The Culture of Food and Feasting in High Medieval England C
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The Culture of Food and Feasting in High Medieval England c. 1066-1330 Ross Staffin (University of Exeter) MPhil Thesis Submitted October, 2016 The Culture of Food and Feasting in High Medieval England c.1066-1330 Submitted by Ross Staffin to the University of Exeter as a dissertation for the degree of Master of Philosophy in Medieval Studies, October 2016. This dissertation is available for Library use on the understanding that it is copyright material, and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. I certify that all material in this dissertation which is not my own work has been identified, and that no material has previously been submitted and approved for the award of a degree by this or any other University. The Culture of Food and Feasting in High Medieval England, c. 1066-1330 The Culture of Food and Feasting in High Medieval England (Project Abstract) The feast in medieval England brings into focus complex issues regarding ceremony and ritual, noble status and family lineage, community, and political authority. The feast was a stage where the lord demonstrated control over nature and its resources through the provision of food. This allowed for management of the household, the construction of informal relationships, and the publicization of formal ones. The feast also reflected the lord’s person with its displays of largesse, Christian piety, and good manners. It was usually a public affair, at which the lord’s socio-political effectiveness and personal identity could shine for a large and diverse audience. The feast was a powerful symbol of good lordship, and it has been studied extensively by historians. Existent scholarship favours the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and covers its tangible aspects such as types of food, how it was acquired, how it was cooked, who served it, and how meals were conducted, in addition to expenditure, seating arrangement, cooking methods, nutrition, and material culture. Some of the social and cultural issues expressed by the feast (e.g. largesse and hospitality) have been studied but mostly from an ecclesiastical perspective. My thesis will take a step back from the individual parts in order to examine the cultural and symbolic significance of the feast as a whole. Our knowledge of the feast is less informed by its literary culture, so my study focuses on the feast’s representation in chronicles, hagiographies, and vernacular romance. These types of narrative are all literary to a degree (even historical chronicles) and writers were free to represent the feast in its idealised form. Economic and logistical concerns are subverted in favour of the feast’s greater symbolic significance. When we examine the feast’s narrative representation, we can trace an increasingly settled and domestic culture of lordship that emerged in High Medieval England. This was a period of profound change in England and throughout Western Europe. Food production increased across Western Europe in this period of increased farming and commerce. And the growth of bureaucratic structures combined with manner of lordship in England based on hierarchical landholding required lords who managed the land and its resources, kept a household, and participated in hierarchical and reciprocal relationships with one another, and with the king. The feast demonstrated the practical and managerial exercise of lordship in the territorial and household settings. It also reflected modes of spiritual refinement and courtliness in the aftermath of the Peace Movement and Gregorian reform, which inspired clerical beliefs that lords should manage their violent impulses and conduct themselves as model Christians. Economic and social changes impacted the nature and perception of lordship, so they also influenced societal perceptions of what the feast was meant to accomplish and represent. The nature of these changes can be read in the feast’s narrative representation, and we can understand better how the banqueting society of the Late Medieval England arose from the warrior culture of the Anglo-Saxon mead hall. - Ross Staffin (University of Exeter) – 630057102 The Culture of Food and Feasting in High Medieval England, c. 1066-1330 Table of Contents Introduction: The History of Food and Feasting in Medieval England 1 Chapter 1: Feasting and The Politics of Good Lordship 14 Chapter 2: Giving Food to Others: Household Management, Reciprocal Relationships, and Aristocratic Largesse 38 Chapter 3: The Feast and Christian Lordship 60 Chapter 4: Aristocratic Manners and Educating the Next Generation 84 Concluding Remarks 106 Bibliography 114 List of Illustrations (fig. 1-8) 1. Luttrell Family Feast (c. 1325-40): “Luttrell Psalter”, British Library Add. MS. 42130, fol. 208. 2. The Last Supper (c. 1325-40): “Luttrell Psalter”, British Library Add. MS. 42130, fol. 90v. 3. The Last Supper (c. 1030-40): “Benedictional”, Getty Museum MS. Ludwig VII 1, fol. 38. 4. Cana Wedding Feast (13th Century): “Bible Moralisée”, British Library MS. Harley 1527, fol. 23. 