Pigging Out

‘I wish I could turn out that moral voice inside me that says eating animals is murder, but I guess I’m just not as strong as you are.’
‘That’s because you need protein.’

It’s likely that the default dietary setting in the Middle Ages was vegetarian or near-vegetarian, since unless you lived by the sea meat would have been expensive to buy and probably illegal to hunt. Stringently enforced forest laws in England and Wales, though perhaps not as draconian as Walter Scott would have us believe, made poaching an extremely risky enterprise to peasant labourers. Rivers were often subject to similar prerogative laws, and it is well known that certain animals – swans, sturgeons and whales – were the exclusive preserve of the monarch. Small landholders may have kept food animals such as pigs, but the staple diet of your average English medieval peasant would have mainly consisted of pulse-based stews or pottages and rye or barley bread.

Peasants tended not to keep recipe books, and these therefore emphatically do not reflect what the peasantry would have eaten. Richard II, at whose court The Forme of Cury was written, ate a great deal of meat, and on days when meat was precluded by Church dietary laws, he would eat fish. So when I proposed cooking from The Forme of Cury this week and was alerted to a guest’s longstanding vegetarianism, I considered that we might have a problem. The book contains about 200 recipes. 83 of these contain no meat or optional meat (or lard), although far fewer also contain no dairy or egg. Only 12 of these recipes can be considered main courses: the bulk of the 83 are puddings, sauces and sides, with two recipes for spiced wine, and of course the seventeen sauces themselves were to be served with meat. Many of these tentatively vegetarian recipes still require ‘broth’, which was most likely made from animal bones. An example:

Ryse of flessh

Take ryse and waisshe hem clene, and do hem in an erthen pot with gode broth and lat hem seeþ wel. Aftirward take almaund mylke and do þerto, and colour it wiþ safroun & salt, & messe forth.

To cut a very long story short, this is risotto made with meat stock. Heston Blumenthal does a version of it at his restaurant Dinner with calf tail, but I was consigned to using vegetable stock. A perfectly adequate, if un-Ricardian, side dish, it will come as no surprise that it tastes far better with flessh than without.

Would you like some meat with your meat?

One of the guests was lactose intolerant, so the holistic vegetarian-ness of the evening was scuppered by the fact that, like in Alpine France, there are literally no main recipes in The Forme of Cury that contain neither cheese nor meat. So on the no-dairy side, we had the ominously named tartes of flessh, and on the no-meat side, an adaptation of rauioles, an early pasta dish that I made with eggy bread. We had several vegetable side-dishes made with meatless broth, and (super-anachronistic) fro-yo after a fourteenth-century fruit recipe, which was described as ‘Christmas on a stick’. This may be the greatest compliment I have ever received.

Medieval food is obviously a gimmick (albeit one of academic interest to me), so one can hardly read ones dietary behaviour in what one prepares. Nonetheless, the sheer difficulty of assembling a meal without meat was jarring. I eat meat, although I know there are many ethical and medical reasons not to. What struck me as particularly odd about The Forme of Cury in the context of current social discourse on food is that meat, sugar and salt were formerly undeniable status symbols; we now hear both that meat, sugar and salt are the most problematic excesses in a modern western diet, and that healthy eating has become the preserve of the economic elite.

In general, we eat far too much meat. Much of this no doubt stems from the industrialisation of livestock farming, but it is a curious irony that the diet of a medieval peasant, consisting mainly of lentils and rye, should now be associated with organic-cashmere trustafarians and pushy middle-class parents. The colossally unsustainable production and consumption of meat is a far cry from the careful stocking of fishponds for a tiny ruling class, but is it really much more democratic? From Jamie’s School Dinners to horsemeat lasagne, we are under no illusion that the budget meat we demand from supermarkets may be nothing of the sort, and all the while rare and expensive foods are still sought by those who can afford them, as happened with spices in ancient and medieval Europe, with pineapples in the Early Modern period, and with extravagantly bland river fish in The Count of Monte Cristo.

