The English: A Social History, 1066–1945 (Text Only) Read online

  By the beginning of the sixteenth century three meals a day had become more common than two. In the Northumberland Household Book, which contains the regulations drawn up for the household of the fifth Earl of Northumberland, this Lenten ‘Braikfaste for my Lords and my Lady’ is prescribed: ‘Furst a Loaf of Bread in Trenchers; two Manchetts [fine white loaves], a Quart of Beer; a Quart of Wine; two Pieces of Saltfish; six pieces of baconed Herring; three pieces of white herring or a dish of Sprats.’8

  The Earl’s two eldest sons were served much the same, though they had no wine and a dish of butter instead of the baconed herring; while the children in the nursery had bread and butter, salt fish, herring or sprats, and beer.

  After Lent was over the Earl allowed himself half a chine of boiled beef or mutton for breakfast instead of the fish; the two boys had chicken; and the smaller children in the nursery boiled mutton bones.9

  At other meals in the Northumberland household and in other grand houses, the food served was divided into portions, known as messes, by the server and distributed to each person according to his rank, a distinguished guest having a whole mess all for himself. Less distinguished guests had a mess for two, while others helped themselves to a mess for four.10

  Bread, baked by the household’s own baker, was eaten at every meal, usually the fine white bread known as wastel, though coarse loaves, dark and gritty and made from scraps which even hungry scullions found unpalatable, were sometimes given to visitors. Meat was served in large quantities, beef and mutton regularly, pork and veal almost as often, venison more rarely. Poultry, too, was a common dish, geese and capons as well as ordinary fowl, though partridge appears to have been too expensive for regular consumption and peacocks were rarely seen except on the tables of the very rich. Gallons of milk and pounds of butter were regularly supplied to the cooks in the kitchen; so were large quantities of cheese which was mostly made on the farm but also bought elsewhere, and enormous quantities of eggs, not eaten on their own but used extravagantly in cooking. The accounts of Eleanor de Montfort, Countess of Leicester, which have recently been studied by Margaret Wade Labarge, show that no less than 3700 eggs were consumed by the countess’s admittedly large household and guests in a single week of 1265.11

  Fish, a staple diet during Lent and on fast days, came from the manor’s fishponds or, more commonly, in the form of salted herrings, smoked mackerel or dried cod. On manors near the sea the range of fish was naturally wider; and while a household of an inland manor might have to content themselves with bream or pike or eels, usually salted and dried or boiled in paste, households by the coast enjoyed fresh sole and mullet, crabs and oysters, sturgeon, porpoise and even whale, a dish then highly prized. ‘Wolde to Gode I wer one of the dwellers by the see syde’, wrote a fifteenth-century schoolboy, expressing a common sentiment, ‘for ther see fysh be plenteous and I love them better than I do this fresh water fysh.’12

  The variety of vegetables, though it became much wider from the fourteenth century onwards, was far narrower than it is today. Dried peas and beans were served often enough, so were onions, leeks, turnips and garlic; but the early medieval gardener was much more likely to concentrate on herbs, and the medieval cook on spices, than they were on the kinds of fresh green vegetables which were enjoyed in France. Sage and parsley, fennel and borage, were all widely grown in England; while the amounts of spices handed over to the cook from the wardrobe were immense. Both mustard and pepper were used lavishly in cooking; so was ginger which was valued for its medicinal properties as well as its culinary effects. Cummin and cloves, saffron, mace and nutmeg, cinnamon, coriander and galingale, an aromatic root from East Asia, were to be found in the wardrobes of all households which could afford them. So were such exotic spices as zedoary, a ginger-like substance made from the rootstock of an East Indian plant, and cubebs, the pungent and peppery berries of a Javanese shrub, though these had to be used more sparingly, being so costly. One fourteenth-century recipe for a preserve containing nuts, carrots, turnips, pumpkins, peaches and pears required a pound of mustard seed for every 500 nuts, half a pound each of anise and horseradish, as well as liberal measures of fennel, coriander, cloves, cinnamon, pepper, ginger, saffron, nutmeg, red cedar, grain of Paradise, caraways (pounded and soaked in vinegar), two pounds of mashed raisins, wine, and twelve pounds of honey.

