Meat and Status. an Historical Look at Meat in the English Diet

Meat and status. An historical look at meat in the English diet.

R. Fitch. Historic Royal Palaces Apt. 57 Hampton Court Palace. East Molesey. Surrey. KT8 9AU

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Abstract.

Rarely does a subject strike a chord with the general public in the way that the study of food history has. This extremely popular topic has the advantage of including themes and subjects as common to us today as they were to people in the past; food, kitchens, cookery and recipes all resonate through the ages and now more people are looking to the past in order to guide them in their food consumption today. Yet it would also be true to say that few subjects have as many persistently held myths attached to them as food history seems to, whether it is the assumption that our forebears used spices to cover the taste of rotting meat or that Henry VIII’s meals were a veritable food fight, people are happy that they know the ‘facts’ and are often shocked to find out the actual truth of our culinary history. Popular culture, such as poorly researched television programmes and movies, repeat these myths over and over, but just as frequently we find the accepted works on the subject adding their own myths to the popular mix; meat was the preserve of the wealthy whilst vegetables were the foodstuff of the poor and that surviving recipes are representative of the foods served on a regular basis to the higher levels of society, but are they actually true? They are often presented with little or no corroborating evidence and given the current vogue for the presentation of live historic cookery demonstrations across the country, these facts are being passed on to thousands of people all of whom are keen to see if they can learn something about the food that they eat by looking at food from the past. At a time when the consumption of meat is considered in some circles to be unfashionable, this paper aims to present a balanced view of meat on the historical table. Throughout, I shall concentrate on evidence from the late medieval and early post medieval periods as these are the periods most associated both with the origins of ‘English’ food and many of these food myths. Wages and costs are expressed in their pre decimal form of pounds, shillings and pence as there is no simple relationship between the two currency systems which would enable the conversion to modern decimal amounts.

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The study and presentation of food history has blossomed over the last twenty years or so, moving from small scale amateur studies in private kitchens resulting in intense publications scrutinised by a handful of people, to large scale live interpretations of historically represented kitchens enjoyed by thousands. Along the way, the academic scrutiny applied in the study of food history has improved and encompassed many other academic and scientific disciplines, leading to a wealth of publications suitable for all levels of public consumption from casually interested amateur, through professional chefs to leading academics. Throughout the studies of food there are, in my view, three main resources available from which to obtain information which in turn can lead to a fourth more practical application which itself feeds back into the research loop; these are:

 The study of surviving period recipes, either in their manuscript form as is the case with the history of early medieval English food, or in the later printed books that start to emerge from the start of the sixteenth century and rapidly increase in numbers as we get closer to the present day.  The study of other food related documentation that is not specifically recipe related such as account books from domestic, college, monastic or Royal households, customs accounts detailing levels of import and export, letters and diary entries that refer to meals or food stuffs etc.  The study of food in art.

These three main areas can lead to the practical reconstruction of dishes from the past, the cooking and consumption of which can open more avenues of research, clarify confusion in texts or explain what is actually being shown in art from the period.

It is, however, my contentions that these three research areas have in the past been treated completely separately and in fact are treated as the preserves of three disparate groups of academics; Food Historians, Economic Historians and Art Historians, each working rigorously in their own fields but with scant reference to the other two! I believe that in order to gain an accurate view of the place that meat has had in the English diet we need to treat the sources in a much more holistic way than has been the case in the past, this is most especially true as a Food Historian in terms of the use of historic recipes as evidence for food in our past.

Recipes as evidence.

Food Historians have for many years concentrated on surviving recipes, almost to the exclusion of all other evidence with the reasoning for this focus being that recipes surviving from a given period are the best evidence for the food that was known about at that time. I believe that this recipe centred research is faulty and clouds our view of food from the past for four main reasons.

 Firstly, using recipes as evidence for commonly prepared foods is an extremely over simplified argument and one that is the equivalent of saying that modern recipe books are representative of the food consumed in Britain today. This argument is made more tenuous when we learn that when looking at the beginnings of English cookery from the mid fourteenth to mid sixteenth centuries no more than a dozen

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English language recipe collections survive, with only two of those in the form of books published in the period and in one of those cases only a single copy is known to exist. That, in my opinion, is akin to stating that Delia Smith’s “Complete Cookery Course” represents British cuisine for the whole of the twentieth century; something that is patently untrue.  Secondly, some Food Historians are happy to use a recipe collection published at a known date to be representative of recipes commonly in use for earlier periods, specifically when discussing the earliest periods of English cookery. The reasoning used to justify this is that unlike today when recipe book authors who are also cooks tend to write and publish whilst still practicing their chosen craft, in the past books tended to be written by cooks who had reached the end of their active career. The logic goes that the recipes published were those used by the cooks during their working life and are therefore representative of a period earlier than the publication date, in one case this argument has been used to retrospectively extend the use of period recipes by over a hundred years as the cookery book author would have been “trained under those who had learned in an earlier tradition therefore it is likely that a number of his recipes came from that earlier period”! Whilst there is undoubtedly evidence of a traditional and evolutionary aspect to some recipes, this argument is, I believe, simply based on the convenience of having surviving recipes from later periods and applying them to periods where little information survives. Whilst it is possible to show that recipe collections that span large periods in time contain ostensibly similar looking recipes, this broad similarity is not an excuse to assume that all of the recipes must simply date from the earlier period.  The third problem connected with the study of surviving recipes is the extremely scholarly nature of the published interpretations that we already have to work with. Given any other academic field, publications on a historical document would be read and critiqued and if need be rebuttals published and possibly a healthy academic dialogue entered into, this has not been the case with the major works on early English food. The published ‘standards’ are held, rightly in high esteem, yet this esteem seems to go one stage further with an implicit assumption that these studies are all that is required and any other work on the subject of food need not look at the recipes again. This attitude is, I believe, due to the nature of the origins of the studies into food history, which began as an amateur affair based on the actual cooking of recipes from the past in peoples home kitchens. It is only recently that these amateur attempts at creating dishes from the past simply for the sake of interest have started to be shaped into a more academic field. The prominent works that study early recipes were published primarily in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and were much more studies into the linguistics of the recipes than the actual food they represented. These works have then been used as the basis of the majority of study in food history simply because they happen to be collections of early recipes and it is, I believe, the amateur origins of this field that have lead to these recipe collections becoming considered above criticism, rather than treating them for what they actually are. These amateur origins are, I believe, to blame for much of the mythology that surrounds the early English diet, a mythology based on misunderstanding of the sources used and a lack of corroborative or substantiating work that could have also been done on other evidence associated with food but not directly recipe based.

