The Staple of Life

The Staple of Life

Among the bare fields and deserted gardens of the derelict Roman villas grew wild garlic and onions. I grow very erect, tall in a bed; runs one Anglo-Saxon riddle on the onion, and bring a tear to a maiden's eve. What am I?

The essential ingredient on the poorer tables, however, was that derisory 'mess of pottage for which birthrights could be sold. The richer Anglo-Saxons ate wheaten bread, but bread of rye or barley was more common. They also consumed vast quantities of pork, the pigs grown fat on the inexhaustible supplies of acorns and beech-nuts to be found in the woods and forests of the country.

The smallholder might also have a few razor-backed pigs on the common land. Venison and poultry were popular among the more wealthy Englishmen. Supplies of fish, among them salmon and herring, were plentiful. Horse-flesh was sometimes eaten. For many centuries large knives and coarse wooden spoons were the extent of the cutlery, the meals often eaten out of communal bowls. Then after the dinner they went to their cups, according to one chronicler, 'to which the English were very much accustomed'. A weak ale, compounded with various spices, was the drink of choice. But the Anglo-Saxons also consumed a drink known as 'morat, essentially mulberry juice mingled with

honey.

The diet of the Normans was not very different, since the agriculture of the country was not materially changed by the invasion. The status of the lord, however, was such that he could tat only wheaten bread. When land was granted to him, it had to be capable of growing wheat; soil that could not bear that crop was of little value to him. That is why few Norman settlements were established in the higher and colder grounds of the Pennines, of Cumbria and other northern regions. The Normans were found among the wheat.

They made their bread in the form of buns or cakes, often marked with a cross. They particularly enjoyed a form of gingerbread that was known as peppered bread?

One difference was evident. They preferred wine to the native ale or mead, and much of it was transported from France. A twelfth-century philosopher, Alexander Neckam, stated that wine should be as clear as the tears of a penitent. He also declared that a good wine should be as sweet-tasting as an almond, as surreptitious as a squirrel, as high-spirited as a roebuck, as strong as a Cistercian monastery, as glittering as a spark of fire, as subtle as the logic of the schools of Paris, as delicate as fine silk, and as cold as crystal. The language of the wine connoisseur has not notably diminished in fancifulness over the centuries.

Through the medieval period little interest was evinced in what were once known as white meats', namely cheese and butter and milk. They were associated with the diets of common people, and were therefore to be avoided. Milk, however, was mixed in sweet confections. Olive oil, rather than butter, was used in cooking.

Fresh fruit was considered to be unhealthy, and the most common vegetables were scorned except by the poor who considered them to be a kind of free food.

The land was so fruitful that, in a good season, it may have been possible for a poor man or a wanderer to survive from the fields and hedges alone. Peas and beans, leeks and cabbages, could also be stolen from the small garden adjoining every cottage.

‘I have no money’ , Piers Plowman complains in the month before harvest. I have a couple of fresh cheeses, a little curds and cream, an oatcake and two loaves of beans and bran baked for the children. I have some parsley and shallots, and plenty of cabbages….

It is possible, therefore, that the diet of the poor was healthier than that of the rich.

By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the meat had become highly favoured with spices such as aniseed and liquorice. The richer families preferred strong and even coarse flavours. It is otherwise difficult to account for the attraction of the grampus and the porpoise even to royal appetites. The 'sea-calf, known in more recent times as the seal, was also a delicacy. The tongue of the whale, another royal dish, was either boiled with peas or roasted.

Strongly favoured birds, such as the peacock or the heron or the bittern, were also on the menu.

‘Powdered salmon' was salmon

sprinkled with salt. The smell of the conger eel was said by one enthusiast to be so wonderful that it would make a dead man sniff.

The first English cookery book,The Forme of Cury’ , was written in the late fourteenth century by Richard Il's master cooks - cury meaning the dressing of food. A dish of shelled oysters and hare's flesh must be favoured with honey. Pork is to be fried and then mixed with saffron and raisins. Pheasant could be mingled with cinnamon and ginger. Spices were not used to disguise the taste of less than healthy meat, they were used for their own sake, and were part of the predilection for strong flavours. They were also used to colour the meats and other dishes; indigo turned the food blue, and saffron converted it to yellow; blood and burnt toast crusts provided the red and the black.

It is instructive that in The Forme of Cury, and in other compilations of recipes, there is seldom any mention of the quantities of the necessary ingredients. Medieval units of measurement are in fact always vague and imprecise. There was no need, or desire, for exactness. It was not a 'scientific age. So gross underestimates and overestimates, at least by the standards of modern accuracy, were likely to be made. The monks of Ely believed that their isle measured 7 miles by 4 miles (11.2 by 6.4 kilometres), whereas in fact it had the dimensions of 12 miles by 10 miles (19.3 by 16 kilometres). It was declared, in the reign of Edward III, that there were 40,000 parishes in England; there were in fact fewer than 9,000, a huge error in one of the most basic measurements of the country. When we read in the sources that innumerable miracles' were attested at a site of pilgrimage, or that the king led the claims.

Space and time were fluctuating and essentially indefinable. An acre of land (0.4 hectares) could be measured in three different wars. Various time systems, such as the regnal year or the papal year or the liturgical year, could be chosen. The charters and memoranda of the period were, before the thirteenth century, largely undated; a bond might give the year of transaction as 'after the espousal of the king of England's son and the king's daughter or 'after Gilbert Foliot was received into the bishopric of London' which we know to have been 1163. Many people were unsure of their exact age; one old warrior, John de Sully, claimed to be 105 and to have fought at the battle of Najera in 1367. If that is correct, then he had carried arms at the age of eighty-seven. The father of another old soldier, John de Thirwell, was reported to have died at the age of 145. The hour of the day was measured by the shadows cast by the sun; clocks were not introduced until the fifteenth century, but they were heavy, cumbersome and not necessarily precise. The time measured by the church bell was that of the canonical day from prime to vespers. And everyone knew that a yard was the length of the king's arm. What else could it be?

Source ~ Peter Ackroyd ~ Foundation of England