WHAT TO EAT AND DRINK IN MEDIEVAL ENGLAND

The modern traveler, coming from an age of good food guides and supermarkets, is liable to forget that people in medieval England still starve to death. Bad years for wheat are 1315–17 (the Great Famine), 1321–23, 1331–32, 1350–52, 1363–64, 1367–68, 1369–71, and 1390–91.1 And these are just the bad years for wheat; there are just as many paltry harvests for all the other cereal crops, and when any one of them fails, people suffer. If a season’s storms leave all the crops under water and rotting in the fields, and the cattle, sheep, and pigs drown in the swollen rivers and mud, and catch waterborne diseases, there is simply nothing for the poor man and his family to eat except the fruit from the trees (if there is any) and the preserved remains of last year’s harvest. When two years’ crops fail in succession, families die. The undernourished children perish first, susceptible to diseases in their weakened state, but it is not long before the adults follow. Men and women will eat anything—herbs, grass, drawk and darnel (forms of weed), vetches, acorns, and even bark—in their efforts to stay alive. They turn to crime—stealing food and livestock wherever they can.2 Sometimes the king and his council try to relieve the situation but there is little they can do except lower the duties on imported grain. This has no effect outside the major towns, for the rural peasantry cannot physically transport themselves to buy the grain. Even if they could make the journey they could not afford to pay the inflated prices being charged.

The pangs of starvation are felt just as severely by those caught in a siege. When you find yourself in a castle or town, with overwhelming force beyond the gates, you may well have to decide between two terrible fates: surrender and death by hanging on the one hand, or resistance and the likelihood of a slow death through starvation on the other. Those who choose the latter may suffer the most unimaginable tortures from lack of food. If you visit Calais in the summer of 1347, you will see just how bad things can get. At the outset of the siege, in September 1346, the French captain of the town expels most of the women, the children, the old, and the unfit, so there are only able-bodied men left. Over the next eleven months those men use up all their supplies. They eat every animal in the town: every dog, cat, and horse. By July they are catching rats and eating those. When they finally give in (on August 4, 1347) it is because, as the captain states in a letter to the French king, they have nothing left to eat but one another, and they would rather die on the battlefield than consume the flesh of their friends and relatives.

Calais is an extreme case, and this chapter is predominantly concerned with tastier things than rats, horses, and dogs. Nevertheless, the extremes are worth bearing in mind as you peruse the metaphorical menus of medieval England. A number of your favorite foods will not be available. There are no potatoes or tomatoes; these come from lands yet to be discovered. For the same reason there are no turkeys: your Christmas dish instead—if you can afford it—is likely to be a swan, a goose, beef, ham, or bacon.3 You will search the markets in vain for carrots, which have yet to be developed from their inedible purple wild variety. Rice is imported only in small amounts, and pasta—although regularly made in Italy and Sicily—has yet to make an appearance in England. Like all true travelers you have no option but to eat the local food, and in many cases you will find that the only alternative is hunger. If an unchanging diet of boiled bacon, rye bread, and peas does not appeal, then consider yourself lucky not to be stuck in a house in which the bacon has gone rancid, the flour has been eaten by rats, and the peas have become damp and rotted.

Rhythms of Food

The modern convention of three square meals per day does not apply in medieval England. Here you will eat just two. With the exception of a few high-status, self-indulgent individuals, people do not normally have breakfast. A householder might take some bread and cheese on rising, especially if he is planning to ride a long distance or be very active, but on the whole he will eat nothing until dinner. This, the main meal of the day, usually takes place between ten and eleven o’clock in the morning, depending on the season. It is followed by supper, a more modest affair, in the late afternoon—between four and five o’clock. Although the medieval diet does not come close to our ideas of healthy eating—for example, boiling cabbage until all the vitamin C has been destroyed—in one sense it has merit, for it delivers the greatest boost of energy in the late morning, when people still have most of the day to work off the calories.

Another important gastronomic rhythm arises from the strict rules about eating meat. The Church forbids the consumption of animals on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, and throughout Lent and Advent. This equates to just over half the year. In Lent even the eating of eggs is forbidden. As this applies to the whole of society, even the king, no host or patron will break the rule in your presence. Anyone who eats meat on a nonmeat day is liable to find himself or herself hauled up before the church courts. It is a sin and will play upon a man’s or woman’s conscience until he or she is relieved by confession, an indulgence, or a penance imposed by the courts.

The third layer of dietary rhythms is simply that of seasonal availability. Fruit is fresher in autumn, and at harvesttime all sorts of things become plentiful, from white bread to pies and flans. Meat is also more plentiful in late autumn. The expense of feeding animals through the winter months means that many are slaughtered at Martinmas (November 11). Some are roasted and eaten straightaway; others are salted for consumption during the winter. Obviously garden produce is seasonal; in fact, vegetables are arguably the most seasonal products of all, as there is little monetary value in them and thus no long-distance trade. As for fish, more fresh varieties are available in summer, when the seas are not so rough and the merchants coming from the coastal towns have longer daylight hours to transport their cargoes to the inland markets. In winter, market fish is mainly salted or dried. Even the form in which things are cooked varies with the seasons. A great deal of cooking takes place out of doors in summer. This is partly because of the weather and partly because keeping a large fire burning on the hearth of a small house tends to make it unbearably hot. Communal cooking of roast meat is common in late summer and autumn; in winter food is older and more often boiled.

For all these reasons, a request for your favorite food when you fancy it—especially if it is a meat product—can only rarely be satisfied. Times of day, days of the week, and seasons of the year all matter much more than they do in the modern world.

Peasant Households

As noted in chapter 2, there are rich peasants and poor peasants, and it goes without saying that married yeomen with thirty acres have a better diet than poor single laborers with no land or garden. It also goes without saying that hungry travelers are not welcome in a place where food is scarce. But let us say you find yourself sitting down at a yeoman’s table, like that in the three-bay house described in the last chapter.

