The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England

by Mortimer, Ian

  9

  What to Eat and Drink

  Food is valuable in Elizabethan England, far more so than in the modern world. A flock of 180 sheep is worth more than the average detached house.1 The difficulties of transportation mean that the food supply depends heavily on what grows locally and how much surplus is available. It also depends on the season. Harvest is obviously a time of much grain and fruit. Animals are traditionally slaughtered on Martinmas (11 November) if the owner cannot afford to feed them through the winter.2 Even the availability of fresh fish depends on the season. There is no use in trying to buy fresh turbot in December if you are more than twenty miles from the coast: only in summer is sea fish carried to markets that far inland.

  These cycles are not quite as straightforward as they appear. Rich landowners do not normally sell their grain immediately after the harvest is in, when prices are low; instead they store it until the numerous small-scale producers have sold all theirs and prices go up again. Pig farmers keep their flitches of bacon back in storage until they can get a better price for them later in the winter. Such tactics are made even more profitable by the unhappy fact that harvests can fail, causing local – and sometimes national – food shortages. Large towns are less vulnerable, being part of an international market that sees preserved foods traded long-distance; but much of the countryside is dependent on fresh food. After a poor harvest, prices for all commodities – not just grain – rise dramatically and the poor are unable to make ends meet. When two or three harvests fail in succession across the whole country, as they do in the years 1594–7, people starve to death; during this famine one hundred people die in Stratford-upon-Avon alone.3 But you still have producers holding back corn supplies, even though hoarding is forbidden by law. In Stratford in 1597 seventy-five townsmen are found guilty of hoarding corn, including William Shakespeare, who is hanging on to ten quarters of malt. Worse than this, ‘engrossers’ buy up all the local supply of an important commodity, such as eggs or butter, in order to drive up the price. In the 1590s certain unscrupulous businessmen buy up to 20,000lbs of butter – and this is disastrous because it is an important part of people’s diet.4 Combined with hoarding, this has dramatic consequences for the poor. In some places the famine of 1594–7 proves as deadly as the plague of 1563.

  It is easy to write the line ‘people starve to death’; it is much harder to deal with the harsh reality. But you need to understand this point, if only to see how little choice you might have in what you eat. The itinerant poor might literally die in the street. The following examples show how famine hits the Cumberland parish of Greystoke. Here ‘a poor fellow destitute of succour’ is found in the highway and is carried to the constable’s house, where he dies. A miller’s daughter dies in her bed, weakened from lack of food. A beggar boy from the Borders is found writhing in agony in the road and dies soon afterwards ‘in great misery’. Another ‘poor, hunger-starved beggar boy’ is found in the street and carried into a house, where he dies. A widow is discovered dead in a barn. A four-year-old local boy dies ‘for want of food and means’, as does his mother. A total of sixty-two people die in Greystoke in just one year – during which time the parish sees no marriages and only three children conceived. You hear the story of a man leaving his home and walking hundreds of miles in search of work or food and returning after a couple of months with sufficient money, only to find that his wife and children have all since died.5 Now you can see why so many people living in Kent in the 1590s walked there from the north of England, as we have seen in chapter 2.

  If you are hungry, you might feel inclined to turn to poaching. But be careful: this is risky. Taking livestock is theft, and theft is a felony that carries the death sentence. Killing wild animals that live on another man’s land is also against the law; even taking a single fish from a river can result in a fine of a shilling or more.6 It is unlikely that you will be hanged for taking a wild animal such as a rabbit; but, even so, you will get a fine amounting to three times the value of the animal as well as three months in prison, and you will have to enter into a bond to guarantee your good behaviour in the future. A second offence will be treated more harshly. If a gamekeeper attacks you and you defend yourself, you can be charged with assault. You may find yourself on the gallows if you injure him.

