Food and Identity in England, 1540–1640: Eating to Impress 9781472514431, 9781474210669, 9781472510655

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
Preface
Acknowledgements
General Notes
Part One: Approaches
Introduction
Literature on food history
‘Sorts’ of people in England, 1540–1640
Sources and methods
1. Food and Identity
Food symbolism – luxury and necessity
Food symbolism – sociability
Part Two: Social Groups
2. The ‘Meaner Sort’ and Their Diets
Labourers and the poor
Household servants
3. The Middling Sort and Their Diets
Wealthy yeomen
Urban ‘professionals’ and artisans
4. The Diet of the Gentry
Staple foods
High quality and high-priced variants of staple foods
Exclusive foods and foods used sparingly
Part Three: Social Relations
5. Special Foods and Their Preparation
Special foods
Recipes and ready-made foods
Fake luxuries
6. Interactions
Gift s and hospitality
Special occasions
Critiques of feasting
Conclusion: Eating to Impress
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Food and Identity in England, 1540–1640

Cultures of Early Modern Europe Series Editors: Brian Cowan, Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Early Modern British History, McGill University, and Beat Kümin, Professor of Early Modern European History, University of Warwick Editorial Board: Adam Fox, University of Edinburgh, UK Robert Frost, University of Aberdeen, UK Molly Greene, Princeton University, USA Francisca Loetz, University of Zurich, Switzerland Ben Schmidt, University of Washington, USA Gerd Schwerhoff, University of Dresden, Germany Francsesca Trivellato, Yale University, USA The ‘cultural turn’ in the humanities has generated a wealth of new research topics and approaches. Focusing on the ways in which representations, perceptions and negotiations shaped people’s lived experiences, the books in this series provide fascinating insights into the past. The series covers early modern culture in its broadest sense, inclusive of (but not restricted to) themes such as gender, identity, communities, mentalities, emotions, communication, ritual, space, food and drink, and material culture. Forthcoming: The Birth of the British Kitchen, 1600–1850, Sara Pennell (2015) Vagrancy in English Culture and Society, 1650–1750, David Hitchcock (2016)

Food and Identity in England, 1540–1640 Eating to Impress Paul S. Lloyd

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 Paperback edition first published 2016 © Paul S. Lloyd, 2015 Paul S. Lloyd has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4725-1443-1 PB: 978-1-350-00204-3 ePDF: 978-1-4725-1065-5 ePub: 978-1-4725-1227-7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lloyd, Paul S. Food and identity in England, 1540-1640 : eating to impress / Paul S. Lloyd. pages cm. – (Cultures of early modern Europe) 1. Food habits–England–History. 2. Diet–England–History. 3. England–Social conditions. I. Title. GT2853.G7L56 2015 394.1’20942–dc23 2014035229 Series: Cultures of Early Modern Europe Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printed and bound in Great Britain

To Pam

Contents List of Figures List of Tables Preface Acknowledgements General Notes Part One

Food and Identity Food symbolism – luxury and necessity Food symbolism – sociability

Part Two 2

3

4

x xi xii xiii

Approaches

Introduction Literature on food history ‘Sorts’ of people in England, 1540–1640 Sources and methods 1

ix

3 6 10 15 23 23 30

Social Groups

The ‘Meaner Sort’ and Their Diets Labourers and the poor Household servants

37

The Middling Sort and Their Diets Wealthy yeomen Urban ‘professionals’ and artisans

59

The Diet of the Gentry Staple foods High quality and high-priced variants of staple foods Exclusive foods and foods used sparingly

75

37 49

59 63

76 81 86

viii

Contents

Part Three 5

Social Relations

Special Foods and Their Preparation Special foods Recipes and ready-made foods Fake luxuries

105

Interactions Gifts and hospitality Special occasions Critiques of feasting

141

Conclusion: Eating to Impress

177

Notes Bibliography Index

182

6

106 128 137

141 152 171

219 239

List of Figures 4.1 Long-term movements in egg prices in London and the Midlands between 1544 and 1639 4.2 Typical prices of some of the more popular wild birds purchased by six households between 1552 and 1640 4.3 Composition of aquatic food consumed by the Reynell household in 1628 5.1 A comparison between the monthly fruit and spice purchases of the Newdigates in 1640 and those of the Reynells in 1629 6.1 Average monthly prices of rabbits at Forde in 1629 and at Arbury in 1638 6.2 Trends in the weekly purchasing of rabbits at three households between 1628 and 1639 6.3 A comparison between the monthly purchases of offal made by the Reynell household in 1628 and 1631 6.4 Monthly purchasing patterns of vegetables at Arbury in 1639 and 1640

85 93 97 123 156 157 159 160

List of Tables I.1 Two typical layouts of seventeenth-century household accounts 4.1 Prices paid for offal products by five households between 1601 and 1640 4.2 Prices paid for poultry by seven households between 1549 and 1640 4.3 Prices of aquatic food purchased by the Cecil household in 1634 and 1635 4.4 Prices of fish and other seafood purchased by the Reynells in South Devon between 1627 and 1629 4.5 Reynell’s food purchases during 1629 5.1 Relative cost of spices to a skilled labourer in real terms in 1439 and in 1639 5.2 Prices paid for fruit at Sir Richard Newdigate’s Arbury estate in Warwickshire during 1639 5.3 Prices of dried fruit and spices and the overall value of their purchases at Arbury in 1640 5.4 The prices and value of spices bought by the Reynells between 1628 and 1631 5.5 Percentages of recipes containing spices in cookery books published between 1638 and 1655 6.1 Relationship between spices bought at Christmas and those bought during the rest of the year by the Reynells

16 88 90 96 96 100 120 122 122 125 132 162

Preface The period between Henry VIII’s Reformation of the Church and the first English Civil War witnessed unprecedented demographic growth and an escalation in economic and social polarization. On the one hand, there was a decline in the living standards of manual workers as wage rises failed to keep up with price inflation and on the other, there was an increase in prosperity among successful merchants, urban businesspeople and large-scale farmers who were becoming wealthier by taking advantage of a growing market economy. This book argues that this dramatic social polarization, and attitudes relating to ‘class’ and identity, was reflected in the changing symbolic meaning of food and food consumption practices in England between 1540 and 1640. It considers not only the diets of labourers and household servants, of middling-status people and of the gentry but also the types of food that contemporaries deemed appropriate for these ‘sorts’ of people. In analysing the role of food as a social and cultural identity marker, and as a tool for shaping relationships, this book also examines the gifting of foods, hospitality at special occasions and criticisms of feasting. It shows that the communicative role of food was a matter of significant import four centuries ago and that while the luxurious consumption of the gentry and well-to-do middling sort increased in scope, the foods deemed fit for manual workers – who had a keener sense of luxury and a broader dietary range than has hitherto been supposed – hardly changed at all.

Acknowledgements The research and subsequent writing of this book was made possible, thanks to the help, encouragement and support of many people. I would like to thank the series editors Brian Cowan and Beat Kümin and the anonymous reviewer for reading and commenting on drafts for this book. I would also like to thank David Gentilcore, Christopher Dyer and my university colleagues for their much valued suggestions. The help I received from staff at the Bodleian Library, the Wellcome Library, the British Library, the university libraries of Warwick, Leicester and Nottingham, the Dorset Museum in Dorchester and the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington and the record offices in Coventry, Exeter, Maidstone, Northampton, Stratford upon Avon and Warwick is also much appreciated. Finally, I would like to thank the staff at Bloomsbury for their efficient, helpful and friendly service.

General Notes Abbreviations CKS CHC CUP FB MB OUP SBRO WCRO

Centre for Kentish Studies, Maidstone Coventry History Centre, Coventry Cambridge University Press Farming book Memorandum book Oxford University Press The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Record Office, Stratford upon Avon Warwickshire County Record Office, Warwick

Currency, Weights and Measures Currency 1d = one penny 1s = one shilling (12d) £1 = one pound (20s or 240d) Thus, in post-decimalization values, 1d = 0.4p and 1s (or 12d) = 5p

Weights Meat and butter 1oz = one ounce (approx. 28 grams) 1lb = one pound (16 oz, or approx. 0.45 kilograms) 1st = one stone (recently 14lb or 6.35 kilograms*) * As a stone varied in weight depending on location, all weights, unless otherwise stated, are expressed in pounds and ounces.

xiv

General Notes

Volumes 1pt = one pint (approx. 0.57 litres) 1qt = one quart (2 pints) 1 gal = one gallon (8 pints or 4.546 litres)

Dates In instances where the Julian calendar was still in use (with the year starting on 25 March), any date between 1 January and 24 March has been written with the old year in full, followed by the new year in brackets. Thus, 16 February 1636 appears as 16 February 1635(6).

Part One

Approaches

Introduction

Mean mens palates are best pleased with fare rather plentifull then various, solid then dainty. Dainties will cost more, and content lesse, to those that are not Criticall enough to distinguish them.1 Stereotypical views relating to ‘class’ were expressed in many early modern writings. While sumptuary regulations conveyed ideas about the clothes one was expected to wear and etiquette guides identified the manners of different ‘sorts’ of people, some Acts of Privy Council and Royal Proclamations associated beggars, the poor and manual workers with crime, bad behaviour and even the spread of diseases. But as the above comment taken from a sermon written by clergyman Thomas Fuller shows, typecasting people was also facilitated by their perceived foodways. Much has been written about historical food practices, and the topic’s treatment by the media demonstrates that it has become increasingly popular with the general public. While the literary review below shows that scholars of early modern history have approached food production, supply and consumption from many angles, there clearly was scope for an in-depth enquiry into food and identity. Thus the focus of this book is people’s projection and reception of images about themselves and others based on what and how they ate during a turbulent period that witnessed many changes. One great change revolved around the Reformation of the Church when confessional divides opened up in England. Religious identity was an important issue to some people and particularly so from the mid-sixteenth century when scepticism of the policies of religious conservatives became more pronounced than ever before. This aspect of ecclesiastical history has increasingly been addressed by scholars of the English Reformation. In 1982, Christopher Haigh noted that the emphasis of scholarly study was shifting from predominantly political issues relating to

4

Food and Identity in England, 1540–1640

religious change, towards explaining the enforcement of rules and ‘popular acceptance of new ideas’.2 Six years later, Patrick Collinson showed that the formation and embracement of Protestant culture are complex issues for the historian to grapple with and that the adoption of Protestantism was gradual and geographically uneven.3 Undeterred by the challenge, Norman Jones and Peter Marshall have since then analysed the religious policies of Elizabeth I and the extent to which individuals and communities refashioned their lives during the Reformation period, and they have considered religious identities during the reign of Henry VIII, respectively.4 A recent study by Collinson has analysed in great detail the writings of the Archbishop Richard Bancroft who was renowned for producing the official Bible and critiquing the more extreme element of godly reformers known as Puritans. This language has been the topic of much recent debate and in The Naming of Protestant England, Marshall considers the descriptive religious terms used by contemporaries – like ‘protestant’, ‘papist’ and ‘puritan’ and notes the unease that some historians seem to feel when using them.5 To be sure, descriptive accuracy can be problematic in view of the nuanced characteristics of post-Reformation religious groups and the considerable overlap between their beliefs and teachings. Even back in 1975, John Bossy considered how confession of sins survived the Reformation, and in a presentation at the University of Leicester in 2014, Bill Sheils noted that boundaries between groups were often less marked than sometimes imagined.6 Like Marshall, Sheils addresses the problem of terminology and says that words like godly, recusant, dissenters, non-conformists and papists became accepted labels. Discussing four areas of England, Sheils offered comparative examples that tend to suggest not only that relationships between Catholics and Protestants varied from area to area but also that even within a parish church whose minister was a Puritan, there could be disputes among Puritans on ideological issues. In Chapters 4 and 6, I produce evidence to show that although Catholic and Protestant churches were forwarding different ideas about feasting and fasting, expression of religious identity through foodways could assume nuanced characteristics. Religious guidelines with regard to abstinence, reinforced by governmental orders instructing people to abstain from luxurious consumption at specific times, could be circumvented as some of the elite prioritized social differentiation. As we will see, not everyone was favourably impressed by proclamations and sermons telling them what to eat and what not to; butchers were warned about the consequences of ignoring

Introduction

5

orders prohibiting them from selling meat on certain days, and ingenious ways in which to consume luxuriously while nodding in the direction of abstinence were found. Another change relates to the growing number of Royal Proclamations and Acts of Privy Council being issued. This is indicative of the increased state control during the period that historians such as Mike Braddick and Steve Hindle have discussed. The state was ‘coming to prominence’ in this century, and its development was driven in part by ‘class’ interests, policed at parish level and enforced through the legal system.7 Sociability was an important element in this state formation, and communal relationships at and between centre and periphery has been a topic that has attracted much debate recently.8 Enforcement of acceptable kinds of sociability can be seen in relevant regulations. These ranged from attempts to control behaviour in alehouses and preventing tippling to attempts to restrain ‘riotous consumption’ during times of dearth.9 These are discussed in Chapter 6. Interaction between large communities and the smaller ones that they encompassed, debated by Alex Shepard and Phil Withington, was bound to impact on bonding and a growing sense of national identity.10 And with regard to foodways, an element of tension between Englishness in cooking and a growing fondness for French and Italian cuisine can be discerned as the adoption of continental fashions was reflected in cookery books of the period. While Brian Cowan has recently discussed tensions that existed between conflicting desires to maintain traditional eating habits and impulses to modernize and expand cultural horizons, I offer some English examples in Chapter 5.11 The period between the Reformation and the Civil Wars was also a time of increasing stratification between rich and poor. This was a result of substantial demographic growth. The size of England’s population almost doubled between 1540 and 1640 and with the subsequent pressure on land resources that forced the pace of agrarian change and rising rents, causing long-term price inflation, economic and social polarization of society gathered momentum at a hitherto unprecedented rate. While wages rose at a modest pace, as data collected and analysed by Donald Woodward and Steve Rappaport shows, living standards of labourers declined as earnings failed to keep up with rising prices.12 At the same time, there was an increase in prosperity among successful merchants, urban professionals and large-scale farmers as they became wealthier by taking advantage of a growing market economy. Against this backdrop, I consider the changing symbolic meaning of foods and food practices during the period

6

Food and Identity in England, 1540–1640

between Henry VIII’s Reformation of the Church and the Civil War that culminated in the execution of Charles I. I offer examples of middling-sort people adopting the consumption practices of the nobility and of their council and national government representatives attempting to regulate the foodways of manual workers and the poor. This book is divided into three parts. Part One considers the symbolic meaning of food consumption in a broad way, assessing the meaning of luxury and necessity in relation to identity construction and then considering food symbolism through the prism of sociability. Part Two reveals the foodways of a broad range of people. Having analysed many historical sources, including under-researched archival material, I have divided early modern society into three broad groups. I reveal in turn the eating habits of manual labourers and household servants; the foods consumed by urban professionals, artisans and wealthy country yeomen; and the varied diets enjoyed by the gentry and nobility. In order to assess the symbolic meaning of food in greater detail, Part Three considers special foods and their preparation and then analyses food supply and consumption through the prism of sociability – including gifting and feasting. A recent scholarly work has highlighted food’s modern cultural and communicative roles by hypothesizing that, in these hi-tech days, consumption is no longer viewed merely as a means of survival.13 Despite the revelation of Cramer, Greene and Walters, however, it will become clear that the projection of one’s identity through the medium of foodways is not at all a modern concept. All sorts of foods and drinks carried symbolic meanings four centuries ago, for at that time, as is the case today, there was a palpable link between ideas relating to social and cultural distinction and the foods that ‘sorts’ of people ate and expected others to eat. I will show conclusively that this link was communicated effectively and unequivocally.

Literature on food history As the emphasis of historical study shifted away from the conservatism of privileging the elite and towards taking more seriously the roles of middling and lower status people, historians of the early modern period have in recent times become more specialized in their approach to economic, social and cultural issues. Following on from Christian socialist scholars like R. H. Tawney, and later from more radical ones like E. P. Thompson and Christopher Hill whose left-wing analyses of the past events tended to prevail

Introduction

7

in the mid- to late-twentieth century,14 many historians have re-examined the complex cocktails of human relationships. This has resulted in highly developed historical analyses that view social and cultural relationships from an increasing number of angles. Lawrence Stone and Peter Laslett in the 1970s and 1980s produced many groundbreaking studies, including works on societal and family relationships, but these have been refined further.15 Keith Wrightson and others who have followed this trend – such as Alexandra Shepard, Phil Withington, Adam Fox and Andy Wood who have studied and fine-tuned our understanding of gender relations, relations between state and parish, literacy and print and conflict and rebellion, respectively – have taken early modern history to a whole new level.16 Thanks to the work of these and many other present-day scholars, the breadth and depth of issues examined has increased significantly, and one crucial topic – a child of the longer tradition of social and economic history – is food history. As an integral part of economics, consumption has never been far from the centre of debate by economic historians. Food, however, although an important commodity in defining consumption patterns, has perhaps surprisingly developed relatively recently as a field of study – even though sporadic but important works emerged half a century ago. While this rich seam of information is increasingly tapped, the treatment of food by historians has diversified as its potential to enhance economic, social, cultural and political knowledge has become more widely accepted. The dietary nutritional aspect of writers such as Jack Drummond, while still currently being pursued by scholars of history in a more refined way – like the 2006 work on medieval food edited by Chris Woolgar, Dale Serjeantson and Tony Waldron, or Craig Muldrew’s 2011 book on the nutrition aspect of the foods of agricultural labourers – has been joined by other approaches.17 In the 1970s and 1980s, the growing interest in food history resulted in the publication of general works covering a broad chronological span; these included books written by C. Anne Wilson and Reay Tannahill.18 Then, during the 1980s and 1990s, the developing interest in social history spawned studies such as those by early-modernists John Walter and Andrew Appleby and classicist Peter Garnsey, in which famine, food supply management and its implications for society were investigated.19 Economic historians focusing on industrial and agricultural change in order to identify cause and effect in the dynamics of living standards, and other historians looking at consumption patterns more generally, have been joined by anthropologists like Sidney Mintz who recognize that food practices

8

Food and Identity in England, 1540–1640

are important indicators of societal change.20 The study of food history has now expanded further. In addition to the growing number of books and articles in general periodicals covering, for example, the religious significance foodways, drinking and sociability in public houses and food-related material culture – the latter two topics most notably being discussed by Beat Kümin and Sara Pennell, respectively – specialist journals have now emerged in order to accommodate the growing discipline of food history.21 The current emphasis of the historical study of food is cultural – including the symbolic meaning of consumption practices to groups or ‘categories’ of people. Although anthropologists like Mary Douglas and Jack Goody utilized this approach in the 1970s and early 1980s, it has now emerged as a distinct category of study in its own right.22 Most recent general works include the Oxford Handbook of Food History and the six-volume set of A Cultural History of Food. The latter includes a collection of essays on food in the early modern age.23 In addition to these, some of the main academic works that I consulted for this book are discussed briefly here. Fifty years ago, Jack Drummond wrote about the history of food and nutrition in England. He drew on a variety of sources ranging from contemporary observations (such as those made by the Venetian ambassador) to accounts of institutions like hospitals. The time-span of five centuries that the author covered did not allow for a variety of determinants that could affect individuals’ diets. Although the broad sweep of his work gave the reader a valuable generic picture – dividing society into clearly defined hierarchical groups and assigning each one its own particular foods – the expression of cultural identity through the medium of food was beyond the scope of his investigation.24 In 1973, C. Anne Wilson’s ground-breaking work on British food and drink also covered a vast time span. Drawing on a wealth of historical sources, she divided her work into sections covering different types of food and discussing the modes and nature of their preparation and consumption. She engages with the issue of social differentiation, but like Drummond’s book, the scope of hers was too broad to consider in detail the symbolic meanings of food.25 Another major and influential work on food consumption is the 1983 book by Stephen Mennell. Covering taste in England and France from medieval times onward, he compares and contrasts the cuisines of the two countries and writes about class influences and urban and rural culture that underpinned them. Although this sociologist suggests that cookery books facilitated the process of social emulation, he notes that guidebooks may not have been followed by their

Introduction

9

owners. It is possible, he argues, that they may have stood for an idealization of values – to identify an individual with a specific group.26 The methodology utilized by Joan Thirsk in her 2007 book on early modern culinary fashions in England includes the analysis of many historical sources such as descriptive books like household accounts and suggestive books like cookery manuals and regimen guides. Dividing the first half of her book into time periods ranging from twenty to fifty years and the second half into food categories, Thirsk’s in-depth account of food consumption acknowledges social differentiation as well as the regional aspect of diet. Despite this, the author has much more to say on the tastes of the well-todo and their increasing interest in exotic fare than she does on the foodways of the relatively less well-off.27 Any discussion connecting consumer choice to identity marking is beyond the scope of her work. While Mark Dawson admirably demonstrates the significance of analysing household accounts in his informative study on the food practices of a gentry family, including its servants, Adam Fox notes that determining the relationship between eating habits and social class is problematic. Despite this, he produces a rather pessimistic view of the fare of the lower ranks of English society.28 My book combines the analysis of a variety of sources in an attempt to take this topic of food and identity in the early modern period to a new level. The eating of foods appropriate to maintaining one’s health is the main theme in Ken Albala’s book Eating Right in the Renaissance. Writing about Europe in general, but with references to England, he uses many suggestive and advisory sources such as cookery books and regimen guidebooks to show that dietary advice for healthful living were influenced by ‘class’ ideology. By the late sixteenth century, specific food, the author asserts, were ‘increasingly invested with social meaning’. At that time, criticism of certain types of food was no longer that they were unwholesome or difficult to digest but that they were ‘considered edible only to a certain class’.29 Robert Appelbaum has also studied cookery books and a variety of literary works in order to assess the meaning of foods to people in early modern times.30 In researching for my book, I have consulted not only suggestive sources like cookery books, dietaries and horticultural books that often emphasized the benefits of eating foods as well as growing them but also many descriptive texts to test the compelling theories of these authors and to consider other reasons for choosing specific foods – where choice was possible. The gifting of foods and the extension of hospitality at special events tells us much about identity construction and projection. These have been the

10

Food and Identity in England, 1540–1640

topics of study by Felicity Heal and Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos. Hospitality in Early Modern England has shown that the nature of hospitality underwent a process of remodelling as ideas of ‘community’ changed along with socioeconomic policy and the pursuit of individualistic lifestyles – at least with the powerful and wealthy.31 This, as David Cressy has also noted, impacted upon social inclusion through the sharing of luxury food. Both Heal, highlighting the gifting of capons and venison, and Ben-Amos have drawn attention to the reshaping of gift-giving and to the circumstances surrounding its role in patterns of exchange in two other recent works.32 The feasting of characters in literary works is discussed also in a collection of essays edited by Joan Fitzpatrick in 2010.33 However, when discussing feasting as a tool for image projection, we should also discuss ways in which identity was expressed at times of religious fasting. Then there is criticism of feasting to consider and the negative response sometimes experienced by gift-givers. Although the latter is an important aspect of human relationships, has been given scant regard by historians up until now. These issues are addressed in Chapter 6, ‘Interactions’. But before we go on to look at my methodology, and then at food symbolism, there is a need to briefly describe the social structure in England following the Reformation, as ‘sorts’ of people form the main structure of this book.