  Honey was frequently employed for sweetening and for the making of gingerbread; but sugar, expensive though it was at up to 2s a pound, was as familiar to cooks as honey in all large households, and was even used, together with almonds, cloves, onions and ginger, to flavour oysters. The Countess of Leicester’s household was getting through about eight pounds of sugar a month in 1265. Her accounts also reveal purchases of rice, another delicacy; and large amounts of almonds which were often eaten with rice and, when dried, were served with other dried fruits such as dates, raisins and figs, mostly imported from Spain.13

  By the end of the fourteenth century it had become a common practice to commit recipes and suggested bills of fare to writing. One bill of fare of the reign of Richard II, which has survived with its attendant recipes, lists three courses beginning with larded boar’s head and a pottage made from slowly boiled pork liver and kidneys, the whites of leeks, minced onions, and bread steeped in broth and drawn up with blood and vinegar, pepper and cloves. The first course also included beef, mutton, pork, swan, roasted rabbit and ‘tart’.

  The second course comprised duck, pheasant and chicken stuffed with a mixture of yolks of egg, dried currants, cinnamon, mace, cubebs and cloves, and two other pottages. One of these pottages was made of ground almonds seethed with good meat broth, minced onions, small parboiled birds – sparrows, thrushes, starlings and linnets were all consumed as well as magpies, rooks and jackdaws – and, again, cinnamon and cloves. The other pottage contained powdered rice boiled in almond milk, the brawn of capons and hens – beaten in that essential item of a medieval kitchen, a large mortar – mace and the inevitable cloves and cinnamon, the whole being coloured with finely ground sandalwood.

  The third and last course included rabbits, hares, teals, woodcocks, snipe, a dish known as ‘flampoyntes’ whose ingredients comprised ground pork, grated cheese, sugar and pepper baked in a pie, and ‘raffyolys’ which were patties made of chopped pork, grated cheese, powdered ginger and cinnamon.

  This was a relatively modest dinner. For a more ambitious meal the recommended bill of fare, again arranged in three courses, included duck; teals; herons; roasted veal, pork and capon; small birds in an almond milk sauce; a mixed meat tart; and a ‘leche lumbarde’ made from pounded pork, eggs, raisins, currants, minced dates, red wine and almond milk, flavoured with sugar, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, salt and pepper, and coloured with saffron. Finally there came a ‘sarsed browet’ into which, in a most complicated recipe which involved pounding with pestle and mortar, chopping, parboiling, seething, stirring and frying, was stirred a wild mixture of almonds, beef broth, cloves, mace, figs, currants, ginger (both powdered and minced), rabbits, squirrels, sugar, partridges (‘fried whole for a lord but otherwise chopped into gobbets’), sandalwood, saffron, vinegar, cinnamon and wine.

  That was the first course. With the second course came more ducks and rabbits; pheasant; venison; hedgehog; jelly; another ‘leche’; ‘browet of Almayne’ which, in addition to more familiar ingredients, including pork and rabbit, ginger and cloves, vinegar and mace, contained pine-cones and wild bugloss; and ‘viande royale’, a concoction of Greek or Rhenish wine, clarified honey, ground rice, pepper, cinnamon, cloves, saffron, sugar, sandalwood and mulberries. The third course provided yet another ‘leche’ and a different kind of pottage; more partridges and boar; roasted cranes, kids and curlews; a peacock served in the skin which was sewn back on to the roast flesh complete with feathers, head and tail; a dish known as ‘pome de oringe’ which was, improbably, made of spiced pork liver, garnished with parsley, rendered shiny with yolk of egg and coloured with indigo.14 Colouring food was consi
dered almost as important as flavouring it. As well as indigo to dye it blue and saffron to make it yellow, burnt toast crusts were used to turn it black and blood to make it red.15

  Cookery books of the fifteenth century emphasize the need for the main courses to be accompanied by ‘subtilties’, ornamental concoctions in pastry or sugar, such as ‘a black bore enarmede with golde’ or ‘a castelle of sylver with [flags] of golde’. These ‘subtilties’ were frequently constructed with great elaboration as a compliment to some notable guest and might display his coat of arms or depict some event in which he had played a distinguished part. They were brought into the hall to the sound of trumpets, and no great feast was complete without one.