  If you want to know which years are good times to visit and which years to avoid, the following is a guide to the extremes. The years of greatest plenty – i.e. those when the price of grain is 20 per cent or more below the average – are 1564, 1566, 1569–71, 1583–4, 1587–8, 1592–3 and 1602, the very best being 1592 and 1593 when grain prices are just 56 per cent and 65 per cent of the average. So much grain is produced in 1592 that Francis Bacon proudly declares that England can now afford to feed other nations as well as her own people.7 It is an unfortunate remark, for it is very soon followed by a great dearth. The harvest of 1594 is poor, that of 1595 is worse, and the following year worse still: wheat hits 170 per cent of its normal price, oats reach a level of 191 per cent and rye has to be imported from Denmark.8 Other bad years – when the price of grain is 20 per cent or more above the rolling average – are 1573, 1586 and 1600. The year 1590 is almost as bad, made worse by the high cost of livestock. Prices for animal products hit new heights and never really diminish.9

  In such circumstances, storage of food is most important. The principal rule is to have separate places for different types of commodity: dry things can be kept in a pantry with bread and dry linen; wet things are normally stored in the buttery. Wine and meat must be kept apart, and cellars should be avoided on account of their dampness. Meat should be seethed in summer to keep it fresh, then kept in a cool cellar soaked in vinegar with juniper seeds and salt.10 Most yeomen will have vats and presses for making cheeses – a valuable source of protein in the long winter season. Similarly, most livestock owners have troughs for salting meat or allowing it to steep in brine. William Horman has some further advice for keeping meat. ‘The place that the meat should be kept in store should be very cold and dry and out of the way of the sun, lest such places wax filthy and foisty,’ he writes, adding that ‘the vessels that serve to keep meat in store should be of earth or glass and not great but rather many and little, clean or well pitched’.

  Keeping fruit throughout the year requires special effort. Soft fruit – gooseberries, cherries, damsons, plums and quinces – can be preserved in a jam. However, most methods call for a lot of sugar, which is expensive. A recipe for preserving quinces begins: ‘take 4lb of quinces and 4lb of sugar, a quart of fair [rose] water and let it boil once up and have four whites of new laid eggs and one of the shells, and beat them very well for the space of half an hour’.11 Oranges and lemons are imported in large quantities – £1,756-worth of them enter the port of London in 1559 – and cookbooks include methods of preserving them in the form of marmalade; but again the processes require a lot of sugar. In London you can buy ready-made marmalade imported from the Continent, as well as dates and figs; but these are for the tables of the wealthy. For the vast majority of yeomen in the country, it is vitally important to store hard fruit through the whole year. To do this, select faultless apples and pears without a bruise or other mark, and leave a length of stalk on them. Place them carefully in your fruit house or ‘hoard house’ on clean dry straw, make sure they are not touching each other and turn them very carefully every month to avoid them collecting moisture. And, most important, keep the door to the fruit house shut, ‘lest children make havoc there’.12

  Harvest time and fruit-picking impose one form of seasonality. Another is entirely artificial. The medieval Church used to restrict the eating of meat on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, as well as in Advent and Lent and on the vigils of certain saints’ feast days. In 1549 Edward VI re-establishes Fridays and Saturdays as non-meat days, as well as Lent and other religious feasts. In 1563 Elizabeth’s government imposes fasting on Wednesdays too, including a prohibition on slaughtering animals. There is an important diffe
rence compared to pre-Reformation times, however: avoidance of meat is no longer a religious observance but secular law. The purpose of fasting on Wednesdays is specifically to encourage the eating of fish, to support the fishing industry. People therefore respond differently. Some households uphold the old religious fasts during Advent and Lent, as if they are still observing the religious law; others ignore Advent, but observe the Lenten fast. Others still ignore Wednesdays and just fast on Fridays and Saturdays.13 But be careful if you adopt a partial regime: heavy fines are levied for eating meat on non-meat days. The standard fine is £3 or three months imprisonment, but in 1561 a London butcher slaughtering three oxen in Lent is fined £20.14 Fines can be levied on the head of a household for every single member who breaks the fast, so if you have lots of servants, make sure they all obey the law.

  If you are really determined to eat meat all week, it is possible to buy a licence to do so. It will cost you £1 6s 8d if you are a lord or a lady, 13s 4d if you are a knight or his wife and 6s 8d if you are anyone else. Even these licences do not allow you to eat beef or veal between Michaelmas and 1 May.15 There is some respite at the end of the reign: the law against eating meat on Wednesdays is repealed in 1585. At the same time there is a general slackening of fish eating and an increase in the consumption of meat. By the 1590s most wealthy households have dropped the strict Lenten fast and replaced it with a reduced-meat diet. In 1593 the government bows to the inevitable and reduces the punitive £3 fine to £1. Now many households begin to eat meat in Lent and on Fridays and Saturdays, if the head of the household wishes to do so, even though it is still technically against the law.