‘Sorts’ of people in England, 1540–1640 Social stratification in early modern England, as Keith Wrightson has noted, was seen as extremely important. Hierarchical structure was thought to promote and stabilize a society in which divisions in wealth, patterns of interaction including duties and obligations, and relative levels of honour and integrity, were essential characteristics of order.34 This called for classification that was based on the perceived relative values of groups of people and of individuals. Thus, in 1577, clergyman and moralistic writer William Harrison wrote: ‘We in England divide our people commonly into four sorts, as gentlemen, citizens or burgesses, yeomen, and artificers or labourers.’35 This division of English society was also commented upon by Thomas Smith, a knight of the realm who was writing from the perspective of a statesman and eminent scholar. Both of these Elizabethan commentators on English life considered stratification to be one of its determining factors. Like Harrison and Smith, I consider here the hierarchical groups within the secular sector of society, for although the ecclesiastical world was similarly stratified, clerical personnel were

Introduction

11

drawn from corresponding ranks in secular society. I have divided them, as many contemporaries did, into three broad tiers: the upper (or better) sort, the middling sort and the lower (or meaner) sort. The upper levels, stated Harrison and Smith, started with the monarch. Below this, and in order of importance, came princes, dukes, marquises, earls, viscounts and barons.36 Although these titles could be created, they could also be hereditary. In the latter case the eldest son of a duke was an earl, an earl’s son was a baron or viscount and the younger sons of the family were ‘but esquires’. These titles were exclusive to male household members; for this reason, and because a household was one inclusive patriarchal unit, the wife took the status of her husband of father.37 These people were known as the ‘greater sort’ of gentlemen and behind them came knights and esquires.38 A knighthood, Harrison noted, was not hereditary – it was a title bestowed upon a man ‘for some great service done’ and could not be passed down from father to son.39 Sir Thomas Smith referred to these people as the minor nobility.40 Apart from their lack of immense wealth that was associated with dukes such as George Villiers whose feasting is discussed in Chapter 6, and to a lesser extent with earls like Sir William Cecil who owned several large properties, another distinguishing feature was that a knighted gentleman could not take a seat in the House of Lords.41 This applied to Sir Richard Newdigate whose food acquisitions figure prominently in this book. This knight eventually received a baronetcy – a title that was yet to come into existence in Harrison’s day. The modern version of this tier of nobility, introduced in 1611 by King James I at least in part to raise much-needed revenue, came between baron and knight. Anyone so bestowed, although wealthy enough to be able to pay cash for honours, could pass the title on to his eldest son; he could not, however, sit in the House of Lords. In theory the amount of wealth and power that families from the upper level of society enjoyed depended on their position within that layer. The higher the family’s social rank, the more subordinates they were likely to have control over. This can be seen by contrasting the number of employees the Earl of Derby had with the number of people who worked for the knight Sir Richard Reynell. The foodways of both of these men’s households are discussed in Chapter 4. A family’s wealth was manifest in many ways: the size and number of houses owned, and the grandeur of their furnishings that are evident in accounts and inventories, were commensurate with, and were identifying features of, social station. Theoretically, clothing could also be an outward sign of hierarchical position; but conspicuous displays of opulence in attire could be, and indeed

12

Food and Identity in England, 1540–1640

were, misleading. In Elizabethan times, the types of clothes, and the materials from which they were made, were officially intended to mark rank. Expectations of the way one was supposed to dress may be seen in sumptuary regulations such as the 1559 Royal Proclamation on dress code.42 In actuality, however, things were different. The monarch’s perceived need to repeat over and again sumptuary requirements suggests strongly that these rules were frequently being ignored. Comments made by contemporaries like Cornish gentleman and antiquary Richard Carew and clergyman William Harrison prove this view; the latter’s lamenting about the fashionable modes of dress in his time reveals that clothing was a dubious indicator of rank.43 As we will see, manners and demeanour could help one distinguish between different sorts of people who consumed similarly; but this was not foolproof. So how could one distinguish a gentleperson? He or she was someone who was accepted as such within his community – it was a question of reputation, honour and esteem.44 Smith states that gentlemen showed love to their tenants and neighbours, and that they were well educated.45 A gentleman’s perceived function, Laurence Stone has noted, was to rule over others while demonstrating a duty of care in return for obedience and deference.46 The middle level of society consisted of those Harrison described as citizens and burgesses. These include ‘those that are free within the city’ and who were of sufficient substance to bear office, and merchants. Because of their statuses and income, Keith Wrightson places wealthy townsmen and wealthy rural yeomen in the same bracket.47 Merchants were of a similar standing to gentlemen in the eyes of Harrison. They could ‘change estate’ with them ‘by a mutual conversion of one into the other’. Economic mobility, and to a lesser extent social mobility, could be a reality in early modern England; as a successful city merchant could become wealthier than a country gentleman, and could display his wealth through land ownership and attire, clearly defined boundaries separating these groups were difficult to discern. Lawyers were also at this level of English society; however, it should be noted that hierarchical levels existed within these middling groups. Indeed while some lawyers, like some merchants, struggled to become prosperous, others were members of the nobility and gentry.48 The foodways of some of these people are discussed in the chapters ahead. Yeomen, in contrast to many urban merchants, generally made their living in rural areas. Harrison located these men in the third of his four tiers of society. They did, he said, have a ‘pre-eminence’ and are of ‘more estimation than labourers and the more common sort of artificers’.49 The

Introduction

13

size of their estates, their success and their capital assets varied considerably, and although some were little better off than husbandmen, others both lived like and described themselves as gentlemen. This self-image of gentility may stem from the fact that the legal definition of ‘yeoman’ applied to a forty shilling freeholder (even though he worked the land and, in practice, could be a tenant).50 There was social and economic mobility between unsuccessful yeomen and husbandmen and between successful yeomen and rural gentlemen. Harrison recognized this and stated that they can and do buy land from ‘unthrifty gentlemen’ and can ‘live without labour[ing]’. Apparently, some were wealthy enough to be able to send their sons to university, and leave them enough money to become gentlemen.51 The yeomen whose food practices are discussed in this book were of the well-to-do variety, and as they were at least as prosperous as many merchants they are included in the chapter entitled ‘The Middling Sort and Their Diets’. Husbandmen, who typically were small-scale tenant farmers, were located by Harrison in the lowest level of society. Because this writer’s concern was mainly with the head and vital organs of the ‘body politic’ – the monarch and the gentry – the overwhelming majority of the population who laboured for a living are afforded a few dismissive, even downright hostile lines. In addition to husbandmen, Harrison’s lowest level of society included retailers operating from rented accommodation, artificers or artisans, day labourers, and copyholders who rented smallholdings. The common denominator here was that they owned little if any land and therefore held no substantial authority over others. Their function within the commonwealth was ‘to be ruled over and not to rule others’. These ‘lower sort’ people were, however, sometimes made churchwardens and constables – positions of limited power.52 While Thomas Smith describes some artificers and retailers by their trades – such as shoemakers, tailors and builders, Harrison is less specific.53 But whatever their trades were, Harrison, as we shall see later, thought that on the basis of their consumption patterns, it could sometimes be difficult to distinguish them from gentlemen. Henry French has discussed the problems of nailing down collective identity as contemporaries saw it, and in a study of eighteenth-century Colchester Shani D’Cruze has noted that traders’ actual levels of economic success were clearly variable – depending as they did on factors such as trading conditions and workers’ ability to meet customers’ expectations.54 For this reason I depart from Harrison’s social structure insofar as it relates to artisans and husbandmen, and I include them as a lower group within the ‘middling sort’.

14

Food and Identity in England, 1540–1640

The lowest tier of society according to Harrison also included unskilled labourers, low-level domestic servants and vagrants. These people, Harrison claimed, include ‘our great swarms of idle servingmen’ who are ‘profitable to none’ and are ‘enemies to their masters, their friends and themselves’. This obdurate clergyman thought that such people could be difficult to identify as members of the meaner sort because they sometimes ‘bear an high sail’. But all was not lost in terms of social identity; their mannerisms, apparently, gave them away.55 So how might labourers obtain the wherewithal to disguise their lowly social position? Although the wage rates of skilled and unskilled labourers are often recorded, their overall income is difficult to establish. In Chapter 2, we will see that while uncertainties with regard to employment made some labourers vulnerable, having two or more jobs and pooling household incomes may have impacted upon consumption in a positive way.56 Household servants who received board-wages were less vulnerable than day labourers economically, but they were dependent on the goodwill of their masters and mistresses. The foods that they ate, depending on their status, were sometimes of better quality and more varied than the foods eaten by many unskilled labourers; and although household servants were subject to status-marking limitations, those who resided at the manor house were, for the time they were there, protected against market price fluctuations. Barry Coward has noted that the wages paid to the servants of the Earls of Derby formed ‘only a negligible fraction of their overall income’. As the Stanleys were typical employers in this respect, clothing, lodging and other allowances need to be considered in order to arrive at standards of living.57 The recommended daily wage rates proclaimed for labourers practicing diverse trades in various counties are well documented.58 But for reference here, typical rates of pay in the closing years of the sixteenth century were around 9d for skilled male workers and 7d for those who were unskilled. Women were supposed to be paid around 1d to 2d less. In 1588 and 1599, foot soldiers were paid at the rate of 8d per day, and at around the same time horsemen and lieutenants received 12d while a captain’s pay was 4s.59 At that time, male and female employees of William Honnywell, a wealthy Devonshire farmer, were paid 12d and 7d per day, respectively.60 These wages were similar to those received by the employees of Sir Richard Reynell, Sir Edward Radcliffe and Sir Richard Newdigate in the early to mid-1600s. I will show that their remuneration typically ranged from between 6d and 12d plus two meals per day. This included copious quantities of cheap beer, which was the staple beverage

Introduction

15

of many English labourers at a time when water filtration and the introduction of tea and coffee lay in the future. Although the incomes of labourers and lowlevel servants may have exceeded a single wage, this overview of remuneration rates should provide a useful guide in subsequent discussions about their food consumption. In Chapter 2, I reveal the type and quantity of food that typical incomes could buy for manual workers. To Harrison, these people collectively formed the lowest stratum in England’s hierarchical order. Comments made by him and other writers show that early modern English society was indeed deeply stratified; but it was also a society in which people inhabited many intersecting communal spheres. People were continually interacting, shaping their identities to accommodate particular circumstances and sometimes moving vertically from one social station to another. It will become clear to my readers that food consumption four centuries ago was as symbolic as it was functional. Like any other method of expressing oneself, eating enabled people to cultivate ‘self and otherness’ mentalities.

Sources and methods As this study sits at the confluence of many topical debates, a complex methodology was required and I therefore consulted and analysed several different types of sources. These are: household accounts, records of public institutions, court records, diaries and correspondences, sermons, governmental communiqués such as proclamations and acts, pamphlets and books including cookery books and regimen guides and archaeological evidence. Each of these sources has its own values and limitations, and analysing and bringing them together facilitates the construction of a model of food practices and attitudes towards them. Household accounts are concerned with financial matters relating to the running of households. Typically they are produced to identify relationships between income and expenditure. Those produced during the Tudor and early Stuart eras, although taking many forms, were used in just such a way. Often made of parchment and usually bound in leather, they commonly list, in order of the date of acquisition, the household items purchased or otherwise acquired during each week of the year. As Table I.1 shows, the left-hand column normally contains the date; the middle column contains the item’s description, including weight or quantity purchased; and the right-hand column contains the price

16

Food and Identity in England, 1540–1640

paid for the item (or its perceived financial value). Some account books are more elaborate. This enables the reader to determine actual consumption rates. They do this by noting the quantities brought forward from the previous week, the quantities purchased or otherwise acquired and the quantities carried forward to the following week (Table I.1). Household income is often listed at the back of the book. Armed with this information, the head of the estate could balance income and expenditure by adjusting consumption patterns. Bookkeeping was sometimes undertaken on a departmental basis. In these cases, kitchen accounts were compiled separately from those of the rest of the estate. The estates’ accounts were subsequently collated by the controller or head steward, and then, in some instances, they

Table I.1 Two typical layouts of seventeenth-century household accounts Date

Item

Value

Monday 15 May

2 pullets

£0 4s 4d

Tuesday 16 May

claret

£0 0s 11d

milk, bread, herbs

£0 0s 6d

sallet

£0 0s ½d

a dosen pigeons

£0 1s 0d

leg and neck of mutton

£0 4s 0d

quarter of a lamb

£0 2s 0d

1lb butter

£0 0s 6d

oyle and [a]sparogas

£0 1s 0d

2 chickens

£0 1s 1d

Bread, milk and ale

£0 0s 10d

Remanet

Venit

Expendit

Remanet

Dates 4lb 8s 0d

–

Dates 1lb 2s 0d

Dates 3lb 6s 0d

Geese 2 – 6s 4d

Geese 2 – 7s 6

Geese – 7s 6d

Geese 2 – 6s 4d

Sources: The three-column kitchen account is an extract from WCRO, CR136v140, Newdigate, 1637; the fourcolumn data is from the Gorhambury household accounts of Sir Edward Radcliffe, 6th Earl of Sussex. This data, which relates to the week ending 6 January 1638(9), is reproduced in full in L. M. Munby (ed.), Early Stuart Household Accounts (Ware: Hertfordshire Record Society, 1986), pp. 95–101. Both types of accounts show relative purchase patterns of high-volume low-value foods, and low-volume high value foods. The lefthand ‘remanet’ column is the quantity in stock brought forward from the previous week and the right-hand ‘remanet’ column is the unused quantity carried forward to the next week.

Introduction

17

were audited professionally. Such records contain a wealth of information for the historian who can use them to analyse past consumption patterns. And, as food makes up a sizeable portion of expenditure, records of kitchen acquisitions have helped me to reconstruct household dietary patterns. For this study, twelve sets of household accounts ranging geographically from Derbyshire to Devon and from Lancashire to Essex, and temporally from 1543 to 1640, have been analysed. In terms of social status, the householders range from wealthy earls to middle-ranking gentlemen. While some accounts record transactions that extend over a period of months, others deal with proceedings that span years. As such, these records can reveal trends in food consumption patterns, and information on household members’ lifestyles and relationships. These families are somewhat scattered, and, to be sure, a fuller picture of change over time, and of regional differentiation, would be facilitated by analysing many more sets of accounts where they still exist. While one may argue that the sets of data presented on the following pages represent only the households to which they relate, it is worth remembering that major households were not isolated communities. Their heads all visited London where they had access to fashionable eating houses and up-to-date cookery books, and they networked with each other. One can therefore detect remarkable similarities between the foodways of the elite living in different areas and notice change over time. Where pertinent data or comment exists within or accompanying these financial statements, it is possible to deduce, by implication and conjecture, the diets afforded to the household’s minor servants, estate labourers and tradesmen. As the accounting methods employed by household clerks took many forms, and differed in the levels of detail that they portrayed. I devised a system whereby the mass of data from each set of accounts was projected onto spreadsheets with a single format. This format was a template from which food acquisition patterns – including purchases and home-produced foods – were recorded, compared and contrasted. Knowing the size and makeup of the households from wage records, and the number of guests from stable records, helped me to determine consumption patterns – as did the types and quantities of food consumed at times when family members were absent. At such times, it is evident that low-level servants who remained at home were provided with simple, basic fare. This type of historical source has its limitations, not least of which is determining the nature of the meals prepared with the foods that reached the kitchens. For establishing this, and for revealing the nature of other people’s diets and feasts, and attitudes towards these foodways, I turned to other sources of evidence.

18

Food and Identity in England, 1540–1640

One of these sources is cookery books. These books ranged in size and quality, with bindings typically being made from stiffened paper or decorated vellum-covered cardboard – depending on the perceived market for each one. Commonly containing between 50 and 200 pages, they can usefully be divided into two broad types: household management manuals that had sections on the preparation of food and the making of medicines and kitchen manuals. While the former sometimes included information on how to rear and slaughter livestock, and were therefore aimed at rural landowning families, the latter were often aimed at middling-status urban women. Although early cookery books tended to see the preparation of meals in terms of maintaining or restoring nutritional balance, those published from the late 1500s became increasingly concerned with cuisine while dietaries continued to offer advice on nutritional health.61 As Sara Pennell has recently reminded us, cookery books are unreliable indicators of consumption when they are used on their own.62 As they are suggestive rather than descriptive texts, we cannot safely infer that the ownership of a kitchen manual means that their instructions were followed nor can we be certain that the books were even read by their possessors. Printed works on culinary matters were acquired in many ways and were purchased for a variety of reasons. These could range from reference – to aid the preparation of a future special occasion – to attempts at impressing visitors by strategically displaying the book. But did these books offer fashionable instruction? One of the criteria for publication was the expectation of an acceptable financial return on investment. This means that even if the recipes had not been familiar to their ‘authors’ or publishers (for some were obviously rehashed, modified or plagiarized versions of earlier ones), the latter were satisfied that their books either followed fashion or that they had the potential to influence trends in consumption. The many recipe books published, especially in the second half of our period, increasingly called for subtle changes to the ingredients that were meant to enhance ‘traditional’ dishes. In addition, their authors suggested the use of new, sophisticated techniques in the preparing of meals.63 Although improvisation was possible, cookery books are an important element in assessing changing culinary fashions. I have analysed them in Chapter 5, not on their own, but alongside household accounts in order to identify productassociation, and to indicate trends in the values of specific foods and in their consumption. Cookery books are important in another way. When sold new, books that typically contained 100 or more pages may have been too expensive for many people on a modest income to buy. Furthermore, the social elite were

Introduction

19

able to attract the most experienced and skilful cooks who sometimes wrote these books. It is evident that by aiming their products at the middling sort, publishers were tapping a growing market which helped to develop their businesses and, as Stephen Mennell has noted, facilitating ‘the process of social emulation’.64 Public institutions were sometimes temporary replacements for the domestic sphere; because of this, their provisions potentially allow for a comparison to be made between consumption patterns there and at home.65 By analysing the victuals allocated to foot soldiers and common sailors, both of whom were drawn from the ranks of manual labourers, and by noting the fare provided by charitable institutions such as hospital, we can ascertain which types of foods those in authority deemed suitable for the ‘meaner sort’. In addition, records of council meetings sometimes reveal much about food distribution and consumption: gifts presented to high-ranking dignitaries are listed and details of mayoral banquets reveal the type of luxurious foods that were enjoyed by a diverse range of middling-status guests at official occasions. Codes regarding the doling of relief to the ‘deserving’ poor and attitudes towards the needy who did not qualify for relief but who stole food can also be found in some of these records.66 I have noted in them not only the foods that people were supplied with but also their tone and language that reveal prejudices regarding foodways. Types of food that were allegedly stolen, the occupations of defendants and official attitudes towards low-status thieves, are evident in assize records also. Although more in the way of depositions relating to cases would produce a fuller picture, these court documents provide useful information.67 Diaries and correspondences can provide a rich seam of information relating to notable events, and sometimes even to daily consumption practices – providing their limitations are acknowledged.68 These sources have the potential to contribute to the enquiry on many levels. Some diaries and letters used in this study gain the perspective of women with regard to their travels and socializing, and others shed light on local food-supply issues and kitchen management. But while many of these communiqués comment on special occasions, or foods given or received as gifts, they infrequently comment on issues relating to social identity. Sermons are another rich source of evidence. Knowing one’s hierarchical place and the duties and responsibilities that were associated with it was a recurring sermonic theme – especially in times of food shortage, high prices and dearth-related rebelliousness. Furthermore, although the cardinal sins of gluttony and greed were more of a concern to clerics than qualitative issues related to consumption, the virtues

20

Food and Identity in England, 1540–1640

of abstinence and temperance that countered such evils sometimes included advice on refraining from feasting on specific ‘delicacies’.69 Hierarchical distinction relating to food practices was another issue that concerned some clerics.70 During times of food shortages, guidelines in the form of Royal Proclamations and legislative orders in the form of Acts of Privy Council also have much to say on food supply and the need to refrain from ‘riotous consumption’. Their tone and language reveal much about attitudes towards consumption practices, and they are clearly indicative of expectations relating to food management and social responsibility.71 These orders, and other acts and proclamations relating to food prices, duty of hospitality and the prevention of the ‘inferior sort’ from obtaining high-value foods, are noted and analysed in this book. Stereotypical views on consumption practices and identity were not limited to this genre of communicative literature. As noted above, this was a topic that occupied the thoughts of moralistic writer William Harrison. But there were others who expressed similar sentiments in books and pamphlets produced throughout the entire period. Another clergyman, Thomas Fuller, gave an account of foods appropriate for ‘sorts’ of people in 1642. Works such as this are examined, along with the authors’ perspectives and agendas, to determine the scope and strength of the relationship between foodways and identity.72 The data from all of these sources were examined using both qualitative and quantitative analysis. There are, of course, many other types of evidence that could be utilized in a study such as this. Probate inventories for example have their uses and limitations. One restriction is that they deal with stocks rather than flows.73 Kitchen utensils, whether handed down or not, can have many uses other than those for which they were designed, and perishable foods left behind – on occasions when they appear in inventories – provide only a snapshot of a moment in time. Analyses of many inventories undoubtedly indicate trends in material culture, especially when examined alongside other evidence. Archaeological evidence is another source that can help to determine food consumption practices on many levels. Whether examining human remains, or analysing pollen counts or residual food in containers, archaeology can cut through the problem of evaluating literary texts written from the perspective of an elite or middling-status writer. The interpretation of archaeological evidence is not, however, without its problems. An excavated vessel may not belong to a community with which it seems to be associated, and although residual traces of edible material preserved in that vessel could be the remains

Introduction

21

of the last meal it held, it may also be unrelated matter. Collections of animal bones, as useful as they are for determining general flesh consumption trends (providing enough can be found for a meaningful comparison to be made), are of little help in determining mealtime preferences. But despite such limitations, archaeological interpretation remains immensely important, especially when it is used in conjunction with historical records. It is in this role that archaeology aids my study. While acknowledging the undoubted worth of these and many other sources of evidence, I believe that my case made on the following pages is durable and convincing. But before I look at the foods that people were eating and were expected to eat, I will first consider the broader issue of symbolic consumption.

1

Food and Identity

Of Temporall goods, wee should pray only for those that are necessarie, for our being; or at least wel-being, and not for those things, that are for Luxurie and Superfluitie; for such, are commonly baites to sinne: But if GOD grant us also these, we should be thankefull, and soberly use them according to our calling.1 Two fundamental concepts are important when discussing relationships between consumption patterns and cultural and social distinction. First, by considering the meaning of ‘luxury’ in relation to ‘necessity’, one has a frame of reference for gauging identity construction and the management and projection of image. This is particularly important when talking about consuming to impress. Secondly, sociability is often central to the transmission and reception of image. This is partly because hospitality and commensality provide a platform for communicating messages about social position and personal values and partly because food events can be used as tools for social inclusion and exclusion. Before looking at the foods early moderns ate, and the types of meals that were considered suitable for them, I will first consider these two topics. Because the early modern meaning of ‘luxury’ was different from our understanding of it, as the words of King James I in the above quotation demonstrate, the first section of this chapter looks at the changing meaning of the word. I then consider the symbolic values of consumption in identity formation before going on to discuss the importance of sociability in projecting images of the self and creating a sense of otherness.

