CHAPTER 5
A new national identity was born in those years from the end of the Hundred Years War to the loss of Calais, when between 1453 and 1558 England, without realising it, became an island separate from Europe. Before England had acted as a province, or a group of provinces within the Anglo-French unit; it was enmeshed in and absorbed by defeats and triumphs in France. Now disentangled from the continent it began to improve its land, reclaim its forests, drain its marshes and fertilise its heaths. Her territory was reduced to manageable proportions, and now she was cultivating it, she would be preparing to become a force in the world market.
Two other elements also contributed to this new role in the world. When the first Tudor, Henry VII, became King in 1485, he found that after the slaughter of the Wars of the Roses there were only remnants left of the old aristocracy. The great families, which had opposed the Tudors – the de la Poles, the Staffords, the Courtenays – had all died out in the struggle. It was now the minor gentry and the bourgeois purchasers of land who stepped into their places. In itself this was not new, but the scale of it changed the nature of the elite. These were people who were practical, and hard-working, who could farm and cultivate land; by 1540 a new aristocracy had become established and they were further to be enriched. This was another major difference with France, its own aristocracy and its influence upon food, which was to affect the specific nature of each cuisine. Because in England an aristocrat was defined by the amount of land he owned with a permeable boundary between him and what would later be known as the gentry, the aristocracy was far more open than in France. Middle and upper classes could merge under the unifying power of money. How this was to affect food we shall see in,Chapter 8.
The other key element that was to distinguish England, and which did not occur in the rest of Europe, was the break with Rome in the years 1529-33. The Reformation spoke the language of nationalism: the King became head of the Anglican Church, and so in his own country was Pope. Church and State were one. The confiscation and sale of Church lands, properties and rare works of art were to give a huge boost to the English economy and enrich the aristocracy and middle classes. Their effect on our diet, not hitherto taken into account by historians, was also radical.
The Reformation was a deep divergence within European society; it set the new Protestants firmly outside Papist unity in an unfathomable way; it occurred because of the deep-set anger and resentment against the Church within the people. The monarch’s desire for an heir merely triggered the explosion. The Reformation, however, was only one of the changes that affected the diet in the century of the Tudors. There was a huge rise in population, and with it a rise in literacy, because of the new invention of printing, which enabled books to be published in the vernacular (cookery books were among the first books published). There was a rise in inflation. Food prices generally rose about 120 per cent between 1541 and 1641 – wages did not.
There was also a blurring of social class: in the reign of Henry VIII loyalty to the crown was rewarded with deeds of land, and feudal and monastic rights were given to a rising middle class. This comprised hard-working, commercially-minded people who married their children off to indigents of noble birth; the Heralds’ Office made a lucrative business of discovering forgotten pedigrees and armorial bearings in old registers. Nevertheless, this was still a fiercely hierarchical society, for the more mobile a society is the more acutely conscious it becomes of social mores that denote status. Thomas Nashe, poet, pamphleteer and dramatist, wrote: ‘In London the rich disdain the poor, the courtier the citizen, the citizen the countryman, the merchant the retailer, the retailer the craftsman …’ The distinctions, as always, were seen in the diet. William Harrison, the clergyman and topographer whose Description of England was published in 1577, pointed out that the gentility ate wheaten bread while ‘their household and poor neighbours rye or barley bread, and in time of dearth bread made of beans, peas or oats’. Nothing much had changed here then from the few hundred years before.
As the power of the middle classes grew, a display of wealth could be exhibited in a range of manners, not just in food and clothes where it had been largely kept in the previous 500 years. It was an age of social aspiration where the emulation of foods eaten by the elite could be pursued, but this food was adapted to their own particular needs. This was also an age of exploration where long sea voyages demanded new ways of preserving all manner of foods. As a sense of nationhood began to creep into the awareness of the individual countries of Europe, we first gained an instinctual Englishness which found its expression in our food. Together, these factors caused a swing away from court food to domestic dishes, away from complication, which required a large labour force and much time expended, to a simpler response to the country produce gathered. This was a century when we can clearly recognise our own cooking, our own food, our own traditional dishes, ways and methods in the recipes that have come down to us.
Reformation
What happened to the fast day when England broke from the Catholic Church? If fasting for two-thirds of the year no longer became habitual, as a sign of personal devotion to God instigated and approved by that holy institution, the Roman Church, then fish consumption would surely decline? If nothing else, one would expect those gourmet dishes made with almond milk and fish would now fade away as there was no reason for their continued creation and consumption. So the Reformation should have made a huge difference to our national cuisine; it should have radically altered it, so that we might have lost a whole range of remarkable dishes forever. In fact, many of them were being cooked in France and some would return 150 years later under a French name,1 while others were secretly kept alive (as if they possessed an element of now being a precious votive offering) within noble Catholic families, to reappear 100 years later in the pages of Robert May’s book, The Accomplisht Cook, published in 1660.
In 1530 Henry VIII accused all the clergy of praemunire; he had charged Cardinal Wolsey with the same crime the year before, meaning that Wolsey had been exerting unlawful jurisdiction over the people. Wolsey died, however, before he could be tried and executed. The clergy, after they had paid a huge fine and recognised the King as the supreme head of the Church of England, were pardoned after two months. The churches and monasteries then endured a period of barbaric destruction: every wall-painting was defaced or painted over, every sculpture broken, walls were white-washed and adorned only with biblical text, the altar, now a wooden table, was moved down into the body of the church, and the priest wore no rich vestments but a plain surplice. Anyone criticising the King’s actions was executed, and Carthusian monks were tortured, hanged, drawn and quartered. All this barbaric zeal was based, of course, not upon religious devotions but on human greed. What we lost aesthetically was a great tragedy, for relics and images, which were the centre of pilgrimages, were melted down or transported to the royal palaces in London, and the shrines of the saints were levelled to the ground. The dissolution of the monasteries was carried out in two operations: it began in 1536 with 374 houses with an annual income of less than £200,000, and continued in 1538-40 with the 186 ‘great and solemn monasteries’. Royal power was now immense for all the riches of the church were being transferred to the crown and it needed a new agency, the Court of Augmentation, to deal with all the new assets.
Ironically enough, the crown did not keep all its new wealth. By the end of Henry’s reign two-thirds had been sold off to peerage and gentry; two out of every three peers were either granted or purchased monastic estates. In Yorkshire, for example, over a quarter of the gentry of 1642 owned property that before 1540 had been held by monasteries. Naves speedily became farmhouses, chantries became parlours and towers became kitchens; a Gloucester clothier, Thomas Bell, turned a Dominican priory into a factory, while a furnace and forge were set up on the site of a Sussex monastery at Robertsbridge.2
How did all this affect our cuisine? The middle classes were growing, because the enrichment at the top of society (all stolen from the immense riches of the Church) was filtering downwards. Cooking became more domesticated, the woman of the household being the centre of an economic unit that controlled the produce of the farmstead, resulting in a range of food and medicinal products.
These huge changes were noted by everyone; a Venetian observer described it as ‘the greatest alteration that could possibly arise in the nation because a revolution in customs, laws, obedience and lastly, in the very nature of the state itself, necessarily follows’. The fact that they were carried out so quickly was because a ground-swell of anti-clericalism had empowered them, a feeling the clergy were well aware of, the fear of which hastened their own willingness to accept the changes.
Saints’ days structure the liturgical year, designating when the faithful should feast, fast and toil. In 1534 Parliament lifted the medieval heresy laws and put in place an Act for the Advancement of True Religion, while fasting and holy days were to be specified in the new prayer book. The first English Prayer Book in 1549 dispensed with all the non-scriptural saints, leaving a bare skeleton of holy days, Christmas, Easter, Whitsun, the feast days of the Apostles, the evangelists, John the Baptist, Mary Magdalene and the Virgin Mary. Saints were no longer the intermediaries between the believer and God; instead believers were encouraged to emulate their devotion. It was not until 1563, however, that John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs appeared, which erased all the old Catholic saints and replaced them with Protestant ones; its intention was to reform the new Church of England and purge the reformed churches of any lingering Roman presence. Foxe’s book was based on the twenty or so fixed festivals of the Church year; these ancient festivals were preserved including the feasts of the Apostles and the early martyrs as well as the days connected with the great high points of the year. Protestant martyrs superseded the numerous Catholic saints with their year of death and an account of their suffering, like Bishop’s Hooper, Ridley and Latimer, Bishops Farrar of Saint David’s and Archbishop Cranmer; Lollards and Wycliffe were given prominence in the beginning of the year. Some 60 new saints’ days, including those of Augustine of Canterbury and Saxon saints Etheldreda, Edmund and Edward, were scattered throughout the year. What did all these strange names mean to the people who since childhood had put aside certain days and made certain dishes for other saints who were suddenly banished? What happened to fasting in itself?
The Protestants took over the idea of fasting but made it spartan when it had been sensual. Though Catholicism condemned luxury as a personal sin of pride, we know that both the Church and royalty celebrated it as a means to social self-assertion. But Protestantism was more concerned with the consequences that were attributed to this vice, namely with immorality and dissoluteness. Days of fasting became popular, where people met to pray and listen to sermons ‘humbly waiting on grace’; living off bread and water for two or three days was thought to engender the gift of prophesying. The old abbots of Westminster, sitting down on a fast day to dishes of pike poached in wine with a herb and garlic sauce thickened with almonds, would have been most put out at this revolutionary change, yet this is where the connection between Puritanism and bleak and tasteless food began. In 1536 a royal proclamation decreed the reduction of fast days and the observance of feast days in honour of the saints was subjected to official attack. Two Cornish fishermen in the spring of 1537 commissioned a local painter to produce a banner with Henry VIII and his Queen together with Christ, Our Lady and St John, but the painter reported them for this Papist image, and they were both hanged in chains at Helston.
The situation became very muddled, and changed with whoever was on the throne: a Martin Marprelate tract of 1588 states that the new bishops were not to forbid public fasts, for they were popular expressions of faith. The wily and most intelligent of Queens, Elizabeth, obviously did not trust the effect of rigorous fasts, making a pronouncement in 1581 that no public fast could be appointed except by her. She explained that she ‘liked well of fasting, prayers and sermons’ but she objected to the way they were done, ‘tending to innovation … intruding upon her Highness’s authority ecclesiastical’.3 Whether this stopped the practice is debatable for Richard Rogers, a minister, wrote in his diary on 22 December 1587: ‘We fasted betwixt of selve ministers to the stirringe upp of ourselves to greater godliness …’ Fasting was of even greater value to the Puritans, though they were very insistent that it was not the superstitious fasting of the Papist.
It was of course the women who determined whether their household fasted or feasted, for it was they who saw the religious significance of food, women who were nursing mothers and had a devotion to the eucharist, women who observed their own bodies lactating or not and the miracle of nurturing the newborn. It was up to the women to observe the new saints or not and there were many accounts of women rebelling in Tudor and Stuart times, even to extremes. Dorothy Hazzard, as a Puritan, refused to acknowledge Christmas as a special day; instead she sat sewing in the door of her grocer’s shop in the High Street in Bristol in the late 1630s, keeping her shop open as a witness to God. Lady Elizabeth Brooke refused to keep the fasts or thanksgivings of the usurpers in the 1650s.4 A rich diet was linked with the stimulation of the flesh, rich food gave one lascivious thoughts, so self-denial was an option for all women who ran a household, since they controlled the purchase, preparation and cooking of the food. For a wealthy woman piety was shown by the choice of a simple and frugal diet. Margaret Clitheroe, wife of a prosperous citizen of York, tried to avoid accompanying her husband to banquets and when she was a carver, she took the worst piece of meat for herself. Katherine Stubbs ‘ate sparingly refusing to pamper her bodie with delicate meats, wines or stronge drinke, but refrained from them altogether’.5 Dorothy Traske ate only vegetables and water. When women were tempted it was by the devil who offered them food.