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 Finally, when other non recipe evidence is used to look at food from the past there has always been an irrational need to attempt to apply the surviving recipes of the time into the context of that evidence even when this appears to contradict the data being used, I believe that this happens simply because the recipes are there and are a lazy way out of a problem, namely trying to determine what people ate based on often scant information. If beans appear in an account and we have a recipe for a bean tart then surely it ‘stands to reason’ that is what the beans were for, or so the argument goes!

As written above, the bulk of the work done in the field of food history has been using surviving recipes as evidence for the types of food that were eaten in the associated period. It is acknowledged that the recipe books or collections were probably only destined for a wealthy audience, but the contention has always been that the recipes ‘must’ have filtered down through society as a whole but with nothing to substantiate this claim. There is little if any discussion that I am aware of that takes into account the original purpose of the surviving collections and books, were they ever widely distributed? How many copies of the books were made? Who were the original owners? Is there evidence that the recipes were actually used at all? All of these questions ‘should’ have an effect upon how we view the recipes, but it seems that these questions have not been asked; the recipes and the fact they are rare survivors from the past have become all important and evidence to show their usage seems not to have been sought. Even if it were the case that these surviving texts contain recipes that filtered down through English society, what evidence do the recipe books present for meat in the English diet?

A small sample was taken of seven recipe collections that span the 15th to 17th centuries and the number of recipes in each was counted. They were then studied and a count was made of the principal ingredients of the recipes to determine how different meats were represented in the various collections. The meats were separated into the following groupings; fish and aquatic animals (but not birds), poultry and fowl, beef and veal, pork and other pig products, mutton and lamb, other meats (such as venison and other game) and finally non meat recipes, which in turn were split into savoury (for example egg dishes), sweet and specifically vegetable. The results can be seen in Table 1 shown below which lists the numbers of recipes in each collection that includes each given type of meat; several recipes call for multiple meats to be used and these meats have been recorded in their respective columns. Only solid pieces of meat called for in the recipes were counted, the use of meat stocks has been ignored in this study, although recipes for the manufacture of stocks are included. Only recipes that would be considered as foods have been included, beverages such as wines and cordials were specifically excluded from this study.

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Table 1. Distribution of Recipe types in Historic Recipe Collections. Total Non Meat Recipe Number of Other Fish Fowl Beef Pork Mutton Recipes Collection Recipes In Meat Total Collection Harleian M.S. 279 257 38 14 38 23 50 6 113 c.1420

The Boke of Cokery. 281 56 28 69 20 25 4 76 1500

Propre New Booke of 48 2 3 6 9 0 7 22 Cokery. 1545

A Book of Cookrye. 169 24 11 45 18 9 11 57 1591

The Art of Cookery Refin'd. 187 27 3 16 22 9 17 100 1664

The Court & Kitchin of 29 Elizabeth… 99 15 6 22 18 8 6

Cromwell. 1664

The Closet of…Sir Kenelme 200 11 8 27 41 3 23 117 Digby. 1669

As can be seen from Table 1, non-meat recipes make up the bulk of each studied collection, with sweet dishes forming the majority of these recipes as shown in the breakdown of non- meat recipes in Table 2, followed in all but two cases by savoury recipes and finally vegetable dishes. This data is plotted as charts for clarity in figures 1 and 2.

Table 2. Distribution of Non-Meat recipes in the Historic Collections.

Recipe Collection Vegetable Sweet Savoury

Harleian M.S. 279 c.1420 9 67 37 The Boke of Cokery. 1500 8 35 33 Propre New Booke of 3 15 4 Cokery. 1545 A Book of Cookrye. 1591 2 43 12 The Art of Cookery 17 72 11 Refin'd. 1664 The Court & Kitchin of 6 18 5 Elizabeth Cromwell. 1664 The Closet of..Sir Kenelme 10 76 31 Digby. 1669

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Figure 1. Distribution of Recipe types in Historic Recipe Collections. 140 120 100 80 60 40 20 0 Fish Other Meat Fowl Beef Pork Mutton Non Meat Recipes Total

Harleian M.S. 279 c.1420 The Boke of Cokery. 1500 Propre New Booke of Cokery. 1545 A Book of Cookrye. 1591 The Art of Cookery Refin'd. 1664 The Court & Kitchin of Elizabeth… 1664 The Closet of..Sir Kenelme Digby. 1669

Figure 2. Distribution of Non-Meat recipes in the Historic Collections. 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 Harleian M.S. The Boke of Propre New A Book of The Art of The Court & The Closet 279 c.1420 Cokery. 1500 Booke of Cookrye. 1591 Cookery Kitchin of of..Sir Cokery. 1545 Refin'd. 1664 Elizabeth… Kenelme 1664 Digby. 1669

Vegetable Sweet Savoury

If the assumption that recipe books are representative of foods actually cooked in a given time period is correct, then surely the results seen in Table 1 and Figure 2 would lead to the conclusion that the majority of foods cooked in the past were sweet dishes and not meat ones; in fact, if we take the Propre New Booke of Cokery (Anon, 1545) as showing foods commonly consumed in the year 1545 then things don’t look too good for meat consumption!

This supposition, however, makes no account of the actual recipes themselves and the details that they contain. A cursory read through any of the surviving texts would seem to

Page 7 of 26 indicate that something may be amiss with the assumption that these are representative recipes. Where are the recipes using simple home grown ingredients? Why are recipes that use simple techniques made more complex by their use of exotic imported ingredients? Where are the simple dishes that one would expect to see? Most importantly, where is any implication in these recipes that they were ever considered to be representative?