Food symbolism – luxury and necessity Traditionally, the connotation of ‘luxury’ was negative. It was used to describe modes of behaviour or consumption that went beyond that which was deemed

24

Food and Identity in England, 1540–1640

acceptable. Typical characteristics of luxury could include, for example, adverse qualities such as lechery, lewd and wanton behaviour and lustfulness. It was associated in many early modern texts, especially in sermons and official government communiqués, with rioting when food was scarce or dear, with whoredom and with sumptuous living. The common denominator was excess – a thing or process extraneous to moderation or order. This continued generally to be the case throughout the Tudor and Stuart periods. Not only did ‘luxury’ convey the meaning ‘unneeded’, but the damaging nature of luxury – beginning with ‘the neglect of necessity and the forgetting of one’s place in the hierarchy’, and the consequences of its pursuit on people and on nations – was emphasized over and again. Although, as John Sekora noted, the ‘social and political meaning of luxury’ developed to signify ‘anything to which one has no right or title’, luxuriousness in the early modern period continued to be perceived as something that caused societal erosion.2 Regarded as a threat to the state, luxury was challenged by governments on many occasions through means such as sumptuary laws that were designed to regulate food consumption and apparel within both secular and ecclesiastical circles.3 But legislators distinguished between ‘lust for false wealth and station’ on the one hand and ‘natural and admirable expression of position and self-interest’ on the other. This duplicity, Sekora notes, explains the position that while ‘all men were subject to the prohibitions of luxury in theory, in practice those in authority were free to do as they pleased’. Any contradiction, he writes, was ‘illusory to the powerful’; the lower orders – as ‘slaves to their passions’ – were subject to laws, while those refined by wealth and education were deemed virtuous and ‘subject only to God or their own conscience’.4 But does this view of double standards, whereby those in authority could be as luxurious as they pleased, stand up to scrutiny? And was ‘luxury’ used to describe the excesses of the lower orders only? There is no shortage of evidence that the powerful considered the insolence and unacceptable behaviour of their social inferiors to be ‘luxurious’.5 ‘Luxury’, however, was also a term used by the Privy Council on at least two occasions in 1596 to describe the ‘excesse in dyett’ and the ‘ryotous [food] consumption’ of the ‘better sort’ during times of dearth. The ‘increase of luxury in London’ prompted the Privy Council to declare ‘stryct order might be taken in all wardes, companies and liberties’ to combat the problem in ‘both public assemblies and private diett’.6 Thus, in theory at least, luxurious behaviour applied to everyone when communal harmony was perceived to be under threat. Notwithstanding its applicability to

Food and Identity

25

all (if occasion demanded it), and its dismissal by some, Sekora’s early modern definition of ‘luxury’ as ‘anything to which one has no right or title’ would seem to be not far off the mark. Although luxuries were not always sought by those who considered themselves godly, always, since The Temptation in Eden and The Fall, they were gratifying in some way; they therefore held the potential to corrupt. Thus, luxuriousness was seen as a frailty that the dominant forces of English society thought could undermine the integrity of hierarchical structure. The meaning of luxury gradually began to change, however. The French historian Fernand Braudel describes luxuries as desirable agents for gratification. They can represent not only superfluity but also social success or ‘the dream that one day becomes reality for the poor’. Of particular relevance here is Braudel’s observation that luxury can serve vanity, conformity, individuality or self-advancement.7 The anthropologist and economist duo Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood have also noted that ‘when society is stratified, the luxuries of the common man may become the daily necessities of the upper classes’.8 The significance of this sentence should not be lost, for it implies that ‘necessity’ – a word which, as we shall see, was used to describe both the meagre rations of the poor and the exotic fare of the elite – meant different things to different social and cultural groups. Although the meaning of luxury was at times fluid between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, as Woodruff Smith has noted, the change in the meaning of a ‘luxury’ over time related to the acceptability of obtaining it.9 This meaning was dependent upon social attitude towards consumption, coinciding, as it appears to have done, with the growth of an economic system that increasingly relied on everexpanding consumerism. While the interdisciplinary Luxury Project undertaken by Maxine Berg and her Warwick University colleagues has focused on the desire by British people in the eighteenth century to consume luxury goods, and thereby help to drive the Industrial Revolution, Linda Levy Peck has pushed this desire by the middling sort to consume as their superiors did further back in time.10 Peck shows that demand for foreign luxuries grew steadily after 1540, and Lorna Weatherill, in writing about luxuries of the late seventeenth century, warns that it is ‘deeply misleading’ to make a distinction between expenditure that was essential and expenditure that was not – especially when ‘considering people of middle rank’. For these people, the historian explains, status must be taken account of. A ‘necessity’ did not have to be something that was necessary to

26

Food and Identity in England, 1540–1640

maintain life, for their expectations extended beyond consuming basics. Even for the bulk of early modern society, Weatherill writes, we need to take account of priorities when discussing necessities.11 The exploitation of England’s growing market economy in the seventeenth century may have lacked the ruthless intensity associated with twenty-firstcentury trading practices, but an increase in the consumption of luxuries was clearly evident to some contemporaries.12 As early as 1621 there was debate between entrepreneur merchants like Thomas Mun who argued that increased trade in luxurious foods created work and raised living standards of ordinary people, and moralists who advocated restraint in the consumption of these items.13 Such debate was irresolvable; and exotic, high-priced foods were sought after in the mid-sixteenth century not only by the nobility and the gentry, but, as we shall see, also by middling status people. By the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the production of and trade in novel and fashionable foods and food-related consumables had expanded to the extent that even some people from lower social groups were buying ‘luxuries’. This was occasioned in some instances by economic forces. Supplydriven expansion which occurred due to a combination of factors (such as technological progress in the form of ‘microinventions’ and more efficient working practices), improved integration of the market and transport, and greater financial input, all helped to increase ‘total factor productivity’ in some industries. This expansion on the supply side of the market had facilitated the lowering of the retail price of certain imported luxuries such as sugar, pepper and tea for some considerable time.14 But an increase in the consumption of fashionable goods across much of the social spectrum also carries social explanations in the form of demand-driven dynamics. With an expansion of ‘the production of superfluities’, opposition to luxurious lifestyle appears to have diminished – or at least the voices of moralists were largely drowned by the clamour of consumerism – as innovations emerged and relatively inexpensive ‘copies’ of luxury goods were manufactured in innovative ways. Such luxurious food-related novelties, including for example plated sugar tongs, tea trays and coffee pots, could be purchased for a variety of reasons other than simply to convey genteel status. These reasons include, but were not limited to, aesthetics, imitation, emulation or personal preference with which the self could be identified.15 At this time the defining characteristics of ‘modern luxury’ were not so much ‘excess’, ‘corruption’, or ‘vice’ but were seen by those engaged in commerce (and obviously by end-product users) as ‘convenience’, ‘utility’, ‘taste and style’.16

Food and Identity

27

Whereas formerly the impulse for luxurious indulgence was seen as degenerate – characterized by the biblical Fall that was caused by unauthorized food consumption in Eden, and contrary to the maintenance of an ordered and orderly society – luxury was still thought of as ‘censurable’ by some at the end of the nineteenth century.17 Nowadays, however, luxurious consumption is encouraged by the media advertisements of food-producing organizations expecting and requiring consumers to ‘trade up’. So how might we define a luxury food item these days? And is a ‘luxury’ vis-à-vis ‘necessity’ measurable economically? Douglas and Isherwood believe that a luxury is something ‘which the individual will quickly cut down on in response to a drop in income’.18 The social theorist Christopher Berry however, in discussing ‘luxury’ in general terms more recently, focuses on the interplay between the notions of ‘needs’ and ‘desires’ and the nature of social order. Although it is something that is ‘positively pleasing’, or desirable because it is ‘refined’, he argues that the ‘mainstream economist’ view of a luxury being something that enjoys high income elasticity of demand (bought after necessities when there is an income surplus), ‘paints too simple a picture’. Maintaining social status by giving luxury goods priority over ‘basic needs’, he writes, is not unheard of; for demand sometimes increases when prices are high. This can be put down to ‘bandwagon effect’ and ‘snob effect’.19 Economists, in their quest to rationalize production and consumption, have over the years produced many equations based on income and price elasticities in order to explain trends.20 Such mathematical expressions, however, can only account for a luxury/necessity relationship founded on the belief that financial cost is a primary factor in determining a product’s acquisition. Other forces are at play. Over a century ago, the overtly anticapitalist observation made by the socio-economist Thorstein Veblen – that consuming ‘excellent goods’ is a ‘canon of reputability’ – takes into consideration a less tangible criterion. Although much water has travelled under the historiographical bridge since then, more nuanced observers, such as anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, also note that luxuries can be complex signs – social messages – rather than merely things. In ascertaining the meaning of luxury, these views remain valid; for there are many facets of food consumption that continually redefine the boundary between luxury and necessity.21 Such a redefinition can be followed, for example, by tracing the moving threshold of poverty as society’s attitude towards what constitutes an acceptable living standard changes. A once-superfluous kitchen gadget is now considered indispensable in many domestic food preparation areas. Conversely, basic food

28

Food and Identity in England, 1540–1640

items usually considered necessities may be redefined as luxuries on occasions when demand outstrips supply – whether or not price movements are involved. To complicate the picture further, the distinction between a necessity and a luxury does not always equate to that between sustenance and self-indulgence. This is because a tasty meal can, simultaneously, avert hunger and delight the senses.22 In discussing the consumption of luxuries in England between 1540 and 1640, I have adopted the modern cultural meaning of the term in the way that Lorna Weatherill defines it: ‘their ability to mark the rank of their owner and thus communicate social position’.23 While a luxury food is one that could be substituted by an alternative of smaller worth, a necessary food is one that fulfils any specific requirement by its consumer. But if want and need were both fluid and interchangeable, then a person’s identity, through which luxuriousness could be expressed, could consequently be marked by capriciousness and exhibit complex forms. As Henry French and Jonathan Barry have noted, one cannot remain quarantined and isolated from outside influences; therefore self-image could be influenced by many elements, one or some of which can dominate over the others, and any of which can be bought to the fore.24 Shaped from birth and influenced by experiences and circumstances that surround them, people’s identities were not only complex but could also have been presented in various ways insofar as situations or resources would allow.25 More than simply ‘markers of difference’, identities have been described by Martin Sökefeld as ‘building blocks’ with which one can construct an image of the self. As the self is not passive, these ‘blocks’ may be shaped as ‘their meaning is constantly being transformed’.26 Thus, while the essence of whom the person was remained intact, the projected image of personality may have been subject to identity-changing processes that included managing posture and attitude, and, not least, consuming specific foods in particular ways. ‘Status consumption’, therefore, could have occurred in order to project either a real or a false image of social class.27 Identifying oneself in a particular way, such as a member of a specific community, furthers social categorization; and, as Thomas Forde and George Tonander have noted, this in turn can encourage the formation of stereotypes. This formation may maximize self-esteem and at once create a means to distinguish one’s fellowship from that of ‘others’.28 As I will clearly demonstrate, this applied also to early modern English society – not least in its foodways. As cultural identity was dependent upon interaction with others, we find

Food and Identity

29

examples of emulative or imitative behaviour and the wish to convey a desired image that reflected social alignment. Thus, Humfrey Braham wrote in the mid-sixteenth century that in his day, more than ever before, ‘an inordinate disdaine among most sortes of parsons hath risen, in that one sort can not stand contente with the state [and] degree of an other’. He went on to complain that while self-opinionated men of high degree found lower-sort people contemptible, the latter tried to compare themselves with their superiors. If Braham’s observation was accurate, this apparent obsession with hierarchical identity ran like a thread through the fabric of society. He noted that while merchants wanted to be considered worshipful, the craftsman coveted the title of master.29 Such aspirations, if they were not to be confined to self-delusion, needed an appropriate display of opulence in order to lend them credibility. This presentation called for the acquisition of relevant consumables. The choice of foods, where choice was possible, was not always definitive. Peripheral spheres of influence cutting across several intersecting communities could impact upon identity construction. A person could and did assume many roles; he or she therefore needed ideally to present the self in many ways, and this called for the shaping of one’s image. As we shall see, it was not uncommon for people to have more than one job; thus, diverse responsibilities could hold conflicting interests, and this called for a balancing act to be performed with regard to time management and the expectations of oneself and others. Success demands skills, and one of these, Sökefeld writes, is the ‘ability to manage different identities’ and constantly adapt them so that they were fit for purpose.30 Social mobility and changing economic fortunes four centuries ago meant that status and material well-being were also far from clear-cut. The income of nobles, for example, could fall below that of successful merchants and other urban businessmen who had gained ‘respectability’ and thus qualified for citizenship and participation in corporate life.31 Status could be ambiguous in the countryside too; the fortunes of yeomen, for example, ranged to the extent that while some were but little better off than husbandmen, others called themselves gentlemen and consumed like them.32 Many influences could thus be assimilated into the personality, and a person’s identity could take many forms. This called for eating the right foods in the right ways. In the following chapters, I will show what these were by analysing not only food consumption practices but also the types of meals that were deemed appropriate for specific groups of people.

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Food symbolism – sociability If eating luxurious or basic foods was key to expressing one’s chosen identity, effective transmission and reception of messages about cultural and social worthiness could best be facilitated by sociability at food events. With regard to modern-day consumption, it has been noted that consumer goods have a dual role: they are at once functional and semiotic – being ‘coded for communication’, and that consumption ‘is shaped, driven and constrained at every point by cultural considerations’.33 Sociologist Colin Campbell also has asserted that consuming ‘can symbolise achievement, success or power’.34 This applies to food as much as to any other consumable; for, as Mary Douglas says, if food is treated as a code, then ‘the message it encodes will be found in the pattern of social relations being expressed’. It informs us of ‘degrees of hierarchy, inclusion and exclusion, boundaries and transactions across the boundaries’.35 Such messages were communicated at hospitable events in early modern times; and although the nature and meaning of hospitality and charity were changing, as Felicity Heal and Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos have shown, occasions when food was supplied continued to provide the well-to-do with opportunities to display their elevated statuses or to portray themselves in particular ways.36 Any extravagance or frugality required an audience to provide meaning; and the company that one kept while eating, whether it was at life-cycle events, seasonal festivities or spontaneous occasions, provided that. But the same occasions that facilitated social inclusion and built or stabilized patronage networks could be exclusive; they held the potential to create social and cultural barriers around a community by denying access or rejecting anyone perceived as unwanted ‘outsiders’. In Chapter 3, it is shown that both men and women attending company feasts and civic banquets were, by their presence, associated with communities that at least once a year shared common interests and special foods. These foods were luxuries that exceeded some of the partakers’ dietary expectations and were provided in order to develop, negotiate or reinforce relationships within exclusive circles. These relationships could assume many forms. Authority could be asserted by the lordly in a number of ways, and their social inferiors’ demonstrations of allegiance, or deference or expressions of disaffection could take place either to convey or mask true feelings. This communicative process could be imparted effectively at such food events that included not just meals but also the exchanging of gift-foods. People who aspired to an elevated social position could use food events to socialize and thus

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pursue self-advancement by transmitting signals about suitability. This often involved gifting and eating appropriate foods conspicuously and in the right manner. Accommodation at the Inns of Court in seventeenth-century London, for example, provided an arena for aspiring gentlemen who had received the necessary education to mix with ‘men of good manners and conversation’ at the hub of English civilized society. In addition to the luxurious meals barristers and trainee barristers enjoyed at the inns, as discussed in Chapter 6, residing in London also enabled them to buy fashionable foods from around the world at ‘the locus of luxury shopping’.37 But a display of affluence could sometimes signify imitation rather than emulation. Establishing or maintaining image through imitation could make a statement about affiliation to a kind. This was important to some people in early modern England; thus, examples of fashion consciousness in the sixteenth century are not difficult to find. The perceived need to repeat time and again sumptuary laws that were enacted to regulate and reinforce social hierarchies, along with the evidence of contemporary observation, demonstrate that imitation was widespread. Even in Cornwall, which is at least 200 miles from the focal point for seventeenth-century English trendsetters, it was claimed that gentlemen’s purses might be significantly lightened by their wives’ inclination to buy modish goods.38 With regard to food, Stephen Mennell has shown that although apathy, reluctance to part from tradition, illiteracy or material deficiency may have slowed fashion-related change in the countryside, this was by no means universal.39 The increasing popularity of hitherto exclusive items among the non-elite that convinces Sidney Mintz of the role of imitation and emulation in marking people’s identities as they tried to raise their social status after 1650 was already happening long before that.40 Colin Spencer and R. A. Houston have both indicated that the social aspirations of middlingstatus groups both in Tudor England and on the continent was manifest in their emulation of the elite and their conspicuous consumption.41 I will show that nowhere was this sort of consumption more in evidence than at special food and drink events where sociability was important. But sociability was also important in establishing and expressing affiliation to kind on non-formal occasions. As we will see, Peter Clark, Beat Kümin and Martha Carlin figure among the historians who have discussed consumption and identity at inns, taverns and alehouses.42 The sorts of foods that were fashionable have been brought to our attention by Joan Thirsk. They included a variety of fruits and vegetables, and a vast array of imported delicacies. As this historian shows, there was

32

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no shortage of English and continental cookery books offering advice on how to prepare them for special occasions.43 As we shall see in Chapter 5, these late sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century books were often aimed at middling-status people. The recipes and title pages of some of them suggest that emulation or imitation of the nobility was a factor in their purchase. I will show how people could copy their social superiors in preparing or adapting both traditional and new fashionable dishes for special occasions. For example, for those who could not acquire ‘genuine’ ingredients, help was at hand. Counterfeit or ‘mock’ luxuries were a feature of cookery books that facilitated imitation of the well-to-do; inexpensive and readily accessible items were named substitutes for those of high value.44 Although such trickery would not have beguiled a gentleperson with refined taste, and such foods were unlikely to be presented in a display of conspicuous consumption when elite guests were present, they were luxuries to their consumers and were expressive of self-identity. I will show that the ‘luxury’ foods being faked included venison, partridge, pheasant, and exotic spice. But it was not just the quality of estimable foods, or copies of them, that was important when it came to display at social events; quantity was a major factor when one wanted to impress guests. The lavish and conspicuous consumption of the well-to-do fulfilled a dual role. First, it marked stature by generating prestige – especially but not exclusively within the Elizabethan nobility as they tried to compete with each other when laying on luxurious entertainment at ‘ruinous expense’. This has been described by Grant McCracken as a ‘spectacular consumer boom’ that paved the way for ‘new consumer patterns’. Secondly, the uneaten surplus food was in theory, if not always in practice, given as alms to the poor.45 Projection of image through sociability at food events, however, extended beyond the provision of ample and sumptuous meals. While seating and serving arrangements reflected the host’s idea of hierarchical order within the communal sphere, table manners and demeanour could be used to portray refinement and wisdom. Seating arrangements and the order in which people were served were commented upon in the Elizabethan and early Stuart eras. Foreign observers noted that the monarch sometimes withdrew to his or her chambers to eat, or at least ate at a table on his or her own, and that the best foods were served to the top tables before any of the remainder was passed down. Many of the social elite were also dining less often in their great halls, with lords sometimes vacating the high table in order to eat separately.46 In the mid-sixteenth century, the Willoughbys, a wealthy gentry family from Nottinghamshire, were eating ‘apart from the bulk of their household’.47 Another example is that of

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Henry Stanley, Earl of Derby who also formulated and enforced household rules that segregated diners according to their rank. In 1587, those identified as ‘the best sort’ were to be ‘placed together and accordinglie served’, while those described as ‘the meaner sort’ were set apart. Any surplus or discarded food and beer left over from these events was supposed to be given as alms. Despite this, a clear distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor was made; those identifiable as ‘vagrant persons or maisterles men’ were expressly excluded from any sort of hospitality.48 These eating arrangements and alms-giving practices were commented upon in 1577 by the radical protestant and ‘critic of contemporary social ills’, William Harrison.49 Eating arrangements were subject to the same social-identity-based segregation half a century later. In 1635, Sir William Cecil attempted to establish a measure of frugality at his overspending Hatfield estate; among other measures, he ruled that ‘inferior servants’ at the ‘lower end’ of the hall were to receive only ‘ordinary and cheapest provisions’. But this retrenchment did not extend as far as self-denial. Cecil decreed that his own table, accessed via a door at the top end of the hall, ‘be furnished rather with more than with less plenty and variety than heretofore’.50 Etiquette, which had long been an identity marker of the social elite like Stanley and Cecil, assumed more importance to newly affluent middling-sort people. Meaningless without spectators, table manners – a medium for conveying images of wisdom, elegance and refinement – had originally been adopted by those of high degree in order to ‘distinguish them from those of inferior rank’.51 But both Anna Bryson and Lawrence Klein note that politeness was marketed in books aimed at a wider audience in the eighteenth century. While Bryson points out that not many books giving ‘extensive detailed prescription’ were published in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Klein taps sources after 1660 to demonstrate that manners mattered to those of middling rank in the 1700s.52 Despite this, sixteenth and early seventeenth century manuals on courtesy – whether they were ‘heavily based on foreign works’ or translations such as A new yeeres gift The courte of ciuill courtesie by gentleman S. R. – were published in England, in English and were clearly aimed at a large and growing middling order. The schoole of virtue, published in 1619, and The schoole of good manners, published in 1609 and again twenty years later, enabled aspiring gentlemen and their offspring to bridge the cultural divide in the field of etiquette.53 While ‘virtue’ was deemed ‘fit for all children to learne, and the elder sort to obserue’, ‘good manners’ was also ‘very necessarie’ for the education ‘both of old and young’. Examples of courtly conduct cited in these books – such as the correct use of napkins, composure and countenance and moderation

34

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in eating – showed their readers that they too could appear to be eminent by ostentatiously displaying decorum at social events. William Harrison noted that although one could not distinguish noblemen from merchants and London artificers with regard to the foods that they ate, one could tell them apart by their ‘Italian or French subtlety and craft’ – or their lack of it – at the table.54 This sort of observation, together with guidebook assumptions that coarse manners epitomized those of low esteem, may have struck a chord with middling-sort book buyers who wished to imitate or emulate those of the leisured ‘class’. In Chapter 3, the foodways of people of these middling status people will be discussed; but next I will consider the diets of manual workers and low-level household servants.

Part Two

Social Groups

2

The ‘Meaner Sort’ and Their Diets

Oh Husband deare, she said, for want of food I die, Some succour doe for me provide, to ease my misery. The man with many a teare, most pittiously replyde, We have no means to buy us bread; with that the children cry’d.1 This verse from a song published in 1640 tells of a poor man who, because he cannot afford to buy any bread, promises his wife that he will go to the wood to fetch acorns in order to feed his starving family. Although this is a ballad, and famine in mid-seventeenth-century England was to most people a thing of the past, the verses reflect one of the many real survival strategies employed by the indigent during times of severe hardship. Acorns and other seeds were collected and then either roasted or ground into a paste and baked to produce a kind of flatbread. Bread was the biblical ‘staff of life’. It was fundamental to the diets of all people regardless of their social status. How it was made, and the ingredients that went into it, made the difference. This chapter looks at the foods associated with the lower stratum of society that includes manual labourers, low-level household servants and the poor. It will be seen that dietary expectations of and for these people were much greater than grain- or seed-based meals such as pottage and gruel.

