Stuffed E-Book

Pen Vogler

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 741

Beschreibung

'Delicious... Wonderful' Guardian 'Fascinating... Full of incident and food for thought' Mail on Sunday 'Delightful... Vogler offers up a feast of tales about popular British foods' Financial Times A SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR A WATERSTONES BEST FOOD & DRINK BOOK OF 2023 The fascinating history of the people, the ideas and the dishes that have fed - and starved - the nation, by the author of the Sunday Times bestselling Scoff. In times of plenty, we stuff ourselves. When the food runs out, we're stuffed too. How have people in the British Isles shared the riches from our fields, dairies, kitchens and seas, as well as those from around the world? And when the cupboard is bare, who steps up to the plate to feed the nation's hungry children, soldiers at war or families in crisis? Stuffed tells the stories of the food and drink at the centre of social upheavals from prehistory to the present: the medieval inns boosted by the plague; the Enclosures that finished off the celebratory roast goose; the Victorian chemist searching for unadulterated mustard; the post-war supermarkets luring customers with strawberries. Drawing on cookbooks, literature and social records, Pen Vogler reveals how these turning points have led to today's extremes of plenty and want: roast beef and food banks; allotment-fresh vegetables and ultra-processed fillers. It is a tale of feast and famine, and of the traditions, the ideas and the laws which have fed - or starved - the nation, but also of the yeasty magic of bread and ale, the thrill of sugary treats, the pies and puddings that punctuate the year, and why the British would give anything - even North America - for a nice cup of tea.

Leseprobe

STUFFED

Pen Vogler is a food historian and author of the Sunday Times bestseller Scoff: A History of Food and Class in Britain, Dinner with Mr Darcy and Dinner with Dickens. She edited Penguin’s Great Food series and guest curated the exhibition ‘Food Glorious Food’ at the Charles Dickens Museum. Pen gives regular media interviews on the history of contemporary food issues and writes for a wide range of publications, including an occasional column for the New Statesman.

‘A fact-stuffed romp through our edible history... [Vogler] relishes the moments where the past crashes up against the present’ The Times

‘Stuffed is dusted, metaphorically speaking, all over with icing sugar: a delicious and tempting thing.’ Rachel Cooke, Observer

‘Persuasive... This clever and informative account confirms that we are indeed what we eat, and that our history is a product of it too.’ New Statesman

‘Fascinating... A scholarly and imaginative book full of incident and food for thought’ Mail on Sunday

‘Delightful... Vogler offers up a feast of tales about popular British foods, ranging from potatoes to kippers and ale.’ Gillian Tett, Financial Times

‘Delicious... [Vogler] is excellent, as in her 2020 book Scoff, at foraging among the sources to bring us wonderful stories of older food cultures.’ Guardian

‘A book that those who have influence over what we eat should read’ Spectator

‘There is so much to enjoy in Stuffed... Vogler is a hands-on historian for whom the past is right there in the kitchen, the supermarket and the everyday ingredient. In Stuffed, her delight in the taste and craft of food-making, its stories and its skills is irresistibly palpable.’ Literary Review

‘Vogler shows how ongoing – and vital – the battle is to eat well... Deeply researched and great fun. It might make you think twice about what you eat, too.’ Evening Standard

‘Meticulously scholarly and extremely funny; as important as it is entertaining. Crucially it slices through the contemporary and historical politics of state versus individual responsibility: eating well is our responsibility, but it is the responsibility of the state to ensure we have that ability… Shot through with wit and humanity Stuffed is an all-consuming read.’ Chris van Tulleken

‘Thoughtful, thought-provoking and full of fascinating detail (and intriguing recipes), this is a timely reminder we should never take our food for granted.’ Felicity Cloake

‘Pen Vogler’s Stuffed may tackle the question of hunger, but it is a generous and irresistible feast of a book. Stuffed details the complex forces that determine diet, making clearer than ever that what we feed ourselves, our families and our communities is socially and politically shaped, and it always has been.’ Polly Russell

‘An ambitious book, leaping merrily from the Neolithic to the modern day... A fun read and an illuminating look at food inequality – and responsibility – in the past.’ Annie Gray, BBC History Magazine

‘This culinary history of Britain looks at the foods that sustained, nourished or delighted its inhabitants in times of plenty and hardship... Pen Vogler is warm, wise company throughout.’ BBC History Revealed, ‘Book of the Month’

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2023 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

This paperback edition published in 2024 by Atlantic Books.

Copyright © Pen Vogler, 2023

The moral right of Pen Vogler to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

No part of this book may be used in any manner in the learning, training or development of generative artificial intelligence technologies (including but not limited to machine learning models and large language models (LLMs)), whether by data scraping, data mining or use in any way to create or form a part of data sets or in any other way.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-83895-576-2

E-book ISBN: 978-1-83895-576-2

Design and typesetting by Carrdesignstudio.com

Illustrations by Carmen Balit

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

For Phoebe and Emma

House of Commons, 21 October 2020

‘It is the government’s responsibility to ensure that children do not go hungry.’

Kate Green, Shadow Education Secretary, Labour

‘Where is the slick PR campaign encouraging absent parents to take some responsibility for their children? I do not believe in nationalizing children. Instead, we need to get back to the idea of taking responsibility.’

Brendan Clarke-Smith, Conservative MP

CONTENTS

Stuffed – A Chronology

Introduction

Part One: Before the Enclosures

Introduction

Beans

Recipe: Fried Beans

Worts

Bacon

Bread and Ale

Carp

Part Two: The Enclosures and After

Introduction

Turnips

Recipe: Beef Stew with Turnips

Goose

Herring

Potatoes and Jam

Cheese

Part Three: Organization

Introduction

Salt Beef

Oatmeal

Recipe: Havercakes

Christmas Pudding

Strawberries

Part Four: Children and Families

Introduction

Sugar

Gruel

Yorkshire Pudding

Scotch Barley Broth and Rhubarb Tart 230

Recipe: Barley Broth or Scotch Broth 243

Part Five: Sharing

Introduction

Beef and Beer (No Fish)

Wine and Ale

Pumpkin Pie

Recipe: Pumpkin Pie

Meat Pie and Woolton Pie

Part Six: Crises

Introduction

Tea

Bread and Butter

Potatoes and Cornmeal

Recipe: Cornbread

Mustard and Pickles

Conclusion

Endnotes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Index

StuffedA CHRONOLOGY

Stuffed is organized thematically around questions of responsibility for producing, distributing and sharing food. However, it is also possible to read the book chronologically using the following chapter timeline.

