The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century (29 page)

If you do happen to wander past the stocks and see a chap with his head and clothes soaked in liquor, the chances are that he is—or was until recently—an alehouse keeper. On the whole these establishments sell no wine, only ale and sometimes cider and mead. They also sell simple food, such as bread and cheese, and perhaps cheap meat pies. Dark and smelling of stale ale, with rushes strewn across the floor, they can be rowdy establishments, full of adventurers’ tales and bawdy song. Unlike inns (whose main purpose is to provide accommodation to wealthy travelers) they exist to provide entertainment, and consequently are a resort of every sort of interesting character, from carters and wagoners to builders, carpenters, bakers, pilgrims, mummers, cutpurses, prostitutes, fishwives, gongfermors, low-lifers, and roustabouts.

When it comes to good food, the nobleman’s table is the place to be. The very best cuisine, and the greatest variety, is served directly to the lord himself at dinner. Long after the grooms and valets have consumed their rations and left the hall, the nobleman will continue eating with his companions, seeing more courses placed before him. The same is the case at supper, even though that is a smaller, less ostentatious meal. At breakfast, the trestle tables will not even be set up for the servants. They have work to do, and there is a belief that too much food makes the worker indolent. Thus the nobleman’s hall represents a spectrum of food quality and quantity, from relatively small amounts of basic pottage at the lower end of the hall to the most expensive dishes and lavish use of color and spices at the top table.

Food and drink in a lord’s residence is based on a series of rules and regulations far more complicated than seasonal availability and economic necessity. In addition to the nonmeat rules set by the Church, late-fourteenth-century aristocratic households are expected to follow legislation restricting the quantities of food. From 1363 even a lord is limited by law to five dishes at any meal: this being part of the aging Edward Ill’s attempts to control extravagance. By this same legislation, gentlemen are allowed only three dishes and grooms two. Of these two, one may be of meat or fish. Although this law is not always
followed to the letter, it nevertheless gives you an idea of the level of protocol to expect. Do you rank as high as a gentleman? If you do, you can expect to be seated alongside the gentlemen of the household and fed accordingly.

Let us suppose you have been assigned a place at the top table, along the bench to the right of the nobleman—a position of high honor. Before actually taking your seat, you will have to wash your hands. One servant, the ewerer, will pour the water; it is caught in a bowl beneath your hands by another servant. There is no soap but a third servant will hand you a towel. Then grace is said by the lord’s chaplain, and the first course is brought in and placed before the lord. He will take a trencher and start to help himself from the dishes laid before him. Once he has had a chance to try them, they are passed around.

The first course normally consists of boiled and baked meats in sauces, perhaps ground meat in a spiced wine sauce, or meat balls in aspic. An example of a daily first course of five dishes served to a lord is brawn with mustard, a meat pottage (containing beef or mutton, wine, herbs, and spices), another meat pottage containing chicken or boiled pork, stewed pheasant or swan, and a meat fritter (normally made with the entrails of animals). “Leche Lombard” is a popular first-course dish, consisting of pork, eggs, pepper, cloves, currants, dates, and sugar all boiled together in a bladder—like haggis—then sliced and served with a rich sauce. Another is “mortrews”: chicken and pork with breadcrumbs, powder forte, sugar, saffron, and salt. Perhaps you would prefer boiled venison with almond milk, onions, rice flour, and wine, colored with alkanet (a dark-red root) and seasoned with powder douce?

The food is actually prepared in “messes” of two or four portions, which are then shared at the table. Several dishes might be set before you. Do not feel you must empty a mess entirely onto your trencher; you are expected to leave a good proportion of it. Leftovers—including the trenchers—will be given to the poor after the meal. Besides, with five different meat dishes to choose from, you could quite easily stuff yourself sideways in just the first few minutes of the first course. Resist the temptation to do this: dinner will go on for about two hours. There will be three courses, each consisting of several dishes from which you should pick tasty morsels, and each course will be
separated by a small, intervening course. As you can see, food in a nobleman’s household is not just about sustenance, it is a matter of honor.

After the first course of boiled and stewed meats in piquant sauces, there will be a short interlude for the serving of fruit, nuts, a “subtlety” or intervening course. This is not always something to be eaten; sometimes it is just to be looked at, especially during a great feast. Perhaps you will see the real “four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie.” Bird lovers need not worry: the pie is baked first and allowed to cool. The birds are placed inside alive afterward, so when the pie is opened they do begin to sing—and fly out and swoop around the hall.