Labourers and the poor For the very poor, like the very rich, the price of food was not a primary concern regarding affordability. Surviving on charitable handouts and

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Food and Identity in England, 1540–1640

acquiring sustenance by employing various non-pecuniary strategies such as gathering, gleaning and thieving discussed in the third part of this book, the indigent were not subject to market forces – at least not directly. But for waged labourers, although prices were not the only criterion for determining diet – as personal taste, acceptability and identity all had their part to play – the financial cost of food was an important consideration. The total income of labourers’ households may have comprised more than the wages outlined in the introduction; and some workers, like the employees of Henry Best who is discussed below, produced their own food.2 But even though labouring families had a great diversity of incomes and lifestyles, the diets of waged workers were generally less varied than those of their social superiors and, as Joan Thirsk has shown, more subject to regional differentiation and seasonality of supply.3 My concern, however, is also with the diet considered by contemporaries to be appropriate to manual workers – that is to say, the foods with which and by which they were identified. Provisions made by institutions to their dependents, and royal proclamations advising employers on the tabling allowances that could be provided as part-payment of wages, help us to make that determination. By subtracting ‘tabling’ wage rates from ‘non-tabling’ wage rates, it is possible, with the aid of other evidence, to construct a model of the fare deemed fitting for this ‘sort’ of person. Although public institutions provided food that may have contrasted with the customary fare experienced by an individual, some of them can furnish us with useful information.4 The codification of Poor Laws at the turn of the seventeenth century required parishes to provide the ‘deserving poor’ (as opposed to all of the parish poor that often included unemployed people who were described by the government as ‘sturdy beggars’ and ‘idle wanderers’) with the most basic of necessities. This requirement could be met in many ways, one of which was almshouses doling out charitable provisions. Yet even before the enactment, the allowances of 4d to 8d or the bread and ale allocated to dependents of Bablake almshouse in the parish of Holy Trinity, Coventry in 1554–1557, and the dole of 6d to 12d per week given to the poor at Hadleigh almshouse in Suffolk in 1579, were intended only to supplement other forms of voluntary charity that may have expanded the range of food available to the indigent.5 Another institution where catering took place was the pesthouse. Given that plague was not a socially selective disease, the advice pertaining to pesthouse provisions not only allowed for a variety of edibles that fell within the parameters of medical reasoning relating to the virulent, reccurring

The ‘Meaner Sort’ and Their Diets

39

epidemics but also a broad range of foods that encompassed the ‘necessities’ of many ‘sorts’ of people. In 1603, a book on the plague written by Thomas Lodge considered salt-meats, beef, pork, spices and pond-fish as inappropriate during times of epidemic. This was because, in line with the prevailing Galenic view of the body and its nutritional requirements, ‘such meats as may easily putrifie in the stomack, such as yeeld but grosse nourishment, and breed oppilation and obstruction that heate the blood and humours, and make them vicious and sharpe’. Because a humoral imbalance (discussed below) was thought to leave the body susceptible to plague infection, he promoted instead the eating of light meats such as veal, lamb, chicken, capon, pullet and, in moderation, sea-fish. These foods, which Lodge noted are delicate and easily digested, ‘doth rectifie and temper the humours of the body’.6 And in Elizabethan Ipswich, those who were infected were provided with a range of both basic foods and those considered to be ‘delicacies’.7 Thus, in theory, plague victims from all social strata could find the sort of foods that they required. In practice, this means also that delicacies may have been available to the poor. In 1624, when Thomas Smyth (a future MP for Bridgewater) was studying at Oxford, he wrote to his father residing at Ashton Court in Bristol saying that poor people ‘are growne so wickedly cunning as to feign themselves infected as to goe to the pest-houses, because they are sure to bee there well relieved with victuals’.8 Even if this comment was an exaggeration, such organizations are dubious indicators of an ‘ordinary’ diet. From his analysis of institutional accounts half a century ago, Jack Drummond found that the diet at hospitals and houses of correction in the late sixteenth century consisted of pork, mutton, beef, herrings (salted or pickled), rye bread and beer.9 But Bridewells, established in order to combat ‘anti-society’ by correcting ‘the faults of a servant class’, housed moral offenders who were ‘drawn from the ranks of the established citizenry’.10 And to complicate the matter further, dietary provisions at Bury’s Bridewell, and probably other houses of correction, were dependent at least to a certain extent upon the level of cooperation of inmates.11 Prisoners’ food could also be supplemented by well-wishers or relatives. In 1579, for example, an order made by York Council forbidding any visitor to supply prisoners with ‘excesse of wyne, drinke or vitailes’ suggests that supplementation here was not hitherto uncommon.12 Dietary provisions for prisoners in the mid-sixteenth century conformed to a ‘general convention’ that recognized social status, even if, as Archbishop Cranmer and Bishops Latimer and Ridley awaiting execution at Bocardo Prison in Oxford during 1554–1555 found, it was significantly below their normal expectations.

40

Food and Identity in England, 1540–1640

The prevailing foods supplied here by the keepers – depending on ‘personal tastes’, accommodation of religious sanctions and seasonality – were, in three of four special dishes per meal, bread and ale; beef, mutton and veal; rabbit, chicken, ling, oysters, eel and butter. These high-ranking ecclesiastical prisoners also occasionally enjoyed a variety of other estimable foods that included spiced cake, fruit, small wild birds, freshwater fish and wine.13 ‘Enjoyed’ might also be the appropriate term for Henry Percy’s diet whist confined as a prisoner to a suite of rooms in Martins Tower within the Tower of London half a century later. Some £800 annually was spent on his provisions here – and he had his own personal chef in the tower to attend his dietary requirements.14 There are other institutional records that, with reservation, are more helpful. Financial remuneration afforded to army soldiers recruited from the lower ranks of society, and the food that they ate while being billeted, are an imprecise indicator as to the types of food they usually ate. This is because variables such as additional resources, gifts and how they chose to spend their money render any approximation conjectural. However, the fare that their social superiors considered appropriate can be discerned. In 1599, the Earl of Nottingham issued a proclamation setting the amount payable by footmen and horsemen for food supplied to them by victuallers and innkeepers ‘in every Towne, Village, Parish and Hamlet, where the said Captaines and Souldiers or any of them are to be placed within the Circuyte of twelve miles every way distant from the Citie of London’. Foot soldiers paid at the rate of 8d a day were to be charged a maximum of 3½d for dinner or supper. For this sum, caterers were expressly ordered to furnish their clients with good wheaten bread and drinke, beefe, mutton or veale boyled, and pigge, beefe, mutton, veale or lambe rosted, or otherwise upon the fish dayes, to have good wheaten bread and good drinke, salt fish or ling, egges, butter, pease or beanes buttered, and so having competent and sufficient thereof for the sustentation of their bodies.

Apart from veal, these were the cheapest and most basic foods one could buy. The earl also decreed that in and around London a loaf of wheaten bread was to be sold for 1d, cheese and beef for no more than 1½d per lb, mutton for 20d per quarter, butter for 4d per lb and small beer for ½d per quart.15 These, however, were market prices for raw materials. Victuallers who purchased them needed to recuperate the expense of processing the foods and generate a profit from their income. It is therefore clear that Charles Howard expected the diet of footmen, who were drawn from the ranks of

The ‘Meaner Sort’ and Their Diets

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manual labourers, to be restricted in terms of variety and limited in quantity. The greater pay that horsemen, lieutenants and captains enjoyed meant that in theory they had more choice at the table.16 Foods that Howard insisted should be made available to army personnel, but which did not feature on the recommended diet list for 8d soldiers, included rabbits, pigeons and capons.17 Gentlemen officers who were sourced from higher social ranks could therefore not only afford to be distinguished at the dining tables in and around London but were actively facilitated in doing so. This is not to say that gentlemen officers forwent bread and beer; and although wine was often drunk by those of high degree, bread was a staple food of most people. The biblical importance of bread was not lost on early modern people, being both the ‘staff of life’, the food shared between Christ’s disciples at the last supper, and the body of Christ himself. In the pages below, I will show how the social elite could use even this basic foodstuff to mark their social identity; but it is worth noting here that while bread made from ‘inferior’ grains such as rye and barley had traditionally been associated with labourers and the poor, these ‘meaner sort’ of people were increasingly demanding bread made from wheat.18 So important was bread to the diet of these people that the cost of grain, or any perceived mismanagement in its supply, was a significant factor in social unrest during the period.19 If grain was scarce or too expensive, bread was made by mixing peas, beans, or, as we have seen, even acorns into the dough.20 Peas and beans were versatile and went into making soups and stews, and they were especially useful on ‘non-flesh’ days – where these days were still observed. Prior to the protestant Reformation, fish was expected to be eaten by everyone during periods of abstinence from flesh. This did not only apply to Advent and Lent but also to each Wednesday and Friday. Fish was never really popular in England, however, and following the Reformation much less of it was consumed. This is evidenced not just by royal proclamations expressing concern about the harm being done to the fishing industry (and therefore the navy) because of the public’s reluctance to buy fish, but also by proclamations censuring butchers for selling animal flesh on fasting days.21 All this food needed to be washed down with copious quantities of liquid; and for those who could not afford to buy wine, beer was an essential drink at a time when water was often unsafe. People of all ages drank beer, and around four quarts of it (approximately four and a half litres) was supplied to manual workers each and every day as part of their food and drink allowances. Charles Howard recognized this and made a similar provision for army personnel.

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Howard’s order of 1599, effectively determining the hierarchical identity of soldiers through the regulation of wages and the provision of food, was not an isolated one. The diets envisaged for military men of various rank by their social superiors (and by implication diets reasonably acceptable to them as civilians) can be reconstructed from other proclamations. In 1588, Queen Elizabeth had issued a similar decree relating to soldiers’ victuals within 20 miles of London. The maximum allowable market prices for some food items were slightly more in 1599 than they had been in 1588, and at the later date victuallers were allowed to charge ½d more for each meal. But the daily wage for foot soldiers (assuming they received wages, for some of them were reported to have sold army-issued weapons in order to cover alleged nonpayment) was pegged at the same rate. This was despite significant price inflation during the mid-1590s.22 The Earl of Nottingham’s perception as to what soldiers drawn from various ranks of society should eat corresponded closely to that of York City Councillors half a century earlier. This was also similar to the actual provisions supplied to the forces of the Henry VIII stationed at Boulogne in the same year – 1545. In York, captains were to receive ‘honeste fayr’ for 4d a meal, while gentlemen officers were to pay 3d, soldiers 2½d and servants 2d. In Boulogne, the King’s purveyor supplied the garrison with malt and hops to make beer, salt beef and ‘beefes alive with ther shepe’, cheese, butter, bacon, stockfish and salted herrings.23 According to a royal proclamation made by Henry VIII one year earlier, the theoretical maximum market prices chargeable for 1lb of the following foods were: beef, ½d; mutton, 1d; pork, ¾d; and best butter, 2d.24 This shows that if soldiers’ meals were limited in terms of variety, then at least quantitatively their diets were adequate. In 1563, on the 16 ‘flesh days’ each month, the beef ration for English soldiers based in Ireland was 1½ lb per day. Although this amount had risen to 2lb in 1600 (or alternatively soldiers could be provided with 1lb of pork), meat was only issued on one day each week. On the other days, either ½ lb of butter along with peas or porridge or 1lb of cheese was supplied. In addition to these items, 1½ lb of bread was provided every day.25 This evidence shows that to the decision-making elite there was a direct correlation between the status of service personnel and the status of their edible provisions, with little regard being paid to individual preferences. In asking whether soldiers, as civilians, would have eaten such foods, or whether they would have identified themselves with finer fare, consideration needs to be given to the reasoning that lay behind the controllers’ decision-making.

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They had an incentive to feed the defenders of their masters well, but provisions were actually based on health considerations, on economic factors and on perceived choice. While these provisions were considered healthful to manual workers under the prevailing humoral schema of bodily requirements that are discussed below, the economic and choice factors were combined in order to accommodate a measure of acceptability within a determined budget. To a point, soldiers were able to negotiate for their preferred food. In 1545, pickled herrings, apparently suggested as a constituent part of fish day meals, were deleted from the soldiers’ menu ‘bycause they like it not’.26 This was also the case for sailors in the following century. Naval supplies as a source for indicating actual and symbolic meanings of food differs from those of other institutions in an important way. Unlike army, hospital, educational or prison provisions, those assigned to sailors when they were far from land could neither be complemented by gifts nor supplemented by purchasing preferred foods. The fare that was supplied to sailors, therefore, ideally needed to be acceptable – even if it would not necessarily have fulfilled their expectations as civilians. Additionally, when provisions were deemed unsatisfactory or disagreeable, sailors could be forceful in venting their feelings. On returning to Plymouth following the mission to Cadiz in 1625, for example, sailors reported that their ‘victuals were very ill saved and spoiled; by reason whereof they not only felt want, but much sickness’. Their food, they claimed, was ‘corrupt and stinking’ due to the negligence of suppliers.27 But what were these victuals? Documentary and archaeological evidence indicates that rations aboard navy vessels did not change over the century and were similar to those regarded by Charles Howard as being appropriate to foot soldiers. Remnants from a wrecked ship show that in 1545, sailors serving on the fateful last voyage of the Mary Rose ate beef, pork and fish. While the sailors’ meat would have been preserved with salt rather than fresh, any deposits of the grain-based foods and dairy products that contributed to their diet would, of course, have long since degraded. The ‘additional’ venison that was found would have been for the consumption of senior officers.28 Documentary evidence shows that both in the same year, and in 1636, sailors’ daily allocations were 1lb of biscuits and a gallon of beer. This was accompanied by 2lb of flesh on four days a week, and by 1 qt of stockfish, 2 oz of butter and 4 oz of cheese on the other three days. Given that the financial allowance paid to the ships’ caterers was 5d a day for each sailor in 1560 – an amount that, with inflation, had increased to 6d in 1589 and to 8½d in 1636 (with caterers complaining of an operating loss of

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1¾d per sailor per month), financial considerations played an important part in the navy’s choice of food for sailors.29 But this influential factor was only part of the overall determinant. Nathaniel Butler, admiral and governor of the Providence Island Company, who had been a common sailor and a privateer during Elizabeth’s reign, recorded a dialogue in 1634 that had ostensibly taken place between himself and a ship’s captain. Butler reported the captain as saying that our seamen are more likely to suffer from fevers than their Mediterranean, French or Dutch counterparts because English sailors have an inferior diet consisting of salted beef or pork. This was contrasted with the continentals’ rations of rice, olives and figs and with their healthier ratio of peas, beans, wheat, butter and cheese relative to the amount of flesh they ate. The admiral, who was in a position to know exactly what sailors ate, responded: ‘our common seamen are so besotted in their beef and pork … that they would rather suffer scurvies … than to be weaned from their customary diet, or to lose the least bit of it’.30 Whether or not this discussion had actually taken place, Butler’s report reveals that sailors had a say in the types of food that they were served and that they were listened to – as was the case with army soldiers. As foods supplied to people of low degree at institutions were comparable with each other, and similar to the food budget of London’s labouring poor, rations reflected in general terms the dietary experiences – and in some cases the preferences – of some within the lower ranks of society.31 These people were accustomed to buying inexpensive foods in the marketplace, and they were facilitated in acquiring them in times of shortages and high prices through orders regulating the supply and price of grain and other basic commodities.32 Factors affecting dietary intake by lower ranks of society could, however, be complex, and one aspect was the affordability of high-priced foods due to hidden financial resources. As Donald Woodward has cautioned, a single visible wage cannot be taken as evidence for what food a family might buy.33 It was not uncommon, for example, for a labourer or craftsman to enjoy several sources of income as the opportunity arose or for his family members to produce some of their own food. This they could either eat or sell; and if they chose the latter, the modest revenue that sporadic or seasonal selling generated could be used in other ways. While we should not downplay the very real problems that were experienced by some labouring families, we should not underestimate the ingenuity and resourcefulness of many. The apparent disruption in income as a result of seasonal work, or a reduction in the real wage when prices rose more sharply than wages – as was the case in the mid-1590s – could sometimes be

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compensated for in various ways. Such methods included extended family members cooperating with each other for their mutual benefit, besides families subsidizing an intermittent income by undertaking small business ventures such as brewing and selling beer; making use of by-employment that was ‘common in early modern England’; or finding casual work.34 Sixteenth-century examples of the latter include shovelling snow in the winter, gathering up stones from under a bridge in the summer, removing packs of dogs from a church and cleaning a church steeple for a reward of 8d. This remuneration would typically cover the cost of buying 2½lb of mutton. Although taking on such jobs was a strategy that helped the poor to balance income with expenditure, in good times it could also allow for the occasional purchase of a relatively costly luxury. The 8d reward could also buy a partridge.35 It is possible, therefore, that Adam Fox’s recent essay on food and distinction portrays an overly pessimistic picture of the fare enjoyed by manual labourers – especially in the light of the evidence that I produce in Chapter 5.36 When times were hard, it was not uncommon for the price of grain to double; but this did not necessarily mean that the poor had to pay these prices. In December 1622, following a second successive cold, wet summer in which food crops failed, the price of wheat reached 11s a bushel in London. Earlier in the year, letters were issued to sheriffs and justices around the country ordering them to be vigilant ‘to repress insurrections in regard of deadness of trade and hard living of poor tradesmen and husbandmen, as there were in Wiltshire’. Perhaps fearing further disorder when the price of wheat again hit double figures in November 1630, the Mayor of Dorchester purchased wheat and ‘sold it to the poore at 6s 8d’.37 Thus, theoretical food prices that could be discounted, and visible wage rates that could form but part of an income, are at best indicators as to the spending power of families. The type of diet that the Crown envisaged for these workers, however, is clearly indicated by the food and drink allowance that was deemed acceptable as part-payment for labour. As was the case for soldiers and sailors, the state had a vested interest in maintaining the energy levels of those who produced the country’s wealth at a sufficiently high rate to perform their tasks; and, as Craig Muldrew has noted, this was accomplished effectively.38 Although a lowermiddling artisan’s allowance varied according to trade, in 1563 it was around 5d while a labourer’s was 4d. By the mid-1590s, a skilled male thatcher or a plumber was entitled to 6d worth of food, and the ration of a male mower of corn at the same time was worth 4d. Women undertaking similar work were expected to eat less.39 While some scholars have questioned the timing and

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even the actual occurrence of any meaningful social or cultural improvement women experienced prior to modern times, others have noted that the postReformation era witnessed a worsening of their lot, with fewer opportunities and greater governmental control over daily lives.40 Government guidelines for those women who did have jobs recommended that depending on their trade and their geographical location, they should receive around 1d to 2d a day less than their male counterparts for the food and drink they consumed.41 While this theoretical disparity is confirmed by household accounts that reveal women did indeed receive 20 per cent less in food allowances, other records show that women could be very resourceful.42 Thus, it is probable that many female workers, whose total remuneration was typically half to two-thirds of that of men, pooled their family resources which enabled them to adjust their diets if or when this became desirable. Food allowances as part-payment for a wage could, of course, be abused by employers who were intent on reducing costs. One method for achieving this is to economize on the variable overheads of wage payments without trimming manpower that might reduce productivity. This could be achieved by cutting back, either qualitatively or quantitatively, on the food allowances of their workforce. The gradual move away from labourers receiving meals as part payment for their work suggests that employers supplied their workers with cheaper ‘second [quality] foods’ when market prices were high, and that workers declined victuals and provided for themselves when meals had become unsatisfactory. Whether or not labourers chose to accept tabling as part-payment of their wages, consideration should be given to the types of foods that tabling allowances could buy. By implication, food prices advocated by royal proclamation indicate which foods the Crown deemed appropriate for manual workers. As food was being prepared daily in the kitchens of employers, very little if any additional fuel or extra manpower was required to produce workers’ meals. Supplementary costs incurred in feeding employees would therefore have laid almost exclusively in the purchasing of raw materials. Maximum food prices that were set in order to protect consumers from overcharging traders periodically feature in royal proclamations.43 But, as a guide to actual prices paid in the marketplace, these notices can be misleading. On the one hand they were intended to be maximum permitted prices. As such, cheaper foods, especially those of inferior quality, could be purchased. On the other hand, the perceived need to admonish traders about excessive rates and sharp practices, and to repeat the caveat over and again, suggests that higher food

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prices than those appearing on the proclamations were charged broadly and frequently. Although kitchen expenses in household accounts may be less than reliable for establishing what labourers paid for their foods – due to quality differentials and quantity discounts – they do serve as a guide to the market prices paid by employers who tabled their workforce. By referring to these payments, and by cross-checking them with the food price proclamations, it can be seen that the authoritative view on the types and standard of food that was deemed appropriate to labourers was influenced largely by socioeconomic factors. But there was also the health angle to consider: while differences between manual workers’ tabling and non-tabling rates in proclamations demonstrate clearly that the Crown’s objective was sumptuary-inspired control by economic means, there was the need to keep labourers fit enough to work efficiently.44 Dietary advice offered by physicians in regimen guides was an important factor, but as Ken Albala notes, dietary custom informed medicine as eating prejudices became based on class distinction.45 What this means in practical terms is that the cheapest products eaten by the lower ranks of society must also have been the healthiest for them; this was because they had always eaten basic, inexpensive foods. Conversely, highly refined foods that were relatively expensive, or difficult for labourers to prepare in their ill-equipped kitchens, were more suited to sedentary, refined people. Thus, socio-economic and health factors were inextricably linked to the point that they were almost indistinguishable when it came to social identity. On the eve of the seventeenth century, typical London prices of basic ‘second’ foods (as opposed to ‘best’ foods) were as follows: bread, ½d per loaf beef, 1½d per lb eggs, 3 for 1d butter, 4d per lb cheese, ½d per lb beer, ½d per quart (2d per gallon).46

The 4d food allowance allocated to unskilled male labourers was thus intended to restrict their diet to the same sort of foods that were consumed by common foot soldiers and common sailors – both on ‘flesh’ days and on fasting days. While unskilled female labourers were probably supplied with smaller quantities of food and drink, the 5d or 6d allocated to skilled craftspeople provided them either with greater choice or better quality victuals.