Just as the Queen doesn’t have a state banquet every night, perhaps Richard took private meals of porridge and leeks. But it seems unlikely. Few cases of vegetarianism are recorded amongst non-ascetics in the medieval West. Aquinas himself argued that humankind’s divine mandate to care for the beasts of the earth doesn’t forbid eating them. In a circular manner, perhaps God’s Annointed, who would later starve to death in prison, thus had the best available argument to pig out, which it seems he certainly did. This is perhaps the most extravagant recipe in The Forme of Cury:

Cokagrys

Take and make [mincemeat], but do þerto pynes and sugur. Take an hold roste cok; pulle hym & hylde hym al togyder saue þe legges. Take a pigg and hilde hym fro þe myddes dounward; fylle him ful of þe [mincemeat], & sowe hym fast togeder. Do hym in a panne & seeþ hym wel, and whan þei ben isode, do hem on a spyt & rost it wele. Colour it with ȝolkes of ayren and safroun. Lay þeron foyles of gold and of siluer, and serue hit forth.

What’s for dinner? Gout.

First Wives Club

Due to various complicating factors (the weather, my research, hangovers) this is my first despatch in over a month, but what a day to choose! For today is the anniversary of the death of wild child, imperialist pig-dog and all-around LAD Henry II. While between 85 and 92% of my enthusiasm for this king was initially inspired by the peerless Peter O’Toole, who portrayed Henry in both Becket (1964) and The Lion in Winter (1968), the historical figure was himself pretty exciting in an era filled with dramatically large characters. In January I spoke on the radio to propose a Tudors-style telly treatment for the early generations of the Plantagenet dynasty, and while the supporting cast ought to include his despotic mother the Empress Matilda, fearsome wife Eleanor of Aquitaine, quarrelling sons, and the ‘turbulent priest’ Thomas Becket, Henry would of course be at the centre, the Tony Soprano of the 12th century.

The case I made was as follows:

Henry II pacified England and Normandy after the twenty-year civil war known as ‘the Anarchy’, fought between his mother Matilda and his uncle King Stephen. He married the phenomenally wealthy, well-connected and beautiful Eleanor of Aquitaine, who was ten years his senior and very recently divorced from the King of France. His repeated clashes with the Chancellor-Archbishop Thomas Becket would lead to Becket’s murder in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170; Becket had been the beloved tutor of his eldest son, also called Henry, and would become the most popular saint in medieval England. The ‘family firm’ nature of the Plantagenets and their influence across their Empire would cause fractures: three of Henry and Eleanor’s sons – his Heir Apparent Henry, Geoffrey, and Richard, later known as the Lion-Heart – mounted a rebellion against him, with the support of King Louis of France. As Katharine Hepburn’s Oscar-winning Eleanor says, what family doesn’t have its ups and downs?

I also made a glib remark about Henry, like England’s other famous Henry, having red hair. (Perhaps Damian Lewis could play him? was the subtext. The discussion arose from publicity about Wolf Hall.) Sex, power and plate armour – surely all anyone desires from Sunday night television? Perhaps with John Hurt in the cameo role of Pope Alexander III, narrating Bulls in voiceover. I can picture it now.

But one has to ask oneself about the environment that allowed Henry’s achievements, theatrical as they were, to warrant such attention. It is a matter of fact that his mother Matilda made an absolute hash of the whole Queen-ing business. She served as regent in Italy for her first husband, the Holy Roman Emperor Henry V, but had little other practical experience of rule. That is, of course, to be expected, as despite being the sole surviving legitimate child of Henry I, as a woman she cannot reasonably have expected to inherit either England or Normandy. Hence the accession of her cousin Stephen, and hence the civil war.