5. The Four Cardinal Virtues (c. 1295): “Frere Laurent, Somme le Roi”, British Library Add. MS. 54180, fol. 91v. 6. Baking Bread (c. 1300-40): Raymund of Peñafort with gloss by Bernard of Parma, “Decretals of Gregory IX with the Glossa Ordinaria (the Smithfield Decretals)”, British Library MS. Royal 10 E IV, fol. 145v. 7. Royal Feast (c. 1310-20): “Queen Mary Psalter”, British Library MS. Royal 2 B VII, fol. 71v. 8. January Feasting (c. 1318-25): “Book of Hours, Use of St. Omer”, British Library Add. MS. 36684, fol. 1v. Cover Illustrations (clockwise from top left) • Luttrell Family Feast (c. 1325-30): “Luttrell Psalter”, British Library Add. MS. 42130, fol. 208. • Baking Bread (13th Century): “Psalter”, Getty Museum MS. 14, fol. 8v, 85. MK. 239. fol. 8v. • “Initial D” Feeding Leper (c. 1275-1300): “Psalter”, Getty Museum MS. Ludwig VIII 3, fol. 43. • “Initial C” Cibus (Food) (c. 1360-75): James le Palmer, “Omne Bonum (Circumcisio-Dona Spiritui Sancti)”, British Library MS. Royal 6 E IV, fol. 264v. The Culture of Food and Feasting in High Medieval England, c. 1066-1330 Introduction: The History of Food and Feasting in Medieval England The feast in medieval England brings into focus complex issues regarding ceremony and ritual, noble status and family lineage, community, and political authority. The feast was a stage where the lord performed certain necessary functions – to provide food, maintain the household, construct informal relationships, and publicise formal ones (made so by the ceremony of homage). It also demonstrated the lord’s person with its displays of Christian piety and good manners. It was generally a public affair, at which the lord’s socio-political functions and personal qualities could shine for a large and diverse audience. This was a culture that demanded continuity between the public and private persona, so the feast was a powerful symbol of both as it demonstrated the lord’s public effectiveness as well as his or her personal identity. In the second quarter of the fourteenth century, an illuminated psalter was commissioned by Sir Geoffrey Luttrell (d. 1345), knight and lord of Irnham manor in Lincolnshire. The psalter’s illuminations depict food production on the lord’s estates as well as its provision in the household, of which successive stages from field to table are shown. Workers plough the fields and gather the harvest, and a kitchen scene shows its preparation in the household. A feast (fig. 1) shows food on the table, which is prepared and served by members of the household. The lord also dines and entertains guests. These guests – Dominican friars associated with voluntary poverty – suggest a level of pious caritas attached to the feeding of these men while the feast seems to mimic a Last Supper illustration (fig. 2). The feast assumes religious overtones, and it appears as a symbol of pious devotion. Aside from the miniature of Sir Geoffrey armed and mounted (fol. 202v.), lordship is represented in the household through visual representations of the lord’s provision of food. The psalter provided this seigneurial family with a visual reminder of the values which defined English lordship by the fourteenth century. While early medieval lordship was characterised by its military ambitions and the warlike tendencies of Anglo-Saxon and early Norman elites, the aristocracy had shed much of this image by c. 1300. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries mark a period of transition for aristocratic society, during which its domestic culture gradually superseded its warrior-based culture. Study of the medieval feast has revealed a growing domestic culture with attitudes and values emphasising the non-martial side of aristocratic affairs. When we turn our attention to food and the culture of the seigneurial household and the great hall, the manner of this transition becomes apparent. The lord’s feast reflected and embodied a less militaristic, more settled, and domestic image of the lord that had emerged in twelfth- and thirteenth-century England. The chronological parameters of 1066-1330 are designed to trace attitudes and values that emerged and/or developed between the Norman Conquest and the composition of the Auchinleck manuscript, which contains the Middle English Amis and Amiloun discussed in chapters three and four. I will additionally trace the increasingly domestic culture of lordship in Anglo-Norman and Plantagenet England over the long twelfth century until the decades that preceded the Black Death. This was a period of great economic and social change in England. Diets improved for all levels of society as the result of better weather in 1 Fig. 1 – The Luttrell Psalter (c. 1325-40) – “Luttrell Family Feast” Fig. 2 – The Luttrell Psalter (c. 1325- 40) – “The Last Supper” The Culture of Food and Feasting in High Medieval England, c. 1066-1330 Northern Europe, which created longer growing seasons. Rising levels of cultivation, technological innovations, growing markets and growing commerce allowed food to be produced, traded, bought, and sold on a considerably larger scale than in the earlier period.