The opposing view was that all fasts were vain and popish. Philip Gammon in 1535 denounced them as ‘nothing in value for the health of man’s soul’.6 Popular confidence in the future of Catholic practices was undermined by the spectacle of gentlemen demolishing crosses or seizing ritual apparatus, as was done at Exeter by Sir Roger Bluett, or encouraging the break of Lenten fasts as did Mr Charles of Tavistock. Poverty goes some way to explain the decline of support in Catholic devotion; it was also a strong motive for theft from churches, which were a rich treasury of all manner of silver, gold, precious stones and ornate plate which could be stolen and melted down. Poverty also led to strong resistance to financial demands from priests. When brought before the Mayor of Exeter for violating Lenten fast in 1556, an inhabitant of the city confessed that his poverty had compelled him to make a soup from forbidden scraps of bacon. The Mayor dismissed the case.7
For hundreds of years before the Reformation the monks had kept large herb gardens containing a great variety of herbs and medicinal plants, the inheritance of the huge range that the Anglo-Saxon herbalists had grown. From these plants the monks had made cordials, salves, syrups and medicinal waters, which they sold on. Many of these had been used in cooking; rose water, for instance, once introduced in the early medieval period from the Arabs, began to be made here, becoming one of the most popular and fragrant of essences; it was used to flavour soft cheeses and many different desserts. The monks had also made cough syrups and fruit and herb syrups for every imaginable ailment. Now, with the dissolution of the monasteries, this source of wisdom and healing was wiped out within a few months. Realising the loss to a local community of such specialised knowledge with its cache of prophylactics, the wives of the local squire and landowner now stepped into this role, studying and adding to their knowledge. Stillrooms quickly became part of the architecture in the new houses that were built, for confectionery also used many of the flavourings and the techniques. The wife or housekeeper chose which medicinal water would be made and the housekeeper supervised the distilling of it, though no doubt a manservant looked after the furnace. Citrus peels and angelica stalks, for example, had to be very slowly boiled for wet sucket and sucket candy, and the furnace room became a useful place for drying out sticky sugar confections and a store place for the ‘banquetting stuffe’ which would become a separate course and feature in this century.
Many changes tend to happen slowly over several decades yet the decline in popular Catholicism was rapid; even in the favourable conditions in Mary’s reign from 1553-8 its recovery was no more than partial. It was as if the great resentment towards the Church that began at the beginning of the famine years in the fourteenth century now reached its full expression. Early in Queen Elizabeth’s reign laws were passed that none of the Queen’s subjects was allowed to eat meat during Lent or on Fridays. The law’s expressly stated object was to maintain seafaring and to revive decayed coastal towns – essential for the preservation and expansion of the navy. Even contemporary writers felt the need to encourage fish-eating; Andrew Boorde in his Compendyous Regyment or a Dyetary of Helth (1562) claims: ‘Of all nacyons and countres, England is best served of Fysshe, not onely of al matter of see-fysshe, but also of fresh water fysshe and of all manner of sortes of salte-fysshe.’
Hence, it was purely the secular demands of possessing a flourishing navy which induced parliament to enforce that fasting in Lent be retained, that meat be given up within this time and fish eaten twice daily. During this change from devotional practice to pragmatic observance the subtleties in the use of almond milk were lost; the dairy cow became supreme, and her butter, cream and cheese were to become an integral part of British cookery from then on.
In reaction against the Papist associations of fancy fast day cooking came a new emphasis on meat, and on mutton, beef and venison in particular. There was a new national pride in their carcass beauty, so that there seemed to be a particular Englishness about eating great haunches of well roasted meat, cooked in the simplest fashion – as if boiled and then well-judged roasting could be wrought without notable kitchen skills. Nevertheless, the distinctions were there, so that made-up dishes, those same dishes eaten for hundreds of years, now began to have French associations – fancy cooking – where sauces could hide inferior ingredients and so deceive the diner. Meat, cooked separately from its sauce was somehow more truthful, more upright and worthy and undeniably English.
Royal Proclamations
Tudor monarchs governed by proclamation; food and its supply especially to the major urban centres like London were a considerable anxiety, which these laws attempted to control. An early definition of the proclamation was given by John Rastell in 1629, who claimed: ‘It was not just a notice publicly given of anything whereof the monarch thinks it good to advertise his subjects.’8 They were statutes, some stemming from personal royal interference, but others responding to a crisis, and had been passed under the great seal, made by the advice and consent of the Council. Imagine the scene:
The Sheriffs and other officials of London, mounted on horseback and dazzling in their robes and insignia of office, waited with their retinues just within the City, watching the procession move toward them from the west. When it had arrived, the heralds detached themselves from the entourage with which they had moved throughout Middlesex from the palace at Westminster, and joined the Londoners waiting just within the Temple Bar. The new procession wound its way through the city streets, stopping now at the end of Chancery Lane near Fleet Street, again at the great cross in Cheapside, moving on to Leadenhall and then finally to St Magnus’s corner. At each place, after the sounds of the trumpets’ blast and the criers’ oyez had died away, her heralds with great solemnity proclaimed the words of the Queen’s proclamation. Soon the same words would be repeated at market crosses, in front of guildhalls, and at other customary places throughout the realm, solemnized in the traditional way by the officials in the respective areas.9
There were in all 437 proclamations issued in the 68-year period during which the three Tudor kings reigned. The first stage in a proclamation was detecting a need, which could come about as a result of information received by the King and council, or from a petition. A significant number of proclamations originated in petitions from the Mayor and aldermen of London, some of them related to the vital question of the food supply to London; other proclamations on placing restraints on food exports were a response to grain shortages and the high price of food in England. On 17 April 1548 the Court of Aldermen agreed that the Mayor, on his next visit to the King’s council, would ask ‘for the staying of butter, cheese and tallow here within the realm’. It worked immediately, for on 24 April a proclamation imposed a restraint. Food shortages continued, for in the same year on 18 September a messenger from the Court of Aldermen was commissioned to ride to the Lord Chancellor ‘desiring his lordship in my lord mayor’s name and my masters’, the aldermen, to intercede with Thomas Somerset, lord high admiral of England, ‘that a restraint may be had with expedition by proclamation’. Eight days later a proclamation forbade unlicensed export of victuals.
Many of the price controls on meat in the 1530s can be traced to the needs of London. A royal proclamation reaffirmed the authority of the mayor and aldermen to set prices on fish and to regulate fishing in the Thames. The hoarding of grain brought forth royal proclamations as it caused shortages and drove up prices. In 1532 there was a grain shortage in East Anglia and justices of the peace were ordered to search for grain and command that it be brought to market. In the following year the treasurer of Berwick, George Lawson, specifically recommended ‘a proclamation be made throughout the country to thresh out their corn reasonably and at a reasonable price there would be enough and sufficient’. In 1533 Thomas Cromwell, chancellor of the Exchequer, became aware that high grain prices had caused a dearth and that people with plenty were buying grain; a proclamation ordered that no one was to buy wheat or rye for resale except for the supply of London, or for baking bread and the provision of the fleet. Those with sufficient grain for seed and their household could not buy more. A proclamation two years earlier had made it a crime to export grain without a licence. This was still not effective, for in 1534 punishments were ordered for grain hoarders and a proclamation set fines and penalties.
A proclamation on feast and fast days on 22 July 1541 was directly ordered by the King, and on 8 July 1546 he took a personal interest in the proclamation prohibiting heretical books, for the month before he had written to Mary of Hungary complaining that books written by ‘heretical and wicked men both in Latin and English are sent over’. The proclamation prohibited the import of any religious books printed abroad without special licence by the King.
One of the most detailed proclamations on food and the only surviving one that attempts to regulate its consumption was that of 31 May 1517, which set regulations on the number of courses that could be eaten at meals and the type of food they contained. A cardinal may have nine dishes served at one meal; a duke, archbishop, marquis, earl or bishop could have seven; lords ‘under the degree of an earl’, mayors of the city of London, knights of the garter and abbots could have six; and so on down until those with an income of between £40 and £100 a year could have three dishes. As a dish meant one swan, bustard, peacock or ‘fowls of like greatness’, or four plovers, partridge, woodcock or similar birds (except in the case of the cardinal, who was allowed six), eight quail, dotterels and twelve very small birds such as larks, they were hardly limited in their choice. Anyone who disobeyed was to be ‘taken as a man of even order contemptuously disobeying the direction of the King’s highness and his council’ and was ‘to be sent for to be corrected and punished at the King’s pleasure to the example of other’. This statute was made thirteen years before the Reformation and one can see clearly how cardinals are favoured; it is all about status and the display of wealth. It was now becoming possible for individuals to rise in the world, and if you had money you flaunted it. Sumptuary laws attempted to keep control of the social hierarchy, and the wealthy were supposed to limit their spending to about ten per cent of the value of their property.
A statute authorised Henry VIII in 1543 to use royal proclamations to fix retail and wholesale prices, so that price-fixing could be flexible to economic pressures. In the Middle Ages local government set price controls, but Tudor legislation under Cardinal Wolsey began to control first of all poultry prices in London; and by 1529 the price of veal, beef and mutton were set by direct orders of the King’s council. This set specific prices per pound and ordered butchers to be bound in recognizances to sell meat by weight. The butchers were furious saying that the graziers charged too much for the livestock and they could not earn enough profit. So the graziers were ordered to sell ‘after such reasonable prices as the butchers may reasonably accomplish’. Graziers who did not obey were threatened with the King’s ‘indignation and displeasure and to suffer punishment for the same at his will’. A circular letter was sent to the justices of the peace instructing them how to enforce such a proclamation. However, the graziers were no more compliant than the butchers had been, so the justices were authorised to seize ‘beefs, muttons and veals’ and to sell them ‘according to the rate of the statute’. In the following year, 1534, another proclamation denounced butchers and graziers and named fines for their offences. Local officials were commanded to see that offenders went to prison. The butchers were not to be controlled, however, for they went on complaining that they could not make a living under the statutory prices until 1542 when Parliament repealed the statutes.
In the summer of 1550 the young King, Edward VI, son of Henry, was beset with the problem of grave food shortages caused by bad harvests. All food exports were banned except to Calais, England’s last French possession (soon in the next reign to be lost), all the ships and goods would be forfeited, the buying of grain for resale was to be forbidden, except to bakers, brewers and innkeepers, farmers were compelled to come to market bringing their surplus, and those who refused would be fined. Fines were set at 13s 4d for every bushel of grain retained and 2s for every pound of butter and cheese. Farmers complained that the prices set for the produce were too low: ‘The great number of such as have the greatest quantity of grains, butter and cheese in their hands … do refuse to bring their corn, butter and cheese to the market in such sort as has been commanded.’
In Mary’s reign of five years there were sixty-four proclamations covering seventy-four topics; in Elizabeth’s much longer reign there were 382 proclamations covering 395 topics. Half of these dealt with fishing and Lent, wine, and grain; over forty-five years, this makes nearly 200 pronouncements that were attempts at adjustments to the food supply. Elizabeth was keen to bolster the fishing industry by making sure that people consumed fish in Lent and on fast days, because her fleet partly depended on the availability of the fishermen and their craft. She built upon a law of Edward VI that forbade eating flesh during Lent by creating new offences for butchers, innkeepers and other victuallers who made meat available at such times. However, though these new laws must have stimulated fish consumption any Papist connection would have been considered heretical nor, of course, was there any attempt to revive the fish dishes of the past with the use of almond milk or almond butter.
