Cheesemaking in Cheshire 1550–1750

Abstract

This article supports a material turn in agricultural and food history by focusing on the utensils and equipment, along with the embodied practices involved in cheesemaking. The period of interest is the long seventeenth century when rich source material is available in the form of probate inventories—lists of the movable goods owned by deceased persons, mainly adult males, and widows. Our laboratory will be Cheshire, an English county that for 200 years, from the mid-seventeenth century, dominated the cheese supply of London and the industrial towns and cities of the north of England. We use 1600 inventories transcribed by Cheshire local historians, a significant portion of which mention cheese and cheesemaking. We argue that the making and marketing of Cheshire cheese was distinctive but that there was nothing inevitable about its success.