THE ANGLO-SAXON PAST - ENGLISH DIET & FAMINE

When William, Duke of Normandy, killed King Harold and seized the throne of England, England’s language, culture, politics and law were transformed. Over the next four hundred years, under royal dynasties that looked principally to France for inspiration and ideas, an English identity was born, based in part upon struggle for control over the other parts of the British Isles (Scotland, Wales and Ireland), in part upon rivalry with the kings of France. From these struggles emerged English law and an English Parliament, the English language, English humour and England’s first overseas empires.

 The English Diet

Baron Simon de Montfort

From ships came trade and a navy. The sea also fed the English. As one historian has remarked, the herring served as the potato of medieval England. Vast quantities of fish supplemented a diet from which red meat, the ‘roast beef of old England’, was almost entirely absent. Visitors from France to England in the nineteenth century came to regard the English countryside as one vast meat factory for the production of beef. But beef, in the Middle Ages, was a luxury encountered more rarely than venison or herring or eel. Cattle were expensive to feed, especially in the winter months when, before the introduction of the turnip as a common winter crop, there was very little save hay upon which they could be fed. Those that were kept were as often used to pull ploughs and carts as for milk or meat. Oxen were the tractors and trucks of medieval England. There was also perhaps a sense, once again inherited from Bede, that there was something rather awful and un-Christian about the eating of beef.
As early as the sixth century, Pope Gregory the Great, writing to Augustine of Canterbury on the conversion of the English to Christianity, had associated the eating of the flesh of cattle with the feasts of the pagan rather than with the Christian calendar. Christianity was a Mediterranean religion, from a region where the diet was principally vegetarian. Meat eating was both a characteristic of the barbarian tribes and a symbol of Germanic pagan allegiance. Only in the Celtic regions of Christendom, in Wales and in Cumbria, did cattle remain a staple element of diet, albeit prized as much for their milk as for their meat. Rents in Cumberland were still paid in ‘cornage’, as so many horns of cattle. The Welsh, in the 1260s, serving alongside Englishmen in the armies of the rebel baron Simon de Montfort, were horrified by the greed of the English for grain with which to make bread, just as the English craved to escape from the endless but breadless Welsh diet of cheese, milk and meat.
As with modern commercial catering, poultry represented a compromise acceptable to most. Chickens and eggs were consumed in vast numbers. Church rents were sometimes payable as so many chickens, particularly at Christmas, and hard-boiled eggs were blessed in church before the Easter Mass, for distribution amongst the village community, a practice that by the fourteenth century was being condemned in some dioceses as a pagan superstition, but which together with the Christmas fowl has perhaps bequeathed both the modern phenomenon of the Christmas turkey and the Easter egg.

St Brices’s Day Massacre 

St Brices’s Day Massacre 

In 1002, hoping to crush the threat from Denmark and the English Danelaw, Aethelred allowed, perhaps encouraged, a massacre of Danes within his English kingdom, timed for St Brice’s day, 13 November: a pogrom, neither the first nor the last in English history, that was intended for political effect, to draw together friends in the mutual expression of hatred towards a common enemy. Following the destruction of much of Oxford in the ensuing massacre, Aethelred himself issued a charter justifying his actions. The Danes, so he argued, had to be rooted out from England like weeds (‘cockles’) from a field of wheat. Yet ethnic cleansing has never been an effective means of dealing with dissent. Those who choose murder and expropriation over negotiation generally sign their own death warrants.
Far from advertising their racial superiority, they often draw attention to their own inadequacy. It is certainly ironic that England’s greatest pogrom should have been timed for the feast day of St Brice, no Englishman but a Frankish archbishop from the Loire Valley, who achieved sanctity in part through his long residence in Rome. According to a much later source, it was the very attractiveness of the Danes to English women that led to the massacre of 1002. The Danes combed their hair daily and began to bathe every week to make themselves more seductive. It was the fact that 13 November 1002 fell on a Saturday, ‘Laugar-dagr’, or ‘Bath-day’, in the Danish language, that determined its choice as a day of slaughter by the unwashed and sexually frustrated English.

Famine – and Apocalypse? 

The massacre of 1002 was followed by a great famine, in which not just the cockles but the wheat itself came close to failing as the sense of crisis and apocalypse grew sharper. Aethelred’s reign spanned the year 1000, widely believed to mark the imminent second coming of Christ. A fear of imminent apocalypse is inclined to provoke precisely the crisis which its prophets proclaim. Aethelred’s own administrators and officials were disunited, and vied with one another for a greater share of power. The Danish King, Swein Forkbeard, mounted a full-scale invasion of England, no doubt hoping to seize his own spoils from the coming degree of intimacy between the two families that extended beyond the council chamber to the royal bed.

Cnut himself, meanwhile, had married Aethelred’s widow, an act of sexual imperialism intended to stamp his authority upon the ruling English dynasty as upon England itself, now subsumed within a North Sea empire comprising large parts of Britain and Denmark and with ambitions towards the conquest of Norway. Most of those Englishmen whose careers prospered after the 1040s, and who were to play so crucial a role in the Norman Conquest of 1066, came to maturity in this period of Cnut’s reign, in the aftermath of a Danish Conquest itself no less remarkable than that later mounted by William of Normandy.

Excerpts from the book "A Brief History of Britain-1066–1485' by Nicholas Vincent, published in the UK by Robinson, an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2011, p.13-16. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.