Sumptuary Laws were unenforceable, however, and royal proclamations faded away as Stuart monarchs were vilified and parliament alienated or placed in abeyance. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries nothing could stop the gentry from flaunting their riches in food and clothing. Sir Thomas Tresham engaged himself in a series of elaborate building projects which increased his burgeoning debts, but he claimed that his Rothwell Market House was a statement of his concern for the good governance of the country, no doubt his lavish entertaining was too. They, of course, had the common design of emphasising his wealth and social standing. Expenses could also be generated within his establishments by prodigal housekeeping. Tresham maintained a large entourage of ‘gentlemen servitors’ at Rushton and gloried in the hospitality that he regarded as an essential family tradition. Lavish entertainment was provided for friends and neighbours, and for their followers ‘to the number of twenty, forty, yea sometimes an hundred’. Frescheville Holles, though he received only a ‘narrow’ allowance during his father’s lifetime, insisted that he must ‘live according to his quality’, a determination that resulted in a heavy burden of debt. Hospitality was a major aspect of this expensive concern for an appropriate lifestyle: Holles would ‘never set down to meales unless he had some of his friends or neighbours with him, and in case they came not he would send for them.’10
Tudor Farming
This was a time of population increase where towns were obliged to seek more food from the countryside, but every village too found itself supporting a larger number of families. Land had to grow more and pasture had to be improved to support more livestock. There was a general move towards cows’ milk away from ewe and goats’ milk, though these animals in the uplands of the north and especially in Wales and Scotland still thrived and their milk was used to make huge, hard sharp-flavoured cheeses.
Contemporary writings on husbandry are full of exhortations to improve the yield, so with economy and ingenuity everything was used in the battle to wrest food from the land; a new interest in the wild began, in wild foods, flowers, herbs, insects, weeds, all used to improve the health of both human and beast. Animals were cured with mugwort, rue, rosemary, savory, bloodwort among much else. When harvests were inadequate, the hungry mixed beechmast and chestnuts into their bread flour; when they were without ale they distilled liquors from gorse flowers, aniseed, fennel and caraway. Every hedge should be planted with fruit trees, hemp could be grown on scraps of weed infested land, willows could do well on marshy land.
J. Norden in The Surveyor’s Dialogue claimed that there was no kind of soil, ‘be it ever so wild, boggy, clay or sandy, but will not yield one kind of beneficial fruit or another’. Farming has always been a conservative business, however, and farmers did not always want to learn new ways. Norden was obviously peeved: ‘We have indeed a kind of plodding course of husbandry hereabouts,’ he wrote. The land was still distributed largely in bits and pieces on the medieval system and a neighbour’s land covered in molehills and weeds did not encourage the others. There were many complaints about bad farming by people who exhausted their land and skimped ploughing. Village bye-laws were needed to maintain minimum standards of husbandry. It was commonly believed that all land had once been forest and that only by the efforts of the farmer had pasture and corn land been cleared, so the arable farmer was always thought superior to the pasture farmer.11
The commonest arable crops were still wheat, rye, barley, oats, beans and peas with the addition of a little buckwheat, vetches and lentils. Two species of wheat were grown, rivet or cone wheat (Triticum turgidum) which produces a mealy flour suitable for biscuits and bread wheat (Triticum vulgare) which yields a strong flour, suitable for bread-making. The domestic variety of bean was grown in gardens only; the small horse bean sown in February liked stiff clay soils and grew in the north and the midlands; it was used to fatten pigs, to feed pigeons, horses and sheep and in lean years to be added to bread. Lentils were considered the best pulse for feeding calves and pigeons, and were grown in south Lancashire and Oxfordshire. Buckwheat liked sandy soil and was used for fattening poultry and pigs and in years of famine it was mixed with barley to make bread: ‘a very hearty and well relished bread’. It helped to promote the poultry business in Norfolk and Suffolk where the largest acreages of buckwheat were grown on the sands and brecks where hundreds of turkeys, geese, chickens and ducks were fattened for the table.
People were on the look-out for new crop varieties: Barnaby Googe, a Lincolnshire squire, saw rape or coleseed growing in the principality of Cleves and recognised it as indigenous to our own seashore; he publicised it in print in The Four Bookes of Husbandry in 1577 commending it as a green manure, as sheep fodder and as a source of oil. It took until the 1590s for rape to be grown on a large scale, enough for it to be exported from East Anglia. As rape is more productive of oil than either linseed or hempseed and as at that time we were searching for ways to reduce the imports of foreign oils, Barnaby Googe deserved a knighthood. However, the cultivation of rape may not have been due to him as it is likely that the seed was introduced into East Anglia by refugees fleeing from Spanish oppression.
Other crops urged upon the enterprising farmer were weld or dyer’s weed which produced a yellow dye grown on the chalklands of Kent around Canterbury; and woad, which grew wild in various parts of England, was grown in Somerset and Surrey, and used to dye wool; or madder for red dye. That crop took three years to reach perfection, so it became popular in gardens grown for the apothecary. Saffron was used as a dye as well as a condiment; it was planted in midsummer and was ready to crop the following autumn. It was said to prepare the ground for excellent harvests of barley. Tobacco was first cultivated in England in 1571; as it was so profitable it spread from the countries around London to Lincolnshire, Yorkshire and even the Channel Islands.
Hops were introduced around 1530 and grown in Suffolk, Kent, Surrey and Essex. They had been dismissed earlier as a pernicious weed but now they became a staple ingredient of beer. This was criticised by traditionalists: ‘Hops, Reformation, Beys12 and Beer/Came to England in one bad year.’ Caraway was grown in Oxfordshire, mustard in the Norfolk fens, onions in the Lincolnshire fens, liquorice at Worksop, carrots in east Suffolk and at Colchester in Essex. The demands of London made Fulham a centre for market gardening where salad leaves, fruits, peas and beans and root vegetables like carrots, parsnips and turnips were grown. Vegetables from the New World were treated with suspicion; as both the tomato and the potato were relatives of deadly nightshade they were thought to be poisonous. Sweet potatoes were grown in the summer and recipes for them were written down by the end of the century.13
In the cattle-breeding areas of the north and west, calves were given a good start by being left to run with the cows all the year. In dairying areas they were weaned at between two and eight weeks and the milk sent to the dairies throughout the summer and autumn for making into butter and cheese. In Essex and Hertfordshire calves were fattened for the butcher as there was a demand for veal in London, but elsewhere it was years before beef was ready for the butcher. They were sent to fattening areas in the Midlands, the counties near to London and East Anglia between August and October and fattened for sale throughout the winter. Barren cows and oxen were used for draught until they were about ten years old, then fattened on hay, vetches, peas, boiled barley or beans and sold to the butcher.
England had a high reputation for great carcass meat and writers of husbandry considered that this was because of its three principal breeds. The long-horned cattle bred in Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Lancashire and Staffordshire, had black square bodies, short legs and large white horns. They were prized for tallow, hide and horn, they gave a good quantity of milk and were strong in labour. Then there were the Lincolnshire cattle of the fens and marshes, which were tall with large pied bodies with small crooked horns, strong for labour-giving good meat. Lastly there were the red Somerset and Gloucestershire cattle with tall, large bodies that made excellent milkers. Also, there were 100,000 Irish cattle imported into England every year, as well as Frisian cattle which came into Cumberland around 1590.
English pride centred upon its mutton, however, and the most prized livestock of all was sheep. ‘Sheep in my opinion is the most profitablest cattle that a man can have,’ wrote Master Fitzherbert in The Book of Husbandry and this belief showed in the care taken of them. In southern England they were regarded as tender animals unable to endure the cold so they were housed in stables in the winter. The lambs were born in April when the pasture was ready for them, and they were weaned from 16-18 weeks, for meat from suckled lambs was regarded as superior to meat from grass lambs. The sheep were shorn about mid-June, then culled at Michaelmas. The regular and wholesale slaughter of all animals at this time had now almost stopped; only the fat animals were killed off, leaving the rest to be overwintered on grass, hay, straw, chaff, peas, mashes of barley, beans and acorn. Great fortunes were made out of sheep-farming: Sir Henry Poole, Elinor Fettiplace’s father, owned rich sheep-farming land around Cirencester in the Cotswolds. Both the Spencers of Althorp and the Russells of Woburn built up their estates and wealth on sheep-farming.
Horses were reared in great numbers in all the forests of England, the packhorse was needed for cross country transport and the cart-horse for labour in the fields. But horses were imported also from abroad for saddle and coach; Gervase Markham recommended that for the saddle an English mare be bred with a Turk or Irish Hobbie. One of the peasant’s standbys was pig-keeping; pigs were thought to be ‘the husbandmen’s best scavenger, the housewife’s most wholesome sink’. The brined, butchered carcasses were hung from the rafters and smoked, keeping a family in meat throughout the winter. It was only the better off peasant, however, who had enough kitchen waste to feed a pig and could afford to keep it. Dairymen kept pigs as they could be fed on the whey; in the forests the pigs were fattened on acorns, beechmast, crab apples, medlars and hazelnuts.
Poultry was also kept by peasants; nearly everyone had a few hens and sometimes ducks, while those that had generous common rights also kept geese. They earned something from the sale of feathers and grease as well as the meat. Turkeys were introduced into Europe from Mexico after 1510, and by the end of the century there were considerable numbers in Norfolk; buckwheat was grown in East Anglia for feeding them, and carrots and turnips were also used. Turkeys were also fed on sodden barley and oats; chickens gorged on wheatmeal and milk for 14 days. Capons were crammed with corn and peas, penned in cages so that they could hardly move and fed on barley malt.
Orchards began to increase in number throughout the century; great emphasis was placed on fruit growing as a profitable industry and was given royal encouragement. Cherries became hugely popular: 600 cherry trees at 6d a hundred were ordered for the great orchard at Hampton Court. Henry VIII’s gardener, Richard Harris, was one of the first to import French grafts of cherry, pear and apple, ‘the sweet cherry, the temperate Pipyn and the golden Renate’; and among apples ‘especially pippins, before which time there were no pippins in England’. The anonymous writer added in 1609 that Harris’s orchard at Teynham in Kent was ‘the chief mother of all other orchards for those kinds of fruit in Kent and divers other places’. Another of the King’s gardeners, Wolf, introduced the apricot around 1524 while gooseberries had been planted in the royal gardens in 1509. This is thought to be a reintroduction of the berry earlier introduced in the reign of Edward I, but then lost with other plants in the social unrest of the next few hundred years. (The wild gooseberry grew all over Britain.) Gooseberry growing now became popular, though it was called different names in different parts of the country.14 Thomas Tusser in his Five Hundreth Pointes of Good Husbandrie in 1573 refers to it as the ‘Gooseberry’; it is thought it got that name because it quickly became popular to make it into a sauce with goose. As our vines had all disappeared there would have been a lack of verjuice for those favourite sharp sauces, so the sour fruitiness of the gooseberry must have been welcomed.15 Fruit-growing spread from the Canterbury area of Kent to other districts on the edge of the Weald.
The creation and maintenance of great gardens as part of the estate depleted many a fortune. Throughout Elizabeth’s reign ambitious courtiers spent vast amounts on their houses and gardens hoping that the Queen might visit. A foreign traveller, Paul Hentzer, marvelled at the great variety of trees and labyrinths in Lord Burghley’s garden who was advised by John Gerard, author of the Herball (1597), and employed forty gardeners at a total wage of £10 a week. Burghley had four gardens at Theobalds: the great garden, the old and new privy gardens, and the cook’s garden for produce. Every gentleman’s house had not only its kitchen garden, but its formal garden of flowers and shrubs ‘for delectation sake unto the eye and their odoriferous savours unto the nose’. Here, exotics from America, the Canaries and other outlandish parts ‘do begin to wax so well acquainted without soils’, says Harrison, ‘that we may almost account them as part of our commodities’.