There could be several sorts of bread in front of you. At the start of the century, dark rye bread is common, as is bread made from wheat and rye mixed together, known as maslin.4 It is unlikely that before 1350 you will be offered fine white bread in a yeoman’s house, but on special days—considering you are a guest—it might happen, if your host keeps a portion of his land sufficiently enriched with dung for growing wheat. On other days you might find bread made from barley (especially in the western counties), or oats, or a mixture of oats and wheat. You might be offered oatcakes as well as bread (especially in the north). If these do not tempt you, consider eating “horse-bread.” This is made from a sort of flour of ground peas, bran, and beans—if contemporaries look at you strangely, it is because it is not meant for human consumption. But in some places you might be expected to eat the brown wholegrain bread known as “tourt.” When this gets old, it is cut into slices and used for trenchers or plates. After use, the trenchers are given to the pigs to eat, soaked in the juices of the meal. Nothing is wasted in a peasant’s household. Even the plates are edible.

As you will gather, bread is an important part of the medieval peasant’s diet. Accordingly, its price is controlled by law (the Assize of Bread). The buying of bread, however, is a typically urban activity. Your rural yeoman is more likely to make his own. He or his wife will take their grain to the manorial mill (normally a watermill but just possibly an early wooden windmill), where the miller will grind it and take a small proportion in payment (normally a sixteenth or a twenty-fourth). If the yeoman has a stone or a clay oven in one of his outhouses, he and his wife might bake the bread themselves. Otherwise they will take their ground grain to the village baker for baking. The end product might be kept up to a week in the home, although when it is that old it is usually used only for trenchers and animal feed.

If there is any rival to bread as the staple food of the English peasantry, it is pottage. There are thick and thin pottages, from thick white porridge made with oats, and runny green pottage made with peas, to white porray made with leeks. Your host will expect your eyes to light up when he sets before you a bowl of a pottage containing peas, herbs, some bacon, and white beans. The most basic ingredients are meat stock, chopped herbs, oats, and salt, but beyond that almost anything can go in. Breadcrumbs are often used as a thickener. If you take a wooden spoon and start digging around, you are likely to find onions and garlic and other garden produce, such as cabbage. The peas might either be the small green sort with which you are familiar, or they may be a white variety. In poor peasants’ houses, large grey peas are used. As with everything else which is green, or greenish, these are boiled thoroughly prior to eating. There is a widespread understanding that green vegetables—cabbages in particular—are not good for you, and potentially harmful if raw.

It is likely that the vegetables served in a peasant’s house all come from his own garden. If you look around it you will see that there are few ornamental shrubs or flowering plants (except lavender and sweet-smelling roses), and the only trees are productive fruit trees. There is no lawn; the garden has no recreational element in its design. Instead there are rows of herbs and vegetables. If the peasant wants to eat turnips or to feed them to his animals, he needs to grow them himself. More to the point, if he wants a safeguard in case of a complete harvest failure, growing turnips is a good insurance policy. Gardens thus fulfill a twofold function: sustenance and taste. The fields are essential for his cereal crops, and the manorial pastures and downlands are important for grazing his animals, but the greatest variety in his diet comes from his garden. How proud he is of his onions, garlic, peas, leeks, chibols (spring onions), cabbages, beans, parsley, and sage. If there are well-kept fruit trees in the orchard, then no doubt his family eats well—and not just in autumn, for fruit can be preserved for a long time, both naturally and in preserves and pickles. Everyone keeps apples but look for pears, cherries, plums, grapes, walnuts, and damsons. Gooseberries, strawberries, and mulberries are also occasionally cultivated. Blackberries and sloes are so commonly found in the wild that there is no need to grow them.

What about meat, you ask? What about dairy products? Where do these figure in the peasant’s diet? After all, that meat stock in the best pottage has to come from somewhere, as does the bacon. True—but do not forget that that meaty broth was in honor of a guest. And meat stock can be made to last a very long time, with the bones being boiled and reboiled. The fact is that many peasants, especially villeins, do not have many opportunities to eat meat. As the poet William Langland puts it, describing the diet of Piers Plowman,

"I have no money to buy pullets,

Nor geese nor pigs but two green cheeses

A few curds and cream, and a cake of oats

And two loaves of beans and bran to bake for my children

And yet I say by my soul, I have no salt bacon

Nor eggs, by Christ, to make collops;

But I have parsley, leeks and many cabbages

And a cow and a calf, and a carthorse,

To draw dung to my field while the drought lasts

And by this livelihood might we live to Lammastide

By when I hope to have my harvest in my croft

So I may serve a dinner to my heart’s delight.

Then all the poor people fetched peascods,

Beans and baked apples they brought in their laps,

Chibols and chervil and ripe cherries many

And proferred Piers this present to appease Hunger".5

Meat is the food of the rich and is in demand not only by the rich but by all those yeomen and townsmen who would like to be seen living like the rich. It is thus a status symbol, and it follows that those at the bottom of the social ladder eat much less of it than those at the top. Nor is it easy for those at the bottom to make up for this disadvantage by catching wild animals. Hunting of game is rarely permitted, being reserved for the lord of the manor. There are some exceptions: wildfowl are plentiful in some areas—estuaries, for example—and they can be caught in large weighted nets or killed with slings. Hares are available to trappers, as are coneys (rabbits), these having bred rapidly in the wild since their introduction to England in the twelfth century. Even though these count as game—and are often caught unlawfully—a manorial court will normally impose only a small fine for poaching them. Even those taking hares from the royal forests will not be severely punished. If you do catch some hares, here is how your host might cook them:

Take hares and flay them; pick the bones clean; hew them into pieces and put them into a pot with the blood, and seeth them. Then put them into cold water. Put the broth with other good stock, almond milk and parboiled minced onions. Let it boil on the fire. Add powder of cloves, cinnamon and mace, and a little vinegar. Take the well-washed flesh, and the bones, and set them all to boil in the broth, and then serve.6