The second course consists of roast flesh. This is where the lord shows off, with exotic meats delicately carved. There will be meaty pottages and meats in aspic as well as a selection of roast venison, fawn, kid, baby rabbit (a coney under one year old), bustard, stork, crane, peacock, heron, partridge, woodcock, plover, egret, larks . . . This list could go on much longer. As the boys will tell you, every one of these animals has to be carved in its own particular way. A mallard is not carved but “unbraced.” To cut up a hen is to “spoil” it. Herons are “dismembered,” coneys “unlaced,” and so on. If you are young enough to be serving in a lord’s household, you will need to learn all these terms and how to wield a pair of carving knives (there are no forks). When the marshal of the hall directs you to “sauce that capon,” “break that deer,” or “display that crane” you need to know which are the tastiest morsels for presentation to the lord. This is not easy, especially with almost no light in winter except that shed by a rushlight and the kitchen fires.

Remember when picking out the tasty morsels during the second course to save some room for the third. The smallest, most delicate animals are normally served at this point, such as roast curlew, sparrows, and martinets (a kind of swallow). Alongside these you might be served baked quinces, damsons in wine, apples and pears with sugar or syrup, fruit compotes, or a fruit pottage. The upper-class English are just as fond of their fruit as their underlings. Plums, damsons, cherries, and grapes are served before dinner, to whet the appetite. Pears, nuts, strawberries, whinberries, apples, and mixtures of fruit tend to be served afterwards, as the season allows. Spiced baked apples and pears are popular, especially in winter. At the end, there will be
a cheese course, if you still have room. With a drink of hippocras—a spiced red wine—and wafers, the meal is finally over. Your trenchers and the uneaten remains are cleared away by the servants and boys, who then either surreptitiously eat the lord’s leftovers themselves or pass them to the almoner for division among the poor who may already be arriving at the manor gatehouse.

The above menu is only for meat days. For the other 194 or 195 days of the year (Advent, Lent, and every Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday) the diet switches to fish. Does the food at the top table become modest and humble, reflecting the religious nature of this custom? Not a bit! On a fish day you might be served a first course of lampreys baked in vinegar, pepper, ginger, and cinnamon; minnows or eels in a pie; baked herrings with sugar; pike in “galantyne” (a very popular sauce made with cinnamon, galingale, ginger, salt, breadcrumbs, vinegar, and stock); or poached mulwell or gurnard. After that lot you will move up the fish ladder to taste more highly prized varieties. Options for the second course include conger eel, doree and salmon in syrup; or roasted turbot, halibut, sea bass, mullet, trout, bream, sole, eels, and lampreys. Henry IV has been known to spend as much as 7s on a single turbot.
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In the 1330s you will often find pike and bream on the menu in the royal household, these being specifically purchased by Edward III for special occasions.
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It is possible that towards the end of the century you will be offered a carp, although the taste for it is really something which belongs to the next century.
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By the time you get to the third course, you will have realized that the religious prohibition against eating meat is seen as no obstacle to culinary excess by the majority of England’s nobility and gentry. For it is at this point that the really special fish are served. Sturgeon comes top of the list:
a fresh
sturgeon is a rarity—normally it will be barreled and pickled, to preserve it—but if you can get hold of one, you can expect to pay in the region of 35s.
¹⁵
Like salmon, bream, tench, and pike, it is deemed suitable to be given as a present from an earl or duke to a king. Salmon in rich sauces is the very favorite food of one of the great fighting heroes of the century, namely Henry, first duke of Lancaster. Accompanying dishes might include sea bream, perch in aspic, fried herring, and seafood (especially whelks, mussels, and shrimps). But even this list hardly does justice to the enormous range of the cooks. It is not so much that many fish have been left off this
list—one could add whiting, plaice, ling, loach, luce, flounder, haddock, swordfish, dace, dogfish, hake, and perhaps two dozen other varieties—but that there is wide scope for including animals which you would never expect to eat. Whales are technically the property of the king, but generally they are eaten by everyone in the vicinity when they are beached. Seals, porpoises, dolphins, barnacle geese, puffins, and beavers are all classed as fish as their lives begin in the sea or in a river. Hence they are eaten gleefully, even on nonmeat days. Medieval knowledge of the fish
at sea
might be limited—the chronicler Thomas Walsingham believes that dolphins can fly over the sails of ships—but once landed, and brought to the kitchen, they are perfectly understood. You only need to hear the terms of carving—”sauce that plaice,” “barb that lobster,” “splat that pike,” “culpon that trout,” “tranche that sturgeon”—to know that these men are no amateurs.
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You are wondering, no doubt, how an aristocrat manages to come by all this fish. After all, once out of water, they quickly go bad, and the means of transporting them from the sea to the kitchen are slow. No one can carry a barrel of sturgeon faster than twenty miles per day, nor a barrel of herrings for that matter. Besides, the nets of seagoing fishing vessels are relatively small and not very strong, and constantly in need of repair. In answer, no part of the country is more than seventy miles from the sea, and the vast majority is within forty miles. Some of the most active ports are situated inland on great rivers, like Gloucester, on the River Severn. Fish can be transported live, in barrels, and this is certainly the means of carrying oysters, mussels, whelks, lobsters, and crab, which are consumed in large quantities by the rich during Lent. Eels too are transported live in barrels from the rivers in which they are caught, and pike can be kept in vats for use when and where required. Most rivers have weirs and fishtraps on them, allowing roach, tench, dace, and bream simply to be lifted out of the river and dispatched in baskets, amid layers of wet straw. Fish-traps are also placed in estuaries, allowing thornback ray, gurnard, sea bream, salmon, grey mullet, herring, mackerel, plaice, and other sea fish to be caught without a net having to be cast or a boat launched. Lords with estates far inland maintain fishponds. The customs of a manor normally protect all freshwater fish for the lord, and he will either maintain his own fishermen to reap the benefit or hire occasional workers to do the fishing. So with all the rivers to draw on, and almost
all the country within two days’ ride of a port, those who can afford it have access to a very wide variety of fresh fish. If you then add the pickled, salted, smoked, and dried varieties—for example, kippers, salt cod, and shrimps and mussels pickled in brine—there is no shortage of river fish and seafood for the noble household.