  Elizabethan people also consider their health when choosing what to eat. ‘I eat rye bread not for niggardliness but for a point of physic,’ declares William Horman. This is unsurprising: we do much the same in the modern world. But our ideas about healthy food are very different from Elizabethan ones. For example, while we make use of sage in our cooking on account of its taste, Elizabethans use it because it is thought to sharpen the brain. Sir Thomas Elyot is worth listening to on this subject. Although a layman and not a physician, his book, The Castel of Health, proves hugely influential – it goes into its sixteenth edition in 1595. He declares that mutton is the most wholesome meat you can eat and that fish is not so good because it thins the blood. He also thinks that spices and vegetables are bad for you. He admits that fresh fruit was once a staple of mankind in the Garden of Eden, but suggests that our bodies have changed since those days; now ‘all fruits are noyful to man and do engender ill humours’.16 His contemporary, the physician Andrew Boorde, is also sceptical about the value of fresh fruit. He recounts how he once went on a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela and urged his fellow pilgrims not to drink the local water or eat the fruit. They ignored him – and as a result they all died. You can hardly blame him for concluding that a diet consisting exclusively of meat and beer is better for you than one that includes fruit and water.17

  Perhaps the most misguided English attitude is that towards the tomato. This is discovered in the New World and is soon cultivated and eaten in Spain and Italy. Yet in England the smell of the plant is thought to be ‘rank and stinking’ and tomatoes are therefore avoided. John Gerard, who grows them, declares in his Herbal (1597) that ‘they yield very little nourishment to the body’. Hence they are cultivated only for their red beauty, and after being shown off they are thrown away or fed to pigs.18

  Mealtimes

  When do you eat in Elizabethan England? You will be glad to know that a great revolution in the English diet has taken place: breakfast has arrived! In medieval times almost no one ate breakfast, and many Elizabethan medical writers still maintain that it is bad for you, being necessary only for workers and travellers. But now most people eat breakfast: the rich, the not-so-rich – even schoolboys.19 ‘To rise early is not the best chance but to breakfast is the surest thing,’ declares Claudius Hollyband.20

  What you eat for breakfast varies a little. Robert Laneham, a gentleman servant, has just a manchet – a small round loaf made with the finest white flour. Less-important servants receive a cheat bread – a white loaf of lower quality. The third quality is brown bread, which still contains all the bran. Schoolboys eat brown bread with a little butter and some fruit. Bread and butter is said to be the countryman’s breakfast; while bread, butter and sage is the breakfast of choice for a number of gentlemen (especially those anxious to sharpen their brains).21 You might also drink small beer with your buttered bread and sage, or watered-down wine. Breakfast at Wollaton Hall consists of bread, ale and a sweet omelette (eggs, butter, sugar and currants).22 Few people eat meat at breakfast. The earl and countess of Northumberland are served each morning with ‘a loaf of bread cut into trenchers, a couple of manchets, two pints of beer, two pints of wine, two pieces of salt fish, six baked herring, and four white [pickled] herring or a dish of sprats’. On meat days the fish is replaced with a chine of boiled beef or mutton.23 You can’t help but notice the quantities of alcohol: a pint of beer and a pint of wine each morning should set you up for the day quite nicely.

  The time for your next meal depends on who and where you are. Noblemen, gentlemen and scholars eat dinner at 11 a.m., in the old medieval tradition. This is the main meal of the day. They follow this with supper, a much smaller meal at about 5 p.m. Londoners and merchants eat about an hour later, having their dinner at 12 noon and supper at about 6 p.m. Sir William Holles is thought to be most peculiar, waiting until 1 p.m. for his dinner at Houghton in Nottinghamshire.24 Sir John Harington is even more eccentric, advocating that gentlemen should not have a specified time for their meals, but should eat at differing times. He also controversially suggests that, for health reasons, you should eat more at supper than at dinner. He is not alone in thinking this: William Vaughan agrees in his 1602 treatise that supper should be the main meal of the day, to be eaten seven hours after dinner.25 But it remains a minority opinion.