There is another reason why peasants do not often eat meat or only eat wild birds and hares. Living animals have many more uses than dead ones. Cows, sheep, and goats provide milk, which, although it does not last long, can be made into cheeses, which can be kept for months. Piers Plowman would be a fool to slaughter either his cow or his calf. Sheep and goats provide wool—essential for warm clothing—so you will not find lamb or kid on a peasant’s table (although you will find roast or stewed mutton, especially in November). Chickens, ducks, and geese are far more valuable for the hundreds of eggs they can produce than the one or two meals which their flesh will provide. Of course, when a chicken has ceased to lay, there is no better place for her than a cooking pot but it is worth waiting until she is old. Oxen, the largest and most valuable of all animals, are vital for pulling the plow—essential for the production of cereal crops. (The special rigid collar which one day will enable large horses to take their place has yet to be developed.) In addition, by carefully slicing the upper legs of cattle and controlling the flow, sufficient blood can be obtained without killing the animal to make blood pudding. Mixed with oats, salt, and herbs, and then boiled, it is a rich source of protein and a tasty variation in winter to pottage or cheese.

You would have thought that fish would provide a welcome, non-meat source of protein for the peasantry. Welcome it is indeed, but it does not figure greatly in most rural families’ diets. For those living inland, there are obvious problems of obtaining fresh fish—transportation adding greatly to the cost. But there is another, underlying reason. The Church’s prohibition of meat consumption on certain days helps to create a strong demand for fish among the nobility, gentry, and clergy. For this reason fish is expensive. Manors where the peasants are allowed to fish for themselves (like Alrewas in Staffordshire), are the exception, not the rule.7 Normally the common man is not allowed to fish on the lakes, ponds, and rivers near his home—such rights belong to the lord of the manor. If you are hired to go fishing, your catch will go directly to the lord’s table. Even if the bailiff quietly allows you to keep a fresh trout, you might well sell it. Your peasant host will certainly have no difficulty choosing between two days’ wages and eating a status symbol. Members of the royal family send fish as presents to one another. The duke of York regularly sends pike, sea bream, tench, and salmon to his cousin, King Henry IV. When the royal family set such a high value on fish, what hope does a commoner have? Pickled and salted herrings are the peasant’s usual fish dinner, with salt fish (normally a white fish, like cod) and stockfish (dried cod) the next most common. These are available throughout the year from town markets. Eels may also be bought, either in sticks of twenty or in pies and pasties, being plentiful in medium-sized rivers and relatively inexpensive.

What is in that painted and glazed ceramic jug on the yeoman’s table? The answer is almost certainly ale: that is to say, a drink made from malted barley or oats without any hops in it (the inclusion of hops being the difference between ale and beer). Ale is so important in the medieval diet that its price, like that of bread, is governed by statute law. Four gallons of ale should be sold for 1d when the price of barley is 2s per quarter. The very best ale—which can be sold for as much as 2d per gallon—is made in Kent. But do not expect to find Kentish ale throughout the country: it does not keep. Without hops it goes sour very quickly. When alewives have brewed a new vat, they set about selling it straightaway, putting a bushel on a pole above the door of the house to advertise its availability. In peasant families, the brewing is done on a regular basis by the women of the household, and when the ale begins to turn sour, it is flavored with herbs and honey or caudled with egg yolks. If spices are available, the sourness might be concealed with ground pepper, galingale (blue ginger), cinnamon, and other exotica, purchased from the local market. In this way, ale is turned into a sort of mulled drink.

Lifting your wooden mug or mazer and taking a swig, you will find that the ale in a peasant household tastes a little sweet. It is also weak. As most prosperous peasants have an aversion to drinking water—which is liable to convey dirt and disease into their bodies—they drink ale exclusively. Only the single laborer and widow, living alone in their one-room cottages, drink water (rainwater is preferred, collected in a cistern in the yard). Married men expect their wives to brew ale as one of their household duties. Cow’s milk is considered suitable only for cooking and for old women and children. Thus the ale cannot be too strong, otherwise the yeoman’s judgment would wobble under the effect of drinking strong alcohol all day every day. In some areas of the country cider and perry (cider made from pears) are drunk instead of ale, especially in the western counties. The cider can be strong. It is also quite cheap—half the price of second-best ale, at ½d per gallon. The same can be said of the honey-based drinks, mead and metheglin (the latter being flavored with herbs), which also are to be found in the west and south of the country: extra strength at half the price. Although your English peasant will never have encountered spirits and probably very little wine, drunkenness is by no means unknown. If a yeoman’s wife is good enough to brew full-strength ale or cider and let him drink eight pints of it in rapid succession, the result is quick, predictable, and not peculiar to the fourteenth century.

Towns and Cities

When you sit down to dinner in a town house, your expectations will probably be governed by what you see around you. If you are in a small wooden building, dining in a small, poorly lit hall, and being attended by your host’s wife, then your fare will probably be less tasty than the yeoman’s meal described above. If your host is an important merchant, on the other hand, and you are being entertained in the well-lit hall of a large house, with several fine pieces of silverware and smart white linen tablecloths on display, and with a whole pile of trenchers stacked up in front of you (one for each course), then you can expect food far richer and more varied than the peasant could ever dream of offering. You might drink red wine and eat beef, lamb, or kid in sauces prepared by the merchant’s own cook, and taste wafers and sweetmeats afterwards, as would a lord.