The Middle Ages (and a Neolithic outlier)

Farming and communal ties

Neolithic – Beef and Beer (No Fish) – p.251

How abstinence as well as feasts bound the community.

Early eleventh century – Beans and Rectitudines singularum personarum – p.19

This manual of estate management from Bath Abbey champions broad beans for lean times.

Recipe – Medieval beanburger – p.25

1066 – Worts before and after the Norman Conquest – p.27

Lowly ‘worts’ or leafy vegetables could be medicine, money, a sign of spiritual purity… and weapon of war.

1217 – Bacon and the Charter of the Forest – p.35

This offshoot of Magna Carta shows how forests can balance conflicting food demands.

c.1256 – Bread and Assisa Panis et Cerevisiae – p.42

Our longest-running food legislation puts an emphasis on retailers over landowners, which survives to this day.

c.1387 – Wine and Ale in The Canterbury Tales – p.258

Do we owe our pub culture to the Plague, when travellers boosted the tavern economy?

The Early Modern period

Sharing food and knowledge from home and abroad

1496 – Carp and A Treatyse of Fysshynge wyth an Angle – p.50

The environmental responsibilities of fishing have changed the carp from fifteenth-century delicacy to inedible celebrity.

1675 – Pumpkin Pie in The Gentlewoman’s Companion – p.270

Hannah Woolley brought together two new discoveries – cookbooks and pumpkins.

Recipe – Hannah Woolley’s ‘Pompion Pye’ – p.282

1699 – Turnips in Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets – p.63

Turnips were a tasty, healthy ingredient until a British spin on European ideas downgraded them to animal fodder.

Recipe – John Evelyn’s Beef Stew with Turnips – p.75

The Eighteenth Century

Enclosures, clearances and the colonies

1770 – Goose and The Deserted Village – p.77

The Enclosures replaced geese and people with cattle, sowing seeds of environmental and social crisis.

1773 – Tea and American Independence – p.302

How state involvement became a little too taxing for Americans with the 1773 Tea Act.

1784 – Herring and The Wealth of Nations – p.89

The pungent herring made its presence felt in the wealth of nations: the Dutch and Scottish and Adam Smith’s third edition.

1792 – Sugar and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman – p.192

Mary Wollstonecraft argues that submission to sugar and sweetness enslaves us all.

1795 – Bread and Butter and the ‘Revolt of the Housewives’ – p.313

Why women and families rioted in the cost-of-living crisis of the 1790s.

The Nineteenth Century

How institutions fed us (or not)

1810s and 1850s – Salt Beef in the Peninsular and Crimean wars – p.133

A tale of two wars shows how snobbery about food became a matter of life and death in Crimea.

1834 – Gruel and The Poor Law Amendment Act – p.207

The miracle rebranding of ‘gruel’ and the continuing failure to feed children.

1840s – Oatmeal and the Co-operative movement – p.147

The first successful co-operative movement of the 1840s contrasts with food banks today.

Recipe – Yorkshire and Lancashire Havercakes – p.157

1840s – Potatoes and Cornmeal and the Great Famine in Ireland – p.327

The consequences of replacing a traditional food culture with monoculture.

1861 – Yorkshire Pudding in Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management – p.219

Why meat was manly but pudding was padding for the wife and kids.

1875 – Mustard and Pickles and the Sale of Food and Drugs Act – p.342

The nineteenth-century adulteration crisis was tamed by legislation which is still in use today; does it need updating?

The Twentieth Century

Feeding an urban nation

1907 – Scotch Barley Broth and Rhubarb Tart and the first LEA school dinners – p.230

What the first school dinners in Bradford can tell us about getting children to eat well.

Recipe – Barley Broth – p.243

1908 – Potatoes and Jam and the Small Holdings and Allotments Act – p.102

Allotments, a partial recompense for the loss of access to common land, still nourish us today.

1928 – The Empire Christmas Pudding – p.159

Britain attempted to resolve the conflicts between free trade and Empire with the Christmas Pudding.

1939–45 – Meat Pie and Woolton Pie in World War II – p.284

What pies and British restaurants revealed about our anxieties around eating together.

1951 – Strawberries and the first supermarkets – p.173

Strawberries lured ‘Mrs Housewife’ into the new supermarkets, but today hide a darker truth.

1965 – Cheese and the Cheese Bureau – p.113

Can governments ever balance the see-saw relationship between milk and cheese?

The Twenty-First Century

Some relationships between past and present.

Food banks

1840s – Oatmeal and the Co-operative movement – p.147

1795 – Bread and Butter and the ‘Revolt of the Housewives’ – p.312

Food security

Early eleventh century – Beans and Rectitudines singularum personarum – p.19

1066 – Worts before and after the Norman Conquest – p.27

1810s and 1850s – Salt Beef in the Peninsular and Crimean wars – p. 133

1928 – The Empire Christmas Pudding – p.159

1939–45 – Meat Pie and Woolton Pie in World War II – p.284

School dinners

1834 – Gruel and The Poor Law Amendment Act – p.207

1907 – Scotch Barley Broth and Rhubarb Tart and the first LEA school dinners – p.230

Food and health

1066 – Worts before and after the Norman Conquest – p.27

1792 – Sugar and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman – p.192

1840s – Potatoes and Cornmeal and the Great Famine in Ireland – p.327

1875 – Mustard and Pickles and the Sale of Food and Drugs Act – p.342

Cultural appropriation and colonialism

1675 – Pumpkin Pie in The Gentlewoman’s Companion – p.270

1928 – The Empire Christmas Pudding – p.159

Retail and hospitality

c.1256 – Bread and Assisa Panis et Cerevisiae – p.42

c.1387 – Wine and Ale in The Canterbury Tales – p258

1840s – Oatmeal and the Co-operative movement – p.147

1951 – Strawberries and the first supermarkets – p.173

Advertising, lobbying and regulatory capture

1773 – Tea and American Independence – p.302

1792 – Sugar and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman – p.192

1875 – Mustard and Pickles and the Sale of Food and Drugs Act – p.342

1951 – Strawberries and the first supermarkets – p.173

1965 – Cheese and the Cheese Bureau – p.113

Gender roles

Neolithic – Beef and Beer (No Fish) – p.251

1675 – Pumpkin Pie in The Gentlewoman’s Companion – p.270

1795 – Bread and Butter and the ‘Revolt of the Housewives’ – p.312

1861 – Yorkshire Pudding in Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management – p.219