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Second quality chickens and rabbits costing 4d each, capons at 9d and pigeons at 2d were pitched beyond a labourer’s individual allowance.47 Yet if they lived in urban areas and did not have access to these birds and animals by rearing or catching them, the joint allowance of skilled workers collectively could perhaps enable them to sample these foods periodically – as was imagined by Charles Howard for higher-ranking army personnel. A pigeon costing 2d and yielding around 5 oz of meat was hardly a cost-effective choice of food in terms of the quantity of grain it consumed to achieve its potential size. This fact was not lost on contemporaries like Arthur Standish, a writer from a well-to-do Lancashire family who lived in Cambridgeshire and wrote on agricultural and agrarian matters. Worried about a recent wave of change in land usage in the east midlands in the early seventeenth century, and its potential impact on grain supply, Standish estimated that, due to the popularity of pigeon meat, there were 40,000 pigeon lofts in England. These lofts, he complained, housed a fraction of the overall population that devoured and destroyed valuable crops. He estimated ‘that twelve score paire of Pigeons devoure, destroy and hinder the increase of twelve score quarters of corne in a yeare’. Admitting that even if it was ‘halfe so much, and that the corne were rated, being Wheat, Rye, Barley and Pease, but at two shillinges and a penny the bushell, sixescore quarters commeth to a hundred pound per annum at a house’.48 Yet despite or because of this extravagance and improvidence we will see in Chapter 4 that well-to-do households consumed this bird in copious quantities. And although this food was much in demand, usually a reason or a pretext for price-hiking as will be shown, the sheer number of them available at market might have been enough to hold their price down for over a decade (see Figure 4.2). This allowed craftsmen who were not able to catch their own birds the opportunity of occasionally enjoying the flavour of pigeon meat. But whether or not skilled labourers acquired the taste for such foods as part of their allowance, their culinary experiences were, for the duration of the working day, restrained by non-pecuniary boundaries demarcated by the elite and their representatives. Even if price/wage ratios and other financial factors combined to allow for a diet more sophisticated than that envisaged by the powerful, employers – at least for the time that their employees were at work – were enabled through official sanction to regulate consumption through the use of time. As time became more associated with ‘work-discipline’ in the Elizabethan period, it was increasingly seen as money – ‘the employer’s money’.49 Thus, unlike wages and prices proclamations that reflected the concerns of the Crown, the enactment

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of the Statute of Artificers in 1563 limited by law the length of time in a day during which labourers and artificers could eat. The order, which required manual workers to serve their masters from dawn to dusk in the winter, and longer in the summer, specified that just 30 minutes was to be taken for breakfast and only one hour was allowable for eating and digesting dinner at a time convenient to the master. Thus, William Harrison noted fourteen years later, while the nobility and gentry were able to mark their status by dining leisurely for hours, the ‘poorer sort’ had to dine ‘as they may’.50 As is often the case today for manual labourers, time restriction – telling workers when to eat and how long to take doing it – determined ‘to a noticeable extent’ what could be eaten, the location and setting of the meal and, by implication, the sort of company that the worker could keep. A contrast between the dinnertime freedom enjoyed by the powerful, and the closely controlled mealtimes imposed on their subordinates, in this way hampered the latter’s opportunity to blur hierarchical boundaries by circumventing wage/price restrictions.51 Mealtimes of the humblest servants in wealthy households may also have been closely controlled, but although they formed part of Harrison’s lowest tier of English society along with labourers, they were potentially in a better position to sample luxury foods.

Household servants On wealthy estates, it was not uncommon for the household heads to employ gentlemen and yeomen to act as servants and officers. Even if an ‘idealising’ anonymous pamphleteer’s comment that ‘their fare was alwayes of the best’ was an exaggeration, these senior-level servants were fed according to their ranks.52 But low-level servants who received board and lodgings were cushioned from short-term inflation by virtue of not having to buy food in the marketplace for the duration of their stay. Furthermore, on occasions, some had the opportunity to eat a varied diet. Servants’ diets are not easy to determine exactly. Information on who ate what within households seldom feature in sets of accounts; and diaries that reveal the culinary tastes of people to whom they owe their existence are less than specific regarding the foods eaten by their subordinates. Despite this, it is possible to determine the nature of low-level servants by using two methods. One entails analysing the quantities of different types of food reaching the kitchens. The acquisition of large quantities of inexpensive foods indicates

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that they were consumed by servants and other workers on the estate, and the acquisition of exotic or costly foods in quantities too small to feed the entire household indicates that they did not, as a matter of course, reach the bottom table. The other method involves noting the sorts of food that were bought to be consumed when the family and their main servants and officers were not in residence. Foods acquired at such times – times during which the estate was being looked after by a handful of servants – may be compared with those bought when the family were at home. One such example can be found in the household accounts of the family of Sir Richard Newdigate who lived at Arbury Hall near Nuneaton in Warwickshire. Born in 1602 to Sir John Newdigate and his wife Anne (nee Fitton), Richard was educated at Oxford before going on to train as a lawyer at Gray’s Inn. Called to the bar in 1628, Richard was regarded by family members living at Arbury as ‘the gateway to the fashionable world of London’, buying for them – sometimes at their request – items regarded as being in vogue.53 This fashion consciousness, acquired or honed in the capital, was, as will be show in Chapter 4, manifest in the purchasing of luxury foods.54 He and his wife Juliana, a daughter of Sir Francis Leigh, had eleven children, and after the birth of their first child they settled at Leaden Porch Court in Holborn where they spent the ‘greater part’ of their married life.55 Described as an ‘active puritan’, Sir Richard, who was eventually made a baronet in 1677, appears to have been an articulate scholar and a hard-working and shrewd businessman.56 In the late 1630s, his net income from the Warwickshire estate alone was around £600 per annum. While his average annual spending was £465, just under £150 was typically spent on food and drink. Thanks to Sir Richard’s resourcefulness and financial competence, his son, also named Richard, inherited in 1678 ‘a flourishing farming concern and an estate worth £78,000’.57 Close family members were often present at Arbury during the times Sir Richard was staying in London, and it is known that Juliana was a frequent visitor there – managing the estate and the staffing arrangements. It is probable that she was one of the women who were prominent in ‘oiling the wheels’ of the Newdigate family fortunes through the medium of hospitality.58 In any event, Richard’s gentlemanly influence and his family’s taste for fashionable consumption are evident at Arbury Hall. When the Newdigates were away from Arbury in July 1640, the only foods received by the kitchen were mutton, bread, butter and eggs.59 These should be contrasted with the luxurious fare that the family usually enjoyed – described in Chapter 4. The servants here were also provided with beef throughout the year. When the Newdigates were at home, vast quantities

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were received by the kitchen, usually at least twice a week. Bought by the stone, the family paid around 2d per lb for beef in 1638. As we have seen, beef was a food provided for low-ranking army personnel and common sailors. It is perhaps unsurprising therefore that, judging by the quantities bought and prices paid for it, this meat was also fed to labourers and servants in wealthy households. This was the case at two other well-to-do households in the 1630s: those of Sir William Cecil and Sir Edward Radcliffe. Cecil was 2nd Earl of Salisbury and Lord Lieutenant of Hertfordshire. In the mid-1630s, he was head of two houses in London and lord of Quickswood near Baldock. He employed around 60 servants, and his spending patterns over the six months between October 1634 and March 1635 suggests that his estate’s annual food consumption was valued at around £2,300. The household included Sir William’s family, his employees and an average of ten visitors – including gentlemen and their servants. Sir Edward Radcliffe, who lived with his wife Eleanor at Gorhambury near St Albans, was 6th Earl of Sussex. In 1638, the year to which the accounts relate, he was seventy-nine years old. The earl’s staffing costs, around £300 per annum, were much less than those of Cecil.60 The expenses incurred between Christmas 1637 and March 1638 suggest that the household consumed around £1,200 worth of food and drink a year. As I will show, the fair that these two families enjoyed was luxurious and often costly; but inexpensive beef, along with mutton that was also relatively cheap, accounted for 73.2 per cent and 68.3 per cent of all meat purchased at Quickswood and Gorhambury, respectively. This shows that beef and mutton were staples of the servants of these two earls. The foods that servants were expected to eat on a daily basis can also be extrapolated from the food allowances that were granted to them when they were sent to market on business. Those granted to the servants of both Sir Richard Shuttleworth, a well-to-do Lancashire lawyer, and Henry Best, a Yorkshire yeoman who described himself as a gentleman farmer, were typically a choice-limiting 4d at around 1583 and 1620, respectively.61 We will recall that in 1599, soldiers based in London paid 3½d for bread, beer and a portion of beef or mutton; and while accounts reveal that 4d bought slightly more food in Preston and York than it did in London, it is probable that there is more to compare than to contrast in their diets. Food was cheaper still in Devon and beef could be purchased in the south of the county for a mere 1.7d per lb in October 1627. This price rose to 2.25d per lb in 1631. It is little surprise, therefore, that this meat was favoured as a household staple by at least one gentleman who lived there – Sir Richard Reynell.

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Sir Richard and his wife Lady Lucy lived at Forde House near Newton Abbot in South Devon. The lifestyle of Reynell in the late 1620s and early 1630s share certain characteristics with those of Newdigate: both were knights and gentlemen, both were lawyers (Reynell was of the Middle Temple), and both had business connections in London.62 But despite the similarities, there were important differences between the two families and their estates. Reynell, born in 1558, built Forde House and lived there with Lucy who was twenty years his junior.63 The provisioning costs at Forde House were ostensibly less than those at Arbury; the total annual expenditure, including rental payments for their house at Exeter, averaged £290 12s over the four years ending 1631. The average annual expenditure on food during this period was £119 7s; but in addition to this financial layout, many oxen and sheep were slaughtered for the table. Other accounting details reveal that bread, dairy produce, vegetables and beer were home-produced. This was also the case at Arbury Hall; but unlike Newdigate, Reynell did not include the financial value of these extras in his kitchen expenses. The size of the Forde household remained fairly constant, with the payroll showing that, in addition to the extended family living on-site, there were around eighteen servants and labourers working for them.64 The sheer quantity of beef that Reynell’s kitchen received demonstrates clearly that this inexpensive meat was fed to Sir Richard’s servants. This is underlined by food acquisition patterns on occasions when the family was away in London or Exeter. One such time was a five-day period in October 1628 when Sir Richard was staying at his rented accommodation in Exeter. On this occasion, the only foods accounted for at the Forde estate in his absence were beef, a small amount of mutton, an unspecified type of fish and one pullet. In the same week the quantities of veal, rabbit and salad items bought by Reynell at Exeter were similar to the quantities he usually purchased at Forde House. This shows that his low-level servants were not normally fed with highvalue foods. The same applied to non-flesh days. While ‘fish’ was being eaten at Forde, the only aquatic foods bought at Exeter by Reynell himself were salmon and a small quantity of shrimps.65 Neither bread nor butter generally appeared as purchases in the Reynell accounts, for these were home-produced foods. They were, however, bought by Sir Richard in Exeter, and were probably also eaten by his servants left at home. On the basis of this week’s accounts, we see that the types of food Reynell deemed fit for household servants and labourers were remarkably similar to those that the Earl of Nottingham described as ‘necessary’ for foot soldiers. The local poor may also have received beef as alms from the

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Reynells. According to her biographer, Lady Lucy was renowned for clothing and feeding the needy, and evidence suggests that she may have provided this meat to sustain indigents during the severest of winter months between 1627 and 1630. The household’s accounts show that at this time of year, out of her own money, she purchased large quantities of beef, over and above that which was bought for the household’s consumption.66 Politician, barrister and poet Sir Thomas Sackville also purchased considerable quantities of beef and mutton for his household in London during 1603–1604. Although Sackville was known as Baron Buckhurst and Lord High Treasurer of England up to the end of 1603 (a position he was appointed to after the death of William Cecil’s grandfather), he was promoted to Earl of Dorset in 1604.67 He had a reputation for good taste and generosity and demonstrated a caring attitude towards the less fortunate. While at the bar, following a verbal assault on London’s idle poor by Lord Chief Baron Periam, in which he described them as ‘the very scumme of England, and the sinke of iniquitie’, Sackville uttered a more benevolent speech urging the steppingup of charitable provision.68 The kitchen expenses at Sackville’s London residence during these two years show that beef and mutton were purchased in roughly equal quantities. The price he paid for a whole mutton was usually 11s (about 2d per lb) and beef was bought for 1.6d per lb. These, and other basics provisions that his staff would have eaten, included butter for 5d per lb and eggs at 2d for five. A comparison with spending patterns in the sixteenth century reveals that there was continuity in the status of beef and mutton between 1540 and 1640. These meats were as important to the households of the Earl of Derby between 1586 and 1590 as they had been to those of the Cecils and the Radcliffes – with his household typically consuming ten muttons and one and a half oxen a week. The household of Henry Stanley’s father, Edward, also attached importance to these meats. His accounts show that he spent £306 16s 8d on beef and mutton in 1561, a sum that amounted to 19 per cent of his total spending on food. And in Essex during 1543, the Petres of Ingatestone Hall also viewed these two meats as basic commodities; they spent almost four times as much on beef and mutton as they did on veal, lamb and pork.69 I will show in Chapter 4 that both mutton and beef, like any other basic product, could become a high-value item depending on its preparation. The addition of spices or the infusion of herbs – of which forty-three types were listed by Thomas Tusser in 1577 – could impart a whole new meaning to a meal.70 But these meats were at the bottom end of the food price scale and were often, if not

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always, available to elite households. As such, and along with dairy produce, legumes, beer and bread, they were associated with household servants – as they were with other manual workers and the poor. Despite this, a diverse range of high-value foods were kept at the estates of the wealthy and, as servants had access to keys, opportunities to eat them would have arisen from time to time. In 1568 Edward Stanley, 3rd Earl of Derby, expressed concern about unauthorized entry into the kitchen of his stately home. Such concern could be driven by a fear of poisoning, but it could also be triggered by revelation that staff had stolen high-value foods. In addition, the works of Shakespeare and other early modern playwrights indicate that servants were not averse to helping themselves to banqueting food as and when suitable opportunities arose.71 Thus, as was the case for labourers (see above and Chapter 5), there is scope for optimism regarding actual food experiences of low-level household servants. But the diets of servants probably differed from those of other manual labourers in two important ways: first, surplus food from elaborately made and exotically flavoured dishes following oversupply from the kitchen may have been sampled at the lower tables from time to time. Secondly, accounts show that some high-value luxuries were bought in quantities far too vast to feed just family and guests on the festive occasions discussed in Chapter 6. Notwithstanding such special circumstances, the association between basic foods and the lower ranks of English society in the eyes of their superiors can have many explanations. One of these was contemporary medical wisdom. A revival of classical art and science during the Renaissance period resulted in an interest in, and a scrutiny of, ancient medical teachings that revolved around a belief in the four universal elements and their humoral counterparts situated in the body and all organic matter. In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, dietetics was based on this theory known as ‘humorism’. Under this philosophy, dietaries – guidebooks on healthful eating – explained that good health depended upon achieving and maintaining equilibrium between the humours that were thought to make up the body. These humours were black bile, yellow bile, blood and phlegm. Any disequilibrium between them caused the body to become either too cold or hot or dry or moist. This, in turn, could cause physical or mental disease. As each type of food had its own humoral characteristics that were transferred to the body when absorbed, it was important from a physician’s point of view that one should select a diet appropriate to ones age, gender and vocation that maintained or improved health.72 Although foods considered cold and moist were deemed unsuitable for sedentary people such as the elite who enjoyed much leisure

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time – especially during the winter in England because the cold, damp climate exasperated the problem of inducing a phlegmatic constitution – they were fit for the digestion of labourers. This was because manual workers produced heat and expelled moisture by sweating and thereby counterbalanced the adverse properties of phlegmatic foods. Such foods included fish that acquired their coldness and wetness from their watery habitats. Physician James Hart wrote in 1633 that many fishes are cold and moist – especially freshwater species – and noted that ‘fish are greatest enemies to cold the moist phlegmaticke bodies, and old age, especially the moistest and slimiest’. Physician, Thomas Moffett agreed with this sentiment. His late sixteenth-century regimen guide that had been ‘corrected and enlarged by Christopher Bennet’ in 1655 stated that, particularly in the springtime, when we ought to feed on the purest and most wholesome nourishment, our blood is not cleansed but corrupted with filthy fish, I mean saltherrings, redherrings, sprats, Haberdin, and greenfish: which are not amiss for Sailers and Ploughmen, but yet most hurtful and dangerous for other persons.73

Beef, and particularly that which came from older cattle, was of a melancholic nature; and although its properties could be ‘corrected’ by roasting it with the addition of well-chosen ingredients, this meat was considered by physician Tobias Venner to be suitable for ‘rusticke men, that labour painfully in the fields, and for those that inhabit cold countries’. While Henry Butts remarked in 1599 that beef was a bodybuilding meat appropriate to ‘youth, labourers and great exercisers’, Hart said that while young beef should be roasted, old beef – which was fit for strong stomachs – should ideally be boiled. To William Vaughan, a Welsh writer with a keen interest in health issues, it was not as straightforward as this. He claimed in the 1612 edition of his treatise on healthful living that all flesh whatsoever, be it Beefe, Mutton or other that is bred on dry places or mountainous, where ther is any reasonable pasture, is alwaies better and more wholsome, then that which is bred in valleyes, or on low and marshie grounds, where there grow bulrushes, and other weeds and hearbs, cold moist, and of little substance.74

This view would have muddied the waters of dietary advice at that time. Other foods associated with labourers were butter and hard, ripe cheese. Thomas Elyot, a knight of the realm and a humanist who had read widely and had an interest in medicine, wrote of butter in his book that was published

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14 times between 1539 and 1610, that this was a nourishing food. Both Butts and Venner agreed – adding the caveat that eating too much of it weakened the stomach. With regard to cheese, however, Elyot claimed that cheese was ‘an enemie unto the stomack’; this was because it bred ‘ill humors’. The sort of cheese that did least harm, he wrote, was ‘soft cheese reasonablie salted’.75 Bread, as we have seen, was widely eaten by most if not all people regardless of their social status; and it was generally believed that bread made from wellground fine flour was easily digested. But because bread made from courser flour was harder to digest, it was more suited to strong stomachs.76 Regarding legumes – peas and beans – there was a general consensus among physicians that they were ‘gross’, ‘windy’ and hard to digest. While it was thought that peas were safer for delicate stomachs than beans, and Venner claimed that beans were ‘only for plough-men, and such as are accustomed to an hard and course kinde of foode’, Thomas Cogan, writing for the benefit of students, assigned peas to ‘rusticks, who have stomacks like Ostriges, that can digest hard yron’.77 Like solid foods, liquid foods had properties that needed to be taken into consideration when choosing what to drink. Beer was the drink that Charles Howard and others assigned to soldiers and labourers, and Venner thought that strong beer, like wine, should be avoided by young people and those with choleric complexions – especially in the hot summer months. Elyot on the other hand wrote that beer, ‘being moderately used, is most like to the naturall heat & moysture of mans bodie’.78 Thus, it is clear that ‘small’ beer (of low alcohol content) was seen as the ideal beverage for labourers to wash their food down with – both at home and, as we will see in Chapter 6, in alehouses when they were socializing. As dietary instruction could be complicated and, in some instances, contradictory, we might expect physicians’ advice was sometimes ignored. The evidence of the regimen guides themselves show that this indeed was the case. While Vaughan noted that some foods were eaten more ‘for wantonnesse then for any nutritive or necessary good’, Butts felt that simplicity and necessity had been overtaken by ‘varietie and plenty’. This, he wrote, had led to ‘luxury and superfluitie’.79 Bullein also criticized the unhealthy eating habits of people living in his time, for his work was directed towards people ‘more rich than wise’ whose ‘excesse of euill diet’ was due to ‘the lust of their eyes’. But perhaps perversity towards dietary advice can be best summed up by physician James Hart who believed people in the early 1600s chose to eat ‘toothsomest’ rather than ‘wholesomest’ foods. He noted that

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… now nothing but the hardest Sugar will downe with us in this our effeminate and gluttonous age. I say no further, but let those that will not be warned, stand to the perill that will fall thereon, I have discharged my duty in giving warning to the wise, sober, and temperate; I know there are some intemperate apitian palates, who preferre their bellies before health; yea, before heaven it selfe.80

It is doubtful that these learned men would have issued such warnings if the following of medical dietary advice was universal – or even widespread. In addition to medical considerations, food choices for oneself and others could be based either on personal taste – influenced at least in part on custom; on affordability and availability in the marketplace; or on a sense that foodways were as much an identity marker as the clothes one wore or the houses one lived in. We saw in the last chapter that Humfrey Braham wrote about an apparent obsession with hierarchical station that occupied the minds of early modern people.81 In order to apply meaning to this, food consumption practices in general, and commensality in particular, needed to assume a symbolic role. Eating was therefore more than functional in the sense that it averted hunger; it signalled many things. These ranged from religious alignment to identification with a particular group or social ‘class’. William Harrison lamented the apparent fact that, in his day (1577), it was difficult to tell the difference between skilled craftsmen and gentlemen by the foods that they were eating. This was because the former were, ostensibly, emulating or imitating the latter.82 Those who drafted proclamations relating to army and navy provisions – the elite or their representatives – had no doubt about which foods were appropriate for personnel taken from the labouring ranks, and these were described by the Earl of Nottingham and others as ‘necessaries’.83 But in July 1628, at least one middle-ranking councillor in Salisbury also was unequivocal about which foods were appropriate for the city’s poor. In Poverty in Early-Stuart Salisbury, Paul Slack has revealed a letter written by Councillor John Ivie that was addressed to his colleague Henry Sherfield. This letter outlined the councillor’s plans to provide for those in need: the provisions, to be sold at cost price, were to be paid for with tokens redeemable at special storehouses, and this, Ivie thought, would curtail beggary, reduce drunkenness and at once save the ratepayers’ money. He wrote ‘… the tokens should be from a farthing and sixpence, and this money should be current nowhere but at the storehouses where they should have such diet as is fit for them’. The diet that was deemed ‘fit for them’, perhaps not surprisingly given the evidence that I have produced above, was to be ‘bread, butter, cheese, fish, candles, faggots [of firewood] and coals, and such butchers appointed to take their money for flesh

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if need be’. The attitude of this puritanically minded councillor towards the less fortunate and their dietary intake was, like that of many others in authority, clearly unambiguous.84 In what sense was this food still as ‘fit’ for the poor in 1627 as it had been in the middle of the sixteenth century? It was cheap, and, notwithstanding periods of dearth, commonly available; it fell within the parameters of dietary advice issued by physicians and apothecaries in the early seventeenth century; and, as the evidence in the next two chapters show, when contrasted with the foods eaten by those of relatively high degree, it was necessary as a status marker of wage-earning labourers. Thus, over the century, there was more continuity than change in attitudes towards these people’s foodways. In writing about Europe in general, and largely using evidence of a suggestive nature such as regimen guides and cookery books, Ken Albala notes that medicine at this time was informed by cuisine as opinions of dieticians had become ‘a simple matter of social prejudice’.85 This means that all three considerations for food choices could be interconnected in the minds of contemporaries; and the sets of evidence that I drawn upon, including actual food purchases by some of the gentry and communiqués of middle-ranking people discussed next, lend support to Albala’s findings.