Whilst the sampled collections all contain numerous meat recipes, some more than others, what exactly do they tell us in reading them? The following pair of meat recipes are examples from two of the collections, The Boke of Cokery (Anon, 1500) and The Art of Cookery Refin'd (Cooper, 1664) respectively:

¶For to make Alawder de beef. ¶To make Alawder de beef / take the clodde of beef and make leches of a span longe / than take percely and hewe it smale with shepe talowe & take pouder of peper & canelle and medle it al togyder & cast therto salte & couche one leche with rawe yolkes of egges & rolle vp the leche and pryke theym close & put theym on a smale broche & roste them vp and serue them in a gode syrupe.

Scotch Scollops of Veale. Cut a leg of Veale into very thin slices, and hack them with the back of a cleaver, and draw lard one inch long thorow every piece, or as many of them as you please; then fry them very well in Butter, then make a sauce with a little claret Wine, halfe an Anchove, and a little Mutton or Veale gravy, let it have but one walme on the fire, then rub your dish with a clove of Garlike, and dish the meat with sauce and serve it up hot; garnish it with Lemmon, with some in the sauce if you please.

Apart from some exceptionally good eating, all that we can deduce from these recipes is an evolution in the style and language used to write them and when viewed in context with hundreds of other period recipes, they show us how tastes changed from one century to another in terms of what ingredients are called for in recipes and what are left out, salt for example rarely appears in recipes yet would be considered essential not just for health reasons in small quantity but for taste as well; what they do not say is anything about how common these dishes are and nor would I expect them to. What these two recipes are representative of are the sorts of recipes that are contained in each of the respective books that they come from; spiced, reasonably intricate and not particularly suited to everyday consumption. Surely a simplistic stew would be a common dish as all that is required is to chop the ingredients, add to water, season and cook until ready, this simple style of recipe is absent however from virtually all of the collections mentioned so far, the closest that we find are recipes that whilst simple in their technique are made complex by the ingredients that they use. Taking the early collection, Harleian M.S. 279 from about 1420 (Austin, 1888, p.6) we find the recipe for a beef stew as shown below:

¶Beef y-Stywyd. ¶Take fayre beef of þe rybbys of þe fore quarterys, an smyte in fayre pecys, an wasche þe beef in-to a fayre potte; þan take þe water þat þe beef was soþin yn, an strayne it þorw a straynowr, an sethe þe same water and beef in a potte, an let hem

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boyle to-gederys; þan take canel, clowes, maces, graynys of parise, quibibes, and oynons y-mynced, perceli, an sawge, an caste þer-to, an let hem boyle to-gederys; an þan take a lof of brede, an stepe it with brothe an venegre, an þan draw it þorw a straynoure, and let it be stylle; an whan it is nere y-now, caste þe lycour þer-to, but nowt to moche, an þan let boyle onys, an cast safroun þer-to a quantyte; þan take salt an venegre, and cast þer-to, an loke þat it be poynaunt y-now, & serue forth.

Transcribed into a more readable modern text it reads thus:

Beef Stewed. Take good beef from the forequarter rib and cut it into good pieces, and wash the beef in a clean pot, then take the water that the beef was washed in and strain it through a sieve and boil the water and beef together until tender; then take cinnamon, cloves, mace, grains of paradise, cubebs, minced onions, parsley and sage and add to the pot and boil all together; then take a loaf of bread and soak it in a mix of the broth and vinegar then pass it through a sieve and add in stages to the stew. Add a quantity of saffron, then salt and vinegar to taste and serve.

This is a very simple and very tasty recipe and one that does not taste the same if the spices are omitted, but does the inclusion of all of the exotic spices make this a representative dish of the period? How much would all of those ingredients cost and more importantly, could the average person afford to use them in a beef stew? Munro (2004) shows that the average daily wage for a labouring mason or carpenter in Southern England in 1420 was 4d/day. The costs of the various spices for the same period can be found contained in Thorold Rogers’ (1882), Table 3 shows these figures (in the first column) along with the price per 30g.

Table 3. Average Prices of Imported Spices For The Period 1411-1430 A.D. Weight of spice % of daily wage Price per Kg in Price per 30g in (g) purchasable represented by Spice pence(d) pence(d) with avg. daily 30g purchase. wage Pepper 52.75 1.5 80 37.5% Saffron 320 9 13.3 225% Cloves 85.5 2.5 48 62.5% Mace 96.75 2.75 43.64 68.75% No statistics for Cinnamon are to be found for the years in question. A linear relationship between weight and cost has been assumed in order to derive the cost/30g figures. Prices per 30g are used both for convenience of conversion to metric and the proximity of this weight to common sales weights of spice jars in UK supermarkets.

More importantly than the cost per Kg or 30g portion, Table 3 also shows the percentage of the average labourer’s daily wage that a 30g purchase would represent. It is these figures that indicate the expense of purchasing these exotic ingredients and should be noted that these are percentages of gross average wage, not disposable income. It is my belief that these spices turn the recipe from simple stew to luxury dish and indicate that the recipes contained within the collections, the majority of which call for some form of imported spice, are not representative of everyday dishes.

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Do any of these conclusions carry through to the present day? If we look at the distribution of recipes in three modern cookery collections, using the same criteria as those applied for the construction of Tables 1 and 2, we find results as shown below in Tables 4 and 5.

Table 4. Distribution of Recipe Types in Modern Collections. Total Recipe Other Non Meat Number of Fish Fowl Beef Pork Mutton Collection Meat Total Recipes The River Cottage Cookbook. H. 94 20 5 8 7 9 5 41 Fearnly- Whittingstall. 2003 The Return of the Naked 139 25 1 4 6 11 3 89 Chef. Jamie Oliver. 2000

More Rhodes Around 182 33 2 9 4 7 4 123 Britain. Gary Rhodes. 1995

Table 5. Distribution of Non-Meat recipes in Modern Collections.

