C M Woolgar, D Serjeantson, and T Waldron (eds), Food in medieval England: diet and nutrition, Medieval History and Archaeology, Oxford University Press, 2006, pp. xv, 347, £55.00 (hardback 978-0-19-927349-2).

Abstract

Food in medieval England—what could be a better subject except, perhaps, food in medieval France? In this collection, an archaeologist, a physician and a librarian bring together nineteen essays summarizing the last two decades of archaeological, scientific and documentary research. Details of digs, analyses of carbon ratios in bones, close studies of manorial and monastic accounts, palaeopathological reports, intricate tables and graphs of seed and bone findings make for tedious reading, but also for conclusions about medieval diet and nutrition anchored, for once, in facts. And these essays leave a surprising impression: the medieval diet was more varied, more delicious, and healthier than has been supposed, with all but the poorest having access to fish and fowl, fruit, vegetables, and meat, most of the time, in most places. Part I surveys the documentable food-stuffs of medieval England. Grain, including wheat, rye, barley, oats, beans and vetch, provided the bulk of calories as bread, ale and pottage. Vegetables and fruit were the next main constituent of the medieval diet; most people (including town dwellers) cultivated small (quarter acre) gardens of vegetables and fruit. These supplied not only the traditional leeks, onions and garlic, but also plums, walnuts, cherries, pears, apples and, in the warmer south, grapes, and even saffron. In addition to home-grown produce, the remains of figs, raisins and almonds in various sites suggest access to imported Mediterranean produce. Both archaeological remains and documents confirm that beef and mutton were the most important meats in the medieval diet, though pork was popular, especially in the pre-Norman period. Fish—saltwater and freshwater—trapped in rivers, farmed in ponds, or fished in the sea, had an important place in the diet; cod, herring and eel bones being especially prevalent in digs. Everyone kept and ate chickens and, to a lesser extent, ducks and geese. Wild fowl, by contrast, was the prerogative of the upper classes. Indeed, the aristocrats seem to have eaten almost anything with wings, including seabirds and larks, though not birds of prey (or crows). Meat of the hunt—boar, hare and especially venison—was also mainly the food of the upper classes. Part II covers medieval nutrition, which was more dependent on climate and season than is the modern, for cultural, medical, and agricultural reasons. Thus little meat was eaten in spring, because of Lent; in summer, when cows and chickens were producing well, the consumption of milk and eggs went up, and pork consumption, thought to be unhealthy in summer, went down. Many special foods were reserved for religious celebrations, especially Christmas and Easter. Despite, or perhaps because of, these seasonal variations, medieval nutrition does not seem to have been as poor as the common canard would have it. At any rate, palaeopathology has not been able to document much vitamin deficiency or disease: medieval skeletons are no shorter than pre-twentieth century European skeletons, nor are they commonly iron-deficient, scorbutic or tuberculous. It was a pleasure to examine such careful documentation of medieval life, and to find conclusions at odds with the fixed idea that life in the medieval period was poor, brutish and short. I recommend that a variety of scholars take the time to read and assimilate the conclusions of this volume. Perhaps then we can lay to rest, and even inter (for future research) the attractive but, apparently, wrong-headed idea of a premodern population hungry for the invention of industrial farming.