Accompanying all this meat and fish is an array of vegetables and herbs. Lords, just like everyone else, cultivate as much garden produce as they can on their own land. But vegetables are not served independently; rather they are used in the sauces accompanying meat and fish. Cookery books include fruit sauces to go with many of the meat and fish dishes, such as applemoy (made out of apples) and verjuice (a sour grape juice used in cooking). Many vegetables and homegrown ingredients are necessary for the lord’s meat pottages and the more basic pottages which are fed to the less-important servants and the messengers and servants from other households visiting on business. Kitchen staff are employed chopping and cooking leeks, onions, herbs, colewort, cabbages, garlic, peas, parsley, and beans for the big pottages, feeding as many as a hundred men. For the lord’s dishes, cauliflower, peascods, borage, fennel, hyssop, and perhaps even parsnips and celery are used.

With regard to bread, the lord himself and his favored guests will be given slices of the best freshly baked white bread, made with wheat, called
“pain demain.”
So precious is this that the flour to make it is sometimes kept in a locked chest. The important officers and gentlemen of the household probably eat “wastel,” the next best wheat bread, costing
Via
per loaf. Third-best is “cocket,” a round white loaf. And as you go down the hall, the quality of the bread goes down too. Brown rye bread may be eaten by those at the lowest end of the hall, and certainly by the stable boys who only get to eat in the hall at Christmas and on other feast days. If those at the bottom of the hall do eat cocket, it will be three or four days old.

The range of wines available in a nobleman’s cellar is far greater than you can buy in any tavern. It is normally illegal for a taverner to sell Rhenish wine alongside Gascon or Spanish wine. But it is not illegal for a lord to keep a good stock of both. Edward Ill’s order for wine for the royal household in 1363-64 amounts to ten pipes of sweet wine (a pipe being 105 gallons), twelve pipes of Rhenish wine, and 1,600 pipes of Gascon wine—a total of 170,310 gallons.
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Not all
of this is drunk by the king and his companions; quite a lot is given out to friends and retainers (a gallon a day to Geoffrey Chaucer, for example). But a lord’s household is never short of wine.