Recipe Collection Vegetable Sweet Savoury

The River Cottage Cookbook. H. Fearnly- 27 13 1 Whittingstall. 2003

The Return of the Naked 25 19 45 Chef. Jamie Oliver. 2000

More Rhodes Around Britain. Gary Rhodes. 32 63 28 1995

As with the historic recipes, non-meat recipes make up the majority of those included in each of the modern collections and whilst it is perfectly possible to compare the statistics from Table 4 to data such as that found in the Food Standards Agency Low Income Diet and Nutrition Survey (Nelson, 2007) or the DEFRA Food Pocket Book (Holding, et al., 2009) to arrive at figures that prove or refute mathematically that the number of recipes in these collections is representative of foods consumed in Britain today, this misses the point that proving that the figures are mathematically representative is not the same as proving that the book itself is representative. A quick straw poll1 of 17 people that consider themselves interested in food showed that only 2 of them owned the Jamie Oliver book; whilst not an exhaustive survey, would we then consider that book to be a representative collection of recipes? We also need to remember that owning the book does not mean or prove that the recipes have actually been cooked by the owner; if this is the only recipe book to survive in

1 Conducted online via http://tudorcook.blogspot.com 23/6/2010 – 26/6/2010 Page 10 of 26 five hundred years time would future Food Historians be right to assume that Mr Oliver’s recipes represent the food that was common at the start of the twenty first century? Worse still for the future view of meat in our diet would be if the only recipe collections to survive were vegetarian ones! Surely we need to look at the historical purpose of recipes and recipe collections and consider that along with the chance survival of a handful of recipes before arriving at any meaningful analysis?

The use of recipes.

When we consider the use of recipes and combine that with the social habits of the day then a likely reason for the distribution of these recipe types becomes clearer. Whilst recipes published today are prescriptive in their nature, with the aim of allowing a near perfect recreation of the original recipe time after time this has not always been the case and it has only been since the mid nineteenth century that recipes in English cookery books have had the familiar layout that we see today, with a list of ingredients followed by a step by step guide to how to prepare the dish. This modern layout is essentially designed for a consumer with little to no culinary skill, hence the step by step instructions. Readers may remember the shock that greeted the publication of Delia Smith’s “Delia’s How To Cook” in 1998 which contained recipes for previously assumed basics such as how to boil an egg and which showed just how limited we as a nation have become cookery wise! Earlier recipes seem to have been destined for a presumably knowledgeable audience, either skilled cooks or householders with staff, keen to understand the dishes that they were to be served. Early recipes have a distinctly narrative form, with the ingredients being contained within an often rambling series of instructions for the recipe. These instructions rarely contain measurements either of weights, times or temperatures which upon initial reading can prove extremely confusing. However, when one looks at the recipes with the assumption that they are guides for a skilled cook then they become much clearer; giving hints and help to enable the reader to cook a dish that they are unfamiliar with, yet one that contains the techniques that the reader would already understand but all the while with no assumption that a ‘cookie cutter’ result should follow from using the texts. Combine this with the knowledge that certain fast days were prescribed by the church, then the selection of recipes that these early collections contain makes more sense as a list of uncommon dishes that a cook would need help and guidance to prepare, along with perhaps a selection of the compiling cooks favourite recipes, in fact pretty much what a modern recipe collection contains. Figures 3 and 4 show the distribution of recipes in modern collections and one only has to view these figures in association with knowledge of the respective cooks tastes and styles to get a likely idea of why certain recipes are included more than others; Gary Rhodes, for example includes many more sweet dishes in his book and was well known as the public face of Tate & Lyle sugar throughout the late 1990’s, thus the fact that he provides more sweet recipes is hardly a surprise.

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Figure 3. Distribution of Recipe Types in Modern Collections. 140 120 100 80 60 40 20 0 Fish Other Meat Fowl Beef Pork Mutton Non Meat Total

The River Cottage Cookbook. H. Fearnly-Whittingstall. 2003 The Return of the Naked Chef. Jamie Oliver. 2000 More Rhodes Around Britain. Gary Rhodes. 1995

Figure 4. Distribution of Non-Meat recipes in the Historic Collections. 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 The River Cottage Cookbook. H. The Return of the Naked Chef. More Rhodes Around Britain. Fearnly-Whittingstall. 2003 Jamie Oliver. 2000 Gary Rhodes. 1995

Vegetable Sweet Savoury

Today we would never assume that the recipes in a modern cookery book reflected or represented our societies food consumption so why should recipe collections from the past be considered to be any different?

So what, if anything, can we learn from just using recipes as an indicator of food types consumed at any given time and in the case of this paper, the place of meat in English meals? In my opinion, very little as we need to consider a much broader spectrum of evidence, the recipes simply give us an indication of known dishes from certain times, not a statistical sample of what was common nor indeed a list of what was actually consumed and

Page 12 of 26 whilst we can get an idea of the relative expense of ingredients within recipes compared to the average gross wage, for a more accurate idea of food and meat from the past we need to look at surviving accounts and household descriptions such as the ordinances for the various Royal and noble households.

Accounts and ordinances.

Surviving accounts are resources that seem to be rarely used by Food Historians, other than to ‘show’ that as certain ingredients were being purchased at a given time that ‘must’ equate to a surviving recipe. As mentioned at the start of this paper, the analysis of accounts seems to be the preserve of the Economic Historian and only very rarely do they cross paths with the work of Food Historians. Accounts provide us with information about what foodstuff people ‘actually’ purchased, they provide details of the costs of livestock compared to meat for consumption and allow us to gain a much better understanding of how common certain items were based on amounts purchased as opposed to speculation based solely on recipe sources, they are, in my opinion a much better resource for enabling us to understand the place of meat in the English diet. The caveat with this is being aware that, especially for the medieval and early post medieval periods, these figures are not representative of the average ‘man in the street’, rather they show details of monastic, college, court or noble consumption and also that they only show amounts purchased or presented as a choice at a meal, not what was physically eaten. Quite simply, we have no way of knowing how much food people in the past ate as details like this were not recorded; the same can be said of current society, with all of the data collected on a daily basis about our shopping habits and consumption, how much of it can ‘actually’ be said to accurately show what we eat rather than what we buy?

Collating the figures calculated by Thorold Rogers (1866, 1882) for the average prices paid for a selection of livestock over the period 1263-1582 we find the totals shown in Table 6.