1951 – Strawberries and the first supermarkets – p.173

Environmental pressures on land

1217 – Bacon and the Charter of the Forest – p.35

1699 – Turnips in Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets – p.63

1770 – Goose and The Deserted Village – p.77

1840s – Potatoes and Cornmeal and the Great Famine in Ireland – p.327

1908 – Potatoes and Jam and the Small Holdings and Allotments Act – p.102

Environmental pressures on ocean and rivers

1496 – Carp and A Treatyse of Fysshynge wyth an Angle – p.50

1784 – Herring and The Wealth of Nations – p.89

Introduction

FEAST AND FAMINE, plenty and want are ancient ingredients of human history. Farming societies emerged when humans began to cultivate food so that they might store up one against the threat of the other. One of the earliest stories in the Old Testament is a morality tale about the need to store grain from seven years of plenty in case they are followed by seven years of famine.

These are the two meanings of ‘stuffed’. When times are peaceful and the harvest is good, there is good food, the larder is stuffed full of provisions and the belly pleasantly stuffed after a feast. In hard times, a famine, a recession, a war, a cost of living crisis, being stuffed means you are exhausted; utterly defeated; you have run out of road.

How have people in the British Isles shared the riches from our own fields, orchards, dairies, kitchens and seas, as well as those from further afield? And when the cupboard is bare, who steps up to the plate to feed the nation’s hungry children, soldiers at war or families in crisis?

Stuffed tells the stories of the food and drink at the centre of social upheavals from prehistory to the present: the medieval inns boosted by the plague; the Enclosures that finished off the celebratory roast goose; the Victorian chemist searching for unadulterated mustard; the post-war supermarkets luring customers with strawberries. And it shows how these turning points have led to today’s extremes of plenty and want: roast beef and food banks; allotment-fresh vegetables and ultra-processed fillers.

At the heart of every story are questions of choice and responsibility; the alkali and acid of human history; no action and reaction can happen without them both present. We are fortunate that so many of the food choices we have to make are pleasurable: shall I stick to pasta or steak, or try the cuttlefish on a menu? Jam or marmalade on my toast? They are, in part, existential: am I a carnivore; a vegan; a flexitarian? Some relate to wider questions of responsibility: for the health of the family I am feeding; for the welfare of the animals we eat; for the quality of the environment now, and the future of the planet we inhabit. Hard times push people into the toughest of choices: whether to go hungry to let your children eat; whether to buy cheap food which will satisfy the first pangs of hunger, but not give the nutrients the body needs.

These actions are never taken in a vacuum; they are coloured by the past; by ideas and ideals, by writers, books, voters, economic pressure, but also material changes such as new cooking technology (the oven) and techniques (the capture of yeast). The business of this book is to try to figure out how people at the time made sense of their changing world. What was going on in the fields, kitchens, shops, dining rooms, debating chambers of the country when we elected to give rice pudding to children; how did we come to love and then lose pumpkin pie; why did we exchange carp and herring for cod and chips; and was the love of Yorkshire pudding and roast beef universal?

Hard times have forced people to fight for or argue over their food rights and responsibilities since the earliest historical and archaeological records.

As with the rest of the world, in Britain these disagreements have been brought into sharp focus by global economic, security and health crises. When, in the Coronavirus pandemic that took hold in early 2020, the footballer Marcus Rashford campaigned for the government to extend a meal voucher scheme into the school holidays for hard-hit families, the House of Commons was, once again, the site of a debate about food entitlements and obligations.

While the Shadow Education Secretary Kate Green said, ‘It is the government’s responsibility to ensure that children do not go hungry,’* Brendan Clarke-Smith, a Tory MP and former teacher, countered with, ‘Where is the slick PR campaign encouraging absent parents to take some responsibility for their children? I do not believe in nationalizing children. Instead, we need to get back to the idea of taking responsibility,’ (see page vii) by which he meant individual, parental responsibility.

These two opposing positions have given rise to debates over how to feed ourselves that have enraged and galvanized people in the House of Commons, in forests, on farms and common land, in local and manorial courts, in front of gaols holding poachers, on the quayside, in churches and village halls, in the officers’ mess and military commissariat for over a thousand years.

A hill farmer on the upland commons or a brewer, a baker, an artisan cheesemaker; the supermarket with aisle after aisle or the corner store with a few rickety shelves; the café serving a full English fry-up, the pizzeria with a child-friendly Margherita. These are the businesses that contract with the community to provide food and that must survive or thrive according to what their local customers, or the whole nation, believe is important; cheap, convenient, local, sustainable, scalable. These values change over the centuries, but some become so embedded we don’t recognize them as assumptions at all.

Although the details change, it is remarkable how food cultures also become settled and fixed over the centuries. We have our Christmas feast, our pancakes and our Easter buns long after the practical need for them has been erased by advances in agriculture. Long before and after Napoleon (supposedly) derided Britain for being a ‘nation of shopkeepers’, that is how commercial society was arranged. When the complexity scientist Peter Turchin began mathematically modelling historical processes, he noted that, even after revolutions, countries usually returned to the same way of rule. ‘Culture is persistent.’1 While he is writing about political systems, I am struck by how much this is also true of our food traditions and habits; cultural preferences (for meat over fish, for example) can continually bob up over hundreds – even thousands – of years. Food cultures aren’t invincible, however; one of the threads which emerges through this book is that the things we say we most prize – eating together, say, or good and local ingredients – are quite fragile in the face of more powerful economic or political expediency.

The furthest point back in time that I venture is the Neolithic. We do not know exactly how and when these ancestors shared power in their communities. It might have been communal; or by a hierarchy decided by physical strength, spiritual charisma, perhaps matriarchal authority. However, archaeologists show that, for them, sharing food was a key part of how they ordered their societies.

