course required the family not to be using the cauldron for its daily pottage, and few families could afford more than one cooking pot. In what was to become Wales, bread was baked on a griddle set on a tripod covered with an iron lid with the heat produced from furze and clods of earth ranged around it, The yeast was made from barley cleared of beard by being pummelled on a clean floor, sieved three times, then mixed with some boiled grey peas and oats, sieved into a container and left on a warm hearth. Then a handful of hops and flour was added to it and it was left for a day or two. The yeast was so powerful it could not be bottled for the bottles would surely explode.
This way of making yeast continued up to the beginning of this century on the island of Anglesey and in Wales. It was unleavened or barely leavened bread, and would have been eaten daily in round flat cakes. The flour was one hundred per cent rye, barley and oats, with little gluten but nothing removed by sieving. Baking under a pot would have drawn the dough slightly upwards. Even sourdough, which might have used fermented liquor from brewing or the sediment from bottom-fermenting yeasts, was slow acting and would have resulted in a heavy damp bread, perfect as it happens, for its use as a receptacle to a thick soup.
One can understand why wheaten loaves were eaten by the rich and valued so highly as food for feasts and communion food as the Eucharist. The baker was a respected figure. In Aelfric’s Colloquy he remarks: ‘Without my skill every table seems empty and without bread all food is turned to loathing, I gladden the hearts of men, I strengthen folk, and because of this, the little children will not shun me.’
Cooking the Food
When looking at what peasants ate, it is often forgotten that in the summer months much cooking could take place outdoors. Iron tripods made for large cooking pots would stand in the midst of a fire; the pot would take mixed stews of bones, vegetables, herbs and wild game birds with suet puddings stuffed into stomach linings. A boiled suet sausage was a Saxon favourite. This could be tied to the handle and either steamed or boiled. Placing food in earthenware jugs, lighting a fire in a hole, letting it die down, and then burying the jug and leaving it for half a day is an ancient method of cooking and one we still associate with hare. In the winter the fire would have been in the centre of the dwelling with stones used as a fireback, but built onto the earth floor on yesterday’s ashes. The fire throughout the winter months would never have gone out; at night the embers would still be warm and porridge could be made overnight. Most meals throughout the year, however, would have been cooked in a cauldron, which hung over the fire and could be lowered when needed.
Modest landowners could afford other cooking equipment: griddle and frying pans, soapstone bowls which were unbreakable on clay floors, other earthenware pots which with a lid could be used for baking, thrust deep into the embers of a fire, and leather vessels which could be used for boiling. Salt meat was simmered with dried peas or beans in the embers for a very long time, salt fish was poached in milk with butter, vegetables were seethed in oil or a mixture of oil and ale, apples, pears and medlars were stewed in wine sweetened with honey. As well as pottage, in Old English the word brod is mentioned, meaning broth – in this context a thin broth, though obviously this could be enriched by cream or lots of butter. The Cook in the Colloquy mentions a fat, rich broth and also various soups; as well as the obvious bean and pea soup, there is a carrot broth, a mint broth, and a hen and mallow leaf broth; a peppered broth is classed as a delicacy. The art of keeping a fire going all day and allowing it to die down throughout the night meant that cooking was inevitably of the long simmered, one-pot variety; it also necessitated various tools like bellows, fire covers and fire tongs, as well as a steady supply of the right size of logs. It has been estimated that to spit roast a pig of 120 lb in weight you needed 15 cwt of thoroughly seasoned large oak logs a foot long.
A funeral feast receipt costing four ores and seven pence tells us that it was composed of bread, ale, a flitch of bacon and a buck; roast venison would have been a treat. Another grander feast, costing eight ores and twenty-four pence, had a pig, three bucks and a bullock with cheese, fish and milk. All cooking relied on some preserved foods, whether it was only dried fungi on threads. Leechdoms (from the Anglo-Saxon word laece, to heal) gave precise instructions on drying foods in the sun and open air, or by the fire or in the oven and kiln. They gave direction as to gathering, drying and powdering of herbs, how to dry seaweed, peas, beans, meat, birds and fish. What foods to salt and smoke and how to pickle.