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Table 6. Medieval and early post medieval decennial average cost of animals purchased live, in pence (d). Years Ox Cow Mutton Boars Capon Hens 1263-1270 123 74 17 30 2.25 1.125 1271-1280 146.5 95.5 17.75 50.75 1.75 1.25 1281-1290 120.75 82 23 54.75 2.25 1.25 1291-1300 127 97.25 22.5 61 2.375 1.25 1301-1310 143.5 103.5 21.75 99 2.75 1.5 1311-1320 172 130.75 26.25 67 3 1.75 1321-1330 174.75 144.75 25.25 51.75 3 1.75 1331-1340 153.75 111.75 20 47.75 2.75 1.75 1341-1350 140.25 108.75 20.5 39.25 2.75 1.625 1351-1360 161.5 122 25.75 52.25 3.625 2.125 1361-1370 208.75 142.75 27 60 4 2.125 1371-1380 190 136.5 26.75 48.75 3.875 2 1381-1390 160.75 103.25 21.75 48 3.5 2 1391-1400 177.75 128 24.5 66.5 3.5 1.875 1401-1410 234.5 26.5 83.75 4 2.25 1411-1420 228 25 94 4 2.25 1421-1430 210 20.5 99 4 2 1431-1440 205 24 96.75 4 2 1441-1450 216.25 28.75 80.25 4 2 1451-1460 229.25 21.25 96.25 4 2 1461-1470 247.5 23.5 110.25 4 2.5 1471-1480 206.5 17.25 105.5 4.5 2.5 1481-1490 192.25 28 94.5 5 2.5 1491-1500 191.75 22 92.25 6.75 1.75 1501-1510 270.25 28 115 9.5 2.5 1511-1520 278 29.75 101.5 12.25 2 1521-1530 370.25 40 126 16.75 3.5 1531-1540 343.5 39 138 10.75 3.25 1541-1550 507.25 59.5 166 8 5.75 1551-1560 943.5 74.5 317 21 4.75 1561-1570 908.25 78.25 297.25 12.5 3 1571-1582 1030.25 92.25 365 13.5 5.25 Cows are not present in sufficient quantity in Thorold Rogers figures for years after 1400 to provide a meaningful set of decennial averages, though it is worth noting that when prices do occur they are generally half those paid for oxen. For the years up to 1400, oxen are generally purchased as draught animals, for those following 1400 the term oxen is used to denote a variety of animals both for draught and food use.

The averages in Table 6 show a steady rising trend in the prices paid for livestock through the medieval and post medieval periods, rising sharply from the early sixteenth century onwards due to a period of increased inflation well documented in both Thorold Rogers figures on the values of money and in exceptional detail by Munro (2004). Wages too rise in a similar manner throughout the same period although as Munro (2004, p.1034) notes they suffer over the period from wage stickiness in that periods of declining consumer prices are not matched by similar reductions in wages and rises in prices, especially the radical ones seen towards the latter end of the presented data are not matched by similar wage increases; this in effect leads to a fall in real wages through the sixteenth and seventeenth

Page 14 of 26 centuries and may well have lead to a decline in purchasing of certain meats as well as other goods by the populace at large. However, as Thorold Rogers (1882, p.330) says “The facts which are contained in these volumes are, as I have often stated, rather those of consumption than of production, and of the consumption by fairly opulent corporations” and these corporations continued to spend and purchase meat, often in great quantity.

Figures for weights of the various animals are scarce at the beginning of the survey period but do appear towards the second half, with oxen weighing in between 139.25 Kg and 193.23 Kg (Thorold Rogers, 1887, p.332) with this latter weight being considered representative and valued at 98 pence (d) per 50.8 Kg (8s 2d/cwt) thus it is not possible to comment on the ratio of average prices paid per kilo of animal compared to per kilo of meat, when those prices are found. The closest that it seems possible to finding out what the average person spent on food is to look at the figures spent as a component of wages ascribed for board, in other words how much people were paid in lieu of receiving food in certain employment situations; these figures can be assumed to reflect the market value put on a day’s food. The figures collated by Thorold Rogers indicate an average value for carpenters of 2d per day for the first half of the sixteenth century in Southern England, compare this to the rate set for one of King Henry VIII’s staff, Nicholas Clampe, who was connected with the Royal Mews and it’s hawks and who received 4d per day during May and June 1530 (Harris Nicolas, 1827, p.71). This difference in rates is not to be unexpected given the Royal employer and assuming a mean average of 3d per day and an assumed working week of 6 days this gives the monthly figure expected to be spent on food of 72d and a half yearly rate of 432d; this rate, however pales when compared to other Royal and noble expenditure on food from the same time. For example, between June and December 1525 the Duke of Richmond purchased 110 oxen at a cost of 28028d (116l 15s 8d), 520 sheep at 17747d (73l 18s 11d), gave away oxen and sheep as gifts valued at 10368d (43l 4s) and spent in total expenditure on food for that same period 329352.875d (1372l 6s 0⅞d) of which 239951.875d (999l 15s 11⅞d) was consumed (Brewer, 1870, p.821); this equates to approximately 555 times the average for a normal working man. To place that difference in context, the National Statistics Office (Skentlebery, 2009, p61-62) gives the national average family expenditure on food and non-alcoholic drinks between 2003 and 2008 as £51 per week, equating to £1224 per half year, meaning that the Duke of Richmond’s present day counterpart would be spending £679320 per 6 months on food alone. These figures appear not to be for the amount of food purchased to feed a single person rather to support his household; however documents pertaining to the Royal household do give an indication of the expenses spent on much smaller groupings of people as well as an indication of the importance of meat in the Court diet.

The Eltham Ordinances.