In all probability your diet in a town will fall somewhere between the two extremes of peasant and lord, so let us here just consider what it is about food in towns and cities which is different from the country. For the countryman living three or four miles from a town, it is not just the cost of buying things which is restrictive, it is the time taken in getting to the market itself. Whereas the rural yeoman will try to cover all his needs in one trip, the merchant, shopkeeper, or laborer living in a town has no problems nipping to the bakery, or to the fishmongers’ market stalls, or sending a servant. Consequently the townsman—and especially the city dweller—has far less control over his food supply than his country cousins. If he needs bread, he buys a loaf directly from the baker; he does not normally go to the miller with his own grain unless he lives in a very small town and has a few strips of land in the open fields just beyond the walls. Similarly, his garden cannot provide all the fruit and vegetables he needs (except in the cases of a few prosperous merchants, who have substantial town gardens). Most people have to go to the market for garden produce.

As a result of this dependence on the market, food is both better and worse in a town than in the country. There are specialist cooks, who will prepare meat pies and pasties and sell them in the street, either from their cookshops or by wandering around with their wares. Meat is brought into town to be sold, and as there is no particular reason to farm an animal once it has arrived, townsmen are readier to buy and eat young ones, especially lambs and kids, which are less chewy and better tasting. More and more white bread is eaten in the towns and cities over the course of the century. Old men and women in the 1390s will tell you how their grandfathers who grew up in the country used to eat nothing but rye bread, vegetables, and the odd bit of boiled pork; but now they eat lamb and beef and regularly enjoy the luxury of white bread. Nor do they go without fruit. Apples are plentiful in the markets, as are plums and cherries (in season). More exotic fruit, such as oranges, figs, and pomegranates, are imported in small quantities, although you will only find such luxury items at a fair or in the market of a major city.

Herein lies the advantage of the town. If you have sufficient money you do not need to grow things for yourself; you can just buy what you need. Moreover, in the larger markets you can obtain many things which are unavailable anywhere else. If you want to buy sugar, wine, almonds, dates, aniseed, licorice, sweetmeats, nutmeg, cinnamon, pepper, coriander, currants, raisins, figs, cloves, ginger, salt, rice, treacle—you name it—the market is the place to go. All these things are available in London in 1390. The list above is from one single account of Henry of Lancaster, drawn up by his officers as they prepare for a sea voyage.9 The key issue is cost. One pound of licorice is only Id but a pound of green ginger costs 2s, a pound of cloves more than 4s, and a pound of saffron 10s. A pound of orange conserve (”citronade”) costs 3s, as much as a skilled laborer earns in nine days. Can you imagine working for nine days for one pound of orange marmalade, or that it should cost a third as much as saffron by weight? Small wonder that the poor skip breakfast.

Not all spices are prohibitively expensive. In town you will discover that the better-off—and that includes the master craftsmen and prosperous officials, lawyers, and physicians as well as the merchants—have a range of spices in their cupboards, which they often keep locked away. Pepper is one of the most popular, costing 20d to 22d per pound. Nutmeg may be obtained for 18d per pound. A cheaper way of buying spices is to opt for a mixture made up by the spicerer. These are sorts of curry powder: powder forte (strong) which contains ginger, pepper, and mace; and powder douce (mild, also known as powder blanche), which contains ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, and possibly sugar and cloves. Talking of sugar, you will be amazed by the number of forms in which it comes. At the spice shop you will find an array of unrefined brown loaves weighing several pounds each and delicate cakes of refined sugar (”caffetin,” 18d per pound in 1390), red and white flat sugars (cheaper, 12d per pound), Cyprus sugar (cheaper still, at 8d per pound), and then all the derivatives: pot sugar, sugar water, sugar syrup, rose sugar, violet sugar, and barley sugar. The level of refining makes the difference between the cheapest sugars and the most expensive. Interestingly they are all used as spices (not as sweeteners) in sauces to accompany meat and fish dishes, especially those using vinegar, or in fruit pottages.

Although the foregoing makes the town sound appetizing, remember that town dwellers face at least two distinct food-related threats. The first arises from their lack of control of the food supply. If there is no grain, then there is no bread. If the price of grains escalates, and the town authorities try to insist on the prices established by the Assize of Bread, then the bakers are liable to go on strike. Without bread, the town quickly grinds to a halt and disorder breaks out. The second problem arises from having so many middlemen in the food chain. How can the town authorities police the sale of foodstuffs? It is very difficult. When a wild pig is seen dead in a street, and then suddenly disappears, people do not know whether it has been cleared up or cooked. Often they are right to suspect it has been disposed of in their take-away pies. London records are full of cases where a dead pig has been decomposing in the town ditch for a week or so and then ends up being scavenged by a pie-maker. Sometimes medieval people take recycling too far.

A major difference between dining in the country and in a town is the access to different sorts of drink, especially wine. Even a small barrel from a vintner costs between 8s and 10s. This is beyond the reach of a modest yeoman’s income. However, proprietors of urban taverns buy wine in bulk and sell by the cup. In this way, at a cost of a ½d or Id, many people can afford to drink a small amount of wine. Of course the cost varies, depending on how sweet the wine is and where it comes from. Most red wine drunk in England is from Gascony the area around Bordeaux (although it is not yet called claret).10 This sells for between 3d and 4d per gallon to bulk purchasers—more if being purchased by the cup. Twice as expensive is Rhenish wine, from the Rhine, costing between 6d and 8d a gallon wholesale. The wines of Rochelle and Spain—such as Lepe, a strong Spanish white wine, or Osey another Spanish white—are comparable in price to that of Bordeaux. Sweet wines from Greece, Crete, and Cyprus sometimes called Romonye and Malvesey (or Malmesey) are about the same price. Cheapest of all is English wine, which is only ever white and normally half the price of Gascon wine. It is scarce, however. Most wine production in England is carried out by the nobility and clergy for their own use. It rarely appears in taverns.