  The amount of food consumed during these feasts, which might continue over a number of days, was enormous. When, in September 1465, the enthronement of George Neville as Archbishop of York was celebrated at Cawood Castle to demonstrate the riches and power of his family, twenty-eight peers, fifty-nine knights, ten abbots, seven bishops, numerous lawyers, clergy, esquires and ladies, together with their attendants and servants arrived at the castle. Counting the archbishop’s own family and servants there were about 2500 to be fed at each meal. They consumed 4000 pigeons and 4000 crays, 2000 chickens, 204 cranes, 104 peacocks, 100 dozen quails, 400 swans and 400 herons, 113 oxen, six wild bulls, 608 pikes and bream, twelve porpoises and seals, 1000 sheep, 304 calves, 2000 pigs, 1000 capons, 400 plovers, 200 dozen of the birds called ‘rees’, 4000 mallards and teals, 204 kids and 204 bitterns, 200 pheasants, 500 partridges, 400 woodcocks, 100 curlews, 1000 egrets, over 500 stags, bucks and roes, 4000 cold and 1500 hot venison pies, 4000 dishes of jelly, 4000 baked tarts, 2000 hot custards with a proportionate quantity of bread, sugared delicacies and cakes. Three hundred tuns of ale were drunk, and 100 tuns of wine, a tun containing 208 gallons according to the thirteenth-century treatise known as Fleta, or 252 gallons according to the more usual reckoning. In any event there must have been well over sixty pints of wine for each person.16

  Although there were various vineyards in England, such as that at Ledbury which yielded Bishop Swinfield seven tuns of white wine in 1290, most wine was imported from the Continent, much of it from Bordeaux, and regular shipments also came from the Rhine and Spain. It had a short life and within a few months was often undrinkable, so disgusting indeed, that Peter of Blois, one of Henry II’s clerks, complained that even at the king’s peregrinating court the wine frequently ‘turned sour and mouldy, thick, greasy, stale, flat and smacking of pitch’. ‘I have sometimes seen great lords,’ Peter of Blois continued, ‘served with wine so muddy that a man must needs close his eyes and clench his teeth, wry-mouthed and shuddering, and filtering the stuff rather than drinking it.’17

  At feasts, of course, even the roughest bastard wine provided for the servants was never as dreadful as this, while the Gascon wine seems always to have been of a high quality. Drunk in cups or in mazers, shallow bowls of maple-wood often fitted with a silver rim and sometimes with a silver cover, it was passed in these vessels from hand to hand, books of etiquette requiring one hand only to be used when handing a cup to a neighbour but both hands to be used when drinking, so that there should be less danger of spilling.

  It was very rare for anyone to refuse wine. Teetotalism was extremely rare, the word itself unknown until 1834. Drinkwater and Boileau were distinctive and uncommon surnames. Indeed, Englishmen had a reputation for heavy drinking.

  The English delight in drink and make it their business to drain full goblets [the Italian friar, Salimbene, wrote in about 1285]. For an Englishman will take a cup of wine and drink it, saying, ‘Ge bi: a vu’, which is to say, ‘It behoveth you to drink as much as I shall drink’, and therein he thinketh to say and do great courtesy, and he taketh it exceeding ill if any do otherwise than he himself hath taught in word and shown by example.18

  Much as they might have preferred to eat elsewhere, the lord and his lady customarily continued to have their meals in the hall with their household until the middle of the fourteenth century. Writing in the previous century for the benefit of the Countess of Lincoln for whom he drew up household regulations, Bishop Grosseteste emphasized the need for her to sit ‘in the middle of the high board’, so that her ‘visage and cheer be showed to all men’.

  ‘So much as you may without peril of sickness and weariness eat you in the hall afore your many,’ he added in another passage, ‘for that shall be to your profit and worship.’ The countess ought also, the bishop considered, make the senior officers of her household sit in the hall as often as she could. Yet while the servants in manorial households were still generally having their meals in the hall when William Langland was writing his Vision of Piers Plowman in about 1362, the lord and his family were not so frequently to be seen there, and might, indeed, appear only upon special occasions:

  Wretched is the hall … each day in the week

  There the lord and lady liketh not to sit.