The Eltham Ordinances were a set of rules for the organisation of Henry VIII’s Court written down in 1526 an Eltham Palace and were considered to be an addendum to previous Royal ordinances set by earlier monarchs. Within the ordinances, as well as setting out job expectations and working practices for various members of the Court, are contained a list of diets that were to be served to those members of the Court for whom board was a component part of their wages. These diets do not list exactly what was consumed, rather they should be viewed as menus would be today, the biggest difference being that the food

Page 15 of 26 was all cooked and laid before the respective diners in order for them to make their meal choice, as one might well do at an Asian banquet today. Food that was considered unbroken, i.e. not touched, at the end of the meal was to be collected up and dispersed by the Lord Almoners department to the poor, that which had been eaten from was sent as rubbish; this would be considered to be extremely wasteful today, especially if a dish had only had one mouthful taken from it, however, this profligate use of food was all part and parcel of the status of life at Court and by implication suggestive of the status of the food served. Whilst it can be argued that the disposal of waste food, probably in large quantity, shows that the food was considered with little value, I would contend that it is completely the opposite and that the disposal of large amounts of costly food as waste was part of the Court ethos of showing wealth via expenditure. This goes against common thinking today, however in the past there was a social expectation to show your wealth by spending it; misers were lambasted not for owning large quantities of money but for not spending that money. The following two examples which I have tabulated from the list as presented in the Society of Antiquaries (1790) version of the ordinances are from the polar extremes of the diet lists and show the menu served to the King and Queen on each flesh day, i.e. Sunday to Thursday in Tables 7 and 8 followed by the diet for the lowest level of Court staff listed as being eligible for board, the “Maides, Servants, Children of Offices, Porters and Skowerers”, also for flesh days, in Table 9.

Table 7. The Diet for The King (Henry VIII) and Queen on flesh days, the first course Dynner Supper s d s d Cheat Bread and Cheat Bread and Manchett 16 8 16 8 manchett Beare and Ale 6 gal’ 9 Beere and Ale 6 gal’ 9 Wyne 1 sext’ 2 0 Wyne 1 sext’ 2 0 Flesh for Pottage 8 Flesh for Pottage 8 Chines of Beef 2 8 Chickens in criuary, Larkes, Sparrowes or 1 13 Lambe stewed, with Chynes of Mutton

Venison in Brewz’ or mult’ 1 4 Pestells of Reed Deere 1 2 Giggots of Mutton or Mutton 2 6 Venison, stopped with 1 6 Cloves Carpes or Yong Veale in Arm’ Capons of gr’ 2 4 farced 1 10 Conyes of gr 1 mess 12 Swanne. Gr’ Goose, Storke or 2 4 Capons of gr’ Conyes of gr’ 1 12 Phesant, Herne, 1 3 4 Shovelard Cocks, Plovers or Gulles Fryanders, Baked Carpe 1 20 1 2 Custard garnished, 1 12 Swete dowcetts or 1 10 Orange or Fritters 1 Quinces or Pippins 1 2

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Table 8. The Diet for The King (Henry VIII) and Queen on flesh days, the second course S D S D

Jelly, Ipocras, Creames of Blank-mange or other 1 mess 8 1 mess 4 Almonds dish

Pheasant, Herne, 1 3 4 Kydd, Lambe or Pejons 1 12 Bitterne, Shovelard

Partridges, Quailes or Mewz’ 1 3 Partridges or Quailes 1 2

Godwitts Brewez’ 1 3 6 Cocks, Plovers or Gulles 1 2

Or Teales, Pulletts, Chic’ Kydd, Lambe or Pejons 1 14 pip’ 1 18

Larkes or Rabbetts 1 12 Rabbetts or Larks 1 12

Snyters, Pulletts or Tarte, 1 12 Chickens 1 12

Fruite 1 8 Venison in fine past 1 12 Tarts, 1 12 Butter and Eggs 3 4

Fritter 1 5 Venison or other Baked 1 12 Meates

Fruit with powder or 1 8 piscards Butter and Egges 3 4

Table 9. Dinner and supper each flesh day for “Maides, Servants, Children of Offices, Porters and Skowerers” d d Bread 2 1 Bread 2 1 Ale 1 gall’ 1 ½ Ale 1 gall’ 1 ½ Beefe 1 mess 5 Beef sliced 1 2 Veale 1 3 Mutton 1 3 10 ½ 7 ½

These diets list the name of the food, followed by the amount to be served, usually in a unit referred to as a mess for solid items, followed by the cost of the dish in that quantity. These costs are totalled in the diet lists to give a financial value to each meal, which in the case of the King and Queen’s meals in Tables 7 and 8 total 780d (3l 5s 0d) which was approximately 10 months expenditure on food for the average man, spent on one single meal. Totals for the second example in Table 9 are 10.5d or 7.5d depending on whether it is dinner or supper, around 3 times the average mans daily board. Also contained within the lists are the totals to be spent per annum on the various meals, which lists the total for meals for the King alone at 364,948d (1520l 12s 4d), an astronomical equivalent of 422 years expenditure on food for the average man! Other historians have taken these diet lists and attempted to work out what they ‘actually’ mean by trying to overlay surviving recipes to those dishes listed and then supposing a blanket like assumption that this applied to everyone at Court, which I believe is a rather unlikely scenario . It is entirely possible for example that the “Venison in fine Past” listed for the second course of the King and Queens dinner could refer to the recipe: Page 17 of 26

¶Venyson y-bake (Austin, 1888, p.51). ¶Take hoges of Venyson, & parboyle hem in fayre Water an Salt; & whan þe Fleyssche is fayre y-boylid, make fayre past, & cast þin Venyson þer-on; & caste a- boue an be-neþe, pouder Pepir, Gyngere, & Salt, & þan sette it on þe ouyn, & lat bake, & serue forth.

Likewise it is possible that the meats listed are simply the main ingredient within a dish and thus the 2 messes of mutton listed under the 1st course in Table 7 could mean that the dish served was actually something like:

¶Stwed Mutton (Austin, 1888, p.72). ¶Take faire Mutton that hat ben roste, or elles Capons, or suche oþer fless, and mynce it faire; put hit into a possenet, or elles bitwen ij. siluer disshes; caste thereto faire parcely, And oynons small mynced; then caste there-to wyn, and a litull vynegre or vergeous, pouder of peper, Canel, salt and saffron, and lete it stue on þe faire coles, And þen serue hit forthe; if he have no wyne ne vynegre, take Ale, Mustard, and A quantite of vergeous, and do þis in þe stede of vyne or vinegre.