The salter ranks in importance with the ploughman, fisherman and smith:
My trade greatly benefits you all. None of you would take any pleasure in your meals or food without my hospitable art. How can anyone appreciate very sweet foods to the full without the savour of salt? Look, you would even lose your butter and cheese and you can’t even enjoy your vegetables without making use of me.8
Food for the Elite
We do have a collection of recipes and observations on digestion. On the Observance of Foods, which dates from the early sixth century (about AD 511), was written by a Greek physician, Anthimus, ambassador to King Theuderic, King of the Franks (an area of north-east Gaul around Metz). It is in a form of a letter written to King Theuderic. To complicate matters, Anthimus had been sent north by his master, King Theodoric, who was the Ostrogothic king in Italy and whom some historians have confused with the king of the Franks, owing to the similarity in their names. The letter is highly informative on the diet at the court: the instructions and observations are imbued with foods rarely eaten in Italy or Greece: pork, bacon, hams and dairy foods from cattle. I mention it here, because north-east Gaul’s climate was very like Britain’s, and as all worldly monarchs were overseen by the power and jurisdiction of the Papacy, society was not basically that different. The food of the elite at the court of King Theuderic would have been similar to that at King Alfred’s. The most striking aspect of Anthimus’s letter is not how the shadow of Ancient Rome still looms, but how the medicinal knowledge is influenced by Arabian thought and its philosophy of humours, which would come to dominate medieval cooking.
The letter is more concerned with health than with cooking and is a detailed guide to the foods that are beneficial to the body; thus bread should be white and leavened otherwise it will weigh heavily upon the stomach. Hares are considered nourishing foods for one in delicate health. One should not eat pig’s kidneys except for the edges and the kidneys of other animals never.9 Only the breasts and wings of fowl should be eaten, never the hinder parts. (Presumably the servants, concerned only with their hunger and not their health, gladly consumed the rest.) Dark meat, such as cranes’, engendered melancholy humours. Hard egg white should be avoided, only eggs that are runny should be eaten. Anthimus is suspicious of lampreys because of their dark blood. He prefers oysters baked instead of raw as it removes the chance of poisoning from them. He endorses a range of vegetables from mallow, beet, leeks and cabbage (the latter should only be eaten in the winter), lettuces, turnips, parsnips and carrots. He approves of both cultivated and wild asparagus: they are boiled with celery and fennel root and flavoured with coriander and mint, then eaten with salt and oil. Orach, radishes, garlic, onions and shallots are all good for you.
This list is interesting for historians over the centuries have always bemoaned the lack of salads and vegetables eaten, as they are rarely mentioned in either kitchen accounts or recipes. Anthimus also approves of barley, broad beans, chick peas and lentils; after the latter have been cooked a little vinegar and Syrian sumac are added, then olive oil, coriander and salt. He mentions ‘French beans’ as being good, even when dried; this is the translator’s interpretation of the Latin fasiolum, which follows the example of other translators when interpreting the same word in the works of Pliny and Galen, where it is mentioned how short growing the plant is. The bean, in fact, is likely to be the black-eyed pea which came from the East to the Mediterranean countries and would not be a version of Phaseolus vulgaris which was waiting to be discovered in the New World.10
As to milk being drunk, Anthimus is naturally suspicious, being a Byzantine, so he thinks it should be heated first or have honey, wine or mead mixed with it. He believes that fresh milk will curdle in the stomach (the proof was there in the carcass of calves) and this could be harmful. This belief was to continue up to the nineteenth century, and as milk quickly became contaminated or turned it was perhaps just as well. He likes curdled milk mixed with honey or olive oil, which was either curds or yoghurt; if the latter it is interesting to see it appear as a food so far north. He does not like cheese either, unless it is fresh and sweet. I imagine this to be an Arabic inhibition, as his dislike of cooked cheese was based on a belief that it produced kidney stones.