At the risk of offending Iron Age Celts, Picts, Romans and the Romano-British, I haven’t attempted to explore the central questions of this book through those societies. It seems to me that the ideas of obligation and community that are at its heart evolved in earnest with the spread of Christianity in the Anglo-Saxon period. There is enough extant written evidence in the century or so before the Norman invasion to see this as the beginning of a particular kind of paternalism, overseen by the church, which lasted until at least the Reformation. Christianity offered moral continuity, even with the violent changes of the Norman Conquest, with new elite food and a challenging new culture of entitlement. This two-tier system represented the opposing forces on the battleground of demands for rights and arguments about responsibilities around food. If this conflicted with the paternalistic, benevolent role of the elites, it is perhaps no accident that the businesses that catered for the common people – bakers, millers, smaller farmers – became instead the immediate focus of discontent when times were tough. These part-economic and part-sociological actions of shifting blame and liability from the powerful to the less powerful are still present in the wobbly seat of our food system, with its three unequal legs of government, business and people.

This is a book of history, not current affairs, but it is impossible to ignore the fact that this uneasy tripartite relationship is still with us. It has been thrust back into the limelight by contemporary hard times – the pandemic, as the MPs quoted at the top of this introduction suggest, then also the war in Ukraine and the cost of living crisis; it will continue to be a feature of our environmental crisis unless the planet’s populations mobilize themselves to stop our host from overheating.

Good times might postpone or hide the need for hard choices, but they never go away. Over the time that I was researching and writing this book, troubles from decades or centuries ago that we thought were in the past shot to the surface again: shelves empty of fresh food, the lack of flour, rationing, distribution problems. However, the germ of the book was not in the 2020s, but in another national crisis that changed the way people lived, behaved and ate, but which lasted for hundreds of years; that is, the Enclosures.

I first became aware, while walking with friends, of how the two sides of this one coin – the commons and the Enclosures – had shaped our landscapes. I realized, eventually, too that the effect on Britain’s food landscape had been just as dramatic and as long lasting.

Walking across our town commons, enclosed farmland and over much rarer common land today made me wonder what happened to those ancestors who suddenly lost grazing access to a major food resource – cattle, sheep, goats, geese. How did they cope? What did they eat? What care did the beneficiaries take for the people who had lost out? How did they justify it? And what difference did it make to the way these people ate – or the whole nation fed itself? These questions were the starting point for this book.

The Enclosures of agricultural land chipped away at the rural peasantry by providing workers for Britain’s growing industrial economy. It had an impact, not just on the diet of the workers themselves, but on what we have come to think of as traditional British food. It has given us a Sunday lunch menu of roast beef or pork, rather than roast goose with sorrel sauce, or lamb with turnips. There are roast potatoes and some vegetables on the side of that plate; but not a ‘pea panada’ (a porridge of peas and bacon) or ‘Woolton Pie’. Both of these became identified with times of suffering and need; the Great Famine in Ireland in the 1840s in the case of the first;* the Second World War in the case of the second.

When so many cuisines from all over the world are available through travel, restaurants and cookbooks it is easy to see that notions of ‘good food’ are cultural; chicken feet, quinoa, deep-fried insects, snails, pickled eggs… Even within these islands, there are differing regional tastes for oats or wheat, ale or lager, Yorkshire pudding or pancakes. Some part of this ‘culture’, though, is also economic. In Britain (and elsewhere), the conviction that ‘good food’ is synonymous with meat grew up in times when it was almost unaffordable, and gives it a deep-rooted status that is hard to dislodge. We are more likely to abjure foods from hard times that, although they might be historically distant, can be geographically too close for comfort. Home-grown dried peas and beans, which have fed the poor for centuries, are not now welcomed into our kitchens and restaurants in the same way as, say, non-native quinoa and chickpeas.

Since the nineteenth century, food has increasingly been produced in factories, or out of sight of the consumer; the conflict over people’s right to food has been shadowed by a question of what ‘good food’ means and who decides whether it is fit for purpose. It is not surprising, perhaps, that a population that was, itself, industrialized in the nineteenth century has in the decades since taken so readily to industrially produced food in the twentieth and twenty- first centuries.

Today, the argument is coalescing around the issue of ultra-processed food (UPF) – food designed in laboratories, and pushed through a whole slew of processes, treated with adulterants, chemicals and additives.2 Many are easy to recognise: lurid orange snacks or a pink-iced doughnut; but many regular groceries such as bread and breakfast cereals are also ultra-processed. The doctor and health campaigner Chris van Tulleken has a useful rule of thumb: if it’s wrapped in plastic and contains ingredients you wouldn’t find in a domestic kitchen, it is probably UPF.3 In the case of UPF, there are confounding questions about obligations and freedoms: if the substance is deliberately manipulated by the manufacturer to be addictive, can we really argue that responsibility for eating it rests entirely with the child or adult consumer? If it is cheap and tasty, but adulterated or engineered in such a way that it can lead to health problems, do scientists, health practitioners and environmentalists have the right to argue that it is not good food? How does the individual’s cultural or economic preference for ultra-processed food fit with society’s responsibility to make the community as robust and healthy as possible? Bad food is fuelling soaring rates of obesity; nearly two thirds of English adults and a third of children aged two to fifteen struggle with obesity or extra weight.4 Obesity-related ill health is costing the National Health Service in Britain over £6 billion a year; lost working days cost the economy roughly 2–3 per cent of GDP,5 with people in deprived areas overwhelmingly affected.

But nobody can agree where the agency lies for these twin problems; nor who should take on the work of solving them. As the quotes from Kate Green and Brendan Clarke-Smith show, some of the most powerful people in the land – MPs in the House of Commons – cannot agree where to start with what should be one tiny, simple part of the problem of distribution of food to hungry people – feeding children in holiday time. The government is responsible. The parents are responsible. It is a binary view, but the solution is not binary.

We are perhaps over-fond of deciding who should be accountable for something, while forgetting that accountability does not exist without ability. ‘Power and responsibility’ have been rhetorical bedfellows from Cicero and the Bible, to the French Revolution and Spider-Man. In a debate in Parliament about whether Britain should intervene in South Africa to support the principle of equal rights (28 February 1906), Winston Churchill, as Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, argued that Britain was morally obliged to intervene on this basis: ‘Where there is great power there is great responsibility, where there is less power there is less responsibility, and where there is no power there can, I think, be no responsibility.’6 As there is a sliding scale of power, so there is of responsibility.

Every story in this book attempts to interrogate the same questions over a long historical period, particularly in times of change or crisis. What power does each person, farmer, business, community or governing body have? What does that say about their rights, their responsibilities and their choices? How does that shape the way they shop, cook and eat? And what does it look like on the plate?