Among the new varieties introduced to the Elizabethan garden were larkspur and laburnum, Christmas roses, passion flowers and orange blossom. Home-grown melons, cucumbers, radishes, carrots, turnips, pumpkins, parsnips and cabbages appeared; as well as apples, pears and cherries, orchards were producing apricots, peaches, almonds and figs, even oranges, lemons and capers.16 At Robert Cecil’s garden at Hatfield there was a separate rose garden, a vineyard, a knot garden and a maze.
Red beetroot with its sweet root was introduced from Italy in the 1580s. Salsify or tragopogon grew plentifully in the fields about London, Islington and Putney. Artichokes were eaten raw with pepper and salt or boiled, while asparagus was eaten boiled with salt, oil and vinegar. Kidney beans from the New World, so called because of their shape and thought efficacious for that organ, were mentioned in the 1550s but not grown here. They were welcomed in France, however, where they were called haricot beans; we knew them later as French beans when they were still green. Romane or garden peas, lentils and lupin seeds were all eaten and Tusser gives Roncivall or Runcivall peas as a delicacy, which were large marrowfat peas. Chervil, young sow thistle, corn salad, leaves of clary and spotted cowslip were all used in salads with varieties of lettuce, purslane, tarragon, cress, succory, endive, root of rampion which was boiled, flowers of borage, radishes and onions imported from Flanders. Chives were thought to make one thin and to engender ‘hot and gross vapours’ as well as being ‘hurtful to the eyes and brain’ and to cause troublesome dreams.
Throughout the century more acreage came under the plough, and heavy manuring of land points to greater numbers of livestock. There was an improved supply of spring grazing through the management and watering of meadows and the reclamation of coastal marshland and fen. The population of England by the end of Elizabeth’s reign in 1603 reached around four million. With the rise in population the agricultural worker lost his bargaining power, which he had first enjoyed after the Black Death; while prices rose wages stayed the same. After 1551 the demand for wool lessened (because of the ‘new draperies’) and there was a fall in sheep population with a shift among farmers to move towards meat and cheese production.
Food of the Star Chamber
Near the old Palace of Westminster there was a large room set apart for the use of the Lords of the Privy Council; it had a painted ceiling of golden stars on a sky-blue background and became known as the Star Chamber. The Lords of the Star Chamber were a law unto themselves; there was no appeal allowed after they had passed sentence. The Lords sat on Wednesdays and Fridays from nine o’clock until dinner time, which they ate in another room called the Inner Star Chamber. Their dinners were carefully recorded in the accounts that have survived from 1519 to 1639. The accounts begin with sums for boat hire, down river towards the City or Southwark where the food markets were; apart from food the accounts list sums spent for candles, coal, salt, wine, vinegar, glass and napkins. Simon selects dinners from 1567 to 1605.17
By far the biggest entry was for the meat consumed, beef being the most common; it appears as either plain ‘beef ’ or as ‘pottage beef ’ and ‘boiling beef ’ or as joints to roast, sirloins, ribs, rumps and ‘double rump’. The cost over the years remained roughly the same – 20d per stone (14 lb). Veal also appears, though it was never eaten with the same gusto as on the Continent, perhaps because some writers tended to think it unhealthy. As a physician, Thomas Muffet, observed: ‘Veal is unwholesome if dry roasted.’ He considers mutton to be ‘generally commended of all physicians as long as it not be too old.’ The best mutton should be about four years, for the ‘elder sort is sodden with bugloss, barrage and persly roots’. Lamb met the physician’s approval too though it was ‘more dainty than wholesome being moist and apt to ingender flegmaticke humours’. Pork was too much a plebeian taste to appear for the Lords of the Privy Council and it only appears once, though brawn made from a pig’s head was eaten at the beginning of a meal.
On all the meat days capons, hens and chickens were provided; geese also appear as do pigeons. Gulls were expensive, possibly because they were caught, then kept in cages and fed on salt beef to make them fat and tasty. They cost 5s per bird which was very expensive compared with beef. A huge range of other birds appear, swans, cranes, bustards, curlews, green and grey plovers, lapwings, teals, oxebirds, crocards and oliffs, winders, wild duck and mallards. Capons appear most frequently either roasted or boiled, as did conies or rabbits costing only 6d for each, though by 1590 the price had doubled. The conies were cooked in the medieval manner; one recipe parboiled them, chopped them then added wine, dates raison, mace, pine nuts, sugar, saffron, pepper, ground ginger and vinegar.
In 1563 William Cecil (later Lord Burghley) created a bill for ‘the increase of fish and navy days’ by making every Wednesday a fish day. Fish eating was already compulsory on Fridays, Saturdays, Ember Days, all vigils and the whole of Lent. In that same year the importation of cod and ling from other countries was prohibited on the pretext that the fish was badly packed in barrels.
In some of the Star Chamber accounts signed by Cecil himself we see that on fish days they consumed poultry and game as well as the fish, showing that their consumption was for political reasons and nothing to do with the old Papist ideas of discipline and penance.
Cod, both fresh and salt, was the staple fish appearing on all the fish days. In 1567 one great cod cost 3s 4d. They also ate whiting, haddock, turbot, sole, herring and mullet, plaice and flounders. ‘White herring’ was fresh herring immediately gutted, washed and left in a strong brine for twenty-four hours, then drained dry and barrelled; in this state it was transported inland, then cooked in pies, grilled or fried. Gurnards were also eaten on almost every fish day, and oysters, crabs and shrimps appear frequently. Rarer fish were grey mullet, only eaten once, John Dory, eaten three times, and the expensive conger eel. Lobsters, prawns and porpoise also appear infrequently, the last only on two occasions and with no record of how much it cost.
Freshwater fish was cheaper and appears frequently, not only salmon from the Thames, both fresh and salted (in 1602 one whole salmon cost 40s) but trout also, though salmon trout is only mentioned once. Eels were also in great demand to be roasted or placed in pies or even salted. Lampreys were eaten frequently at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign on all the fish days from 1567 to 1590, then only once in 1605, which might show that the fashion for them had almost passed, or that they had begun to disappear from our rivers. The latter is unlikely as the last mention of them in great quantity was by Frederick Furnivall in 1866, in Early English Meals and Manners, where he noticed that the ‘lamperns had been taken in extraordinary quantities from the Thames at Teddington’. Crayfish, pike, carp, perch, tench and bream are also all eaten. Conger was scalded and cleaned, then lightly poached, cooled then a sauce was made from parsley, mint, pellitory, rosemary, sage, breadcrumbs, garlic, salt, vinegar and wine, poured over and served.
Vegetables appear in the accounts under the heading of herbs and onions; these might have been cabbage, leeks, sorrel, spinach, lettuce and endive, all grown at the time. The vegetables that appear under their specific name were artichokes, beans, carrots, cauliflower and peas. A compound salad was made up of ‘young buds and knots of all manner of wholesome herbs at their first springing; as red sage, mint, lettuce, violets, marigolds, spinach mixed together then served up with vinegar, salad oil and sugar.’18
A glance at the daily purchases gives some idea of the cooking practices. For an October fish day in 1567, there are ling, salt salmon, great pikes, whitings, codmops, flounders, great eels, soles, roaches, tenches and green fish. It seems a great quantity, not to say variety of fish for 30 lords. One imagines them having appetisers of salted salmon and green fish strips on sops of bread in green sauce. One imagines perhaps some of the other fish, the pike, flounders, soles, the side of porpoise, lampreys and eels being baked. There were salads of spinach and carrot. There were red wardens to be baked with rosewater, medlars and barberries. There was a gallon of cream and a 100 eggs to make custards.
A couple of weeks later, on Monday, 3 November, the meal begins with brawn, then there was beef and mutton boiled with pork chines. (This cut of meat appears frequently; it is unknown now, but was used up to the twentieth century. It is part of the backbone of the pig with a hefty bit of spinal marrow, necessary for the stockpot.) To roast, there are three geese, one turkey cock (possibly guinea fowl as there was some confusion between the two for a time), three joints of veal, four capons, rabbits, pheasants, curlew, partridges, plovers, snipes and thirty-six larks. There are prunes and cream to make tarts as well as more red wardens, barberries and medlars, also beef suet, rosewater, oranges, spices and 100 eggs. A huge steamed fruit pudding seems to be one of the dishes on offer.
In 1590 the most expensive ingredient over the year is the bill for spices at £29; the next most expensive is the coals for cooking at £15; coming third are the wages for the master cook, Mr Stephen Treagle, for cooking fifteen dinners at 6s a day, which came to £4 10s. The Cheshire cheeses over the year come to 15s.
On Wednesday, 9 June 1602, there is a record of 44 stone of beef bought (about 279 kilos), over 20 lb per lord. There must have been much over which the retainers and other servants were to enjoy. In addition there were also five joints of veal, eight joints of mutton, a lamb and nine geese, eighteen ducklings, seven capons as well as twelve rabbits and fifteen pigeons. There were also artichokes and peas, both in season, as well as strawberries, gooseberries, cherries, oranges and lemons.
You could not find food of higher quality than that which is reflected in these accounts. The Lords of the Privy Council were the monarch’s closest advisors, the most important group governing the country. Apart from the sheer magnitude of the amounts ordered, the food appears to reflect a simplicity of cooking; meat was boiled and roasted, and all sorts of pies and tarts were made, which was not true of the medieval period. Robert May (seeChapter 6) was apprenticed to the Star Chamber cook for a few years after he returned from France, yet the food in his book strikes a still grander note than the recipes suggested by the above ingredients. A Tudor recipe for sole, for example, was poached, then served with an onion, saffron and bread sauce, which is a lot simpler than May’s rich recipes for his Papist masters. The Lords of the Privy Council were definitely not Papists (in fact there is new evidence that some of them may have been secret atheists). The ideological influence upon food and particular recipes is explored in the next chapter.
Tudor Cooking
Because of the growth and wealth of the middle classes, food throughout the century gradually moved steadily away from complication and grandeur, from food designed to impress and fill the spectator and diner with awe, towards food that was born out of a domestic kitchen from a small workforce. Surely food at court and at functions aimed at impressing guests, who were often foreign, with a sense of power and affluence was still a necessary part of government? This is true, but the first Henry Tudor to reign was of a parsimonious nature; the royal court was one of scrupulous economy and notorious for penny-pinching.
We also have to take into account the fact that the nobility had radically changed after the old elite had, for the most part, been swept away in the ravages of the Wars of the Roses. In the 1530s John Leland noticed the great number of ruined castles on his tour of England. This elite, which still ruled in the rest of Europe, was divorced from the realities of medieval life; it is doubtful whether it would know the difference between a hoe and a rake, or have any knowledge of the income from dairy herds dotted over perhaps 5,000 acres from three different estates. The cooking of the medieval era for this elite had been thoroughly denatured: meats had been pummelled and ground into pastes which were spiced, egged and creamed, then reshaped into moulds which looked and tasted quite different from the original product. This was food from which the provenance and source had been totally erased, its humble beginnings of farmyard and millpond had vanished in the preparation and cooking. There had also been medieval food that was presented back in its full glory, like wild boar with its glistening tusked head, roasted pheasant back in its skin and tail feathers or gilded and crowned swans. This had all been food that represented the elite’s power and wealth, food that informed the guests that their hosts were monarchs of the wild forests, rivers and seas, and food that reflected the image they had of themselves.