As taverns generally sell wine, not ale, they tend to be quite upmarket establishments. Given their numbers—there are 354 of them in London in 1309—it is not surprising that they vary in quality11 Their wine similarly varies. Establishments which sell poor wine tend to attract the rougher sort and are regularly closed down by the authorities. But there are some reputable establishments. An example of the latter will have mazers of silver-edged wood and clean linen cloths on the tables. It will serve professional people, such as clerks, merchants, officials, and the gentry. The taverner, mindful of the importance of a good reputation, will very probably show you the door with polite firmness at closing time (he is responsible for your actions after curfew). The wine itself is stored in a cellar, in its casks, and carried through to you at your table. In case you have any concerns about what you are drinking, ask to see the barrel. The taverner should keep his cellar door open at all times during opening hours and allow you to check the marks on the barrels. In London, prices are fixed by the authorities, so if you think you have been sold cheap wine in place of the best Rhenish vintages, you should be able to check and take the matter further. If guilty, the taverner will probably back down, knowing that if he is caught misselling his wine, he is liable to be fined or closed down, as well as being drawn to the stocks and having his own supply of wine poured over his head.

If you do happen to wander past the stocks and see a chap with his head and clothes soaked in liquor, the chances are that he is—or was until recently—an alehouse keeper. On the whole these establishments sell no wine, only ale and sometimes cider and mead. They also sell simple food, such as bread and cheese, and perhaps cheap meat pies. Dark and smelling of stale ale, with rushes strewn across the floor, they can be rowdy establishments, full of adventurers’ tales and bawdy song. Unlike inns (whose main purpose is to provide accommodation to wealthy travelers) they exist to provide entertainment, and consequently are a resort of every sort of interesting character, from carters and wagoners to builders, carpenters, bakers, pilgrims, mummers, cutpurses, prostitutes, fishwives, gongfermors, low-lifers, and roustabouts.

Noble Households

When it comes to good food, the nobleman’s table is the place to be. The very best cuisine, and the greatest variety, is served directly to the lord himself at dinner. Long after the grooms and valets have consumed their rations and left the hall, the nobleman will continue eating with his companions, seeing more courses placed before him. The same is the case at supper, even though that is a smaller, less ostentatious meal. At breakfast, the trestle tables will not even be set up for the servants. They have work to do, and there is a belief that too much food makes the worker indolent. Thus the nobleman’s hall represents a spectrum of food quality and quantity, from relatively small amounts of basic pottage at the lower end of the hall to the most expensive dishes and lavish use of color and spices at the top table.

Food and drink in a lord’s residence is based on a series of rules and regulations far more complicated than seasonal availability and economic necessity. In addition to the nonmeat rules set by the Church, late-fourteenth-century aristocratic households are expected to follow legislation restricting the quantities of food. From 1363 even a lord is limited by law to five dishes at any meal: this being part of the aging Edward Ill’s attempts to control extravagance. By this same legislation, gentlemen are allowed only three dishes and grooms two. Of these two, one may be of meat or fish. Although this law is not always followed to the letter, it nevertheless gives you an idea of the level of protocol to expect. Do you rank as high as a gentleman? If you do, you can expect to be seated alongside the gentlemen of the household and fed accordingly.

Let us suppose you have been assigned a place at the top table, along the bench to the right of the nobleman—a position of high honor. Before actually taking your seat, you will have to wash your hands. One servant, the ewerer, will pour the water; it is caught in a bowl beneath your hands by another servant. There is no soap but a third servant will hand you a towel. Then grace is said by the lord’s chaplain, and the first course is brought in and placed before the lord. He will take a trencher and start to help himself from the dishes laid before him. Once he has had a chance to try them, they are passed around.

The first course normally consists of boiled and baked meats in sauces, perhaps ground meat in a spiced wine sauce, or meat balls in aspic. An example of a daily first course of five dishes served to a lord is brawn with mustard, a meat pottage (containing beef or mutton, wine, herbs, and spices), another meat pottage containing chicken or boiled pork, stewed pheasant or swan, and a meat fritter (normally made with the entrails of animals). “Leche Lombard” is a popular first-course dish, consisting of pork, eggs, pepper, cloves, currants, dates, and sugar all boiled together in a bladder—like haggis—then sliced and served with a rich sauce. Another is “mortrews”: chicken and pork with breadcrumbs, powder forte, sugar, saffron, and salt. Perhaps you would prefer boiled venison with almond milk, onions, rice flour, and wine, colored with alkanet (a dark-red root) and seasoned with powder douce?

The food is actually prepared in “messes” of two or four portions, which are then shared at the table. Several dishes might be set before you. Do not feel you must empty a mess entirely onto your trencher; you are expected to leave a good proportion of it. Leftovers—including the trenchers—will be given to the poor after the meal. Besides, with five different meat dishes to choose from, you could quite easily stuff yourself sideways in just the first few minutes of the first course. Resist the temptation to do this: dinner will go on for about two hours. There will be three courses, each consisting of several dishes from which you should pick tasty morsels, and each course will be separated by a small, intervening course. As you can see, food in a nobleman’s household is not just about sustenance, it is a matter of honor.

After the first course of boiled and stewed meats in piquant sauces, there will be a short interlude for the serving of fruit, nuts, a “subtlety” or intervening course. This is not always something to be eaten; sometimes it is just to be looked at, especially during a great feast. Perhaps you will see the real “four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie.” Bird lovers need not worry: the pie is baked first and allowed to cool. The birds are placed inside alive afterward, so when the pie is opened they do begin to sing—and fly out and swoop around the hall.

The second course consists of roast flesh. This is where the lord shows off, with exotic meats delicately carved. There will be meaty pottages and meats in aspic as well as a selection of roast venison, fawn, kid, baby rabbit (a coney under one year old), bustard, stork, crane, peacock, heron, partridge, woodcock, plover, egret, larks . . . This list could go on much longer. As the boys will tell you, every one of these animals has to be carved in its own particular way. A mallard is not carved but “unbraced.” To cut up a hen is to “spoil” it. Herons are “dismembered,” coneys “unlaced,” and so on. If you are young enough to be serving in a lord’s household, you will need to learn all these terms and how to wield a pair of carving knives (there are no forks). When the marshal of the hall directs you to “sauce that capon,” “break that deer,” or “display that crane” you need to know which are the tastiest morsels for presentation to the lord. This is not easy, especially with almost no light in winter except that shed by a rushlight and the kitchen fires.