I have, very occasionally, had one of those magnificent meals in a restaurant (often, but not always, Chinese) that brings dish after dish to the table. Each has different ingredients, contrasting tastes and aromas, colour and texture, yet they bear a thematic relationship to each other; they are part of a whole. This book is an attempt to do the same in chapter form. Rather than start at a zero year, and build my argument incrementally over time, I have tried to offer a meal with many dishes.

Every ‘dish’ or chapter has a central ingredient; the strawberry, the turnip, potatoes, mustard, beans, sugar, for example. These are what we eat – roasted turnip, strawberries and cream, confectionery – but they are also the main characters in a bigger story. The turnip tells us something about Renaissance and Enlightenment ideas of personal and public health; the strawberry shows us how supermarkets attracted customers and grew in influence and size; mustard allows us to look at the arguments behind food labelling that arose from the adulteration crisis of the nineteenth century. I haven’t attempted to tell the story of each ingredient from the earliest times to the present. Instead, I have anchored each chapter to a significant date; for example, the publication of a recipe book, the passing of a law, a war or other crisis. I’ve explored the changing use of that ingredient, and what people thought about it, in the years around these dates.

The twenty-six chapters are grouped together into six thematic parts: before the Enclosures; the Enclosures and after; organization; children and families; sharing; and crises. Two huge subjects, the impact of religion and our relationship to the environment, do not have their own parts, because I felt they permeate all of these issues (though each could easily justify a book of its own).

Within each thematic part I’ve included a recipe, such as the first pumpkin pie or a medieval bean burger. Although they are all familiar (and delicious), none is particularly common today in this country. Each instead, I hope, suggests how different our diet might be today, had our forebears made different decisions about how to make sure of good food in hard times.

* A survey showed that just under two thirds of the population agreed: https://www.food.gov.uk/research/research-projects/food-in-a-pandemic

* The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland existed between 1801 and 1922. The words ‘in Britain’ in the subtitle of this book apply to Ireland only in that period.

PART ONE

Before the Enclosures

Introduction

IF YOU’VE GROWN even so much as a tomato plant in your garden or a pot of basil on your windowsill, you’ll have discovered that producing something to eat involves a multitude of resources. The natural world will supply water, sun, soil and nutrients. The soil might be in a plastic sack from the garden centre, but some part of it will have come from the earth; or compost that has been broken down by processes none of us own. You will be responsible for ensuring each plant gets the right amount of solar rays, water (from a tap if the skies don’t deliver) and additional nutrients, perhaps a fertilizer made with seaweed and with added potash and magnesium (both mined from deposits). You’ll also draw on generations, perhaps centuries, of human knowledge. Gardeners are generous with their expertise and will happily tell you to water your basil plants in the morning because they hate sitting in water overnight; whereas it is better to water end-of-season tomatoes in the evening because cold morning water risks splitting the fruit as they absorb the water and swell in the sun. You supply the space, tools and labour, and in return you get the joy of a home-grown tomato and basil salad.

Nearly everything that goes into making your tomato and basil salad comes from resources that are common to us all. It doesn’t feel that way, because we have arranged ourselves so that they can be packaged, piped and sold; or access to them (such as rainwater and sun) is dependent on whether you are lucky enough to have a home with outside space. The long history of the food we eat is a story of the breaking up of these common resources into individual areas of control and ownership and therefore of responsibility.

Archaeologists trace the history of Britain’s food production and consumption back to an early Palaeolithic (the Old Stone Age of intermittent Ice Ages) hunting culture in which the promise and jeopardy of the whole landscape were met with in common. The nomads who followed herds of reindeer or elk, and hunters who brought down woolly rhino and mammoths might also have been considered a ‘resource’ by animal predators. Some of the earliest prehistoric remains in Britain are evidence of how the common land was broken up by early field systems, tamed by basic agricultural methods and planted by types of grains, such as the emmer and einkorn wheats of the Neolithic period. The Late Iron Age has left archaeologists with evidence of how land, and therefore power, began to coalesce in Celtic societies, with their chieftains and ritualized mead-drinking and feasting, designed to enforce the hierarchy of the community. Whereas food in Roman and medieval times is reasonably well documented, how people ate in the intervening centuries is still something of a mystery. Looking at what archaeologists can tell us about land use together with the few extant documents on the management of estates and bodily health, enables us to get a sense of how our Anglo-Saxon and Celtic ancestors negotiated privilege and duty around food and drink, before the disruption and imposed hierarchy of the Norman invaders.

These Norman kings arranged land laws to accommodate their obsession with hunting deer and eating venison. Whole swathes of land became subject to Crown-friendly ‘Forest Law’, so that ‘Common Law’ with its various owners’ and users’ rights was trumped by the king’s right to hunt (whether he owned the land or not). Hunting rights and commoners’ rights for protein – principally from domestic pigs – exemplified the conflict between authority and rights to the commons which has driven our food story over the last thousand years. It is manifest in a medieval document of 1217, the Charter of the Forest, a scion of Magna Carta, which pushed back at King John’s royal land grab, and asserted the rights that some men (freemen) had to ‘forest land’. ‘Forest’ meant the land outside a boundary, rather than specifically wooded lands. The ‘forest’ offered a place for pigs to snuffle acorns, for livestock to forage, for freemen to gather honey and fish from ponds.

Within the boundary was both parkland and farmland, the latter on an ‘open field’ system which attempted an egalitarian distribution of good and bad land by giving farmers, tenants and workers a dislocated series of strips for them to grow their own crops. Medieval communities, for all their fierce hierarchies, were also pragmatically social. Baking and brewing were best done at scale and were brought together in one place for a whole community. Feeding the entire lordly household was a huge responsibility when a few dozen, or even hundreds, of people might sit down to eat together in one hall every day, requiring a complex arrangement of kitchens and servants. Although it was a responsibility the lord and lady of the house were usually keen to divest themselves of, the sense of Christian obligation was often the glue that held communal dining in place.