Anthimus loves quinces, apples, plums, peaches and cherries, but they must all ripen on the tree. Blackberries, mulberries, fresh figs, chestnuts, hazelnuts and almonds are all good, as are pistachios, dried figs, dates and raisins. The Frankish court seems to lack for nothing and from this huge range of ingredients one feels there must have been a lively cuisine. Two recipes have some detail to them, but one gathers that heat from fire could be difficult to control, for roasted meat tends to get burnt, unless it is boiled first. There is, however, much mention of gentle cooking over charcoal, which needs the use of a chafing dish.
First, a recipe for what could be a Beef Daube. The beef, Anthimus says, should be washed in clean water then boiled until almost done. Sharp vinegar and half as much honey, the white part of leeks, pennyroyal, wild celery or fennel, should then be added and the stew simmered for another hour. Then spikenard, pepper, costmary and cloves should be ground, and these spices mixed with wine and added to the stew just before serving. Spices were expensive; spikenard grew high in the Hindu Kush and was exported from the Ganges, so this, even for a royal household, was a recipe for an occasion. The wine added at the end would give aroma and delicacy to the finished sauce. Anthimus also advised that the stew would taste better if cooked in an earthenware pot rather than an iron one. How right he is, for it is an observation other cooks have made and one I can personally agree with. How sophisticated this recipe is; it strikes me as simple but well judged. And though it is sent to a king, something similar with less expensive ingredients would also have been eaten by the Saxon nobility.
Anthimus’s next recipe is delicate and again highly sophisticated. It is made from minced chicken and beaten egg white, heaped up upon scallops in a fish sauce, and cooked in a chafing dish; the egg white and chicken cook in the steam from the sauce. When it is served a little wine and honey is poured over it and Anthimus tells us that it is eaten with a spoon. This strikes me as gastronomy – as good as it gets.11
As with the peasant household, the implements at a manor kitchen would have been a large cauldron and tripod, but they would have had a much used spit turned by hand and able to hold the occasional large carcass or a string of smaller ones. There were also smaller spits for small birds. Oxen, being labouring beasts, were valued alive, but when past their prime would have been slaughtered; as their meat then was tough they would have been boiled slowly. The most common large carcass to be roasted would have been deer, then wild boar, and occasionally the more elderly sheep and goats; almost certainly they would have been boiled first then spit-roasted.
Further implements in the manor kitchen would have been a gridiron for baking breads, a ladle, iron pots of differing sizes, a mortar and pestle, knives and wooden spoons. The meals would have revolved around boiled and roast wild meats, game and boar. Beyond this basically simple idea of cooking, the concept of a cuisine, where time and skill were expended on food, existed, as we have seen, but if we are to remember the Cook in the Colloquy was also somehow resented. Nevertheless, an Anglo-Saxon cuisine of dishes we would consider highly delicious today undoubtedly existed, and many of these have stayed with us and were the basis on which Anglo-Norman cookery was to rise to new heights.
Leechdoms abound with terms like ‘work it into a paste’, ‘beat two eggs in hot water’, ‘sweeten with honey’, ‘shred new cheese in front of a gentle fire’. There were sweet omelettes containing flowers and fruit, there were dishes of milk, or cream or curds sometimes mixed with sweet wine and ground cereal – a dish that would come to be known later as flummery.12 Cows’ heels and calves’ feet were used to make jellies. Summer puddings used bread to contain fruit, such as blackberries, raspberries and whortleberries.13 Sweet dishes were called eft mettas, literally after meats.
The idea of regional specialities to be sought after had taken root: pigs from Gloucestershire and Buckinghamshire, for example, fed on beech mast, which bequeaths a special nutty flavour, were dearly prized; the hams from Yorkshire and Westmorland, which had been cured with a mixture of common salt, saltpetre, black pepper and honey, were praised. Oven-roasted meat was somehow wrapped in a flour and water paste so that it was steam-baked. Beef was marinaded in vinegar and herbs, and vegetables and apples in wine and honey. Clay was used for wrapping sea birds when roasted in the fire. There is a recipe in a Leechdom for a sage omelette: ‘take a handful of sage and grind it very small and twelve peppercorns and grind them up fine, then take six eggs and beat them up with the sage and pepper, take a clean pan and fry the mixture in oil.’ There is also another recipe for a vegetable omelette. Perhaps the most impressive recipe is osterhlfas (oyster loaf), in which a loaf was hollowed out and the inside filled with a mixture of oysters, minced meat, suet, egg, herbs and seasoning, then baked.