Remember when picking out the tasty morsels during the second course to save some room for the third. The smallest, most delicate animals are normally served at this point, such as roast curlew, sparrows, and martinets (a kind of swallow). Alongside these you might be served baked quinces, damsons in wine, apples and pears with sugar or syrup, fruit compotes, or a fruit pottage. The upper-class English are just as fond of their fruit as their underlings. Plums, damsons, cherries, and grapes are served before dinner, to whet the appetite. Pears, nuts, strawberries, whinberries, apples, and mixtures of fruit tend to be served afterwards, as the season allows. Spiced baked apples and pears are popular, especially in winter. At the end, there will be a cheese course, if you still have room. With a drink of hippocras—a spiced red wine—and wafers, the meal is finally over. Your trenchers and the uneaten remains are cleared away by the servants and boys, who then either surreptitiously eat the lord’s leftovers themselves or pass them to the almoner for division among the poor who may already be arriving at the manor gatehouse.

The above menu is only for meat days. For the other 194 or 195 days of the year (Advent, Lent, and every Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday) the diet switches to fish. Does the food at the top table become modest and humble, reflecting the religious nature of this custom? Not a bit! On a fish day you might be served a first course of lampreys baked in vinegar, pepper, ginger, and cinnamon; minnows or eels in a pie; baked herrings with sugar; pike in “galantyne” (a very popular sauce made with cinnamon, galingale, ginger, salt, breadcrumbs, vinegar, and stock); or poached mulwell or gurnard. After that lot you will move up the fish ladder to taste more highly prized varieties. Options for the second course include conger eel, doree and salmon in syrup; or roasted turbot, halibut, sea bass, mullet, trout, bream, sole, eels, and lampreys. Henry IV has been known to spend as much as 7s on a single turbot.12 In the 1330s you will often find pike and bream on the menu in the royal household, these being specifically purchased by Edward III for special occasions.13 It is possible that towards the end of the century you will be offered a carp, although the taste for it is really something which belongs to the next century.14

By the time you get to the third course, you will have realized that the religious prohibition against eating meat is seen as no obstacle to culinary excess by the majority of England’s nobility and gentry. For it is at this point that the really special fish are served. Sturgeon comes top of the list: a fresh sturgeon is a rarity—normally it will be barreled and pickled, to preserve it—but if you can get hold of one, you can expect to pay in the region of 35s.15 Like salmon, bream, tench, and pike, it is deemed suitable to be given as a present from an earl or duke to a king. Salmon in rich sauces is the very favorite food of one of the great fighting heroes of the century, namely Henry, first duke of Lancaster. Accompanying dishes might include sea bream, perch in aspic, fried herring, and seafood (especially whelks, mussels, and shrimps). But even this list hardly does justice to the enormous range of the cooks. It is not so much that many fish have been left off this list—one could add whiting, plaice, ling, loach, luce, flounder, haddock, swordfish, dace, dogfish, hake, and perhaps two dozen other varieties—but that there is wide scope for including animals which you would never expect to eat. Whales are technically the property of the king, but generally they are eaten by everyone in the vicinity when they are beached. Seals, porpoises, dolphins, barnacle geese, puffins, and beavers are all classed as fish as their lives begin in the sea or in a river. Hence they are eaten gleefully, even on nonmeat days. Medieval knowledge of the fish at sea might be limited—the chronicler Thomas Walsingham believes that dolphins can fly over the sails of ships—but once landed, and brought to the kitchen, they are perfectly understood. You only need to hear the terms of carving—”sauce that plaice,” “barb that lobster,” “splat that pike,” “culpon that trout,” “tranche that sturgeon”—to know that these men are no amateurs.16

You are wondering, no doubt, how an aristocrat manages to come by all this fish. After all, once out of water, they quickly go bad, and the means of transporting them from the sea to the kitchen are slow. No one can carry a barrel of sturgeon faster than twenty miles per day, nor a barrel of herrings for that matter. Besides, the nets of seagoing fishing vessels are relatively small and not very strong, and constantly in need of repair. In answer, no part of the country is more than seventy miles from the sea, and the vast majority is within forty miles. Some of the most active ports are situated inland on great rivers, like Gloucester, on the River Severn. Fish can be transported live, in barrels, and this is certainly the means of carrying oysters, mussels, whelks, lobsters, and crab, which are consumed in large quantities by the rich during Lent. Eels too are transported live in barrels from the rivers in which they are caught, and pike can be kept in vats for use when and where required. Most rivers have weirs and fishtraps on them, allowing roach, tench, dace, and bream simply to be lifted out of the river and dispatched in baskets, amid layers of wet straw. Fish-traps are also placed in estuaries, allowing thornback ray, gurnard, sea bream, salmon, grey mullet, herring, mackerel, plaice, and other sea fish to be caught without a net having to be cast or a boat launched. Lords with estates far inland maintain fishponds. The customs of a manor normally protect all freshwater fish for the lord, and he will either maintain his own fishermen to reap the benefit or hire occasional workers to do the fishing. So with all the rivers to draw on, and almost all the country within two days’ ride of a port, those who can afford it have access to a very wide variety of fresh fish. If you then add the pickled, salted, smoked, and dried varieties—for example, kippers, salt cod, and shrimps and mussels pickled in brine—there is no shortage of river fish and seafood for the noble household.

