WHAT DID PEOPLE REALLY EAT IN MEDIEVAL TIMES?
Dough rolled on the bodies of naked women? Plant-based vegan peasant chow? Or something else entirely?
In all the years I have been making TV documentaries, two subjects reliably delight viewers. The first is anything to do with toilets. The second is food. I don’t think we need dwell on the direct connection between the two, but the fascination is real. Eating and shitting are two of the top three timeless human activities. It’s no surprise that we like to find out how other generations and civilisations went about their business.
I don’t want to lower the tone of History, Etc to the sewer just yet, but I do want to share a few loosely connected notes about medieval food.
The Anglo-Saxon Hipster Diet: new evidence
Last week I read a fascinating piece of new research, since widely reported online (see here and here and here), which investigated that the diet of people who lived in Anglo-Saxon England.
The conclusions of the scholarly article (in fact, a pair of scholarly articles taking a broad look at both the scientific evidence and the cultural context of medieval feasting in England) were detailed and nuanced. The headlines culled from them by journalists were simple. During the Middle Ages almost everyone, rich and poor alike, ate like a twenty-first century millennial hipster: mostly plant-based and seasonal, with periodic, protein-rich blow-outs at parties and on special occasions.
If you want to take a deep dive into the topic of ‘Food and Power in Early Medieval England’ (as the pair of articles are entitled) then I highly recommend them. But if you just have a passing interest, then take it from me that what you need to know is this:
The isotopic evidence as it stands gives a picture of fifth-to-eighth-century diets which are more homogeneous than has commonly been supposed, where what people ate was more dictated by regional trends (environmental differences as well as regionally different foodways) and seasonality than purely by social status. This is perhaps unsurprising in many ways, yet narratives of social stratification causing drastically different diets have been persistent in the literature.
Sam Leggett and Tom Lambert, ‘Food and Power in Early Medieval England: a lack of (isotopic) enrichment’, Anglo-Saxon England 47 (April 2022)
In other words, everyone was more or less in the same boat, and (in the early Middle Ages at least) kings’ and peasants’ diets did not vary quite so much as film, TV, novels and even history books often imply.
I Got Big Bread (And I Cannot Lie)
We all know what the third great timeless human activity is, and it is the subject of a newly launched History Hit podcast called Betwixt The Sheets. A recent episode of the podcast saw the brilliant medievalist Eleanor Janega touring listeners through the seamier side of medieval sex.
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