3

The Middling Sort and Their Diets

Wealthy yeomen no Serving man, nor other Yeoman taking wages, nor such other as may not dispende of freeholde fourtie shillings by yere, as is aforesaid, shall weare any Shert, or Shert band, under or upper Cappe, Bonet, or Hat garnished, mixt, made, or wrought with silke, golde, or silver … .1 In economic terms, yeomen in Tudor and early Stuart England were a diverse group of people. Although a yeoman was supposed to be a forty shilling freeholder who had the responsibility of running a farming enterprise, some were relatively unsuccessful farmers to the point that they were no better off than land-renting small-scale farmers known as husbandmen. In contrast, other yeomen were successful businesspeople. While the former sort worked the land with or without the help of farmhands, the latter sort – taking advantage of a growing market economy by utilizing various strategies such as improving techniques and subletting – could sometimes afford to delegate farming duties to others. Despite protestations of the Crown, such as the one quoted above, these yeomen acted and consumed like gentlemen. One such yeoman who actually described himself as a gentleman in his farming and memorandum books, and whose wealth and lifestyle was akin to that of some of the lower-gentry, was Henry Best from Elmswell in East Yorkshire.2 He enjoyed a varied diet that was distinctly different from the food eaten by his employees and others of lesser rank. The Bests’ income that paid for luxurious foods came from leasing part of their estate and from commercial mixed farming which was evidently driven by a desire to maximize profit by exploiting the market economy. Between 1617 and 1627, Best employed up to 9 servants, several day labourers and a few casual or seasonal workers who were hired at appropriate times during the annual agricultural cycle. Although

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the wages he paid were slightly less than average, Best claimed that his staff received superior meals to those experienced by workers on nearby estates. At each of the three daily meals, Best’s husbandmen and labourers received butter, cheese, milk or porridge and either eggs, pies or bacon. Although they were usually given ale to drink, they were occasionally provided with best beer.3 This account paints a rosy picture of the provisions enjoyed by Best’s farmhands, but the fare of this ‘gentleman farmer’ was superior. Although his manor house did not contain the trappings that would indicate a desire for conspicuous opulence, he compared favourably his own food to that of his social inferiors. The yeoman purchased exotic drinks and an array of expensive spices that he would have used sparingly to add variety to his daily meals. On one occasion in July 1617, Best spent £2 17s 6d on a range of luxuries that included cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, pepper, sugar, raisins, currants, saffron, aqua vita and rosewater.4 At this time, the high-value foodstuffs may have been bought prior to entertaining distinguished guests at a special occasion – to prepare dishes in an exciting way in order to lend credence to his claim of gentility. One event worthy of celebration during this year was his taking control of the Elmswell estate. The rosewater, like the spices and aqua vita, still had a medicinal role in the early seventeenth century and featured in the collection of cures owned by Lady Grace Mildmay, but it also had a culinary use. Having been ‘adopted into the cuisine of the European courts and aristocracy’, it subsequently featured in English cookery books, particularly as an ingredient in dairy-based recipes.5 Costing around 1s per pint, the rosewater that was to feature as a purchase of Warwickshire gentleman Sir Richard Newdigate on seventeen occasions between 1636 and 1640 – usually in May and at Christmas – had been bought by the Yorkshire yeoman three decades earlier. As far as drinks were concerned, although Best’s servants occasionally enjoyed best beer, the relatively small quantities of aqua vita bought, if not used to cure specific ailments, would have been drunk by the yeoman’s family and guests. This aqua vita (water of life) was a spirit – probably brandy, whisky or gin. As the word ‘yeoman’ is a broad category that included many country folk with varying degrees of income and success,6 there can be no such thing as typicality of foodways within this ‘group’. Despite this, Best’s extravagant expenditure on food may have been typical of other wealthy yeomen who imagined themselves as gentlemen. This is true of a similarly successful farmer who lived at the opposite end of the country. His name was William Honnywell, and his estate in Ashton, South Devon, was just ten miles north of Sir Richard

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Reynell’s Forde House.7 Honnywell, who kept a diary from 1596 until his death in 1614, claimed in 1603 that his property was worth £492. This was a remarkably precise figure that might indicate a reliable audit had been carried out. In addition to his fixed assets, his sheep, cattle and crops were valued at over £400. Honnywell, like other aspiring ‘gentlemen’, spent a considerable amount of time in London where he purchased high-value consumables while his wife, who was familiar with business management from before the time of their marriage, administered the Devon estate that spanned two parishes. The purchases that the yeoman made during his visits to the capital suggest that he liked to live well and enjoyed displaying his opulence. In 1596, a year of such considerable hardship in Devon that the Privy Council issued a warrant allowing the county to purchase grain from its neighbours, Honnywell – with complete disregard to the Crown’s sumptuary guidelines quoted at the top of this chapter – acquired in London luxuries that included a pair of velvetedged shoes and 30 gold buttons that were made especially for him to adorn his hatband. His food intake on a daily basis, like that of Best’s, remains unknown, but his diary entries show that he purchased game like rabbits, woodcocks and snipe and that he received at least one gift of a shoulder of venison. While he boasted of entertaining his friends lavishly, the tabling allowance of his staff was calculated at 6d per day.8 Despite the separation of Henry Best and William Honnywell by 318 miles, the similarities between the two successful agricultural businessmen regarding diet and identity were far from superficial. Best liked to be known as a gentleman; and Honnywell, having expanded his empire in 1604 by marrying his wealthy landlady Mrs Staplehill, clearly visualized himself as one. While both ate high priced luxurious foods, consumed conspicuously when entertaining and spent money extravagantly, Best identified labourers and servants by their diet and distinguished between their foods and his own superior fare. Both country ‘gentlemen’ paid their employees at or near to the rate which was deemed appropriate for labourers, and both fed their workers with foods befitting their station. Neither man could claim a distinguished pedigree, but both of them aspired to gentility and aligned themselves with their immediate social superiors by distancing themselves from ‘others’ of lesser rank. Thus, the process of establishing and consolidating their chosen identity was seen to be achievable at least partly through making luxury foods their necessities. Not all wealthy farmers wished to express their prosperity through the medium of food consumption, however. The accounts of Robert Loder, a landowner who farmed a large estate of about 150 acres in north Berkshire

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during the early seventeenth century, suggest that he was more concerned with the accumulation of wealth than with extravagance in diet.9 Loder practiced mixed farming with an emphasis on arable cultivation, but his preoccupation with enhancing profit margins, which is manifest throughout the ten-year period of his accounts, can be discerned on many levels. Each year, he calculated which crops would be the most profitable to grow and which animals would give the best return on his investment. But maximizing income was only part of the story for this capitalist farmer, for he realized that this went hand in hand with minimizing expenditure.10 Thus, Loder believed that employing the smallest possible workforce was crucial to success. He also believed that employing men rather than women in his orchard would be beneficial in two important ways: first, it would result in speedier harvesting and secondly, it would reduce the level of pilfering that he experienced.11 If Loder’s view of the relative inefficiency and untrustworthiness of female workers was commonplace, it may help explain wage-rate disparities discussed in the previous chapter. This yeoman gives the impression that he was something of a worrier, for he also lamented the fact that he may have occasionally undercharged customers for his produce.12 The accounts also reveal that the enthusiasm shown by this rural businessman for making money was not kindled by an overwhelming desire to eat luxuriously, and this was despite Loder’s net profit usually exceeding £200 per year.13 He estimated the annual cost of food to be about £10 for each of the seven to eleven members of his household14; this would have worked out at little more than the food allowance afforded to his day labourers, which, for the ‘wheller’ and ‘his boy’, was 6d and 3d, respectively.15 This yeoman was not far off being self sufficient, and although he did purchase basic foods from outside when such action was deemed convenient or practical, and even bought a few exotic spices, most of the family’s food was home produced. As the grain-based foods and beverages of the Loder family were made from wheat and barley grown on their estate, they were in a position to monitor the quality of the production of beer, bread and pastries from start to finish. This may have been important to the yeoman, for he liked to keep a tight control over the affairs of his estate. Beef was occasionally served at the table, but the main meat consumed by the household came from home-reared pigs. The other foods listed as expenses were milk, butter, cheese, fish and a small amount of fruit and spices for which Loder paid around £1.16 The spices included mustard, rice (a grain often listed as a spice in household accounts), currants, raisins, cinnamon, cloves, mace, ginger and pepper.17 Sugar was also used to flavour the Loders’ food, but this was used sparingly. The amount

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purchased in 1618 was a mere 6½lb.18 Both Loder and his staff ate cherries from the orchard, and in addition apples, quinces, pears and plums were also available to him.19 He also kept pigeons, hens and geese, and, although they are not accounted for, rabbits and wild birds may have been eaten by the family. Thus Loder’s diet was reasonably varied but hardly luxurious, and the assertion made 30 years later by clergyman and historian Thomas Fuller, that the meat of yeomen was neither ‘disguised with strange sauces’ nor ‘surrounded by salad’, seems applicable here. It was certainly more applicable to Loder than to others of his degree like Best and Honnywell, who, as a matter of social and cultural identity, made luxuries their necessities.20

Urban ‘professionals’ and artisans Like large-scale farmers whose agricultural and agrarian activities generated significant income, successful merchants and craftsmen plying their trades in urban centres also were able to blur the edible markers of social distinction between themselves and the gentry. Town council members and civic leaders were usually drawn from the middling sort, and lord mayors of London throughout the late medieval and early modern period, for example, overwhelmingly were merchants or master craftsmen by trade. Diaries kept by some of these people, and council records, show that they ate luxurious foods at least occasionally, and although the reasons for partaking of sumptuous fare could be multifaceted, one outcome was that it created a sense of identity. On 29 August 1542, the lord mayor of York and his council colleagues received from the Earl of Cumberland two deer – a stag and a buck.21 These animals, which were intended to be eaten by the middling-status committee members, were the source of venison, a meat that was associated with the social elite. As I will show in Chapter 5, this status-marking luxury was, in fact, sampled by many people from all walks of life – even though it could be bought neither at butchers’ shops nor at market. Although the animals were presented by the earl as a mark of affection or gratitude and would have been enjoyed exclusively by a closed circle of council members and their guests, this was far from being an isolated occurrence. On 3 February 1578(9), an order was made prohibiting the consumption of ‘any venyson’ at the lord mayor’s dinners or ‘at his entri into his office’.22 Despite this legislative endeavour ‘two bucks’ were again bestowed upon the mayor of York and his aldermen – this time by the lord president, the Earl of Huntingdon. The venison was to be enjoyed by

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all those present at the house of one Francis Hynch. As the record notes, this included ‘the sheriffs, [the council of] xxiiij, the Chamberlaynes and all their ladies and wives’.23 Council records indicate that the gifting of luxury foods by nobles to town or parish elders of middling rank was not uncommon and that it sometimes constituted part of a process of reciprocal favour through which lords acquired services from civic leaders.24 Of further significance is the gender revelation. Male councillors were not the only recipients of such food on this occasion, for the coterie expressly included ‘all their ladies and wives’. These women could associate themselves with and were identifiable as members of a privileged club within which the consumption of luxury food served to distinguish its members from outsiders. York was not alone in this respect. Following their inauguration on 30 September 1552 the mayor, aldermen and new sheriffs of London held a dinner that was attended by men and women alike. The grandeur of the occasion was not lost on merchant tailor and diarist Henry Machyn, for he observed that it was ‘a grett dener as youe have sene; for ther wher mony gentyll men and women’.25 These fellowships, although elastic enough to accommodate the female guests of councillors, were at once impervious to unwelcome outsiders of both sexes. As was the case at York, venison was one of the luxurious foods enjoyed by this London community. Supposedly only available to those of noble status, this food was a social marker that simultaneously identified its consumers as being different from outsiders and, as Felicity Heal has pointed out, helped to ‘develop and reinforce patronage networks’.26 There were other occasions when urban professionals and high-ranking craftsmen ate luxurious foods, and one of these was the annual get-togethers of manufacturing and trading companies. Usually held in the summer, these were high profile events at which the skilled craftsmen who had risen through the ranks of their trades to become masters enjoyed sumptuous fare which they may not necessarily have been used to. The Merchant Tailors’ dinner that was held on St Paul’s Day in 1557 was attended by the lord mayor, his sheriffs and other ‘worshipful’ men. Not only was venison was consumed in great quantity by the participants but two bucks were also given to ‘the parysh’ to ‘make mere’.27 Who exactly were supposed to make merry on that day in 1557 is not clear, but as the meat of two bucks was clearly insufficient to feed a heavily populated parish in London, ‘the parish’ probably meant the parish elders – the ‘better sort’ of inhabitants – rather than the entire parochial community. Two years later, on 29 August 1559, the Merchant Tailors’ feast again featured a noteworthy selection of estimable foods, for Machyn observed

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that this included venison ‘be-syd al odur mettes’.28 If this special occasion was exclusive to a select group with shared interests, and to local government officials who could further those interests, then the Master of the Company of Skinners’ annual gathering held in June 1560 was less so. The committee of the fellowship was joined by many ‘worshipful’ men at the dinner. But at the subsequent party where ‘all was welcome’, the ‘grett plenty’ [of delicacies] included spiced bread, marmalade, suckets, comfits and fruit – a popular fashion-food that included cherries, strawberries, pippins and oranges. But the latter were not just any old oranges: the diarist makes a point of mentioning they were Portuguese oranges. Evidently these were deemed to be special in some way. At the following year’s meeting, three stags and eight bucks were consumed at the pre-banquet lunch. On the same day that the Company of Skinners held their annual gettogether, the Master Grocers held theirs. The local dignitaries in attendance at the grocers’ party included the Lord Mayor of London, his aldermen and sheriffs, worshipful gentlemen and many ladies and gentlewomen. Their dinner on 16 June 1561 included more than thirty bucks and stags.29 The organizing of these special dinners, which enabled traders and craftspeople to express fellowship and enhance their reputations, continued into the next century. Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos has shown that at the blacksmiths’ annual gatherings of the early seventeenth century, held like many others in London in midsummer, ‘large quantities’ of venison pasties, capons, geese, fresh salmon, sugarloaf and wine were offered to the members.30 The poor, she writes, sometimes benefited from urban guild feasts, through donations in times of dearth and plague, and through the organizing and funding of some guild-sponsored almshouse festivities.31 But these gestures, as generous as they undoubtedly were, would also have served to remind poor recipients of their exclusion from the main event, and of their inferior and dependent position. The nature of at least some of the feasts themselves appears to have changed in the seventeenth century, for it has been noted that socially inclusive events attended by council leaders eventually became more exclusive and restrictive ‘rather than fraternal and allembracing’.32 This trend towards exclusivity at communal gatherings reflects a broader trend in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England whereby communal circles contracted, and those encompassed within them became increasingly marked by conformity to type. But council leaders drawn from the professions such as commerce and finance – like London’s Lord Mayor William Harpur who had attended the Master Grocers’ feast in 1561 – continued not only to be recipients of luxury foods at special occasions, but also presented

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such foods to acquaintances and elite dignitaries while entertaining at semipublic events and privately at home. We have seen that beer was provided as the chosen beverage for common foot soldiers who were drawn from the ranks of the ‘meaner sort’; and beer, along with ale, was also provided for yeoman Best’s farmhands. Ale, usually made by fermenting malted barley, differed from beer in that it was not flavoured with hops that acted as a preservative. Hopped beer was introduced from mainland Europe in the early sixteenth century, and it gradually replaced ale as the drink for manual workers. In contrast to this, evidence suggests that at least some of middling status – including merchants and artisans – drank wine. William Harrison was impressed by this; and John Smyth, a successful merchant who owned his own ship, and was twice Mayor of Bristol in the late sixteenth century, partook of this beverage when entertaining ‘his merchant friends’ at Ashton Court.33 While beer was thought by physicians to be thirstquenching, nourishing and cooling and therefore best suited to those with hot constitutions living in England, Scotland and Ireland – such as manual labourers – wine was different. As discussed below, wine in general terms was humorally warm. It was supposed by physicians to be diluted with water so that the ‘fumes’ of the alcohol did not reach the head and cause inebriation. In England, however, one was advised not to water the wine during cold winter months, as doing so would compound the problem of damp absorption and turn some of one’s blood into phlegm.34 Wine was also relatively expensive, and the best sorts needed to be imported; this made the beverage an ideal social identity marker. John Smyth and his guests may also have drank a beverage known as ‘hippocras’, for he wrote a recipe listing its ingredients in his ledger. Containing a selection of spices, this drink was originally considered medicinal; but, like many other foodstuffs, it had become a fashionable drink in its own right among the well-to-do. It was not dissimilar to the modern-day German drink glühwein, or mulled wine in English.35 Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that some of the middling sort consumed luxury foods and drinks as a matter of course. Judging by the tone and language deployed by Harrison, a protestant clergyman who was high on morals and somewhat lower on respect for his social inferiors, he was peeved that foods associated with the gentry were being eaten by those from the lower levels of this social group – like artisans.36 At a higher level, many of the foods consumed by people whose careers ranged from merchants to associates of the legal profession could be quite impressive. John Greene, a barrister and a judge of the Sheriff ’s Court, noted in his diary entry on August 1635 that

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he and his colleagues, while dining in the hall of Lincoln’s Inn, had recently eaten on ‘every flesh day’ an impressive range of estimable meats that included ‘venizon and some other dish, besides either pullets, veal, tongs, pigeons, ducks or the like’. This extravagance was not confined to flesh days, however. Those of the middling sort found ways to mark their superior identity – real or imagined – even at times of abstention. As I will show in Chapter 6 when discussing Lenten food, the quality of permitted foods, and the way in which they were prepared, could distinguish people of substance from the poorer sort; and they were facilitated in doing this by referring to cookery books. Thus, on ‘fish days’, Greene and his colleagues ate ‘hortichocke pie and sturgeon’. Greene’s experiences of luxury foods were not limited to the dining hall of Lincolns Inn. On Saturday, 17 August, this lawyer was a participant at a ‘Venizon feast at the bownlin green’, and on 4 July the following year, he noted that ‘cherries now at best and at 2½d a pound’, that strawberries were ‘very cheape’, and although ‘artichoaks are not full ripe’, rabbits now are ‘pretty big’.37 The noteworthiness of these details, and the admission that ‘our exceedings all this reading have been very great’, in a diary primarily concerned with legal matters, indicates that this extravagance may not have been a regular occurrence for all Lincolns Inn lawyers and trainee lawyers. Yet the entries show that high-value prestigious foods were at least occasionally available to those residing at Inns of Court where professional identities that included civility and gentility could be fashioned.38 Given their aspirations to gentility, it ought not to surprise us that Greene and others in the legal profession ate such foods both conspicuously and inconspicuously – possibly within exclusive or socially restricted surroundings. Like meals eaten by lords in their manor houses, those taken in the dining hall at Lincolns Inn were not for public viewing. The feast at ‘the bowlin green’, on the other hand, probably was. When consumed conspicuously and in an appropriate setting, luxury foods held the potential to define their consumers’ social position or to make a statement about their chosen identity. This could be in front of clients, peers, employees or servants. However, when consumed inconspicuously the value of luxuries did not diminish. The reassurance and satisfaction that the fare was congruous to its partaker was of substantial import to the process of self-identity. But if the lawyers in question, as gentlemen or aspiring gentlemen, had acquired or were acquiring the taste for venison, sturgeon ‘or the like’ – eating it simply because they liked it – then we should note that refined taste was itself a hallmark of the cultured classes.

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The natural philosopher and ‘scientist’ John Dee, who worked and socialized with government officials and foreign ambassadors, was no stranger to the taste of venison. He had received gifts of this meat on at least two occasions during the late sixteenth century and had also dined with the Lord Treasurer Thomas Cecil and his wife.39 As a guest of this high-profile gentleman, Dee would have experienced luxurious foods of the sort described in the next chapter, but even on his own, he was used to eating foods that some contemporaries would have considered extravagant, for on 31 March 1594, at ‘abowt four of the clock I did eat toasted cake buttered, and with suger and nutmeg on it’. Although we might expect a man who moved in elite circles to consume luxurious fare, the same applied to the family of general merchant and wool trader John Johnson. Johnson, who operated mainly from Calais and rented Glapthorn Manor in Northamptonshire in the mid-sixteenth century, clearly aspired to gentle status. He and his wife Sabine acquired many exotic foods with which to prepare special dishes. In addition to hunting deer by warrant and cooking venison, the Johnsons bought sturgeon and salmon for consumption on ‘fish days’ and purchased wild birds, a variety of expensive spices, and sub-tropical fruits from London.40 In the light of the luxurious meals enjoyed at Inns of Court, a compliment coming from one of Johnson’s guests, a lawyer named Christopher Breen, is indeed revealing. Breen compared favourably the ‘delicious’ fare presented to him at Glapthorn with that which he was normally accustomed. Clearly some merchants were more successful than others, and this would have influenced standards of living – including food consumption and the ability to provide lavish hospitality. However, this case shows that at least some people who reached the upper levels of the middling sort were able to consume like gentlepeople. Why did this section of society, from artisans to lawyers and merchants, choose to eat these relatively luxurious foods? To be sure, some of them could afford to do so, and no doubt they acquired a taste for the unusual and the exotic that the social elite took for granted, but this is too simplistic an answer. There are many factors that influenced food consumption practices at this level of society; and if one was because these people could afford to do so, it still leaves the question of why they felt the need to spend their financial resources on special foods. It is noteworthy that John Johnson of Glapthorn Manor was declared bankrupt in 1553; and although this may have been down to business problems, expenditure exceeding income by adopting a lavish lifestyle certainly would not have helped his cause in this respect. So was this expenditure an investment of some sort?

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One reason for choosing high-value food, where choice was possible, was because consumers had acquired a taste for them. This, at least in part, resulted from curiosity and experimentation. As many people from the upper levels of the middling sort, including merchants and prosperous yeomen, visited busy urban centres such as London where eating houses and take-away food stalls were trading all year round, they had access to fashionable foods. These included foreign foods that had been introduced by migrants from the continent who populated London to the extent that the city relied upon them.41 This access, which would have been a catalyst for experimentation at home, applied to many European foods cooked in special ways; for there is a whole genre of late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English cookery books that advised their readers on how to reproduce meals in the French, or Italian, or Spanish style.42 Comfits is but one example of a fashionable snack food that was readily available to those who could justify paying the market price for them. These sweets were held in high regard throughout the entire period; and although were a delicacy dating back to medieval times, by the late sixteenth century ‘comfit makers appeared as a distinct occupational group’.43 These confectioners were often foreigners living in London and other urban centres, and, despite trading restrictions imposed of aliens, the success attributed to at least some of them was a measure of both the growing popularity of sweets among middlestatus people and of the influence that immigrants had on the early modern English diet.44 London was also the centre for purchasing cookery books. Some of the many culinary guides available to those who had the necessary disposable income to buy them were described by their authors, compilers or publishers as portrayers of fashionable cuisine. These could be bought new or second hand from many booksellers in the capital, and then taken home and either read, stored for future reference or used to experiment in reproducing supposedly voguish meals. But curiosity and experimentation may not be an adequate explanation as to why middle ranking people bought luxurious foods and made them their necessities. To be sure, some of the foods acquired by the Johnsons and other relatively well-to-do families and individuals were valuable in terms of price or limited availability, but what was their appeal? Was there something about high value foods that made them more nutritious in the eyes of sixteenthand early seventeenth-century consumers? If so, were these people investing in good health by eating them? Many of the foods deemed appropriate for English people were either indigenous or had become assimilated into the diet

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over an extended period of time. Foreign foodways were viewed with suspicion because they differed from those of the English whose practices had been conditioned by climate and custom. This is evident in dietary advice. Eating copious quantities of butter, for example, was considered by physician Andrew Boorde to be fine for the Dutch – because they had become used to it: dutche men dothe eate it at all tymes in the day, yt which I did nat praise when I did dwell amonge them, considerynge that butter is unctious, and every thynge that is unctious is noysome to the stomacke.