Accompanying all this meat and fish is an array of vegetables and herbs. Lords, just like everyone else, cultivate as much garden produce as they can on their own land. But vegetables are not served independently; rather they are used in the sauces accompanying meat and fish. Cookery books include fruit sauces to go with many of the meat and fish dishes, such as applemoy (made out of apples) and verjuice (a sour grape juice used in cooking). Many vegetables and homegrown ingredients are necessary for the lord’s meat pottages and the more basic pottages which are fed to the less-important servants and the messengers and servants from other households visiting on business. Kitchen staff are employed chopping and cooking leeks, onions, herbs, colewort, cabbages, garlic, peas, parsley, and beans for the big pottages, feeding as many as a hundred men. For the lord’s dishes, cauliflower, peascods, borage, fennel, hyssop, and perhaps even parsnips and celery are used.

With regard to bread, the lord himself and his favored guests will be given slices of the best freshly baked white bread, made with wheat, called “pain demain.” So precious is this that the flour to make it is sometimes kept in a locked chest. The important officers and gentlemen of the household probably eat “wastel,” the next best wheat bread, costing Via per loaf. Third-best is “cocket,” a round white loaf. And as you go down the hall, the quality of the bread goes down too. Brown rye bread may be eaten by those at the lowest end of the hall, and certainly by the stable boys who only get to eat in the hall at Christmas and on other feast days. If those at the bottom of the hall do eat cocket, it will be three or four days old.

The range of wines available in a nobleman’s cellar is far greater than you can buy in any tavern. It is normally illegal for a taverner to sell Rhenish wine alongside Gascon or Spanish wine. But it is not illegal for a lord to keep a good stock of both. Edward Ill’s order for wine for the royal household in 1363-64 amounts to ten pipes of sweet wine (a pipe being 105 gallons), twelve pipes of Rhenish wine, and 1,600 pipes of Gascon wine—a total of 170,310 gallons.17 Not all of this is drunk by the king and his companions; quite a lot is given out to friends and retainers (a gallon a day to Geoffrey Chaucer, for example). But a lord’s household is never short of wine.

The butler in a nobleman’s residence has to deal with just as much ale as wine. The servants and staff all require drink, and only the important officers are allowed wine. Each man has an allowance of a gallon of ale a day, but that is purely a nominal quantity. There is no flagon assigned to one man which he drains over the course of twenty-four hours. There is a clear distinction as to who may drink the best ale and who is drinking second and third best. Normally ale is brewed in the household’s own brewery from malted barley and is kept until it is all used up or has gone off. But a butler might buy ale from local alewives, if the stocks are running low or if his master has arrived unexpectedly at a manor house before his brewing staff have managed to make enough for the whole household.

Monasteries

The provision of food and drink in a monastic establishment is just as complicated as that in a nobleman’s household. Although the monks are all equal in the eyes of God, they are far from equal in their own eyes. The abbot gets the best food, and also gets to share the lordly fare provided in his house to the monastery’s noble guests, who stay with him in his lodging. Certain monastic officers, such as the almoner, sacrist, infirmarer, and chamberlain, have rights to better fish and more exotic fruit than the other monks. Those monasteries which have lay brothers provide them with their own refectory, kitchen, and diet. Guests staying in the monastic guesthouse may be given a different diet altogether.

On one level you could describe the monastic household as a lordly one, with the abbot or prior as the lord. That would be superficial for many reasons. First, the man in charge has been elected to his position by the other monks, and so his relationship with his fellows is wholly different to that between a lord and his servants. Also the monastic refectory is a restricted area; only monks may eat there.18Important guests eat with the abbot in his lodging, less important guests in the guesthouse or at the beggars’ gate. But most of all it is the extraordinary customs about eating meat which have developed over the centuries which make dining in a monastery unique. Like everyone else, monks do not eat any flesh on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, nor in Advent or Lent. In addition, they are not supposed to eat the meat of four-legged animals at all, according to the Rule of St. Benedict. However, St. Benedict lived a long time ago—in the sixth century—and over the subsequent eight hundred years, monks all over Christendom have found ways to circumvent the Rule. These monks mostly come from well-off families, and so were stuffed with the best and richest meats from the day they could sit up at their father’s table. Then they entered the Church and were completely deprived of meat. The result is that many of them simply crave it. And the Rule states only that they should not eat meat in the refectory . . . Consequently, many monasteries have built a second dining room, called the “misericord” (place of mercy) where meat eating can take place. Also, although eating quadrupeds is banned, there is nothing in the Rule specifically against eating offal, which is removed from an animal prior to roasting it. Realizing that all this is not wholly within the spirit of the Rule, but realizing also that he cannot stand in the way of progress, Benedict XII (pope from 1334-42) suggests a compromise.19 As long as at least half of the monks eat in the refectory, the remainder can head off to the misericord and gorge themselves on whatever meat they choose, provided it is not a Wednesday, Friday, or Saturday, or a day in Advent or Lent. Those who remain in the refectory must refrain from eating the flesh of quadrupeds but may eat fowl and can include meaty ingredients—such as liver and other offal—in the cooking. On the nonmeat days everyone must eat together in the refectory and observe the nonmeat rules.

Each member of a religious community has an allocation of a gallon of ale each day—although the officers are allowed more, if they want it. This is no hardship: monasteries brew very fine ale indeed. When offered for sale it regularly fetches 1 Via per gallon or even 2d. A few monasteries also have their own vineyards and make their own wine, but the majority import the wines of Gascony like most large households. Wine is drunk only on saints’ days, when the meal is more of a feast. Fortunately for the monks there are sixty or seventy of these in the year.