Fruit sauces were traditionally served with meat and fish dishes. The English used a greater number of green herbs for their green sauce than the French did. Some basic cooking procedures were already established: clarifying butter; whipping cream; a prepared mustard referred to as gerenodne senep; serving vegetables with butter or oil and vinegar; and a wide range of herbs used to flavour all manner of dishes.
Feast Halls
The high point of Anglo-Saxon cuisine must have been those celebratory meals in the feast halls where the King’s throne was also called the gift-seat, for the King rewarded warriors for their triumphs. Beowulf received a golden standard, helmet, mail shirt and eight horses with golden bridles and jewelled saddles. These halls were vast: the foundations of one at Yeavering measure 80 ft by 40 ft with supports for a high roof; another at Cheddar, dating back to the ninth century, is 75 ft in length. Silver gilt mounts for drinking horns and cups of exquisite workmanship have been found and we know that a harp was played as the nobles ate. A horn was blown to summon the guests to the feast. The Great Hall was guarded by doorkeepers, who ensured there were no gatecrashers or anyone entering while the meal was in progress. Hangings, sometimes interwoven with gold used to decorate the walls and tablecloths were in use by the early ninth century, table napkins by the tenth. The diners were seated on cushioned settles.
The function of the royal feast was to emphasise the ruler’s power through a lavish display of wealth, and to attract followers and supporters, so that hopefully the feast became a unifying force within society. The King or ‘chieftain’ provided food and drink that was prestigious in kind and plentiful in quantity; the more rituals attached to the food, the more music and spectacle arranged the greater the ruler appeared. The feast was central to the manner by which the King wielded his power.
Men were in charge of the cooking and the serving of the food; they carried the roasts upon their spits and knelt to serve the diners, carving choice cuts for the King and his favoured guests. They drank beer14, ale, wine and mead; the bread served was always of wheat, but often made from enriched dough mixtures of flour mixed with eggs and cream, spiced and flavoured, and sprinkled with seeds such as dill, caraway, pepper, fennel and sweet cicely. Meat, fish and game were served. Nor would a feast ignore the dietary knowledge of the time; it would be likely to celebrate it. For example, the inclusion of a sorrel sauce for a fish dish is very likely, because sorrel is mentioned in the Leechdoms, through which we know that the connection between food and health was a strong one. No society before or since placed so much emphasis on the health-giving properties of a huge range of herbs and gave so many recipes for the creation of potions, ointments and dishes to be eaten.
Herbal Knowledge
The Saxons possessed a formidable awareness of the power of herbs upon human and animal metabolism. The Leech Book of Bald, which dates from around 900-950, is considered by some to have a much wider knowledge of herbs than the doctors of Salerno. This book, the first medical treatise written in Western Europe after those in the ancient world, is written in the vernacular, so as a work of study it was available to all. One chapter consists of prescriptions sent by Helias, Patriach of Jerusalem, to King Alfred, so it was a work that reflected the thinking upon the subject in the civilised world. It was a manual of a Saxon doctor who refers to two other doctors, Dun and Oxa, who had given him prescriptions. In the Herbarium of Apuleius, which included Dioscorides’ additions, only 185 plants are mentioned, and in the earliest Herbal, printed in Germany in 1484, 380 plants appear. The Anglo-Saxons had names for at least 500 different plants. Pliny tells us that the Ancient Britons would gather herbs with such striking ceremonies that it would seem as though the Britons had taught them to the Persians. In fact, the Leech Book is full of ancient Indo-Germanic beliefs, which shows that trade between the West and the East went far back into prehistory.
