The English Diet

From ships came trade and a navy. The sea also fed the English. As one historian has remarked, the herring served as the potato of medieval England. Vast quantities of fish supplemented a diet from which red meat, the ‘roast beef of old England’, was almost entirely absent. Visitors from France to England in the nineteenth century came to regard the English countryside as one vast meat factory for the production of beef. But beef, in the Middle Ages, was a luxury encountered more rarely than venison or herring or eel. Cattle were expensive to feed, especially in the winter months when, before the introduction of the turnip as a common winter crop, there was very little save hay upon which they could be fed. Those that were kept were as often used to pull ploughs and carts as for milk or meat. Oxen were the tractors and trucks of medieval England. There was also perhaps a sense, once again inherited from Bede, that there was something rather awful and un-Christian about the eating of beef. As early as the sixth century, Pope Gregory the Great, writing to Augustine of Canterbury on the conversion of the English to Christianity, had associated the eating of the flesh of cattle with the feasts of the pagan rather than with the Christian calendar.

Christianity was a Mediterranean religion, from a region where the diet was principally vegetarian. Meat eating was both a characteristic of the barbarian tribes and a symbol of Germanic pagan allegiance. Only in the Celtic regions of Christendom, in Wales and in Cumbria, did cattle remain a staple element of diet, albeit prized as much for their milk as for their meat. Rents in Cumberland were still paid in ‘cornage’, as so many horns of cattle. The Welsh, in the 1260s, serving alongside Englishmen in the armies of the rebel baron Simon de Montfort, were horrified by the greed of the English for grain with which to make bread, just as the English craved to escape from the endless but breadless Welsh diet of cheese, milk and meat. As with modern commercial catering, poultry represented a compromise acceptable to most. Chickens and eggs were consumed in vast numbers. Church rents were sometimes payable as so many chickens, particularly at Christmas, and hard-boiled eggs were blessed in church before the Easter Mass, for distribution amongst the village community, a practice that by the fourteenth century was being condemned in some dioceses as a pagan superstition, but which together with the Christmas fowl has perhaps bequeathed both the modern phenomenon of the Christmas turkey and the Easter egg.