As with a noble establishment, not everyone in a monastery has breakfast. Only the abbot and the principal officers are likely to be allowed to sit down and eat bread and cheese in the morning. The others must content themselves with Mass, in line with the old saying, “The sacrament is a good breakfast.”20 For most monks, lay brethren, and guests, the first meal of the day is dinner. In the refectory, it starts with a pottage. Thereafter, depending on whether it is a fish day or not, you may be served “umbles” (sheep entrails cooked in ale with breadcrumbs and spices, often served in winter), “charlet” (chopped meat, eggs, and milk), “dowcet” (a custard dish, containing milk, cream, eggs, sugar, and currants), or a rich cheese flan. Somehow the Benedictine monks at Westminster manage to justify eating bacon—even though it is most certainly the meat of a quadruped—and so bacon and eggs (”bacon collops” as it is called) is served in the refectory as a treat just before Lent.21

When the misericord is functioning, the monks display a huge appetite for meat. Pope Benedict’s compromise means that a monk may only eat in the misericord for a maximum of eighty-six days per year. Hence he looks forward to his turn, especially if it follows a long period of abstinence, such as Lent. The first course at dinner is almost always beef. The second course normally consists of more beef plus three further roasted meats, veal, mutton, pork, or goose. Lamb is eaten in late spring, boiled pork in winter; at other times of year, mutton is served. At supper, only one meat course may be served. Thus most monks eat about four hundred meat dishes per year. You might agree that that is hardly following a Rule which dictates that he should not eat the flesh of quadrupeds at all.

Many species of fish appear in a monastic diet. Every day the refectory sees fried, poached, baked, and roast fish served at dinner. Note that it is only at dinner that monks eat fish: at suppertime they eat shellfish, such as cockles and whelks. About half the intake is preserved sea fish, whether salted, smoked, dried, or pickled; but as monasteries often have the tithes of parishes, or are institutional lords of manors in their own right, they can expect to be sent freshwater fish on a regular basis. Some of the largest fishponds in the country are owned by monasteries—Gracious Pond (Surrey), constructed by the abbot of Chertsey in 1308, extends to over thirty-five acres and the ponds at Frensham (also Surrey) extend to over a hundred acres. Thus you will often find dace, roach, and bream served in the refectory, or that old favorite, pike in galantyne sauce. The abbot might eat more expensive seawater fish: turbot, gurnard, thornback ray, sole, conger eel, and salmon. It depends whether he is eating privately in his quarters with a guest or with the brethren in the refectory.

One last thing. There is an old traveling minstrels’ trick which you might want to keep up your sleeve. How guests are treated in a monastery is the decision of the almoner. If he treats you badly, or serves you the most miserly portions of food, or if you get given “a vile and hard bed,” go to the abbot and praise him to the skies for the generosity of his house, and emphasize the large amount of money which the almoner must have laid out on your behalf.

My lord, I thank you and your worthy convent for the great cheer I have had here, and of the great cost I have taken of you; for your good liberal monk, your almoner, served me yester evening at my supper worthily, with many divers costly messes of fish, and I drank passing good wine. And now I am going he has given me a new pair of boots, and a good pair of new knives, and a new belt.22

The abbot will have little choice but to take such thanks at face value and bask in the fictitious glory. But have no doubt: the almoner will have a lot of explaining to do later.

Notes

1. Dyer, Standards, p. 262.

2. For the close relationship between harvest failure and petty crime see Hanawalt, “Economic Influences,” pp. 281-97; Platt, Medieval England, p. 110.

3. At the peasants’ feast at North Curry (Somerset) in 1314 each man of the hundred should have received two white loaves, as much ale as he could drink, a mess of beef, bacon with mustard, another mess of chicken, cheese, and candles “to burn out while they sit and drink.” On Christmas Day 1347 at Hunstanton (Norfolk), Sir Hamon le Strange and his household consumed bread, two gallons of wine (12d), one big pig for the larder (4s), one small pig (6d), a swan (a gift from Lord Camoys), two hens (given as rent), and eight rabbits (two of which were a gift). See Fisher andjurica (eds.), Documents, pp. 406-408.

4. Dyer, Standards, pp. 153-54 (Worcestershire and Norfolk), 159; Finberg, Tavistock Abbey, p. 98.

5. Langland, Piers Plowman, passus VI (B Text), lines 280-95; Langland, trans. Tiller, Piers Plowman, p. 81.

6. This recipe is a paraphrased version of “Hares in Padell” in Society of Antiquaries of London, A Collection of Ordinances and Regulations, p. 428. Although the publication of the volume as a whole relates to the royal household, not a peasant home, this section of recipes is not necessarily an exclusively royal one. It has been used here as indicative of the form of a contemporary recipe for hares. The peasant version would not include the spices.

7. Dyer, Standards, p. 157.

8. Riley (ed.), Memorials, p. 312.

9. Smith, Expeditions, pp. 5-34, esp. p. 19.

10. According to the OED, the term “vin clairet” originally denoted “white” or yellowish wine. No medieval accounts refer to Gascon wine as claret. A date of circa 1600 is given for it being associated with red wines from this region.

11. Creighton, Epidemics, I, p. 50. This should be compared to 1,334 individual brewers of ale.

12. TNA DL 28/1/9 fol. 21v (two turbots for 14s).

13. TNA E 101/388/2 m. 1.

14. Carp were purchased along with pike by Henry of Lancaster when in Venice in the 1390s. See Smith, Expeditions, p. 217. The Franklin in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales keeps pike and carp.

15. Smith, Expeditions, p. 97. He paid five nobles and eleven scot (Prussian) for one fresh sturgeon and one porpoise. The same account notes that two porpoises were worth twelve scot. At twenty-four scot to the noble, the sum paid for the sturgeon therefore was about 5 1½ nobles, or 35s sterling.

16. For these carving terms, see Furnivall(ed.), Babees Book, pp. 140-48, 265.

17. TNAE 101/394/17m. 1.

18. Harvey, Living and Dying, p. 69.

19. Harvey, Living and Dying, pp. 40-41.

20. Bradley (ed.), Dialogues, p. 48.

21. Harvey, Living and Dying, p. 54.

22. Coulton (ed.), Social Life, p. 405.

Written by Ian Mortimer in "The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England", A Touchstone Book, a division of  Simon & Schuster, USA, 2008, chapter 8. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.