Growing food such as grain, vegetables and fruit, rather than simply gathering it, prompts groups to organize themselves in ways which might be different to, or conflict with, producing animal protein. There is, for a start, a direct competition for vegetable food between humans and animals or, rather, the humans that eat them. Leaves, turnips, potatoes, legumes and grains are processed by milling, drying, preserving or cooking, and used to nourish humans. They weren’t always appreciated as food but, from Anglo-Saxon times onwards, many plants were seen as a source of quasi-medicinal goodness (even those we now know are poisonous). When bad harvests or war lead to scarcity, the need to share crops between not only people but their livestock as well has stretched them very thinly. Money spent on scarce grain for horses and cattle pushed up the price for human consumers. Societies in Britain have tended to be arranged so that the rich and powerful got the meat, but also other animal-derived foods such as milk and cheese, particularly in times of dearth. In return they took upon themselves the responsibility to prescribe how food, particularly plant-derived food such as bread and ale, should be shared out among the rest of the population. This forms the basis for one of the longest-running pieces of legislation in British history, the Assizes of Bread and Ale. By contrast, decisions around who gets to eat freshwater fish have been principally negotiated by social pressures and shared responsibility. Today, devotees of inland rod and line fishing in Britain seem to have reached the kind of broad consensus that the economist Elinor Ostrom celebrated in her book Governing the Commons, by which their right to fish and keep some fish to eat is balanced by their responsibility to observe close seasons and not overfish.

Beans

In which we explore the web of responsibilities of late Anglo-Saxon and early Norman England, with guidance from a manual of estate management from the early eleventh century. And a plate of beans.

Likewise alternate years let your cut fields lie fallow,

and the idle ground harden with neglect:

or sow yellow corn, under another star, where you

first harvested beans rich in their quivering pods

Virgil’s Georgics (c.29 BCE)

EATING THE FIRST of any crop is a happy occasion (with the added piquancy of pride if you have grown it yourself), but there is something particularly pleasing about broad beans. Perhaps it is because for many years our supermarkets ignored them. The ones they now sell in season tend to be older, so you have to painstakingly nick each tough seed coat to get at the soft green meat inside. When I rediscovered home-grown broad beans, popping them from their furry pods to eat raw, I couldn’t believe that these delicate, delicious things bore any relation to the grainy thugs that gang up with tomato sauce and lurk in endless tins. In fact, I was right to be incredulous because, although broad beans and haricot beans belong to the same family, they are entirely different genera.

A thousand or so years ago, dried broad beans were treated rather as tinned beans are today. Beans were easy to grow against a cottage fence, or in a field to provide food for the whole community, and so were cheap and ubiquitous. They were an ideal fuel; nutritious and, once dried, almost indestructible. So long as workers and their families were well stuffed with beans, their overlords might consider their responsibilities duly taken care of, and enjoy their venison and spiced wine with a clean conscience.

Beans are one of the oldest of cultivated plants. They were one of the foods brought to David and his people in the wilderness,1 and there is evidence that they were cultivated around the Mediterranean from 5,000 years ago and in Asia earlier.2 Not everybody was a fan. Pythagoras was said to abjure them and Herodotus reported that Egyptian priests wouldn’t even look at them. The Romans attributed both sexual and spiritual properties to the bean, and had quite fancy recipes. Apicius probably has dried beans in mind as he tells you to skim the pot, then add leek, coriander, pepper, lovage, oregano, fennel seed, liquamen (fish sauce) and wine.3

Until the Columbian Exchange that brought haricot, runner and ‘French’ bean types to Europe from the Americas4 of the genus Phaseolus, any mention of ‘beans’ meant broad beans (also called faba or fava beans). The delicate broad beans we now grow in the vegetable garden are the result of plant breeding in the early modern period. Eleventh-century households would have relied throughout the winter on dried Vicia faba var. minor, a variety similar to today’s field, horse or tic beans, which are used for green manure or chicken feed.5 There are references to beans across the scant Anglo-Saxon literature; in Colloquy on the Occupations, written by Ælfric as a Latin vocab exercise for his pupils in the early eleventh century, the monk’s model pupil says that he eats ‘Wyrta ond æigra, fisc ond cyse, buteran ond beana ond ealle clæne þingc ic ete mid micelre þancunge.’ (‘Leaves and eggs, fish and cheese, butter and beans and all clean things I eat with much thanks.’)6

The departing Romans didn’t bequeath their bean recipes, but they do seem to have left the country with a reasonably flat social structure. It is thought that most families were ‘free’ – broadly self-sufficient from farming their own land, or land they tenanted.7 Increasingly, though, lands were brought together and a hierarchy emerged of royalty, nobility, freemen and peasants of different levels. Farming came to depend on a complicated system of bondage and obligations, depending on the status of the individual (and perhaps the Roman villa gave a model for these early estates). Peasants of some standing on an estate were granted land to grow food for themselves and their families, in return for which they provided, perhaps, two days’ labour a week, or three at ploughing and harvest time. Agreements might include an additional and very specific responsibility, to give the lord’s swineherd six loaves of bread, for example.8 At the bottom end of the scale, in the early eleventh century, out of a population of around 2 million, every one in ten was a slave, in bond to the lord of the manor or abbey.9 Immediately after the Norman Conquest, there was a dramatic fall in the number of free peasants, and a sharp rise in the number of people in bondage as freemen were forced into financial servitude to the Normans. But there were some eventual winners; by 1120 there were no slaves in Norman England. Perhaps the Normans found the system of feeding and housing slaves, who paid nothing back, inefficient; perhaps the moral responsibility weighed heavily on their Christian souls.

The yoke of the unfree Anglo-Saxon peasants was so heavy because their role in producing food was so vital, but the numbers were against them. With a steadily increasing population, there was no room for bargaining power, and freemen might be forced to sell themselves into bondage in times of famine. Ælfric imagines the ploughman’s day from driving the oxen to the field at the crack of dawn, to watering and cleaning out the oxen in the evening after a full day spent ploughing. Even in the bitterest winter weather, fear of his lord sends him out to the fields. ‘Ge leof, micel gedeorf hit ys, forbam ic neom freoh.’ (‘Oh dear, it is much work, because I am not free.’)10

A manual of estate management called Rectitudines singularum personarum, probably compiled at Bath Abbey in the early eleventh century, spells out the responsibilities of people across different levels of local society, from thegn (a minor noble) to slave.11 The thegn’s duty is to the king or an earl (a higher noble); it is civic and military but he isn’t expected to get his hands in the earth or occupy himself with farming, although he’s expected to make sure the king’s ‘animal fences’ are in good order. The reeve managed this estate, on behalf of the landlord, tenants, cottagers, peasants and slaves in roughly descending order of amount of land granted to each. There are concomitant increasing details in their non-monetary obligations and rewards corresponding to their work – chitterlings for the swineherd, buttermilk and cheese for the dairymaid, for example. It was quite detailed because the vocabulary used for the different ranks of peasants and their duties changed from one estate to another. Bonds between some of the freemen and their lords might have been seen by them in terms of ‘commendation’ suggesting allegiance and jurisdiction but not in terms of exchange of goods.12 By contrast, the shepherd of Bath Abbey was granted twelve nights’ dung at midwinter, one lamb a year, the fleece of one wether (a castrated ram), milk from the flock for seven days after the equinox, and a bowl full of whey or sour milk for the entire summer. It showed that the lower your status the more dependent you were on your lord for your food; only the peasants with the highest status had a degree of self-sufficiency.