The men ennobled by the new Tudor King were small farmers and tradesmen with a quite different image of themselves, men who had worked all their lives and would continue to work, who were fully aware of the difference between a duck and a hen’s egg, who relished the flavour of the new pippin apple because they had planted orchards, who knew that the season for Seville oranges was a short one and expected their wives to oversee the making of ‘marmelada’, a term that covered a thick preserve from all fruits, not just oranges, and made to last the whole year. When they sat down to dine they wanted their food to reflect everything they worked for. They wanted their Colchester oysters raw, not cooked with spices, cream and eggs; they valued their mutton from Romney, to be plainly roasted without stuffing, a cheese from Swaledale to be eaten as it was, not used in sauces and stuffings.
A medieval recipe for stuffed fresh figs (expensive because imported from the Mediterranean) sums up its age: make an indentation in the fresh fig and fill it with chopped hard boiled egg, cinnamon and salt, then dredge it all in flour and deep-fry. This was designed to be finger food and once bitten into might have surprised the palate with its different textures and flavours. Such recipes vanish in the following century; figs are only mentioned as an ingredient in syrups or medicinal waters. Gerard thought that figs were a remedy for stomach pains and coughs. This practical approach is what colours Tudor cooking, though the medieval urge to turn everything into hash took time to die out.
Because books were now printed in the vernacular, literacy rose throughout the century, which spread among the English people an independence of thought and a certain wilfulness to authority. Reading became a grass roots force for justice and free thinking, even though the people’s reading skills were chiefly based upon Biblical text. Wycliffe’s aim to have an open English Bible in every home was beginning to be fulfilled, though it would take another two or three hundred years to complete.
Printed cookery books also grew in popularity. The very first one to be published, This is the Boke of Cokery, bears a date of 1500 but was more widely seen after 1533; it is described as ‘a noble booke of feastes royall, and of Cookerie for Princes householde’, and is typical of many others throughout the century. These books and those in the following century were aspirational. They were often collections of recipes from royal households or noble estates, and a mixture of medicinal recipes – cordials and physics – with preparation techniques for carcasses, fish and fowl and their cooking, techniques of cheese-making and preserving. They often contained practical advice on these techniques, though this was frequently sketchy and might be difficult to follow precisely, perhaps because the writer had only observed the slaughter and butchering of a pig and not actually wielded the knife. The recipes for cosmetics and beauty treatment all swear effectiveness and many a woman must have followed these instructions with the same slavish attention as they do now, believing that if it works for a royal household it would inevitably be just as effective in their more humble abode.
A fuller version of this first printed book has recently (June 2002) been discovered in the archives at Longleat. It is divided into three parts: the first gives details of the coronation feast of Henry V and a feast for George Nevill who became Archbishop of York in 1465; the second a calendar of seasonal foods; and the third a list of ingredients. It is a perfect example of the huge social change that printed books heralded, for it was designed for the aspiring gentry newly affluent through trade, so that they might replicate the dishes eaten at court.
This aspirational stimulus is inherent in the popularity of the cooking recipes. Many of them are highly complicated; one can imagine the servants cutting corners, since they would be following the instructions read out (or learnt by heart) by the housekeeper; or one can imagine the housekeeper doing her own more sensible adaptations of the recipes on the excuse that the master and mistress prefer it done this way. What is certain is that books of recipes then and now do not tell us necessarily what people eat, only what they aspire to eat, or what they imagine they should be eating so that their wealth and position will be envied by their neighbours.
The same is true of books that cover the whole range of a housewife’s activities. The Boke of Husbandrie of 1523 shows how intensive the work of the middle-class housewife could and should be: she had to winnow all corn, to make malt, wash and wring, to make hay, shear corn, and in time of need help her husband to fill the wain or dung cart, drive the plough, load hay and corn, ride to the market to sell butter, cheese, milk, eggs, chickens, capons, hens, pigs and geese as well as looking after the dairy and doing the household accounts, ‘to make a true reckoning and accompt to her husband what she hath received and what she hath paid’. She also had to cook and preserve the produce that was harvested.19 This book is valuable information on what was considered to be the proper role of the housewife which had changed very little since the medieval period. It was to begin to change at the end of the seventeenth century.
One of the earliest printed cookery books in England is A Proper Newe Booke of Cookerye, 1545.20 It was the first of a series of short cookery books which often contained the same recipes or very similar ones, for they were part of the publishers’ routine production. It gave information on seasonal meats and how they should be dressed and served at the table. Some of the recipes seem esoteric to us now and perhaps they did then to the general reader – a tart of borage flowers, or marigolds, primroses and cowslips?
The consumption of spices by the nobility was still high in the first third of the sixteenth century. In May 1535 Lord Lisle’s London agent sent him a box which contained 91 lb sugar, 10 lb pepper, 2 lb each of cinnamon and ginger, 1 lb each of cloves and mace. The dishes in the recipe books tend to be simplified versions of medieval ones where the meat is minced or grounded then flavoured and spiced. William Harris (1546-1602) describes what the nobility ate: ‘Tthere is no daie in manner that passeth over their heads, wherein they have not onelie beefe, mutton, veale, lambe, porke, conie, capon, pig, or so many of these as the season yeeldeth; but also some portion of the red or fallow deere, beside great varietie of fish and wild foule and thereto sundrie other delicates …’21 Much food was sent as presents or just necessary supplies. The letters to Lord Lisle are full of references: in 1534 he was sent sturgeon and baked crane; in the following year it is venison and several dishes for a banquet (the separate course after the meal), which were cheeses, crystallised fruits, sweetmeats and wine.22
Shakespeare’s Master Shallow’s idea of a modest repast was ‘a couple of short-legged hens, a joint of mutton, and any pretty little tiny kickshaws’. The last was a rendering of quelque choses, meaning a dish of no great consequence; kickshaws then were small fancy dishes either sweet or savoury. The term faded by the eighteenth century. Robert May, using the French term, gives a few egg recipes.
During three months of 1589, William Darrell, a Wiltshire squire of frugal tastes, when detained in London lodgings with a skeleton staff of servants over a tangle of lawsuits, ate beef and mutton for both dinner and supper, with side dishes of game – a brace or more of pullets, rabbits, or occasionally pheasants and pigeons – and sometimes veal and once lamb. Bread and beer were always there and often butter and cheese, but soup or broth and ‘sallets’ were rare and peas seem to have been the only vegetable. Friday is a fish day with ling, plaice, whiting and conger; he ignored the law enjoining two fish days a week. In 1563 the fine for non-observance of a secular fish day was £3 or three months’ imprisonment, unless one obtained a special licence to eat meat on these days. ‘Lords of Parliament and their wives shall pay for a licence 26s 8d yearly to the poor men’s box in their parish, Knights and their wives shall pay 13s 4d and lesser persons 6s 8d.’ Darrell dismisses pastries and jellies for dessert but has a quart of strawberries with cream in season. The cost of each meal ranged between five and ten shillings. Darrell’s household wages bill only came to £50 per annum.
Harrison, the topographer, claims a merchant does as well as a gentleman; the multitude of dishes enables each guest to choose his particular fancy and no one consumes more than half a dozen of them on guest days or two or three en famille. What is left over supplements the basic diets of the household staff and a gentleman must at all costs be openhanded. Harrison says that gentlemen do not habitually over-eat or over-drink; it is the meaner sort of husbandman who guzzles and becomes drunk at public feasts to compensate for long weeks of broth and porridge, dairy produce, the inevitable bacon and rye or barley bread, with beer, cider or mead according to district. In a modest merchant’s household with two or three maids, including the children’s nurse, the highest wage per year would be £4 and the food bill might be no more than 30s a week.23
Foreigners seemed to be impressed by our food. ‘Very sumptuous and love good fare,’ was the comment of a Dutch physician, Levinus Lemnius, who visited England in 1560. Perhaps he had tasted Sir Hugh Plat’s Polonian sawsedge: ‘Take the fillers of a hog, chop them very small with a handfull of red sage, season it hot with ginger and pepper, then put it into a sheeps gut, then let it lie three nights in brine, then boil it and hang it upp in a chimney where fire is usually kept and these sawsedges will last one whole year. They are good for sallades: or to garnish boyled meats or to make one relish a cup of wine.’24
The Ancaster family laid in white herrings at 23s 4d a barrel and Bess of Hardwick had a passion for shrimps. Smoked and pressed pilchards were exported from Cornwall to Spain. Sir Hugh Plat’s fish paste is white fish boned then mixed with white breadcrumbs, four spices and isinglass and made into the shapes and forms of little fishes. Quail were imported live from the Lowlands. The crane, the bittern, the wild and tame swan, the brant, the lark and two kinds of plover, teal, widgeon, mallard, shelldrake and shoveller, the peewit, scamen knot, olicet, dun bird, partridge and pheasant, were all hunted or snared, eaten and enjoyed. Sir Hugh Plat gives a recipe for cooking sparrows. Larks cost from 1d to 10d a dozen, pigeons were thought to be ‘a hurtful fowl by reason of their multitude’. There were also, ‘peacocks of the Ind’, hens, geese, ducks and turkeys. Harrison says: ‘We do not, thanks be to God and the liberty of our princes, dine or sup with a quarter of a hen, or make repast with a cock’s comb as they do in some countries25; but if occasion serve the whole carcases of many capons, hens, pigeons and suchlike do oft go to wrack besides beef, mutton, veal and lamb, all of which at every feast are taken as necessary dishes among the Communality of England.’ Big country feast days were Plough Monday, Shrove Tuesday, sheep shearing and Harvest Home.
Sir William Petre (1505-1572), who was a secretary of state to Elizabeth and lived at Ingatestone Hall in Essex, observed the fish days fairly regularly because of the Royal Proclamations which declared them necessary to the fishing industry; if he had held them on religious grounds he would have been prosecuted for heresy. At a wedding celebration Petre hired a master cook from London to take charge with four other cooks beneath him. His own resident cook travelled with him wherever he went. There were some perquisites in the position; cooks were allowed to keep the dripping and rabbit skins as well as candle ends (which could be melted down) and all the leavings from the table. Sir William had only twenty indoor and outdoor servants, but his ovens turned out 20,000 loaves of bread in a year and the dovecote had to provide over a thousand birds. The estate provided the household with nearly all their food as well as the Petres’ London house, except for wine, dried fruit, sugar and spices. Gifts of food were very popular; when Petre’s son, John, was christened a friend sent them a guinea fowl, a mallard, a woodcock, two teals, a basket of wafers and various cakes for the christening feast.26
On the table there would be pewter and silverware, also such pieces as ceremonial salts (the Earl of Leicester’s was made of mother-of-pearl and shaped like a galleon). When not upon the table they would be arranged upon the sideboard with ornate spice boxes, pepper-casters, pomanders, candlesticks and clocks. Spoons were made of silver and laid on the table with knives, forks had been introduced from Italy but did not catch on, for they are not mentioned in any inventory until 1660. Goblets were made in silver, gold and glass and horn tankards were ornamented with silver bands. So much silver was a product of the mines in the New World, which boosted the currency as well as ending up in warming pans and chandeliers.
Mutton was the meat eaten most frequently at Ingatestone Hall, followed by beef, venison and pork. Eggs and cheese were much enjoyed; the household used about one pound of cheese to every egg. Fish came from the east coast, oysters, flatfish and mackerel with the occasional bass and salmon, the estate pond was full of carp. Several dozen larks are referred to as presents in the kitchen books of the Hall; a neighbour also sent a present of a crane. A ‘birder’ was paid for catching wildfowl, sparrows, blackbirds, starlings and thrushes. The kitchen book also shows that they ate mallard, widgeons, teals, shovelards, woodcocks, curlews, redshanks and plovers. Between Easter and Michaelmas in 1552 the household ate over 1,000 pigeons from the dove-house.