  Obviously special occasions alter these routines. It is customary for all the wedding guests to be invited to breakfast before the ceremony, so many have had a good tipple before they go to church; they then rush to the inn afterwards to partake of the beef and mustard, frumenty (wheat and spices boiled in milk) and mince pies traditionally served at the wedding feast. Similarly after a funeral it is customary to hold a ‘drinking’. Be prepared to imbibe large quantities of wine or beer – and to write off the rest of the day – if someone invites you to such a sorrow-drowning occasion.

  Food in a Wealthy Household

  Food is like clothing in that it is an opportunity for the wealthy to show off, reminding everyone of their social status. Long before you even taste a morsel in a large house you will observe the clean diamond-patterned linen tablecloths and the similar high-quality napkins folded into elaborate shapes. In some houses you will see silverware to the value of £1,000 or more – plates, saucers, dishes, bowls, flagons, knives, spoons, salts, even eggcups. You will find that great attention is paid to the order of precedence: seating plans are not designed for people to enjoy their neighbour’s company but in accordance with social hierarchy. If you are a gentleman (or your husband is), the pair of you may well be seated in the great chamber with the head of the household. If you are lower in the pecking order, you will eat in the hall.

  Cooks in wealthy households are for the most part ‘musical-headed Frenchmen’, or so William Harrison declares. As for the food they prepare, you will be astonished by the variety and quantity of meat. On every meat day the kitchens prepare dishes of beef, veal, mutton, lamb, pork, chicken, geese, rabbits and pigeons. And those are just the basic meats. All sorts of rare birds that you have probably never considered eating may appear before you – stewed, poached, boiled, baked and roasted. If a rich man is trying to impress you he may serve teal, snipe and curlew. He will give you venison because of its prestige value: it cannot normally be bought or sold, only hunted by the wealthy. If it is a fish day you may be served stur
geon, porpoise or seal. One recipe begins: ‘take your porpoise or seal and parboil it, seasoning it with pepper and salt, and bake it’.26 Another form of ostentation lies in the number of servants bringing food to the table: fifteen servants wait on the Willoughby family at Wollaton. In an earl’s house you can expect to see even more servants process in, all carrying silver plates.

  Before we look at the full range of food on the menu, it is important to give a caveat: you should not assume that every meal is a gut-busting indulgence. Some rich men eat frugally: Mr Percival Willoughby (Sir Francis’s son-in-law) has been known to sit down with a couple of servants and consume just a quarter of mutton (a quarter of the sheep, that is, at 16d), a piece of beef (8d) and bread and butter (12d) in a light supper.27 However, most meals are much more extravagant. A formal dinner at Wollaton will start in the late morning and go on for at least two hours.

  If Sir Francis invites you to dinner, remember to wash your hands before the meal. The old style is for a ewerer to pour water for you, but these days it is more common for a basin to be provided for all to dip their hands in. Having washed your hands, dry them on the towel provided and take your place. If there is a clergyman present he will say grace; if not, another man will be appointed. It need not be an extensive thanksgiving; most men have a short rhyme prepared for such a duty, such as:

  O Lord which givest thy creatures for our food

  Herbs, beasts, birds, fish and other gifts of thine,

  Bless these thy gifts, that they may do us good,

  And we may live to praise thy name divine.

  And when the time has come this life to end

  Vouchsafe our souls to Heaven may ascend.28

  You will have a silver or pewter plate laid out on the table in front of you, together with a cup, spoon and loaf of bread. In front of the master of the household will be the salt – an elaborate silver or gold vessel – and a pepper box. Use your own knife unless one has been provided from a household set. Do not expect to see a fork: eating with a knife and fork is an Italian custom generally regarded in England as foppish. Young men who want to advertise the fact that they have been on the Grand Tour occasionally insist on using a fork, much to the annoyance of their hosts. Court ladies also sometimes eat with one. Lady Ri-Melaine, at a dinner in her own house, orders that a knife, spoon and fork are set at every place; but normally forks are only used for fruit and sweetmeats.29