Even expensive tuna in 1655 was considered by physician Thomas Moffett/ Christopher Bennett to be more suitable for Mediterranean stomachs that it was for English ones: No Tunny lives past two years, waxing so fat that their bellies break: at which time more gain is made of their fat, by making Train-oyl for Clothiers, then good by their flesh; which is only good, (if good at all) for Spanish and Italian Mariners.45

The English needed to apply moderation (or correctives) when consuming these and many other foods. However, staples like beef and pork could be characterized by coldness and wetness in the humoral sense of the words – especially if the animals from which the meat came were young like calves or suckling pigs. Ironically the oft-chosen correctives for such foods, as we will see in Chapter 5, were the sort of spices our yeomen and merchants bought. Physicians like Henry Butts and Thomas Elyot agreed that spices were hot and dry to various degrees, and although these substances were to be used sparingly by cholerics and melancholics – because the heat and dryness of spices produced an excess of yellow bile in the body thereby exacerbating the former’s fiery temperament and increased the level of black bile in the latter’s body causing despondency – they were very useful. Cloves, nutmeg and its derivative mace, ginger, pepper and cinnamon were ideal for counterbalancing the cool moist properties of many meats when cooked with them. Spices also tended to strengthen the stomach, sinews and brain.46 Tobias Venner added that nutmeg and mace are beneficial to ‘olde, cold, and phlegmaticke bodies’; that cinnamon ‘correcteth putrefaction of humors, resisteth poysons, exceedingly comforteth the principall parts, especially the heart and liver’; and that ginger, among other benefits, dispels ‘flatulent moysture’ and ‘increase the geniture’.47 We will recall that a proclamation drawn up by the Earl of Nottingham in 1599 allowed middle-ranking army personnel, such as horsemen who

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were drawn from the middling sort, to receive a wider choice of meats than foot soldiers. In addition to beef and mutton, horsemen were to be offered rabbit, pigeon and capon while being billeted in and around London. This seems to have reflected the sorts of foods they experienced as civilians. Rabbit meat was thought by Butts, William Bullein and Elyot to offer good nourishment to all but melancholics. This was because rabbits were cold and dry. And while pigeon flesh was thought to be easily digested and beneficial to people with phlegmatic constitutions when eaten in moderation, due to it being warm and moist, the capon, according to Elyot, ‘is above all other fowles praised: for as much as it is easily digested, and maketh little ordure, and much good nourishment’.48 It is not surprising then, that eight years later, as I showed in Chapter 2, Thomas Lodge recommended the eating of these light meats as part of a controlled diet that would help prevent infection during plague epidemics.49 Venison was eaten on occasions by middling status individuals such as yeoman Honnywell and natural scientist John Dee and by master craftsmen and civic representatives at social gatherings. This prestigious meat was thought to be hot and dry and offered little nourishment. Physicians believed it engendered melancholic blood, and eating it could even cause fevers.50 Despite this, venison remained a much sought-after food; and, like other meats, it could be corrected by cooking it with well-chosen ingredients. These included sugar, fruits and wine. Sugar was considered a spice, but unlike those mentioned above, it was humorally warm and moist. This meant that the addition of sugar could moderate the insalubrious qualities of choleric meats and shift them towards a temperate middle ground. As I will show, a variety of fruits was commonly used as ingredients when roasting or baking venison. Eating a fruit on its own was considered by European dietary writers to be problematic because many of them were thought to be cold and wet and therefore phlegmatic. This was a particular problem in the cool, damp English climate. Some fruits were also difficult to digest, unwholesome and ‘windy’, but there were some exceptions, and sometimes even the side of a tree upon which a fruit grew could make a difference. Fruits made excellent medicines, however; and they were also acceptable as constituent parts of cooked dishes, with their cold, wet characteristics being especially appropriate for rendering venison nutritious.51 Wine was also a corrective used to counterbalance the adverse qualities of some meats, with different types of wine possessing different nutritional characteristics. Generally, red wine, according to physician Tobias Venner, was

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warming, nutritious and, providing it was not consumed to excess, profitable in almost every possible way to people of every age and constitution. Indeed, Venner devotes thirteen pages of his book Via Recta ad Vitam Longam to wine and its (mostly) beneficial properties. White wine, he notes, is most suitable for young people with hot constitutions such as manual labourers and is more cooling and thirst quenching; but it is also less nourishing that red wine.52 Other physicians agreed with these sentiments, with Elyot, for example, noting that wine: nourisheth and comforteth as wel al the bodie as the spirites of man. And therefore God did ordaine it for mankind, as a remedie against the incommodities of age, that thereby they should seeme to returne unto youth and forget heavinesse.

But even in ancient times it was not advisable for minors to consume strong alcohol: Galen also prohibiteth children to drink any wine, for as much as they be of a hot and moist temperature, and so is wine: and therfore it heateth and moisteth too much their bodies, and filleth their heads with vapours.53

As we will see, red wine was recommended for venison by the authors of cookery books; this was for reasons of taste, texture, opulence and health – for the properties of the liquid helped to neutralize the humoral hotness and dryness of the meat. But high-priced exotic ingredients were not strictly necessary as humoral correctives. Some artisans and others from the lower tiers of the middling sort who may not have been able to buy them were facilitated in the maintenance of nutritional well-being by a medical work attributed to physician and astrologer Philip Moore. In 1564, Moore produced a small and relatively inexpensive book to enable men and women who could not afford the services of a physician to understand bodily requirements and maintain it in good health. It included a description of the humoral system, simple dietary advice and how to make herbal medicines at little cost.54 It is important to realize also that not everyone chose foods on the strength of medical advice. Whether this was because of contradictions in advice, lack of understanding, or that people had other agendas for eating the meals that they did, it is absolutely clear that physicians thought there was a level of perversity among the public towards following dietary advice. This, as we have seen in Chapter 2, can be discerned in the tone and language deployed by dietary writers who expressed concern

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about contemporary eating habits. They include the views of Henry Butts, William Vaughan, William Bullein and James Hart.55 How, then, might we account for expensive, exotic or uncommon foods being acquired and eaten by people of middling social rank? Was their financial expenditure on these luxuries an investment in identity building? Imitating the foodways of the gentry may have been important to nouveau riche merchants, lawyers and others whom these days we may refer to as ‘professionals’ and indeed to artisans and master tradespeople who William Harrison could not distinguish from gentlemen and who attended civic social gatherings and parties organized by guilds. But there is evidence to suggest that identity building sometimes went beyond imitation. Humfrey Braham wrote in the mid-1500s that ‘… one sort can not stand contente with the state [and] degree of an other’. He noted that those of relatively low social standing tried to compare themselves with gentlemen. He further observed that merchants wanted to be considered worshipful and that craftsman yearned for the title of master.56 If this was an accurate observation, then emulation was at play. Although early modern commentators such as Harrison knew that some middling-sort people enjoyed the same foods as the elite did, determining that emulation was a motive is dependent upon establishing that high-value foods held similar meanings to both groups. This can be difficult to prove. However, there can be little doubt in the case of one merchant who aspired to gentle status – the aforementioned John Johnson of Glapthorn in Northamptonshire. Johnson’s business success in the 1540s was driven by, or resulted in, a desire for upward social mobility and, at eventual ruinous expense, this was expressed in the family’s consumption choices that made luxuries their necessities. It was also necessary for families and individuals to be well known for eating the sorts of foods that were associated with their ‘class’ or were associated with the social group to which they aspired. Unlike the friend of the Johnsons, lawyer Christopher Breen, an apprentice of the merchant complained that the meals he was provided with – which were supposed to be appropriate to those of his master’s occupation – were both insufficient and of poor quality. The reaction of Sabine Johnson in dealing with the issue, which included writing letters to assure people that her hospitality was actually very good, raises an important question.57 Whether or not the accusation of the apprentice was justified, why did Sabine deem it necessary to go to such lengths to deny the claim? Even though an entrepreneur’s success in business in early Elizabethan England could result in a significant accumulation of capital, the

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creation of wealth was not so much an end in itself as a means by which upward social mobility could be engendered, developed and expressed. Where noble titles could not be bought, or would not be bestowed, the nouveau riche could confuse the distinction between honour and affluence by opting for the kind of lifestyle that was associated with the gentry. Thus, the grandeur of the home, a reputation for generosity, and, not least, the consumption of luxurious meals, assumed great importance. The concern of Sabine was possibly therefore the thought of the Johnson’s hard-earned ‘gentle’ reputation being slighted; for the family had, in the short term, succeeded in narrowing the consumption gap between themselves and their social superiors by broadening the gap which was imagined to exist between themselves and the ‘meaner sort’. As I will show in Chapter 5, the types of food deemed appropriate for middlingsort people to portray images of gentility both changed to a limited extent and expanded in scope over the century to 1640; but the portrayal itself was marked by continuity. Like Henry Best, the successful early seventeenthcentury market farmer from East Yorkshire, and like William Honnywell his South Devon counterpart, the Johnsons imagined themselves as the sort of gentlepeople discussed next, and they consumed accordingly by making highvalue consumables their necessities.

4

The Diet of the Gentry

Oh what nisitie is this? what vanitie excesse, ryot, and superfluitie is heare? Oh farewell former world? For I have heard my Father say, in his dayes, one dish, or two of good wholsome meate was thought sufficient, for a man of great worship to dyne withall, and if they had three or four kinds, it was reputed a sumptuous feast.1 In complaining about the extravagant late sixteenth-century eating habits of the well-to-do, these rhetorical questions were asked by hack writer Philip Stubbes. Although he painted a colourful picture of contemporary ills with broad brushstrokes, I will show that, even when the gentry were not entertaining guests, their diets were indeed impressive. When discussing the diet of the gentry, that is to say the foods consumed by them on a regular basis throughout the course of the year, it is possible to break it up into three distinct groups: basic staples, high-quality and high-priced variants of staples and exclusive foods bought in small quantities and used sparingly. I will first consider the acquisition of staple foods by these people whom William Harrison described as the ‘better sort’ of English society. These were relatively low-priced foods purchased in large quantities for habitual consumption by at least some members of their households and which were generally affordable to – or at least obtainable by – a broad range of people under normal economic and supply conditions. Many of these were eaten by servants, and although they could be transformed into special dishes by using novel methods and exotic additives, they were also the foundation of the diet of the well-to-do.2

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Staple foods In Household Servants, we saw that beef and mutton were purchased cheaply in quantities that suggest they were eaten as staples both by senior members of households and their servants. We have also seen that salt pork was a basic meat supplied to soldiers, sailors and the needy. But while small quantities of fresh pork reached the kitchens of many grand estates – often in advance of special occasions – other relatively inexpensive foods purchased by the gentry included certain types of saltwater fish, chicken, basic dairy produce, bread, beer and legumes. On non-flesh days and at fasting times, regulative orders, even those made after the protestant Reformation by the government of Queen Elizabeth I, required abstention from eating meat. Alternative foods were supposed to be sourced and eaten, and one of these was fish. But as I showed in Chapter 2, fish was not particularly popular in England. Although it sometimes replaced meat during fasting periods, this was by no means universal.3 Ponds and streams were an obvious resource of large households, but the same could be said of demesne land in respect of animals reared for home consumption. Yet unlike home-reared cattle, sheep and poultry that are sometimes mentioned in kitchen accounts of the gentry, there is seldom any mention of a home-bred supply of fish. Historian Joan Thirsk notes the extent that the well-to-do went to in order to secure a variety of fish ‘in all seasons’.4 While this certainly applies to the protestant household of the Shuttleworths in Lancashire, it does not apply to the Newdigates of Warwickshire. Accounts show that the Newdigates, who were also protestants, were not particularly fond of fish, for they spent just £11 7s 1d on this type of food over five years. Out of a total expenditure on food of £630 7d, this amounts to a mere 1.8 per cent. At their Arbury Hall residence, more was spent on mackerel than on any other fish, and these fishes were bought for between 3d and 8d each during May and June only.5 Unspecified fish were sometimes purchased for consumption by this family, but acquisitions of this genre of food were generally sporadic. Depending on how it was cooked, it may have been quantitatively insufficient to feed the family and their staff. In contrast, the Cecils at Quickswood purchased many different varieties of fish. The cheapest of these were salt fish and green-fish (uncured fish, usually cod) and these were purchased every week – often in quantities sufficient to feed the entire household.6 Sir Richard and Lady Lucy Reynell bought a considerable amount of seafood. This perhaps is not surprising given the geographical location of their

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estate; for Forde House is just six miles west of Teignmouth and ten miles north of Brixham. In practical terms this means that seafood, not having to be transported great distances inland, was both inexpensive and fresh. The average annual value of fish purchases for the household was £18 6s 6d, but ironically the Reynells spent only 1s 5d over five years on mackerel – a species of fish that is commonly caught around the southwest coast of England. The staples here were corfish (salt fish), costing 3d to 5d each; pilchards, purchased each August and September for 4d per 100; and oysters, bought between September and April for between 2d and 6d per 100. Lobsters, which in North Warwickshire were something of a luxury at 12d to 18d each, were bought regularly by the Reynells between March and September for just 3d each. These crustaceans appear to have been eaten frequently by the family as a matter of course on fish days throughout the summer months.7 Fish was also readily available at markets in London, and while fish is not mentioned in the London accounts of the Earl of Dorset during 1603 and 1604, those of the Earl of Northumberland, who was allegedly implicated in the Catholic-inspired ‘Gunpowder Plot’, show that he spent 6.8 per cent of his food budget on this sort of food. This included purchases of relatively inexpensive salt fish between September 1585 and January 1587.8 Four decades earlier, the purchasing of seafood was somewhat sporadic at the Derbyshire estate of George Vernon; but in contrast, salt fish was an important component of the household diet of one of Vernon’s contemporaries – Sir William Petre. At his Ingatestone Hall home in Essex, ling and haberdine, along with some ‘fresh fish’, was purchased weekly by this Catholic statesman.9 The substitution of meat by fish on non-flesh days, then, was not always adhered to by the gentry and nobility and did not strictly follow confessional lines. But on occasions when fish was eaten, inexpensive varieties bought in sufficient quantities to feed household servants and labourers were mainly salt fish (usually ling), herring and occasionally some stockfish (usually dried cod). The latter, a regular feature on institutional menus, had been doled out with bread to the poor by the Petre household.10 The dietary experience of servants on fish days differed distinctly from that of their masters and mistresses, however. While the former were fed with inexpensive seafood deemed fit for those of low social rank, accounts show that the latter often chose to eat highvalue aquatic food. Unlike seafood, which was sometimes a substitute for meat, the consumption of birds was often an addition to the meal. The seasonal nature and relative price/weight ratio of oft-purchased ‘wild’ birds excludes them

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from being considered basic diet foods. Poultry, however, and especially chicken, was often purchased all year round. Lady Juliana Newdigate, who was often in charge of the Arbury Hall estate when her husband was away in London, regularly bought capons and chickens, and the latter – even after allowing for the probable difference in size – were still cheaper at around 7d to 10d each for most of the year. Either or both of these birds were acquired in sufficient quantities to feed most of the household almost every week during 1639.11 Like Newdigate, Sir William Cecil and Sir Edward Radcliffe frequently purchased chickens, although at these gentlemen’s estates, chickens accounted for a mere 0.7 per cent and 2.8 per cent of their overall food and drink budgets, respectively. The price that the Earl of Sussex paid for this bird between 1637 and 1639 was 8d to 10d each and ten years earlier, the Earl of Salisbury typically paid around 4d to 8d.12 At neither Quickswood nor Gorhambury were chickens purchased in sufficient quantities to feed all of the staff, but these birds were eaten on a regular basis by some household members. This was also the case twenty years earlier both in Lancashire and in London. At Gawthorpe in 1616 the Shuttleworths consumed chickens regularly, yet only four each week reached the dining table. Similarly, the quantity of chickens listed in the accounts of Henry Percy indicates that just a few people within his household ate them frequently.13 Earlier sets of accounts reveal that in the mid-sixteenth century chickens were not key dietary items despite their relative cheapness, even though they were very occasionally purchased in bulk. On 12 August 1549, for example, Sir George Vernon purchased six ‘chekyns for ye howseholde’ at 1d each.14 Although chicken was an inexpensive and popular poultry product, it was not a definitive staple in the sense that it was enjoyed regularly by low-ranking servants. Kitchen ledgers of the gentry show that there was an escalation in the frequency and number of chickens purchased by the nobility and gentry as they became more expensive. But at around 8d each in 1640, although the bird’s new exclusiveness had made it more acceptable to them, it was hardly an upper-class status marker – even though some manual workers might have come to view it as such. Low-priced foods such as bread, beer and basic dairy products were also staples of elite households; but unlike chickens, whether they were purchased from external suppliers or home produced, they were acquired by the kitchens in sufficient quantities to feed the entire households. While the Newdigates bought bread, milk and ale almost every day and bought eggs and butter twice a week, the Cecils also purchased large quantities these products every week over the winter of 1634–1635.15 Bread, dairy produce and ale accounted for

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15.2 per cent of the total monetary value of all food and drink purchased by the Newdigates, and the same items accounted for 23.7 per cent of all kitchen purchases at Cecil’s Quickswood estate. When the spending on these basics is added to that which was spent on beef and mutton, the percentages increase to 44.5 and 58.5, respectively. These were all relatively cheap products, with typical prices in the late 1630s being 5d to 8d per lb of butter, 1½d for a loaf of coarsegrained ‘kitchen’ or second-quality bread, 1d for two eggs, 1d for two pints of milk and 2d for a gallon of ‘small’ beer. Although these foods constituted much of the standard fare of Newdigate’s and Cecil’s low-level servants, they were also used as base ingredients in sumptuous meals eaten by family members and their guests. While the Newdigates assigned financial value to all of their recorded acquisitions – both those sourced from external suppliers and those that were home-produced – the Reynells did not.16 At Forde House, cattle and sheep were home reared, and purchases of beef and mutton supplemented this supply. But beer, cider, bread and dairy products were, on the evidence of staff descriptions and equipments bought and repaired, nearly always home produced.17 As they were not allocated monetary value in the ledgers, the quantities of these foods reaching the kitchen are not clear. Despite this, there is evidence in the Forde House accounts to suggest similarities between Reynell’s consumption and that of other gentlemen. During times when Reynell was staying in Exeter on business, and food purchases in the city are accounted for, basic items as well as luxuries were acquired. One example shows that during his five-day stay in Exeter in October 1628 bread, dairy products and beer represented 34 per cent of the total food and drink costs that included 24 different items.18 In view of the evidence that I produce below, it is likely that while some of this food sustained the few servants that were with him, much of the rest served as ingredients in tasty meals. Butter, bread and ale also figured prominently in the diet of gentleman Robert Throckmorton who was lord of Coughton Court in South Warwickshire. While a surviving daily food bill from 1633 shows this to be the case, the weekly accounts of his grandfather and predecessor, the recusant Sir Thomas Throckmorton, show that eggs were also an important dietary item of his family during the autumn of 1609.19 In the northwest of England during the late sixteenth century, the stewards’ accounts of the Shuttleworths reveal that the Lancashire household’s consumption was built around the eggs, cheese, milk, beer and mutton produced on their own farm, and this was supplemented by external supplies. Although the food consumed here appears to have become more sophisticated between

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1582 and 1617, and purchases of high-value foods were by no means rare, basic diet items consumed remained essentially unaltered.20 In the early seventeenth century, for example, two hogsheads of small beer, a whole cheese, half a stone of butter, 120 eggs and 10s 9d worth of bread was consumed on average each week. Also, both in Lancashire and when he was staying in London, the Earl of Derby in 1561 spent 33.8 per cent of his food budget on bread, beer, beef, mutton and dairy products – although dairy products did not figure as prominently in this gentleman’s household consumption as they did in other elite households.21 And at Sir Henry Percy’s estates at Syon, Bath and Tottenham and at the Petres’ Ingatestone Hall, during December 1552 and January 1553, the same basic foodstuffs were ever-present features of consumption.22 It is clear from the rate and volume of purchases of these relatively inexpensive foods that there was more continuity than change in their consumption at the estates of the wealthy over the period. It is evident also that the geographical mobility of these gentlemen means that regionality in their consumption of basic foods is not particularly striking. But low-value foods, as we will see, could be refined in order to accommodate nutritional guidelines and hierarchical distinction. This also applied to vegetables. Information contained in the household accounts discussed below informs us that vegetables were cultivated at the estates of the well-to-do. Unsurprisingly, greens that satiated refined taste were grown for the tables of the elite; however, legumes – vegetables that were most associated with poor rural peasants – were also grown there. Peas and beans were commonly purchased in their dry form by poor folk who used them as an integral component of, and bulking agent in, some of their meals. In the experience of Yorkshire yeoman Henry Best, peas were an ingredient in the bread eaten by the relatively poor. He noted that they usually put ‘a peck of pease to a bushell of rye, or two pecks of pease to a frundell of massledine’ when making their bread.23 While the former was a ratio of 4:1 in favour of rye, the latter was a ratio of 2:1 in favour of peas. One of the factors that made peas inexpensive was the wages involved in harvesting them: While a male pea ‘puller’ received an unimpressive 8d per day in Yorkshire in 1642, a woman doing the same work received even less – just 6d.24 At around the same time the Newdigate household purchased, on average, 12.5 pecks of peas and 10d worth of beans a year – with the peas being bought during May and June (and occasionally in July) and the beans in July and August. The price paid for fresh peas was usually between 6d to 7d for a peck, but out-of-season dried peas were bought for around 12d.25 Newdigate’s

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contemporary, the Earl of Sussex, spent 14s 6d on peas during March 1639 and paid 11d a peck for them; this amounted to 1.08 per cent of the household expenditure on food during that month.26 Many types of food were considerably cheaper in early seventeenth-century Devon than they were in Warwickshire, London and the Home Counties; and in the 1620s, the Reynells had paid 2d a peck for peas. However, Sir Richard and Lady Lucy’s accounts reveal that, in addition to the legumes sourced from external suppliers, both peas and beans were grown on their Forde House estate, with beans being set by the gardener in late January at a cost of 6d.27 Although many pre-1600 household accounts are largely silent regarding the purchasing of legumes, George Vernon bought dried peas for his household’s consumption and probably also grew them on his extensive estate near Bakewell. Like these vegetables, all of the foods discussed here were relatively economical to buy, and, notwithstanding supply problems when they might assume the status of luxuries, they were easily obtainable products that formed the basis of wealthy householders’ diets. These basic foodstuffs, however, were substitutable by more expensive or refined alternatives that helped to mark the identities of gentlepeople and nobles.