But one has to ask is that ‘likely’, especially when we consider the information regarding surviving recipes shown above? Whilst considerably more work would need to be done on these diet lists along with the other accounts listed in the Eltham Ordinances and the Privy Purse accounts to work out how much was being spent on sundry other ingredients to then attempt to calculate if sufficient quantities were being purchased to support these theories, I feel that it is much more likely that what we see in the diet lists is simply what it looks like and that Food Historians have been guilty of over thinking the problem purely because of the overly inflated position in which the surviving recipes are held. I suggest that it is more likely that the meats listed are simply cooked, primarily by roasting rather than forming part of some complicated recipe. The reason for this suggestion is simply the scale involved of the buildings that the Court occupied and the numbers that were being catered for coupled with the relative expense of roasting compared to other cookery methods which would have added along with the cost of the meat itself, to the cachet of dining at Court. Figure 5 shows a block plan of Hampton Court Palace in around 1547 ad. The area shown in grey represents those parts of the building coming under the auspices of the ‘Domus Providencie’, literally the ‘household of provision’, the section of the Royal Household responsible for providing, amongst other things, food and drink and which consists of all the departments connected with the kitchens from the bakery and wood yard in the smaller satellite building (known as the House of Offices) through to the stores, accounting rooms and actual cooking areas in the main body of the Palace itself. We can see from this simple image the percentage of the building set aside to the procurement, preparation and serving of food and thus get an impression of the importance that food itself had within the Royal Court.

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Figure 5. Hampton Court Palace in 1547 showing the area controlled by the ‘Domus Providencie’

Within the kitchen buildings at Hampton Court that survive today, the most distinctive elements are the six large fireplaces that were set aside for roasting. These fires were part of a food factory that dwarfed the domestic kitchen areas of the average Englishman and were essential in preparing food for around 600 people twice a day when the Court was in residence. These large fireplaces would enable sufficient cooking space to roast meat for 600 people; whereas the rest of the infrastructure, as we currently understand it, is woefully inadequate for preparing in bulk, most of the recipes that survive in Henrecian period recipe books.

How much meat was served?

If we look at the diet listed in Table 9 we see that beef to the value of 5d and veal valued at 3d are served for dinner with mutton rated at 3d and sliced beef at 2d presented for supper; these monetary figures give us the best chance of determining how much food was served for each dish and as such, a broad idea of the position of meat at the Court table. A proclamation dated 21st May 1544 (Gairdner and Brodie, 1903, p.338) set the prices that beef, veal and mutton were to be sold at. These figures of ¾ d, ⅞ d and 1d per pound allow us to calculate the amounts of meat contained in the specified diet as approximately 1.56 Kg veal and 3.03 Kg beef for dinner and 1.21 Kg sliced beef and 1.36 Kg mutton for supper. Most modern UK restaurants serve approximately 100g of meat per person in a serving [conversation](Kyle Connaughton, Fat Duck restaurant, personal communication), these servings from the Eltham diets are for a mess of people, with a mess generally assumed to have four or sometimes six members. Assuming a mess of four members, this gives us a per head amount of approximately 400g veal and 760g beef for dinner and 300g beef and 340g mutton for supper. These are the people at the bottom end of the social scale at the Royal

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Court, yet they are being given the choice of two meats per meal and in sufficient quantity that one should not go hungry. This was the luxury of being fed at Court, food and sufficient choices of it on a regular basis at a time in history when there was little guarantee that a meal would be available every day of the year thanks to famine and dearth of crops or animals for large amounts of the population. The Eltham diet lists only refer to flesh or fish days but not seasons in the year or any other delineator, leading to the conclusion that very much like school dinners of years past, if you knew what day it was then you knew what dishes would be served. This ostensibly boring diet goes against much that is written about royal dining, the bulk of which seems to take references to meals from later years when diets changed and attempts to retrospectively apply this information to the past. Meals where the ubiquitous heaving table, stacked with a multitude of dishes simply do not seem to be a part of the medieval and post medieval dining tradition, a tradition that seems to imply that ‘any’ food on the table, but mostly meat, ‘every’ day is a sign of wealth and status. The diet lists contain few if any references to non-meat dishes other than fish and the lists of expenditures on food stuffs that it ‘does’ give that are not meat are imported spices; this is something that is common with lesser noble household ordinances as well. The Earl of Northumberland’s ordinances (Percy, 1905) for example date from 1512 and only list the following ingredients in connection with the kitchen; wheat, ale, beer, wine, cheese, mutton, pork, beef, veal, salt-fish, salt, assorted spices, honey, sugar, vinegar, verjuice, mustard, dates and currants. More importantly, no department of the household for either the aforementioned Earl or the Monarch is listed as being responsible for obtaining vegetables, a situation which continues through the extremely well documented reign of Elizabeth I (Woodworth 1946). Clearly meat was of importance and vegetables less so as they fail to warrant a mention. Some have attempted to explain this lack of vegetables, which they assume ‘have’ to have formed part of the diet as they are mentioned within surviving recipes, by putting forward the idea that vegetables would have been grown by the household and not incurred a financial cost and would therefore not be included within these ordinances. I find this extremely hard to believe given the level of detail which the surviving accounts go into and as Harris Nicolas (1828, p.5) states in his introduction, the Royal Court was not alone in its desire for accurate book keeping!

“The Accounts of the Citizen of London are remarkable for the minuteness with which the expence[sic.] of every article of food, from a farthing's worth of fruit to several pounds' worth of meat, is stated…”

It is unfortunate that definitively being able to show exactly what food stuffs were procured by the Royal Court using documents written by the department responsible for buying them is not possible due to their destruction by bombing during the Second World War.

It is my belief that meals at Court and in other noble households consisted primarily of simple roast meat dishes, few in number for the bulk of the staff and fewer in number for the principle diners that has been assumed in the past.

Turning now to food as illustrated in period art, is there any indication that this idea may be correct?

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Food in art.

This is in itself a massive subject and one that lies in the main, beyond the scope of this paper. Of prime importance when looking at art from the period in order to add to our body of knowledge is the fact that art is the result of considered composition in order to come to a finished result. Paintings and sculptures are not snapshots in time; the artist placed all of the items in the image for a reason even if we are unsure of what that reason may have been. Harbison (1995, p.26) has the following to say on this subject:

“While one of the aims of this art must clearly have been to evoke wonder in the viewer, the subtlety and sophistication of its realism must also be acknowledged and explored. It is not simply the embodiment of a modern objective view of reality, replacing the time-worn mystical and subjective bent of the Middle Ages. In the fifteenth century, reality and its representation in art was still viewed as magical, capable of being manipulated by both God and Humankind. Thus, an art that might initially seem to be a naive record of visual experience revealed ultimately a reality that was highly conventional, simultaneously factual and emblematic. With the benefit of modern critical distance, the strands that these artists wove together so seamlessly in creating their worlds can be unravelled: and, at least in general terms, the meanings it was meant to convey may be ascertained.