On a Lenten Thursday, Ingatestone Hall prepared for dinner ‘a jowl of ling, half a hakerdin [halibut], 2 mudfishes [plaice], 40 white herrings, 50 red herrings, 2 cakes of butter’. And for supper: ‘A tail of ling, 3 mudfishes, 30 white herrings, 2 cakes of butter, 6 eggs’. A cake of butter weighed generally about 41/2 lb.
The cellar contained barrels of verjuice for cooking as well as ale and beer. The stocktaking in 1551 reveals that they also had a butt of sack, two puncheons of French wine, a hogshead of French wine, Gascon wine and Rhenish wine as well as 4 gallons of malmsey. They made their own perry from their apples, mead and various flower and fruit wines, as did Elinor Fettiplace later who gives many a recipe. In a sheltered south-west corner of his orchard, Sir William had built a banqueting house, the small pavilion in which the last sweet and fruit course was served to guests in the summer; next to this building was the cook’s garden, with chives, sweet marjoram, purslane, cauliflower, leeks and mustard. Next to that were the brick dove-house, which contained thousands of birds, and ponds well stocked with fresh water fish. This is food that still reflects the medieval traditions, but simplified, one feels, because the labour in the kitchen, with only twenty servants, is so much more limited. There is little doubt that Petre, though living in a grand house, lived modestly and within his means.
William Harrison, in his Description of England in 1577, speaks of gentlemen taking pride in their kitchens but not overeating; meat and bread remained the principal foods, though salads were very popular, dishes of cucumber, peas, olives and artichokes were more common than in the past. The Petres’ servants ate very well; just before Christmas in 1551 when Sir William and family were still in London, the servants had twelve local people for guests at dinner and between them they ate three joints of boiled beef and one roasted, a neat’s tongue27, a baked leg of mutton, two rabbits and a partridge; for Christmas they ate much the same but finished with eight baked pear pies.
The food has a much more familiar ring to it now than the recipes cooked for Richard II; it has lost the esoteric glamour, the touch of strangeness that in the medieval world both entices and alienates. Because these people are not estranged from the source of food as was the medieval elite, they are hard at work producing the food they cook and eat. The new nobility appeared to work unremittingly. Lady Hoby records mornings spent dyeing wool, winding yarn, making oil and spinning; she dried fruits, made quince jelly and damson jam, dried rose leaves for pot pourris, prepared candies and syrups and distilled cordials. She was the wife of Sir Thomas Posthumus Hoby, the ambassador to France, and knew as much if not more of their estates than her husband did. ‘I walked with Mr Hoby about the town to spy out the best places where cottages might be builded, after supper I talked a good deal with Mr Hoby of husbandry and household matters.’28
The food of the Tudors seems to be the same food that we eat now. In The French Garden,29 a dialogue written by two Huguenot refugees who taught French in London, we recognise the hostess of a dinner party and sympathise with her anxieties. Her guests were offered oysters with brown bread, salt, pepper and vinegar, which, however, were declined by all on the grounds that shellfish should not be eaten in the dog days. (The hottest time of the year; the dog days begin on 3 July and end on 11 August, so called from the rising of the great dog star, Sirius, and the lesser dog star, Procyon.) They dined from a table covered with a damask table cloth, used damask napkins and a silver chafing dish; they had wine from a silver jug, and drank from glass, the glasses being rinsed before being refilled. They ate roast beef and salt beef, veal and a leg of mutton with a galantine sauce (red wine and cinnamon thickened with breadcrumbs); there was also turkey, boiled capon served with oranges, a hen boiled with leeks, partridge, pheasant, larks, quails, snipe and woodcock. They also had wild boar as well as domestic pig; the boar was thought the better as it had more flavour. Salmon, sole, turbot and whiting with lobster, crayfish and shrimps were eaten, but an eel and a pike were sent away from the table untasted. Young rabbits and marrow on toasts tempted those who did not care for the gross meats; then there were artichokes, turnips, green peas, capers, cucumbers and olives. The turnips were from Normandy where grew the best; they were small and had a much better flavour than our large English ones. (How right they were then and now.) There were salads of lettuce, spinach, endive, and of sage, rosemary and violet buds. There was quince pie (the quinces must have been bottled from the previous autumn), almond tart, cherries, gooseberries and prunes. There was also Dutch cheese, Angelot30, Auvergne and Parmesan31; grated cheese was mixed with sage and sugar, and there was also a mild cheese from Banbury.32 There were strawberries, raspberries, peaches and apricots, served with cream and green walnuts but no chestnuts. What a delicious feast this all sounds. We must not think, however, that this was typical as one of the guests remarked: ‘In truth I have not seen of a long time all at once so much poultry, nor fowl nor so good fish.’
The chafing dish mentioned above was a dish with burning coals in it to keep food hot, but this method was also used for cooking and became much more common within the century. It was usually a round dish with hot charcoal in it covered with another dish used for the cooking; this sat on a movable tripod, and allowed for cooking over a gentle heat. Meat could be stewed, fish could be poached, delicate liaison with egg yolk and broth could be wrought without accidents and burnings. The chafing dish had a long history, for both Cicero and Seneca refer to them and they were certainly used in the medieval kitchen; in the sixteenth century, however, the dish is often specified for particular recipes.
In a far less grand noonday meal there were sausages and cabbage with porridge for the children, though hospitality induced the host to offer a pike with a high Dutch sauce and also black birds, larks, woodcock and partridge. This elicited from one of the diners the remark: ‘Here is too much meat, me thinketh that we be at a wedding.’33 Three or four hours were spent over this meal: ‘The nobility, gentlemen and merchant men sit till three o’clock of the afternoon so that it is a hard matter to rise from the table to go to evening prayers.’ Supper was supposed to be a lighter meal taken between five and six. A roast shoulder of mutton, three fried rabbits, bread, beer and a pint of claret seems, however, to have been the typical meal for a solitary gentleman living in lodgings in London in 1589.34
Almond milk is now conspicuously absent from most of the recipes, and some popular dishes now have cows’ milk substituted. Flummery was a favourite dish of Tudor and Stuart banquets. It began as a lechemeat based on calves’ foot broth and almond milk with added spices; it was left to cool and set and then was cut into leches or slices. Now it was made with a spiced cream set with calves’ foot, isinglass or hartshorn,35 It was eaten with cream or a wine sauce poured over it, but elaborate dishes could be made where the flummery was poured into egg-shaped moulds then set into a nest of shredded lemon peel jelly, or moulded into fish and presented in a jelly pond. (It originated in a far simpler Welsh dish, llymru, made from soaked oats,.)
Dishes made with cream became a new passion: there were trifles, fools and white pots. An Elizabethan trifle was a thick cream flavoured with sugar, ginger, and rosewater. A fool was a flavoured cream mixed with eggs and heated gently until it thickened; the whitepot had dried fruit added to this mixture and it was baked like an egg custard. Sage cream was made with red sage, rosewater and sugar. Clotted cream was made by leaving new milk for several hours in shallow bowls over a slight heat, for it must not boil.
A book published in 1573, The Treasurie of Commodious Conceits and Hidden Secrets by John Partridge, reflects the social changes that have occurred in the century. The title page indicates that this is a book for all men and women of whatever quality; the receipts have been gathered from men of great knowledge, which have made the book a treasury for profit. This is a book that contains hidden secrets and sundry experiments, and it is intended for a housewife’s closet. It was a book that became highly influential, and was reprinted until 1637. It claims to disseminate to the general populace secrets that once belonged to Guilds; the receipts are for marchpane, marzipans, tarts, blaunch powder, conserves of roots, flowers, fruits, syrups, lozenges, medicines and perfumes. Many of these at the beginning of the century would have been made by monks or imported from Spain. Some of them, the sugar work and sugar pastes, encroach upon the apothecaries, who had attempted to place a form of protectionism over their sugar-work. In the twelfth century, as we have seen, these were the medicinal comfits. Partridge is aware of what he is doing and exults in it, claiming that he might suffer from a backlash of jealousy from the rich (for it is also their secrets of the still-room that he divulges) or the physicians and surgeons might well blacklist him or simply refuse to buy his book. This was the first people’s cookbook, making arcane knowledge available to all.
Another form of cookery book was, of course, the collection of receipts kept within a family and passed down from generation to generation. Some of these waited hundreds of years to be published, so that a wider public might enjoy and learn from them. The Receipt Book36 written by Lady Fettiplace (fl.1604) is one such, and it is here that we can see most clearly the changes that had occurred in English cooking throughout the Tudor century. If it began still within the medieval traditions, by Elizabeth’s death it was well into a new age. This collection of recipes is without the mainstay of medieval cooking that hung on into the recipe books to the middle of the century, such as the generously spiced meat hash or that great favourite, the sweet and sour sauce. Many of the medieval influences are still clearly to be seen, however, although they are all modified. There’s a recipe for saffron buns, but that is the only time the ingredient is used. Her colouring was achieved by more natural means than in medieval recipes. She gives several almond recipes, for buns, a custard and a pudding which she calls a ‘blanchmane’ which is a flavoured almond custard, and obviously the heir to the medieval mawmenny; by now, however, it is totally without the minced chicken and colouring and is close to what the Victorians knew as blancmange. She also gives a recipe for almond butter, to be eaten as a dessert for it becomes a thick cream, which is flavoured with rosewater and which later Nicholas Culpeper suggested should be eaten with violets. She does use fruit sauces in savoury dishes, and this is still one of the great characteristics of our cooking. She uses egg yolk for thickening sauces instead of breadcrumbs, but she retains some Arab influence by a generous use of rosewater (there are rosewater pancakes) and a liking for currants. In her cooking flavours are clear and separate: two or three spices might be used but not seven or eight; there are rich vegetable dishes such as spinach with cream, egg yolks and butter, or charming ideas like stewed oysters flavoured with the juice of Seville oranges. Fettiplace provides a rich storehouse of ideas that we might well explore, such as a white wine sauce thickened with egg yolks for boiled mutton, mutton flavoured with the peel of Seville oranges, or rabbit pie well flavoured with nutmeg. She pots crayfish (Mrs Beeton’s recipe, 300 years later, is similar); she preserves apricots, peaches and green walnuts in syrup, makes rose-petal jam and uses both a lettuce and a spinach sauce with boiled chicken. She gives one recipe that stems from the Anglo-Saxons and which was to remain a favourite for another 200 years – sops in wine. These are slices of bread placed in a wine sauce and then baked, so that the top is toasted while the underside of the bread soaks up the sauce; the sops are then buttered and served. These were presented as an appetiser or as a snack after a hard day’s travelling.37
Elinor Fettiplace is circumspect in her use of spices keeping them for her mince pies, plum puddings and fruit cakes, as we tend to do today. Pies of all sorts are a staple for they were a way of preserving meat and could be taken and eaten as travelling food. They were expected to keep for a quarter of a year sealed with clarified butter. Pies were sent as presents by country people to friends and relations in town. They could be made from venison, wild boar, swan, elk or porpoise. They were often of vast size made with rye-flour paste (which was not eaten) and baked in a bread oven for six to eight hours; then the juices were poured off and they were sealed with clarified butter. Smaller pies were also made with wheat flour crust, which was expected to be eaten; the meat inside was possibly chicken, rabbit and ham, or mixtures of small game birds, or turkey. These too were filled with clarified butter and were often kept upon the sideboard, a slice to be offered to guests.