As an antidote to many diseases and afflictions some herbs become sacred like watercress, chervil, fennel and camomile and these are but a few. Herb drinks were made by adding pounded mixtures of herbs to ale, milk and honey. There were vapour baths with sweet smelling herbs, sunburn oils and cleansing creams, prescriptions for hair loss, eye mistiness, headaches, snake bites, nose bleeds and wounds. Rooms, people and animals were all fumigated with a mixture of herbs burnt slowly to produce smoke. Plants from the wild were therefore central to the life and vigour of the Anglo-Saxon culture.
Imported spices were enormously valuable. The Venerable Bede on his deathbed in 735 was careful to share his pepper and his incense, while London was already a commercial centre for the sale of expensive and rare spices. Bede describes it as ‘an emporium for many nations who come to it by sea and land’. Spices reached northern Europe by way of the Persian Gulf, Red Sea, Egypt and the Levant, and, unlike silver coinage which was frequently debased, peppercorns kept their value. In the 960s Corby Abbey bought from Cambrai sacks of spices which ranged from 120 lb of pepper and cinnamon and 70 lb of ginger to numerous 10 lb parcels of other spices. Although trade was flourishing, the early Church fathers disapproved of it, however. Leo I declared it was difficult for buyers and sellers not to fall into sin. The Anglo-Saxons exported woollen cloaks to the Carolingian Empire, while Cornish tin had been used in Europe’s metal industries since Roman times. There was also a brisk business in slaves, generally war captives. At the time of the Domesday Book, twelve per cent of the population were slaves; these were taken in battle and either kept for labouring or sold on.
Export of wool began in the early eleventh century just before the Norman Conquest. By this time the Flemings had a large mercantile fleet. Gold had stemmed from Byzantium and the Muslim Empire and by the tenth century English land purchases had been made with it, pointing to constant trade in the Mediterranean. Peterborough’s abbey church had a great cross of solid gold, and English goldsmiths were famous throughout Europe. Pepper doubled in value when it crossed the Mediterranean, and spices, fine silks and taffetas and even wine were all so expensive that only the royal court and the richest of nobility could afford them. Nevertheless, wars, conquests and famine could harm trade and set it back decades. The Danish conquest, for example, with its demands for ransoms in silver, so depleted the English capital and impoverished the English merchants that trade declined. When this occurs, gastronomy is also discouraged, although treacherous weather and the resulting inadequate harvests were the prime enemy and a constant threat.
The Famine Years
The tenth century was full of catastrophes brought on by unseasonable weather of unceasing rain and floods, and months of snow and frost. For a society that relied upon bread as its staple food, a ruined harvest meant famine followed inevitably by plague or pestilence. In the hundred years following the first millennium, England would be conquered yet again by invasion, and further weakened by years of unendurable famine. In 1044 a dreadful famine struck England and the Continent and three years later there was snow and frost and more famine. In 1051 a failed harvest produced extreme dearth where thousands died; again three years later there was a terrible famine, after a comet was seen. In 1068 there was famine and plague after a severe winter and in 1069 the northern counties of England suffered a great dearth after being harried by William I trying to subjugate his northern territory; the mortality was so great that the living could not take care of the sick nor bury the dead. In 1086 there was a murrain15 of animals and intemperate weather and in the next year pestilence and famine in which many thousands died. In 1093 there was great famine and more mortality.
If we take notice of the number of references to hunger in the early medieval chronicles and legal documents we must recognise that it was a normal, almost everyday, experience. Plagues inevitably followed the famine, exacerbated by the fact that people moved around searching for food. If bad harvests were not enough, eating toxins in the cereals was also a continuing hazard. There was corncockle (Agrostemma githago), a weed that grows with the corn and needs to be rooted up before the harvest as the seeds contain githagen, which predisposes those that eat it to leprosy. Then there was ergot (claviceps purpurea), a fungus disease of cereals especially rye. Ergotism (ignis sacer, St Anthony’s Fire or erysipelas) was one of the most common complaints dealt with in the Leechdoms, and produced convulsions, gangrene, abortions, often death and certainly hallucinations in both humans and livestock. Ergot flourished in wet conditions for the moulds secreted their dangerous aflatoxins on damp grain, meal or flour, especially where rye was the main crop, which was in the West Midlands.