Fortunately there is at least a small amount of documentary evidence to serve as a guide. By the middle of the fifteenth century, contractual agreements made between artists and their patrons specified that, in religious scenes such as the Annunciation or the Nativity, contemporary furniture found in the homes of the "Seigneurs et bourgois" was to be included, Thus, one may be reasonably sure of, for example, the fifteenth-century authenticity of the lush red bed depicted in the Arnolfini Double Portrait….This phenomenon can be called a "descriptive realism of particulars”.

Immediately, a further possibility arises. Were not only individual still-life details but entire interior settings meant to be accurate or specific records of contemporary reality? There is no documentary evidence to support this supposition; no contemporary contract dictates to an artist that he portray accurately some particular domestic or ecclesiastical interior. What seems to be the case is that artists freely wove together details from different environments in order to make stereotyped wholes. This is difficult to prove absolutely in the case of domestic interiors, since so few survive intact from the period, but it easy to demonstrate in the case of the church interiors where the vast majority of models available to the artists survive - for none was copied or recorded exactly.”

With this in mind, can we reasonably use images of food in surviving art as evidence for the types of food served? Not directly I believe, as in most cases we do not have images of specific recorded events to work from, although as we move closer to the present day this form of art does increase in frequency. Without that documentary corroboration all we can be left with is supposition based solely on the object that we think we see within the painting, in other words supposition based on an entirely realistic object set within an

Page 21 of 26 unrealistic setting. We can though I feel, use surviving images to give an idea of the importance certain foods had compared to others, if not to food consumers then to the original viewers of the image. A small survey was undertaken in order to ascertain whether anything can be learnt statistically from images of food in art. A random selection of 110 images of meals was chosen spanning the date range 1160 ad. - 1675 ad. Only images that showed a formally set table containing at least a tablecloth were considered as part of the sample, images of impromptu dining or picnic style meals were ignored as were still life compositions as these are considered to be completely unrepresentative of actual dining styles. Scale of the image and the medium used to produce it did not influence the choice, with panel paintings as well as manuscript miniatures included in the survey. The 110 images showed 205 clearly illustrated dishes either upon or just adjacent to dining tables, of these, 5 were shown as empty and 128 were illustratively unclear as to what the food was supposed to be. Of the remaining dishes, 28 were clearly fish, 23 fowl of some form and 21 meat, either as whole animals or obvious joints. These figures, along with the respective percentages that they account for in the survey are shown for clarity in Table 10.

Table 10. Occurrences of meat, fowl and fish in a sample of medieval and post medieval art. Number of Contents Empty Meat Fowl Fish Dishes unclear 205 5 128 21 23 28 Percentage 2.44% 62.44% 10.24% 11.22% 13.66% of sample

The modal average number of dishes present in the images surveyed was 1, with 48 occurrences, followed by 2 dishes with 27 occurrences, 3 dishes with 15 and 4 dishes with 3; larger numbers of dishes were represented by only single occurrences. Do these statistics show us anything meaningful with regard to food? I would suggest that the primary reason for meat joints/animals, fowl and fish to be clearly illustrated is simply clarity for the viewer as they are obvious when drawn that they are showing food; 62.44% of the dishes in this survey could have contained any number of complicated foods such as the recipes given as examples previously, but this is not clear from the images. The high number of fish dishes can be explained by the high number of religious themes, the Last Supper in particular (21 of the 110 images) that formed parts of the survey; this is unavoidable when looking at medieval art as religious subjects far outnumber purely secular ones. Apart from bread, there is no food recorded as being that which was served at the Last Supper, but by the Middle Ages it was commonly depicted with either fish or sometimes a whole lamb in a dish, symbolising the paschal lamb. Surely in these cases we cannot consider that the dishes shown are accurate depictions of ’actual’ foods served? I would suggest too that this approach should also be taken with other depictions of food in art where no corroborating documentation exists to speak to the purpose of the image. The dishes that appear seem to be shown primarily for clarity, to make it clear that food is being depicted in the image.

What I think we can gain from the analysis of these images is the relative paucity of dishes on the tables as illustrated. It is clear from the paintings that the people depicted within them are of some social note, or that the images themselves were to be ‘consumed’ by

Page 22 of 26 wealthy patrons who as Harbison (1995) stated, set criteria for what was to be included within the image. Yet we see that for all other depictions of wealth and status that these images contain, their tables and meals consist of on average one single dish. I believe that this is indicative of the idea that having ‘some’ food on the table was a sign of status and so much more the better if that was meat.

Conclusion

Although one of the aims of this brief paper was to show the importance of meat in the English diet, I feel that this aim is beyond the scope of anything other than a multi-volume work. What we can conclude for the period of history that has been discussed is that there is little evidence to show what the vast majority of the population of England ‘actually’ consumed for their meals. Whilst it is possible to eventually work out average amounts of meat that ‘could’ have been purchased, this still leaves us no closer to understanding exactly what would be done with this ingredient. I feel that the best conclusion that is currently possible is that wealth and status, if they are shown by food, are not illustrated by vast quantities of dishes, nor are they indicated by the surviving recipes, they are, I believe, shown by the serving of meat on a regular basis to as many people as is practical to do so. What is certain though is that the information sought about food from the past is sorely lacking, yet at the same time this form of data is not being adequately recorded by our present society. Whilst numerous surveys take place on a regular basis and have done for several decades now, these surveys are concerned more with the purchase of foods in order to asses public ‘consumption’ for the food trade and much less with the actual consumption for food for eating. If successive generations are to understand the way we view food in the sort of detail that we wish to learn about previous generations, then a great deal more care needs to be taken about what information we choose to detail about our current lives.

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