Lady Fettiplace uses vegetable rennet made from thistles, artichokes, ginger or the green rind of fig trees, to turn her cheese that was to be eaten throughout Lent. She makes simple cream and curd cheeses throughout the summer, but also in a vat she makes Angelot cheese which is obviously her own Brie-like cheese. Owners of dairy cattle now found it more profitable to turn their milk into butter and cheese, for milk could not be sold at the market for fear of its separating; the whey and buttermilk were sold, but the rest of it was used as pig food. The big estates of the nobility now had quantities of milk to be used daily, and this was turned into curds of various kinds for fear of milk fermenting in the stomach.
From then on, therefore, every cookery book devoted a large section to recipes that used curds in their different forms. They were mixed with butter, cream and spices to make fresh cheeses. They were mixed with fruit, lemon juice and sugar to make puddings. They made syllabubs, custards and cheese-cakes. Naturally, cream was also now being added to more and more dishes and sauces. Syllabubs became a favourite dessert made from wine or cider, sweetened with sugar, nutmeg and lemon to which cream was forcefully added, sometimes from a great height, to make it froth up. The milk was even squirted into the wine straight from the cow. French cheese was the fresh creamy curd flavoured with cinnamon, rosewater and sugar, and it was eaten with fresh cream poured over.38 Alternatively, whites of egg were beaten, then stirred into the cream cheese with nutmeg, rosewater and lemon juice. Various fruit creams were made by heating cream with white of egg flavoured with mace and lemon; then when well boiled they were sweetened and fruit such as raspberries stirred in. (These were, of course, egg custard without yolks and could be baked in a low oven.) Spiced cheese tarts were made and in the following century were known as cheese-cakes. Curd fritters also continued to be made and enjoyed; they were spiced and eaten with added sugar. Cabbage cream was a form of clotted cream: a dish of thick cream was allowed to form a skin; this was then carefully lifted from the dish and arranged on a platter, where it was folded to resemble a cabbage leaf; rosewater was sprinkled over it, then more creamskins were lifted and arranged – the rosewater stopped them from sticking together. Then it was placed in the stillroom for two days and before being served it was sprinkled with sugar, ginger and a light dusting of nutmeg. Dishes made from cows’ milk were now a central part of our diet.
The traveller Fynes Morrison who wrote an itinerary over 10 years covering his journeys in 1617, thought that the English ate fallow deer more often than any other nation. It was baked into pasties which were dainty and not found in any other kingdom; nor was brawn. No kingdom had as many dove-houses or roasted their meat as well as the English; they also ate more hens and geese and plenty of rabbits, which were both fat and tender and more delicate than any elsewhere. The geese they ate twice a year, when they were young around Whitsun and after the harvest, when they had eaten off the stubble; they are then both roast and boiled.
Preserving
Before the Age of Discovery the sailor’s diet had been just about adequate, preserved meat, ale, ship’s biscuits and dried peas, but then voyages were short, no longer than a few weeks. There was no shortage of sailors because the meat allowance of 8lb of salt beef per man per week was generous, but there was much corruption and the men were often short-changed on supplies which led to anger, resentment and mutiny. The mutineers on the Golden Lion sailing on Drake’s Cadiz voyage in 1587 wrote: ‘for what is a piece of beef of half a pound among four men to dinner, or half a dried stockfish for four days in the week … you make no men of us but beasts.’39 Once long voyages began, a new disease struck the sailors down – scurvy. It had not affected the Vikings on their long voyages of discovery for they took with them cranberries and cloudberries. The Dutch treated land scurvy with brooklime, cress, scurvy grass and strawberry leaves. Sir Richard Hawkins had been a prisoner of the Spanish in the Netherlands and learnt that sour oranges and lemons were a cure. This was not generally accepted, however. Scurvy was thought to be engendered by fog, damp, and sea salt and other remedies were tried like vinegar and oil of vitriol.
As always the officers and gentlemen ate well, for they had fresh meat, and sheep and goats for milk at the beginning of the voyage; then, with the pigs, they were butchered and eaten; they also kept hens for fresh eggs and supplies of fresh vegetables and fruits whenever they landed for provisions. They were also well supplied with preserved foods from home. Pastes of potted meat and fish were kept under a seal of clarified butter, or the meat was chopped up small and baked in a low oven for six to eight hours; then the juices were poured away, the meat was crushed and pressed hard down in a large stone jar, and clarified butter was poured over. Hare pie was made by first boning the meat, then the flesh was hashed and beaten to a pulp with a mortar; it was seasoned, larded and baked, then the juices were poured off and claret wine poured in. Once cool, it was sealed with clarified butter and a double layer of brown paper. Hams and bacon were smoked and dried using honey, salt, juniper, pine tar and much else to contrive a meat that would survive the heat of tropical climes. Fresh garden peas were potted in clarified butter, watercress grew in glass jars, broom buds were pickled. Many types of fish like herrings, mackerel, char, salmon, lobster and crab were smoked, salted, dried and potted. Potted shrimps, a standby and a delicacy still for the British, were created at this time for the officers’ table. Provisions included dried beans, nuts – walnuts and almonds – clotted cream (boiled with sugar till it was quite stiff); waxed eggs (they were greased in hot lard and packed in sawdust); pickled eggs flavoured with allspice, ginger and garlic, and pickled vegetables in brine or vinegar; there were also many different pastes of smoked fish, cheese and mushrooms. There were barrels of figs and sacks of dried fruit, raisins and prunes, dried pears and apples, and marmalade that was boiled for longer than usual so that it became a stiff jelly and could be sliced. There was bottled spring water and cinnamon water to aid the digestion. Of course, there was also wine and sugar to add to it. These provisions were all for the ‘banketting on shipboard of persons of credite’.
Sir Hugh Plat, worried about how to keep meat fresh at sea, suggested that it be placed in a perforated cask and dragged astern. The cold salt seawater would keep it fresh and sweet. A ship in 1576, setting off to catch the ‘Whale Fish’ in Russia, was provisioned with bread, cedar oil, hog’s-heads of beef, salt beans, peas, salt fish, wine and mustard seed.
This urge to provision husbands, fathers and brothers obviously inspired house-holds to create new recipes and flavourings, many of which became an integral part of the British repertoire. Voyages to the New World and to the Orient turned the west of England ports like Bristol, Plymouth and Liverpool into flourishing market centres.
Each harvested product was stored differently in the home: apples were cored, dried and threaded in rings; mushrooms the same; lemons, oranges, pumpkins and onions were hung in nets; dried roots were wrapped in linen; and husked walnuts stored in wet salt. Dried stockfish and herrings were hung in a dry attic, bacon and bath chaps (the cheek of a pig boned, brined and cooked) stored in a keg of sawdust, dried beef hung near the smoke hole, and cheeses were wrapped in cloth to preserve their moisture and aroma.40
Wealth and Commerce
Throughout the century the middle classes were growing more prosperous and literate. They were the new consumers, eager to absorb fashionable trends in clothes, architecture and food. We were the first modern commercial nation, and there is evidence that well over half or even two-thirds of all households received some part at least of their income in wages.41 New industries were adding to the wealth of the nation and the population was expanding (of the four million population 200,000 of them lived in London) and these new industries were assisted by foreign immigrants. ‘What country in the world is there,’ a Member of Parliament asked in 1596, ‘that nourisheth so many aliens from all parts of the world as England doth?’ A clergyman, William Lee, invented a knitting frame, which the hosiery industry in the east Midlands used with alacrity, making a fortune, but leaving the clergyman penniless. Other new industries were papermaking, printing, gun-founding and the manufacture of gunpowder; there was substantial growth in the lead, copper and iron industries and steel was first produced in 1565. The new gentry and nobility, being a practical lot, often invested in iron mines, blast furnaces and ironworks located on their own land; if not, they were shrewd enough to purchase a neighbour’s land and then borrow the money to invest in fuel, raw materials and wages.
Enclosures of land, as we have noted, had already begun and contemporaries were anxious to distinguish between a farmer’s enclosure of his land for improvement (Thomas Tusser’s A Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandrie had appeared in 155742) and a rich man’s enclosure of ‘other men’s commons’. Writers also pointed out the difference between enclosure by force and enclosure by consent. Rioting against enclosures had already occurred in 1548. The old medieval horror of usury had entirely vanished; it was legalised in 1571 and loans of money at high interest levels were now commonplace. The now affluent middle classes had bonded with the nobility in their love of money and both resented government if it interfered in matters of enclosure or usury. Land was necessary for the new industries and textiles were the biggest export of all for there was a growing demand for English cloth abroad, which boomed from 1559 to 1603. Cloth-making was a cottage industry, clothiers collected orders, hired out looms and put out work. The huge looms would take up nearly all of the space in the one single room that a family inhabited. London bought cloth in its unfinished form from these provincial markets where prices were low and then saw to the finishing and dyeing, which counted for a great deal more in the value of the fabric. The cloth market in London, Blackwell Hall, was built as early as 1397, but rebuilt in 1558; after it was again burnt down, in the Fire of London in 1666, it was rebuilt to huge dimensions in 1672.
Household interiors were full of fabrics with curtains, hangings, tapestries and the linen cupboards piled with sheets, fine linens, napkins and tablecloths. Social vanity grew to its height in the 16th century and would remain a driving factor in matters of fashion and food until the present day. Nicholas Barbon wrote in 1690: ‘Fashion or the alteration of Dress is a great promoter of trade because it urges people to spend money on clothes before the old ones are worn out: it is the life and soul of commerce … it is an invention which makes man live in perpetual springtime, without ever seeing the autumn of his clothes.’43 One of the new palaces to be built upon the river Thames was Craven House, home of the Craven family founded by Sir William Craven who was a Lord Mayor of London and had made his fortune out of tailoring.
Basinghall Street, where Blackwell Hall stood, became the centre of commerce in London. Throughout the century covered markets and market stalls grew up in provincial cities and towns as never before. Between 1500 and 1640 there were 800 market towns in England and Wales; 300 of these confined themselves to single trades, some specialising in grain, others in malt; ninety-two were cattle markets, thirty fish, twenty-one wildfowl and poultry and a few specialised in the odd and idiosyncratic, such as Wymondham which dealt exclusively in wooden spoons, taps and handles. It has been worked out that each market town catered for between 6,000 and 7,000 people, while the average population of the locality was around 1,000.
London, with its growing population, absorbed food from almost the whole of Britain: herrings came from Scotland and cattle from Wales, but most of its produce stemmed from the Thames valley. Uxbridge, Brentford, Kingston, Hampstead, Watford, St Albans, Hertford, Croydon, and Dartford busied themselves in the city’s service, grinding grain and sending in flour, preparing malt, harvesting fruits and vegetables and dispatching game birds, mutton carcasses, butter, cream and cheese. The orchards and hops of Kent flourished near London, its forests were also rich in game: pheasant, partridge, quail, teal, wild duck and the wheatear or English ortolan which Daniel Defoe thought ‘the most delicious taste for a creature of one mouthful, for t’is little more, that can ever be imagined’. The appetite of the Court, the Navy and the Army, all centred within the city of London, was prodigious. The increasing prosperity of its surrounding countryside made an impact upon all travellers. Servant girls at the Inns were mistaken for ladies of gentility so very neatly were they dressed. The peasants appeared well-clothed and ate white bread; they did not wear clogs like the French and were even seen to ride on horseback.
Because the distance between the producer of the food and the buyer had now become too great, food consumption required secondary go-betweens, the merchant who bought from the producer, the carrier who took the produce and the retailer who sold to the market stall. This is why food prices rose throughout the century; the demands of population growth created new jobs for people who took their percentage. Traditional customs of buying and selling food began to vanish forever. We shall see in the next chapter how this is explained trenchantly by Daniel Defoe in The Complete English Tradesman, published in 1726.