Cashflows in society tended to go between craftsmen, artisans, merchants and the landowning echelons. One imagines a lively bartering economy on those workers bound to the land, between the lord’s beekeeper, swineherd, cowherd, shepherd, ploughman, sower, cheese-wright. With the slave alone the obligations are one way; they are not expected to pay food rent (ale, meat or honey) or give anything to the estate except labour and complete obedience. In return the estate makes sure they have an allowance of grain throughout the year, are fed in winter, with extra provisions in Easter and at harvest. On this estate male slaves are also given a strip of land to plough. Female slaves were allocated, alongside the standard rations of corn, plus a sheep and, in summer, whey to drink, a ‘sester’ of beans for food in Lent, when ‘white meat’ (dairy products) and bacon were off the menu (a ‘sester’ is an Anglo-Saxon unit of measurement that varies across time and according to what is being measured and is difficult to define but might be about 5kg).13

Across the fields of Anglo-Saxon and early Norman England, the nitrogen- fixing value of beans was probably appreciated, though not understood. Traces of beans in place names often suggest a joint emphasis on the food crop and the fields in which it was grown. The hamlet of Barton in the Beans in Leicestershire frankly acknowledges an ancient relationship with the legume, but it can also be traced in place names containing ‘bin’, ‘been’, ‘ben’ or ‘ban’, which refer to a clearing or field where beans are grown.14

They crop up too in archaeological records in York and Winchester, and figure throughout estate management records: Thorney Abbey in the East Anglian fens put aside 40 pence for bean seeds; a spring task, after ploughing, was beana sawan, to sow beans. The collection of Anglo-Saxon scraps of science and medicine known as Leechdoms mentions, unsurprisingly, that they cause flatulence. Eaten new from May onwards, later crops would have been dried and relied on for protein and bulk during the following year’s Lent when meat was forbidden. It gave them something of a reputation as penitential food; ‘I wyl ete beenes, and good stock fysh,’ the pleasure-loving physician Andrew Boorde attributes to the hardy Dane in his idiosyncratic and slightly mocking tour of European habits, A Dyetary of Healthe (1542).15

Dried beans were virtually indestructible, though they toughened as they aged. Like bacon and hams, dried pulses took a long time to soften and cook, but in doing so, they helped to absorb some of the salt from bacon or ham; the first recipe of The Forme of Cury, the earliest English cookbook from around 1390, is for an old standby, ‘gronden benes’: dried beans seethed in broth and eaten with bacon. We still enjoy this ancient double act in pea and ham soup, though broad beans have fallen further out of our culinary repertoire than peas. In recent decades we have been more interested in beans from the Americas; originally baked with fatty pork or sausages, until the meat shortages of the Second World War convinced Heinz and other manufacturers to omit them from their tins of baked beans.

The Egyptians, however, have improved their broad bean relationship since the days of Herodotus. Their traditional dish ful medames is made by cooking dried beans with something alkaline, which helps soften and remove the tough outer skins; they are then flavoured with salt, lemon juice, oil and garlic. Modern recipes add other ingredients such as onion, cumin, tomatoes and tahini. I recently saw a recipe for a broad bean burger and realized it was almost identical to ‘benes yfryed’ in The Forme of Cury: beans, seethed almost until they burst, mixed with oil, fried onion and garlic, and flavoured with ‘powdour douce’ – sweet spice.16

Dried broad beans in this country have yet to recover from their previous ubiquity. As a nation, we are happy to import other peasant staples, but remain sceptical about our own. Supermarkets and wholefood shops are likely to have all kinds of dried beans for cooking – pinto, butter, red kidney, black turtle, aduki, mung, cannellini, haricot, soya, black-eyed, calypso, borlotti, edamame… but not the broad bean. As I searched in vain for dried broad beans, it was the equivalent, I reflected, of a future food historian traipsing round the local shops – if such things will exist – but failing to find the go-to cheap and easy protein of the twenty- first century: a tin of baked beans.

Fried Beans

If you replace the Old English letter thorn or þ with the modern ‘th’, it’s quite possible to read the medieval English of this recipe. The food historian Glyn Hughes explains ‘ysode’ as ‘soft’ and that ‘powdour douce’, sweet spices, might have included aniseed, fennel, ground hyssop and sugar. I’ve suggested the more conventional (to us) coriander and cumin, both of which were used in medieval cooking and medicine.

MODERN RECIPE

Makes 6–8 burgers

350g dried fava beans

1 large onion, finely chopped

2–3 cloves garlic, minced

1 teaspoon ground cumin

1 teaspoon ground coriander

½ teaspoon fennel seeds (optional)

Salt and pepper

Olive or sunflower oil for frying

Optional – 1 egg and about 40g of porridge oats or breadcrumbs

Soak the beans overnight in at least three times their volume of water. They will absorb water and approximately double in size. Rinse well, cover with fresh water, add half a teaspoon of salt if desired. Simmer for 45–60 minutes until the beans are soft. Once cool enough to handle, pop the beans out of their skins (squeezing gently from the dark hilum or scar). You will have about 550–600g of beans. (Or use the same weight of cooked fresh or frozen ones.)

Gently fry the onion and garlic in a little olive oil until soft but not coloured (putting a lid on the pan for the first 5–10 minutes will help them cook without browning too fast). Mash the beans with a potato masher or pulse in a mixer. Add the onion, spices, salt and pepper and taste for seasoning. Once you are happy with the taste, add an egg and porridge oats or breadcrumbs to help them hold together like burgers and chill them in the fridge for 15–20 minutes.