Henry’s wife Eleanor represents the other side of the same coin. As the elder of two sisters, she became Duchess of the quasi-independent Aquitaine in her teens following the death of her father. Aquitaine effectively comprised all of western France south of the Loire, and an easterly channel between Bourges and Limousin, as far as Lyon. In short, most of modern France. So when she married Prince Louis of France, later Louis VII, and her property theoretically transferred to her husband, France doubled in size. One of the stipulations of their marriage, however, was that Aquitaine would remain independent until their son came of age. Eleanor and Louis had two daughters, then for a combination of political and personal reasons they were divorced, and she married Henry, then Duke of Normandy, taking Aquitaine with her.

All the women who independent.

Landowning aristocratic women were not nearly as rare in the Middle Ages as one might suppose. One famous example within the English monarchy is Blanche, co-heiress to the Duchy of Lancaster, whose marriage to John of Gaunt made him the richest man in England. Another is Margaret Beaufort, only child of the Duke of Somerset and eventually mother of Henry VII. Blanche’s marriage was arranged by King Edward III himself, eager to wed his spare sons to wealthy heiresses. Margaret was also married by a king, Henry VI, to his half-brother, when she was 12 and he 24. Within a year she was pregnant and he was dead.

The grim reality for heiresses – and it is only honest to frame these women in terms of their fathers’ land – was to be fought over by noblemen, their guardians or prospective fathers-in-law, sometimes abducted (a feudal version of ‘finders keepers’, and quite legal), promptly remarried if widowed, and generally treated as an extension of their desirable property – which would, of course, be absorbed by their husbands’ families. Now, it may seem disingenuous to suggest that aristocratic women were the hardest-done-by of medieval European society, and I would claim no such thing. But I would argue that the disparity between the sexes was greater at this stratum of society than amongst the peasantry or burgeoning urban bourgeoisie.

I am often struck by how frequently working women appear in records of the medieval period, and there are hundreds of books and articles on the lives of working women before the modern period, in contrast to how little popular culture assumes about historical women-at-work. From spinners and laundresses to agricultural labourers, it is patently absurd to judge that women did not work in the past – and smacks of elitism in the same way that some western, middle-class feminists seem to believe that the success of the movement begins and ends in the boardroom (although, doing doctoral research in medieval Latin, I am barely qualified to highlight anyone else’s elitism). Women weren’t ‘professionals’, and only professionals count, is how that argument develops. Of course mainstream history is elitist – probably because, until very recently in the west and still in parts of the developing world, literacy is a matter for elites. But even the high-status and highly romanticised Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry shows women mowing, shearing sheep, harvesting grapes, and generally behaving like humans in an agrarian society. The images of aristocratic life in the same manuscript only hint at an imbalance: there may be no women at the Christmas feast, but they get to flirt in the same garden and join the same May Day hunt as their men.

©Photo. R.M.N. / R.-G. OjŽda

Working 9 to 5.

Quid enim iste cum Henrico? He, after all, was neither the cause nor the worst case of the difficult treatment of property-owning women in the Middle Ages. Henry was not responsible for his mother’s disinheritance or mismanagement, nor indeed for Margaret Beaufort’s horrific childbirth. It is all the more important to remember that Eleanor was substantially older than him at their marriage, and apparently suggested the match herself, possibly in part to avoid less desirable suitors who had attempted to kidnap her ‘fair and square’. This level of autonomy is remarkable because it is so rare.

Henry is a curious example of a man whose power was, if not provided, certainly solidified by his mother and wife, who in certain lights both overshadow him. Eleanor backed her sons’ rebellion against their father and allegedly had one of Henry’s mistresses murdered. (To clarify, this is almost certainly untrue.) Although Henry was tutored by the philosopher William of Conches and was on good terms with several other learned clerics, it is Eleanor who is remembered, perhaps without foundation, as the patron of poets and musicians. Eleanor is quite rightly described with superlatives; Henry is popularly less famous than both of his sons and his best frenemy Thomas Becket. And the icing on the cake? Katharine Hepburn won an Oscar for her portrayal of Eleanor; Peter O’Toole lost out to Cliff Robertson for Charly.