At the beginning of the sixteenth century chickens had cost 11/2d each, eggs were 3/4d a dozen, rabbits 1s 4d for nine and a gallon of gooseberries 2d. By 1558 gooseberries and rabbits had doubled in price and chickens trebled. Seven geese cost 9s 4d, two breasts of veal 2s 4d, two necks of mutton 1s and 36 gallons of beer 4s 8d.
Class
People, in this new economic climate, adapted and changed, for human nature insists that new wealth has to be displayed to show everyone else how prosperous a family has become. There was no better way than to buy land and to build a family house in the new style using the latest materials, which were brick and glass. Country estates grew up outside market towns, modest medieval farmhouses were torn down or greatly enlarged, so that they were buried beneath grand facades and long galleries. A new style, Tudor-Gothic, came into being, built from bricks, which by the turn of the century had become very fashionable (both Hampton Court and St James’s Palace had been built with them). Cupolas sprang up on top of towers, chimneystacks were ornately finished, gables had painted beasts and entrance porches sprouted finials. There was a passion for windows, so much so that Hardwick Hall, built in the 1590s, gave rise to a jingle: ‘Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall’. Though it was a master mason who drew up plans for the house to his client’s requirements, it is interesting to note that a new word came into the language by 1563: that of architect.44 There was little use in living in new large houses with many windows if no one visited, however, so entertaining was important and the food and wine chosen for such entertainment reflected, as always, the court.
Queen Elizabeth was an intellectual and highly civilised, and greatly disdained soporific indulgence in huge banquets and orgies of drinking (which was to happen in the next reign). Her show of restraint and circumspection was obviously something that was absorbed by the rest of society, if the evidence of Elinor Fettiplace is to be accepted. The Queen was an early riser; when she gave audience to Mary, Queen of Scots’ ambassador, Sir James Melvil, she bade him arrive at Whitehall at eight a.m.
where he found her walking in the garden, having attended to her devotions, various civil affairs and had had her breakfast; this consisted of manchet, ale, beer, wine and a good pottage, like a farmer’s, made of mutton or beef with ‘real bones’.
The menu for her dinner on 17 November 1576, a date that marked the eighteenth anniversary of her succession, was not a special one. Her menus varied little over the years. A first course of choice of beef, mutton, veal, swan or goose, capon, conies, fruit, custard and fritters, manchet (the best white bread made up in small loaves), ale and wine. Second course provided lamb or kid, herons or pheasants, cocks or godwits, chickens, pigeons, larks, tart, butter and fritters. Supper was also a two-course meal with a first course of boiled mutton, roast mutton, capon, herons, ‘chicken bake’, congers, beer, ale and manchet. Authorities tell us the Queen ate very little (she never became fat or gross like her father), and she rarely drank wine, preferring beer or ale and these only in moderation.
Raleigh in his instructions to his son is especially detailed about the horrors of drunkenness. ‘Take especial care that thou delight not in wine, for there never was any man that came to honour or preferment that loved it; for it transformeth a man into a beast, decayeth health, poisoneth the breath, destroyeth natural heat, brings man’s stomach to an artificial heat, deformeth the face, rotteth the teeth, and, to conclude, maketh a man contemptible …’ A German traveller in 1598 reported: ‘The Queen dines and sups alone, with very few Attendants, and it is very seldom that any Body, Foreigner or Native, is admitted at that Time, and then only at the Intercession of somebody in Power.’45
Hentzner describes an account of the ritual attendant upon the Queen’s dining. First, two gentlemen, one bearing a rod, the other wearing a cloak, entered the hall, knelt three times, spread a cloth upon the table and then left. Second, two more gentlemen appeared carrying the salt, a plate, and bread. They too knelt three times, placed these things upon the table and disappeared. Third, came an unmarried lady (a countess, he says) and a married one who bore a tasting knife. They curtsied three times, went to the table, and rubbed the plate with bread and salt ‘with as much devotion as if the Queen was present’. They stayed in the room. Finally, the Yeomen of the Guard, bareheaded and in scarlet livery with a golden rose embroidered on the back, came in bringing a course of twenty-four dishes served in plate, mostly gold. As each was brought in, it was received by a gentleman yeoman and placed on the table. The married lady who wielded the tasting knife then gave each yeoman a morsel from the dish he had brought in to try it for poison, for there had been attempts – foreign of course – to poison the Queen. All the time while this was going on twelve trum-peters and two kettledrums ‘made the hall ring’. Then the dishes were taken to the Queen by the women; she selected what she wanted to eat and the ladies got the rest.
Though the Queen always dined alone or with a few friends, when the day’s work was done she often enjoyed supper with friends and attendants ‘whom she would cheer up with mirth, discourse and civility’. After or during supper she would often admit Tarleton, the great comedian and talker, or other entertainers to amuse her with ‘stories of the town, common jests and accidents’.
By the time of Elizabeth the old dining hall where masters, servants, guests and travellers all dined together had been jettisoned and a new small, intimate room at one end of the big hall became the new dining room, where the master and his family ate alone. The old dining hall became the great chamber now used for games, dancing, plays and household prayers. This, the largest and grandest room in the house was also built as an entrance hall to stun the visitor with its size and beauty.
Etiquette ruled the nobility as well as the wealthy middle classes who were aspiring to join them. The Boke of Kervynge by Wynkyn de Worde, though only a short book of twenty-four pages, was first published in 1508 and was reprinted throughout the century. It is highly detailed on the manner of carving, giving precise instructions on how to carve fish, flesh, beast or fowl. It gives instructions to the butler and the panter, knives must be polished and spoons kept clean, cloths, towels and napkins folded in a closet. In all seasons butter, cheese, apples, pears, nuts, plums, grapes, dates, figs, raisins, green ginger and quince jam must be kept in the larder. For feasting there must be butter, plums, damsons, cherries and grapes; after a meal, pears, nuts, wild strawberries, whortleberries, hard cheese, apples and caraway comfits.
This produce was all part of the banquet, the course of sweetmeats taken after the main meal, for which separate rooms were now provided, built in the gardens, and referred to as the banqueting house. In 1533 an arbour was built on top of a mount at Hampton Court; the South or Great Round Arbour was three storeys high, nearly all windows, and topped with an onion dome with a gilded crown. Sir William Petre had one built at Ingatestone Hall. Queen Elizabeth’s favourite palace at Nonsuch had a banqueting house three storeys high built on the highest hill in the park; guests would have wandered through the rooms, up into the turrets and out onto the balconies to survey the countryside below. Banqueting was a movable feast: laid out like a buffet you picked out what you wanted, took a glass and conversed as you moved around the company. It all sounds very familiar to us now, though we tend to keep this activity to functions and parties, where we eat, drink and talk while we admire the setting.
The foods served were preserved citrus peels, quince marmalades, conserves of soft fruit, sugar candies, spiced sweet dry cakes, spiced fruit breads and to drink there was spiced hippocras (considered to be a digestive), Rhenish claret wine and beer. These were drunk from Venetian glass, another fashionable necessity. (The New World had made gold and silver relatively cheap so now the gentility spurned them.) Venetian law decreed death for any Venetian glassmaker who took his secrets abroad; nevertheless Giacomo Verzellini arrived in England in 1574 and obtained a patent for making Murano drinking glasses. He eventually became glassmaker to the Queen and retired a rich man in 1592. By that time there were glassworks in Sussex, Surrey and Kent.
During Elizabeth’s reign sugar refining began in England and grocers stocked sugar loaves, bits of which were broken off by a sugar chopper. Barbary sugar was known and used, ordinary sugar was imported in loaves of 100 lb and broken up for selling. At the beginning of the century sugar cost from 4d to 10d a pound, but by 1600 the price had risen to 1s or 1s 6d.
The best sugar is made from the tears or liquor of sugar canes, replenished so with juice that they crack againe. The best sugar is hard, solid, light, exceeding white and sweet, glistring like snow, close and not spungy, melting very speedily in any liquor. Such cometh from Madeira in little loaves of three or four pound apiece … Barbary and Canary sugar is next to that. Your Common or Coarse sugar (called commonly St. Omers sugar) is white without and brown within, of a most gluish substance, altogether unfit for candying or preserving, but serving well enough for common syrups and seasoning of meat.46
By the end of the century the list of banquet delicacies was huge: apart from locally grown fruit and imported dried fruit, there were fruit flavoured stiff jellies and sugar pastes, biscuit breads, cream jellies, sugar candies, marzipan and gingerbread. As the dairy herds grew so did the consumption of cream throughout the whole meal, and syllabubs and flavoured cream cheeses began to appear as part of this last movable feast.47
Succade, the sugar preserve of orange and lemon peel, had been imported into England from Spain ever since the thirteenth century, and, as we have seen, the banqueting course itself stemmed from the last course of the medieval feast where all manner of sweet dishes, sugared fruits, spices and nuts and sugary comfits were served. Sugar was seen as partly medicine, partly a preserving agent and as a form of decoration. By the 1530s the name of ‘banquet’ came to stand for both the sweetmeats themselves, the course where they were eaten and the place in which they were enjoyed. It was due in the main to the large amount of sugar produced in Madeira (where sugar cane replaced wheat by 1460); lesser amounts came from the Canaries, the Azores, North Africa and the Mediterranean. Increased production meant far more imports to northern Europe. However, the Portuguese who owned Madeira had also moved sugar production to Brazil which throughout the century became the biggest supplier of sugar to northern Europe. By 1610 Brazil had 400 mills producing 57,000 tons of sugar annually. This was the beginning of the triangular slave trade in the Caribbean, which increased profits to almost unbelievable heights.
Sugar started as a luxury, presented as gifts from one prince to another.48 By 1500, however, sugar had taken the place of honey and it was big business; in Antwerp in 1550 there were nineteen sugar refineries, but the real money was made at the wholesale end where in London barrels of various kinds of sugar were sold to grocers. Sugar, in itself, but also as the prime ingredient of the banqueting course, was a symbol of untold luxury and pleasure, but people also clung to the old medieval idea that it was medicinal, so the course also became a digestif. The appurtenances to the course, the house, the gardens, the views, and the musicians playing in a glade, underlined the excessive wealth that had contributed to this moment. Indeed, to build a banqueting house was a symbol in the sixteenth century that you had reached the very highest social position possible.
In contrast a very small object – if made from silver – was to become another symbol of class. It was first observed by Thomas Coryat on his travels in Italy and he wrote about it in his Crudities in some detail:
The Italians do always at their meals use a little fork when they cut their meat. For a while with their knife, which they hold in one hand, they cut the meat out of the dish, they fasten their fork, which they hold in their other hand … this form of feeding I understand is generally used in all places of Italy, their forks being for the most part made of iron and steel, and some of silver, but those are used only by gentlemen.49
Coryat was laughed at for using his fork back home, and it remained unacceptable for another fifty years, then quickly became a status symbol.
Within society there existed an angry stratum of class hostility, the elite feared the poor while they felt a passionate virulence against their masters. A Scottish observer commented in 1614 on the ‘bitter and distrustful attitude of English common people towards the gentry and nobility’.50 Only the landed ruling class were allowed to carry weapons; there was a deliberate policy not to allow the ‘meaner sort of people and servants’ to serve in the militia. In 1588 when the whole population was called to arms to fight the Spanish Armada there was a general fear that servants trained as soldiers would become unruly and unwilling to continue to serve their masters. These feelings of profound discontent within the lower classes, who had to cope with rising prices and to exist on scraps from their masters, and whose diet otherwise was bread, beans, whey, ale and cheese, would be tapped in the following century by the Parliamentarians in their revolt against the monarchy.