Make them into 6–8 patties (wetting your hands will help). Fry them in 2 batches in a large frying pan on a medium to low heat.

& serve it forth.

BENES YFRYED

Take benes and seeþ hem almost til þey bersten, take and wryng out þer water clene. Do þerto Oynouns ysode and ymynced, and garlec þerwith, frye hem in oile, oþer in grece, & do þerto powdour douce. & serve it forth.

From The Forme of Cury (c.1390), rendered into modern English by Glyn Hughes (2016)

Worts

In which we expose the double life of ‘Worts’ and other vegetables around the time of the Norman Conquest. On the one hand they were beneath notice; on the other, they were medicine, money, spiritual purity; even a weapon of war.

Take this wort

Instruction in almost every Anglo-Saxon remedy

MANY OF US live in those urban terrace houses with more or less rectangular back gardens separated by – usually – a rickety fence from the neighbours. At the back of their house in Tottenham, North London, friends of mine have a sunny, productive vegetable garden, unusual for being an L-shape. The foot of the L is, in fact, the bottom of their neighbour’s garden. He is no gardener or cook, lives alone and his autism hampers his interactions with other people. As an arrangement its simplicity seems rather lovely. It has enabled my friend and her family to become self-sufficient in many of the crops they grow. In return she takes their neighbour his part of the harvest or something she has made from it; a chard tart, a salad of fennel and mint (enlivened with some pomegranate molasses); or one of kohlrabi, cucumber and sprouted beans. Sharing his garden and receiving food gives him social ties, much needed throughout various Coronavirus pandemic lockdowns.

This arrangement, if not the chard tart, would have been familiar to the Anglo-Saxons as ‘food rent’. In the reign of the last but one of the Anglo-Saxon kings, Edward the Confessor (reigned 1042–66), my friends’ patch of ‘Toteham’ was owned by the Earl of Waltheof, son of Siward of Northumbria. Waltheof would have used his tours across his lands with his retinue to assert his authority and collect food rent, the least perishable the better. King Ine of Wessex (reigned 689–726), one of the first Saxon rulers to convert to Christianity, quantified it in his written laws. For every ten hides of land (probably around 500 hectares), whoever farmed the land had to pay ‘ten vats of honey, three hundred loaves, twelve ambers of Welsh ale, thirty of clear ale, two full-grown bullocks, or ten wethers, ten geese, twenty hens, ten cheeses, an amber full of butter, five salmon, twenty pounds of fodder and a hundred eels’.1 The Anglo-Saxon predilection for feasting would have taken care of some of this on the spot: ale, a great deal of roasted meat and the perishables such as salmon and eels (though they might have been pickled in verjuice or salted).

The social fabric of the Old English poem Beowulf hangs on these royal feasts. Most of those ten vats of honey would be skilfully fermented to become mead, ‘the fire in the head’ that bonded the king and his closest knights who would protect him bodily; a battle was never very far away, thanks to land-hungry neighbours. In Shakespeare’s King Lear, set in the eighth century, the king’s ‘riotous knights’ that so upset Goneril and Regan would have been, in the king’s home, partying with a purpose: to form bonds of allegiance. And yet for all the feasts in Beowulf, not a mention of food passes the poet’s lips.2 Only the monster, Grendel, gets to eat.3 He haunts the mead-hall at night, ‘hastily grabbed a sleeping soldier, tore him apart without any trouble, chewed his joints, drank the blood out of his veins and gulped him down in gobbets’.4 Golden mead, and that cloudy Welsh or clear Anglo-Saxon ale, is what mattered, poured into the sort of drinking horn we see stitched into the Bayeux Tapestry, suggesting a liquid-only dinner for King Harold and his men on the night before the Battle of Hastings. A fragment of the horn of the aurochs, a kind of wild cattle that became extinct in Europe in the seventeenth century, and the elaborately decorated silver mouthpiece were pulled out of the early seventh-century grave of King Rædwald (probably) at Sutton Hoo. In a society that depended on leather as well as drinking horns, it was convenient to turn the collateral – the beef – into a feast.5

Like a high-stakes business lunch, the interests of warrior society were being negotiated over those mead-filled drinking horns. The devotion of the king’s earls and thegns was repaid with land. Land meant food security, economic stability and a degree of protection from violence and injustice. None were ever guaranteed, thanks to wars between rulers in the early centuries, and incursions by Viking raiders from the end of the eighth century.

Food rent ensured that nobles could eat, but keep themselves distant from the lowly business of production. The monk Ælfric, in his Colloquy, imagines interrogating a number of workers –fisherman, oxherd, fowler, salter and baker. He is dismissive of the cook whose skills were unnecessary in an Anglo-Saxon world that prized steeliness over luxury. However, he allows the cook to argue that he’s a crucial member of the community. Without him they would have to put up with uncooked vegetables and raw meat, and wouldn’t have the rich broth he made. His most indispensable characteristic, though, is that he props up the social order; if everybody had to cook for themselves, he points out, nobody would have the status of being a lord.6

After the Norman Conquest, this organization of job roles, which got the crops into the field and the livestock cared for, didn’t change immediately. What changed overnight was the aristocracy. In the Domesday Book, Earl Waltheof’s land passed to the Norman Countess Judith (in fact, she was his widow; like many Anglo-Saxon earls he had made a strategic alliance with a Norman noble – in this case the niece of William the Conqueror, though this didn’t save him from the dubious honour of being the only English aristocrat to be executed by the Normans).

Power coalesced around the king. The mead-hall gave way to the towering Norman castle. The Countess Judith, and countless other Norman nobles and monasteries, held their land ‘of the king’. It was assessed by size, by the number of ploughs it might support, and by the number and types of workers on the land; a descending hierarchy of villeins, bordars, cottars and slaves.

Their households were enormous and the provisioning and preparation of food for 300 people or more was a huge undertaking. Households were fed together in vast halls with strict rules as to who might eat numbers of dishes according to status: the most powerful could help themselves to as many as they wanted; a lowly cleric might be permitted to try only two. However, as the poet William Langland shows in Piers Plowman (c.1370–86), by around 1370 this was becoming less popular at the top end of society; lords still acknowledged their responsibility to feed the household of servants, but did not want to eat with them.