Another common hazard was that cured pork was a source of botulism; as the curing process did not kill off the parasites. Whipworms (trichuris trichiura) leads to severe diarrhoea or Ascarids (Ascaris lumbricoides) which are large round worms whose migrating larva can produce hepatitis and damage the lungs. From the coprolite evidence analysed in York, most people carried some worm infestation for most of their lives. Even King Alfred was well aware of this affliction when he wrote to Boethius and commented ‘on the small worms that crawl within and without man even sometimes kill him’.16 There was contamination of milk and dairy products by bacteria, flies and mice lived in food stores, which was why, if milk was not drunk straight from the cow, it could not be kept, but had to be boiled or turned into butter and cheese.
The Anglo-Saxons must have also suffered from vitamin A and C deficiencies in the long winter months, leading to eye, skin and urinary tract diseases and bleeding gums and ulcers. The Leechdoms recommend beet leaves, mallow, brassica, nettle and elder leaves, all of which were good sources for these vitamins. Their teeth show marked wear, a sure sign of a coarse, fibrous diet. They may also have absorbed lead from their food-processing equipment, by salting meat in lead containers; brining creates an acidic medium, which dissolves metal. Lead-lined cider vats and presses might have caused outbreaks of colic and lead poisoning. Many women died from childbirth and attendant complications between twenty and thirty: of those that survived, only a very few lived beyond forty-five, though their stature was greater than in the Iron Age and the later medieval population.
None of these troubles and afflictions was to change after the Norman Conquest. This was the underbelly of a struggling society, clinging onto life and supporting a ruling elite of two per cent with no foreseeable means to improve its wretchedness. All it had, if it was loyal to Christ, free of sin and true to the rituals and regulations of the Church, was the hope of paradise, of an end to pain and suffering and the rewards of heaven. For many that was enough and the rumblings of revolt against an oppressive system would continue for the next few hundred years until the greatest pestilence of all, the Black Death, would scythe down half the population and change the social structure and the food they ate forever.
Notes
1 Tacitus, Germania, ch.23; trans Mattingly (Penguin Classics 1951).
2 Aelfric: Colloquy, op.cit.
3 Knowles, David, The Monastic Order in England: a History of its Development from the Times of St Dunstan to the Fourth Lateran Council, 943-1216 (CUP 1949).
4 Anglo-Saxon Conversations. The Colloquies of Aelfric Bata, ed. Scott Gwara; trans. and introduction, David W. Porter. Colloquy 21 (Boydell Press 1997).
5 Ibid. Colloquy 25.
6 Ibid. Colloquia Difficiliora, 1.
7 Hagen, Ann, A Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Food and Drink: Production and Distribution (Anglo-Saxon Books 1992).
8 Aelfric: Colloquy, op.cit.
9 As the kidneys’ function in mammals is to remove waste and excess substances from the blood and change them into urine, I have often thought it odd that such an excretory organ should be eaten at all. Perhaps this was an early taboo now faded which might in our days of factory farming be resurrected.
10 Of the dolichos family, which is both pole and dwarf in growth.
11 Anthimus, On the Observance of Foods, translated and edited by Mark Grant (Prospect Books 1996).
12 An oatmeal dish from the Welsh llymru which spread into Cheshire and Lancashire, and which was made from oatmeal steeped in water, then strained and boiled, until it became solid like a blancmange.
13 See Hagen, Ann, op.cit.
14 This was a fermented fruit drink, as beer from hops was not made until the sixteenth century.
15 All infectious diseases of cattle were referred to as murrain, these could have been any of the diseases we are familiar with now that cause such havoc in contemporary farming.
16 Quoted in Hagen, op.cit., from which this analysis of Anglo-Saxon infestation derives.
Written by Collin Spencer in "British Food - An Extraordinary Thousand Years of History", Grub Street, London, 2004, chapter 2. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.