  Now have the rich a rule to eat by themselves

  In a privy parlour … for poor men’s sake,

  Or in a chamber with a chimney, and leave the chief hall

  That was made for meals, for men to eat in.19

  By Langland’s time this ‘chamber with a chimney’ had become the usual dining-room of the rich. In the past, when the meal was a festive one, the ladies of the household had nearly always dined in an upper chamber; but now their husbands and sons were habitually climbing the stairs to eat there, too, at first in the apartment where they also slept, but later in great chambers, finely panelled and decorated with carved stonework and brightly painted wooden ceilings, the cupboards glittering with polished plate and shining ornaments, the chests covered with rich damasks, light streaming perhaps through a large oriel window filled with expensive, greenish glass which was usually fixed in removable frames and transported with the rest of the household equipment to other houses. By the middle of the fifteenth century it was presumed in the Booke of Courtesy that the lord would eat in such a chamber, while his steward would preside over his former table in the hall.

  Yet if less formality was now observed at the hall’s high table, the ceremonies attendant upon serving dinner in the upstairs chamber were as extravagant as ever, if not more so. A contemporary set of regulations, listing the formalities ideally to be followed in the household of an earl and requiring the services of at least twenty servants, has been described by Mark Girouard. There had to be grooms of the chamber to set out the trestle tables; and a yeoman of the ewer and a yeoman of the chamber, assisted by a third yeoman, to lay the earl’s own table, bowing to the board and kissing their hands before spreading the cloth. In laying the cloth they formed ‘a state’, a fold into which their master’s knife and spoon were later tucked. There had to be a yeoman of the cellar to place the requisite cups on the cupboard, to fill the shelves with their ostentatious display of plate, and to bring up the wine from the cellar. There had also to be a yeoman of the buttery to fetch the beer, and a yeoman of the pantry to bring up the bread, knives and spoons and the huge and elaborate dish, often in the shape of a ship, in which the salt was kept. This was reverently placed to the left of the earl’s place with three ceremonial bows.

  These preparations duly completed by the yeomen servants, the presence of the gentlemen sewer and carver was now required. These officials were both ritually washed by the yeoman of the ewer who presented them with towels which the one placed over his shoulder and the other hung round his neck like a scarf, folding it crosswise over his chest and tucking the ends into his belt. The carver was also equipped with napkins on which he wiped his knife before cutting slices of bread from all the loaves on the earl’s table. He did this so that he could take ‘sayes’ of them, a precautionary measure of tasting observed since the days when poison was likely to be suspected.

  Ceremonial ‘sayes’ were also taken by the sewer in the servery before the various dishes were allowed to be taken in procession by the gentlemen and yeomen
through the hall and up into the chamber. At the door the marshal of the hall received the leader of the procession, calling out, ‘By your leave, my masters’, as an order for all the servants to stand up, bareheaded and in silence. The food, growing ever colder, was then arranged on the tables while the carver took ‘sayes’ to confirm the findings of the sewer downstairs, being careful when he was cutting the meat to follow the rules of the Boke of Kerving which instructed him never to set on ‘fyshe, flesche, beefe, ne fowle more than two fyngers and a thombe’.

  At last informed that his meat was ‘on the board’, the earl and those who were to dine at his table now appeared. The earl was deferentially approached by two gentlemen. One, carrying a bowl of water, sank to his knees as the earl washed his hands; the other, ‘with suitable bowing and kissing’, dried them with a towel. The gentleman usher having, with two assistants, shown the earl to his chair, then disposed the guests at his table, having taken great care to ensure that the exact order of precedence was followed and no one given grounds for feeling offended. The most worthy and important guests were placed on the right hand of the earl, above the salt, at the end of the table known as the ‘reward’. Usually one side of the table only was used, and there was a significantly wide space between the earl and his guests below the salt, and even between him and his neighbour above the salt if it were felt that the difference in rank merited the separation. Conversation was consequently very difficult.