High quality and high-priced variants of staple foods I have shown that salted meat formed a sizeable portion of the provisions supplied by institutions to manual labourers and the poor. By contrast, as accounts make clear, the meat reaching kitchens of wealthy households after animals had been slaughtered on their estates was, at least for part of the year, fresh. The beef and mutton purchased at market for consumption by senior members of the manor was also fresh whenever possible, and, as the prices paid for these meats show, they were of the ‘best’ quality rather than the cheaper ‘second’ quality.28 But even the most fundamental of necessities, ‘daily bread’, was subject to status-marking refinement, for it could be produced in different forms and from a variety or combination of different grains. Bread’s assumed importance stemming partly from its many biblical references continued after the Reformation, and it was eaten as a matter of course by Catholics and Protestants alike.29 Thus, it appeared on the tables of both the Petres in the midsixteenth century and the Radcliffes, Cecils and Reynells in the seventeenth century – all of whom made a point of distinguishing between their households’

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basic, coarse mixed-grained loaves and their own premium, refined loaves. As the latter sort was consumed by the elite for its qualities rather than purely for its sustenance value, it qualifies as a luxury food that was also a necessity.30 At Gorhambury, the best quality bread, ‘manchet’, was purchased for around 2d per loaf by Sir Edward Radcliffe. This compares with lesser ‘kitchen’ loaves that cost him 1½d and smaller rolls of bread that were half that price. At Quickswood, three times more ‘household’ bread than the best quality manchet was purchased in 1634–1635.31 ‘Household’ bread, as the name implies, was intended for the consumption of lower-level servants, and the ratio between manchet and household loaves purchased by Sir William Cecil actually reflects the hierarchical structure of the his estate at that time. At Arbury Hall, although the prices of loaves of bread are not recorded, the same hierarchical distinction was made by the clerk of the kitchen between bread provided to servants – described in the accounts as ‘diet’ or ‘houseall’ – and the refined sort that helped to define the family’s identity at the table – described as ‘whit’, or sometimes as ‘mancheat’.32 The value of the total purchases of the latter sort of bread was twice that of the coarser bread. This indicates that the quantities of best bread and lesser bread were eaten by the household in equal measure. This seemingly polarized arrangement at the manor where wheat bread was reserved for the well-to-do was neither uniform nor static within the nation at large. Although there was a general decline in real income over the period between 1540 and 1640, and despite many labourers in London being ‘almost entirely market dependant’, those on low incomes became increasingly reluctant to buy bread that they considered to be of inferior quality once they had become accustomed to the wheaten variety.33 But the taste for wheat, a grain that Henry Best stated was an identity marker of the gentry, had spread not only to the labouring poor in London and elsewhere but also to those dependent upon charitable handouts.34 Local authorities in the Midlands and in East Anglia both acknowledged this, and they assisted the indigent in making wheaten bread. In 1623, 1630 and 1631, the overseers of the parish of Cratfield in Suffolk subsidized prices not of barley or rye but of ‘wheate which was sould out to the pore’.35 How could the social elite living in wealthy households respond to this convergence in bread eating practices? The shifting boundaries that obfuscated cultural identity required new markers to be established; and this could be accomplished by adding rare or precious ingredients to the flour when making bread. Spiced bread, as noted in Chapter 6, was presented to guests at exclusive

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social events, and although there is nothing in the kitchen accounts of the gentry to suggest that spiced bread was purchased by them, they had the necessary ingredients in stock and the know-how of their chefs to make it. An alternative course of action was open to those who wished to pursue it: namely, the deletion of bread from the table menu – at least on occasions when conspicuous consumption mattered. The ‘sumptuous and profuse’ banquets at which Elizabeth I, James I and Charles I attended included many courses of meats and ‘delicate dishes’, but even where descriptions of these events are detailed, bread is not mentioned.36 It is of course possible that bread was not referred to by contemporary reporters because its consumption was taken for granted, but this is not what one observer thought. It was noted by John Ernest, Duke of Saxe-Weimar, that when he visited King James at Theobalds in September 1613, the king was ‘seldom seen to eat any bread’.37 In the light of an observation made by Fynes Moryson, a writer who travelled extensively throughout England and Europe in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, perhaps these sumptuous feasts with many dishes and apparently little bread should not surprise us. In writing about the diet of the gentry, ‘the English’, Moryson noted, ‘prepare largely for ordinarie dyet for themselves’, and this included ‘a moderate proportion of bread’. He contrasted this with the ‘excessive’ number of dishes that ‘stand one upon another’ when company is expected. As we will see in Chapter 6, this was an issue that protestant hack writer Philip Stubbes had complained about in 1583.38 Dairy produce was another type of food associated with labourers and the poor, but low-cost milk and cheese could also be refined or substituted by high-quality variants. C. Anne Wilson has noted that cream was consumed at all levels of society, and it was increasingly used by the well-to-do as a cooking ingredient.39 However, it should be noted also that cream in 1636 cost 4d per pint which made it around four to six times as expensive as milk; thus, one may ask whether this would have been a justifiable purchase, at least on a regular basis, for an urban labourer receiving a wage of 12d per day. Cream was, however, purchased with increasing frequency by Sir Richard Newdigate’s family between 1636 and 1640 – but only in quantities of one or two pints at a time during the spring and early summer.40 Although the Arbury accounts are concerned only with the value of foodstock reaching the kitchen, and do not therefore record the nature of meals delivered to the dining table, it is perhaps significant to note that cream was often purchased on the same days as gooseberries, strawberries or cherries. The fruit itself was not inexpensive: gooseberries costing 6d per quart at the start of their season were reduced to

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2d by the summer, and the market price of cherries varied between 4d and 8d per lb. Eighty years earlier, the future Earl of Leicester, Robert Dudley, also purchased strawberries and cream together, signifying an association between these two types of luxurious food.41 Certainly, botanist and apothecary John Parkinson saw a link between fruit and cream. Strawberries, he wrote in 1629, ‘are often brought to the Table as a reare service, whereunto claret wine, creame or milke is added with sugar, as every one liketh’. In his view, this made ‘a good cooling and pleasant dish in the hot Summer season’.42 While physician Thomas Moffett preferred to leave out the ‘creame or milke’, advocating instead the addition of wine and sugar only, he issued this warning about strawberries: howsoever they be prepared, let every man take heed by Melchior Duke of Brunswick how he eateth too much of them, who is recorded to have burst a sunder at Rostock with surfeiting upon them.

But cream was popular with fruit, and it was also an essential ingredient in syllabub. One did not need to make syllabubs, however; for ready-made syllabubs costing 3d to 4d each could be purchased – as they were at Arbury around five times a year throughout the summers of 1636 to 1638.43 Cheese was considered by William Harrison in 1577 to be ‘appertinent only to the inferior sort’, and Ken Albala has noted that the hard variety was often deleted from the healthy diet of the ruling classes as it became associated with the poor.44 The acceptability to the elite of some cheeses was based on the criteria of their superior quality, their geographical origin (cheeses from mainland Europe were thought to be the best) and their consequential high price and thus their exclusivity. Joan Thirsk correctly sees this as ‘a snobbish preference’.45 It was a preference that the wealthy used as an identity marker, as an example from 1639 makes clear. In that year the wording of Edward Radcliff ’s kitchen clerk distinguishes clearly between the hundredweight of cheap cheese bought for his household and the relatively small amount of the expensive ‘Holland’ cheese bought specifically ‘for my lord’.46 Another example shows that three decades earlier, at Gawthorpe Hall in Lancashire, in addition to producing cheese on the family estate, Colonel Richard Shuttleworth bought ‘Holland’ cheeses on several occasions. Like those imported from Italy, Dutch cheeses had a reputation for high quality.47 This leaves little doubt that the luxuries of manual workers were necessities to the elite in the sense that they were social identity markers. In the southwest of England during the early seventeenth century, although this dairy product does not appear to have been purchased at Forde House, 4s 7d was paid by Reynell for the carriage of two cheeses each

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weighing 3 lb.48 This was a significant sum of money for transporting a small amount of cheese, and it reflects the value attributed to a premium quality food. Like other dairy products, chickens’ eggs was a basic food that could be substituted by an upmarket counterpart. Eggs could be acquired cheaply throughout most of the century and were bought in considerable quantities by large households. Based on prices paid by the Newdigate and Sackville households, and on the maximum prices theoretically allowable (see Figure 4.1), we can see how eggs became dearer. Five eggs could be bought for 1d in 1544; but although their price had increased sharply during the dearth years of the mid-1590s and had risen again to two for 1d by the late 1630s, they were probably still affordable to many. The eggs of turkeys and ducks, then, were an expensive alternative for those who could afford to buy them. While the Cecils purchased six turkey eggs for 4d just once over a period of six months, the Newdigates occasionally bought a small number of duck eggs.49 The polarity between the types of staples eaten by household heads and the types intended for their subordinates who significantly outnumbered them is underlined by the quantities purchased. Most of the main basic foods – bread, beer, dairy products, beef and mutton – account for half of the overall expenditure on food and drink at elite estates. These products were relatively cheap, bought in large quantities and consumed mainly by servants and estate labourers. The other half of the total expenditure paid for a wide variety of foods and beverages bought in small quantities. In the case of the Newdigates, variety meant purchasing 214 different items of food and drink over five years, most of which were either variants of the aforementioned basics or exclusive

6

pence (d)

1604

4

1588

3 2

1639

1599

5

1544

1633

1580

1 0

Figure 4.1 Long-term movements in egg prices in London and the Midlands between 1544 and 1639 The numerical values on the left are pence and prices are for a dozen eggs. Sources: Tudor Royal Proclamations, vol. I (London, 1964), 21 May 1544; Tudor Royal Proclamations, vol. 3 (London, 1969), 7 August 1588; Stuart Royal Proclamations, vol. 2 (Oxford, 1983), 14 May 1633; Nottingham, C. Howard, By the Lord Generall (London, 1599); CKS, U269/A2/1, Sackville Accounts; WCRO, CR136v140, Newdigate.

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foods used sparingly. It is to some of these foods that I now turn – a selection of superior high-priced exclusive consumables that were described as ‘necessaries’ by the wealthy. I will show that the eating of such foods, in addition to signifying social status when being consumed conspicuously, could also establish, develop or maintain a sense of self-worth when they were being consumed inconspicuously. Some of these high-priced luxuries were fashionable ‘new’ foods of the type that C. Anne Wilson’s suggests were accepted ‘most readily by the wealthy for the sake of their novelty’.50 Although undoubtedly this was true for some new foods, I will show that acceptance of unfamiliar high-value produce occurred at differing rates and with various levels of enthusiasm.

Exclusive foods and foods used sparingly Because of the negative meaning of the word ‘luxury’, and because of the possibility of tarnishing one’s reputation by using it to describe wanton selfindulgence, justifying one’s own extravagant consumption and the contrasting diet of one’s social inferiors required the use of the word ‘necessity’ and its variants. ‘Necessaries’ – a word that over and again was used to describe the basic provisions of foot soldiers and common sailors – also, then, related to fine foods. As such, Henry Percy described his dietary complements – such as exotic fruits, cream, artichokes and spices – as ‘necessaryies’.51 They both satiated appetite and conveyed symbolic meaning. Before the mid-sixteenth century, the price of rabbits had fallen as they had become more commonly available in the marketplace. This, along with their escaping into the wild, has prompted historians to conclude that they were no longer an ‘expensive luxury of the rich alone’.52 While Joan Thirsk has pointed out that rabbits were now available ‘to a wider circle’, C. Anne Wilson has noted that their meat was now ‘enjoyed by all’.53 But despite their increased availability to people from many walks of life – either through purchasing or catching them – household accounts reveal that rabbits were slow to lose their status as an estimable food of the well-to-do. Its relatively high price when considering its meat-yield, its consumption as a special-occasions food (discussed in Chapter 6) and its association with high-ranking members of at least one gentry family indicate that it was still highly regarded. The Newdigates usually paid between 6d and 8d for each rabbit for most of the year during the latter half of the 1630s, but as Figure 6.1 shows, the price of this animal increased significantly at Christmas and the New Year.

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This suggests that it was a prized commodity. In Hertfordshire during the same decade, the Cecils paid a similar price for each of the vast number of rabbits that they purchased – 8d in October rising to 14d in December. Sir William spent £4 6s on this animal in the second and third weeks of December 1634; this amounted to 8 per cent of the overall spending on meat at that time.54 Notwithstanding seasonal fluctuations, the price of this animal appears to have remained almost unaltered since the turn of the century – and it was uniform across much of the country. The Throckmortons at Coughton Court in South Warwickshire purchased fourteen rabbits a week for the total cost of 8s 2d during October 1609; this amounted to 7d for each animal.55 But eighteen years earlier, the price paid for rabbits by Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, at his Bath residence had been significantly lower at 4d for each one. Typically, three rabbits, suitably prepared and cooked, were shared – along with other meats, butter and eggs – between two male members of the Percy family, four of their male guests and four male servants.56 During the latter years of the sixteenth century, the Shuttleworths at Smithills paid on average 3.75d for each animal.57 While the price of lesser meats such as beef and mutton – although subject to short-term fluctuations – had remained relatively stable, rabbit meat had doubled in price during the years of poor harvests and food-supply problems in the mid-1590s. This, together with the undulation in purchase patterns and seasonal market prices, suggests that rabbit meat held on to its luxury food status at least up until the mid-seventeenth century.58 But if rabbit meat was now being eaten by some people of low rank, offal was, by contrast, a hitherto low-status food that was becoming increasingly popular with the upper-orders of English society.59 This is evident from fashionable cookery books, from the popularity of offal at festive times, from the small quantities purchased and used sparingly and from the market prices paid for it.60 In contrast to just the one animal by-product – neats’ tongue – that was bought weekly in 1612 by Sir Richard Newdigate’s father, Sir John, the Arbury kitchen daybook of 1636–1645 shows that fourteen different offal products were purchased.61 The most popular of these, bought in small amounts on a regular and frequent basis, were lambs’ heads, calves’ feet, neats’ feet and tongues, udders and sausages. Additionally, ewes’ ears, trotters and dishes of sweetbread were occasionally bought in quantities that clearly limited the scope for widespread consumption. Prices of the more prevalent products are shown in Table 4.1. In Hertfordshire, between one and five lambs’ or calves’ heads were purchased during eighteen of the 24 weeks in the winter of 1634(5) by the Cecils. This family also bought up to four neats’ tongues most weeks

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Table 4.1 Prices paid for offal products by five households between 1601 and 1640 Animal product

Households Sackville

Reynell

Cecil

Radcliffe

Newdigate

1604

1630

1634–1635

1638

1640

12

12 6–12

Lamb’s head

12

Neat’s tongue

9

11

10–16

15

Neat’s foot

4

4

6

4

Calf ’s foot

3

4

3

Calf ’s head

6

8–18

12–14

24

12–15

10

6

Calf ’s intestines

6

Udder

6–10

Values, expressed in pence, are the average prices paid in the years shown. Sources: WCRO, CR136v140, Newdigate, 1640; Munby (ed.), Early Stuart Household Accounts, pp. 5–62 and 79–158; Gray, Devon Household Accounts, pp. 58–83; CKS, U269/A2/1, Sackville Household Accounts, 1604.

until mid-January, and udders and small quantities of sausages were occasional purchases.62 Although sausages had formed part of the diet of merchants and ‘affluent peasants’ in medieval times, they were seldom found at the tables of the English gentry until the early modern period.63 Yet by the early seventeenth century, accounts show that a limited number were being purchased at manor houses for twice the price of beef. As was the case for other offal products, the quantities of sausage bought were inadequate to feed the entire household. For the Reynells in Devon, tongue, calf ’s head and calf ’s intestines were the most popular offal purchases; but the very small quantity of these and other animal by-products occasionally acquired from external sources may have been simply to supplement organs taken from home-reared animals. Half a century earlier, a butcher’s bill presented to the Earl of Northumberland requested payment for ‘marie bones’, which had both medicinal and culinary uses, and 18s 4d worth of neats’ tongues.64 An accounts book relating to this earl’s household consumption at Bath in 1591 shows that one pair of calves’ feet was consumed at the supper table each evening by Sir Henry Percy, twenty-three travelling staff and between seven to ten high-ranking guests.65 Like the four ‘neats’ feet’ supplied to Percy in the Tower of London in February 1607, the small quantity of meat or jelly yielded by these ‘feet’ – which cost 4d each – was either exclusive to one or a few or it was eaten sparingly as part of a dish by several people.66 Four years earlier, the newly appointed Earl of Dorset, Sir Thomas Sackville, had also paid 4d for each of the neats’ feet he bought in London.67

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The accounts of the Earl of Derby in the 1560s and those of the Shuttleworths in the 1580s, do not give an indication as to whether this type of product was purchased. However, as is the case at Forde House and other estates with livestock-rearing capacity, non-purchase does not necessarily mean non-consumption. The accounts of Ingatestone Hall for the week ending on 14 January 1548 show that Sir William Petre’s household consumed just two neats’ tongues and two marrowbones during that period, and in the winter of 1551–1552, again just two tongues were consumed – on 20 December and 7 January.68 But who else was now eating offal? Stephen Mennell points out that English cookery books on their own are an ambiguous indicator as to the early modern consumption of offal, for there were few recipes for its preparation until French influence became stronger in the eighteenth century.69 Despite this, however, we see in Chapter 5 that the increasing complexity in its preparation and the extravagant use of enhancing agents called for by recipes in which offal did feature, indicate that the new consumers were those targeted by such manuals – the swelling numbers of people making up the ‘middling sort’. These merchants, lawyers and others whom we might describe as urban professionals could possibly justify paying the market price for these luxuries (see Table 4.1). Thus offal, formerly cheap enough for the urban poor and college caterers to buy, became a status-marker of the gentry and middling sort for a time. But by the 1800s, after it had fallen out of fashion and its price had decreased, it was once again directed at ‘the working classes’.70 If suitably prepared animal by-products reached the dining tables of elite households in insufficient quantities to feed all servants and ‘tabled’ tradesmen, then this was also the case with many birds. Although domestic fowl was not a definitive luxury, some poultry was held in esteem as an additional element in a varied diet. There is a problem of comparing bird-meat consumption at different estates when analysing accounts; this is because expenditure often refers to the quantities of fowl purchased – the weights of which were inherently variable. Given the reasonably comprehensive data in kitchen expenses books, however, it is possible to construct a model of consumption patterns. Pullets, being immature hens, were small; pound for pound, they were more expensive than chickens, and this reflected their special status as a young, tender bird. Capons, like cockerels, yielded more meat than chickens, but even allowing for the size differential, they were disproportionately expensive (see Table 4.2) and were therefore highly valued.

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Table 4.2 Prices paid for poultry by seven households between 1549 and 1640 Fowl Percy (London)

Shuttleworth (Lancashire)

Reynell (Devon)

Cecil (London*) Radcliffe (Herts)

Newdigate (Warks)

1549

1586–1591

1586–1591

1627–1631

1634–1635

1636–1640

9–14

Pullet

20

6–8

10–15

25

27–30

26–40

16

4

8

20

14–21

16–22

4

8

21

Hen Turkey

58

Goose

7

Chicken

1

1637–1639

4

2

17–21 20

42

14

26

24–38

24–38

3

4–14

8–10

4–10

Average prices of domestic fowl; values, expressed in pence, are for each bird. *Possibly purchased in London and transported to Quickswood. Sources: WCRO, CR136v140, Newdigate, 1636–1640; Munby (ed.), Early Stuart Household Accounts, pp. 5–62 and pp. 79–158; Gray (ed.), Devon Household Accounts, pp. 1–105; Harland (ed.), The House and Farm Accounts of the Shuttleworths, pp. 30–70; Batho (ed.), The Household Papers, pp. 9–15, 17–18; Carrington (ed.), ‘Selections’, pp. 62–81.

Food and Identity in England, 1540–1640

Capon

Households Vernon (Derby)

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At Arbury, while hens were usually only purchased during February, the expensive pullet was an occasional acquisition. Capons, however, were bought all year round during the late 1630s.71 Purchases at Gorhambury at the same time indicate a contrast in taste. Although capons were regular but low-volume acquisitions, the Earl of Sussex bought around 145 pullets the first thirteen weeks of 1639. At Quickswood, from October until the end of December 1634, the Cecils’ main purchases of domestic fowl were capons and geese. In the New Year, however, either his priorities or the availability of poultry changed, because from that time until the end of March, more money was spent on hens and turkeys than on other birds. Yet throughout most of the six months at this location, pullets and chickens were also purchased regularly – and in roughly equal quantities.72 During the previous decade, despite or because of the cheapness of poultry in Devon, expenditure by the Reynells on this type of food was infrequent. Between 1627 and 1631, only £1 16s 3d was spent on hens and pullets, and while cockerels were regular winter acquisitions, capons were occasional purchases. During this period only one goose was bought.73 A lack of enthusiasm for domestic fowl among this household’s elite is clearly evident, as a smaller percentage of their food budget was spent on fowl when they stayed in Exeter with fewer servants than they had at home. Although personal taste was a likely factor in this family’s apparent indifference towards poultry, given their ardour for luxury foods, price was also a possible factor. A cockerel costing only 1d more than a pigeon was hardly a luxury here in terms of price. Like the Reynells, Sir Richard Shuttleworth, followed by his younger brother Lawrence, and then Colonel Richard Shuttleworth, farmed their own estate and produced much of their own food at Gawthorpe and Smithils in Lancashire between 1584 and 1613.74 While the nature of consumption here became more luxurious, particularly at around 1605, chickens along with capons, hens and pullets were consumed by the household throughout the period. The differences between the prices paid by the Shuttleworths in Lancashire, George Vernon in Derbyshire and Henry Percy in London (see Table 4.2) demonstrate that regional location is a factor that should be considered when discussing the link between poultry prices and their acquisition. If the price of a pullet and a capon relative to that of a chicken suggests that the former was something of a desirable luxury, it should be noted that this status would seem to be confirmed by my findings on the gifting of poultry that are discussed in Chapter 6.

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The prices paid for wild birds and waterfowl also varied according to criteria like geographical location, their species, and the month of the ‘birdeating season’ during which they were purchased.75 C. Anne Wilson has pointed out that small wild birds were, in general terms, becoming less popular as a food during the early modern period.76 However, between 1636 and 1640, the Newdigates spent 6.45 per cent of their winter meat budget on wild birds. This was a significant intake by at least some members of the household, and the figure does not include pigeons which were always bought in April and May. In addition, wild teal, wild wigeon and ‘ducks’ – domestically bred mallards – were sporadic purchases throughout the year. A ‘duck’ usually cost between 7d and 12d, while the teal and widgeon cost 5d to 6d and 6d to 8d, respectively.77 As the latter two species of waterfowl weighed much less than a home-reared ‘duck’, it is evident that a premium was paid for rarer foods that were difficult to obtain and therefore considered luxuries. William Harrison noted this correlation in 1577 when he wrote that rare foods were the ones most desired by guests.78 Game birds were also expensive and these were consumed frugally by the Newdigates. Only one brace of quail costing 2s was bought at Arbury over five years.79 Considering their high price relative to their meagre meat yield, quail was clearly a luxury. The same can be said of the partridge that is discussed in detail in the next chapter; only eight of these birds, normally costing 9d each, were entered in the Newdigate kitchen accounts over five years. Other game birds were undoubtedly acquired by Sir Richard, but as no more than three were bought at any one time, partridge meat was an exclusive luxury that distinguished the consumption of the family from that of their waged staff. Another bird that figures prominently in the purchase record of the nobility and gentry, despite the protestations of Arthur Standish discussed in Chapter 2, is the pigeon. Their financial value depended on whether they were ‘wild’ or ‘fattened’ and on the quantity purchased – for there was often a discount for the bulk buying of birds. In Warwickshire in the 1630s, a single wild pigeon cost 2d and a ‘domestic’ pigeon that had been fattened was 4d. An example of price discounts for bulk buying can be seen when the Arbury Hall kitchen took delivery of five dozen pigeons in 1640; they were charged just 5s for the 60 birds.80 Although this was a substantial saving for those who could justify the expense of buying many birds, each pigeon still cost the same price as a loaf of household-quality bread – 1d. It is not known how the Newdigate’s chef prepared these birds for the dining table, but a cookery book aimed at the well-to-do of that time suggested boiling them in white wine with the addition

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of sun-dried raisins, capers, butter, eggs and a variety of spices – including the very expensive mace.81 Clearly, following such a recipe would have been beyond the scope of some labouring people in 1640. Snipe, woodcocks and larks were the most popular birds in early seventeenth-century England. Snipe was an infrequent acquisition of the Newdigates, and at 2d each, it was expensive for its size. The similar looking yet unrelated woodcock that was four times as bulky usually cost the family 9d to 10d. Larks were purchased often by this Warwickshire family, usually by the dozen. Each dozen birds cost around 4d for most of the ‘season’, but as we will see, their market price increased significantly during the festive season.82 Also in the 1630s, at Gorhambury, the Radcliffes purchased no fewer than 900 larks over a seven week period. Snipe was an expensive luxury at Gorhambury, possibly because they were relatively scarce in Hertfordshire (see Figure 4.2). But despite or because of the price of this bird, £2 13s 4d was spent on its acquisition over three months.83 Exclusive too were some of the birds that the Cecils purchased five years earlier. Sixteen different species were bought for consumption at Quickswood between October and March; these were possibly acquired in London, for the prices paid for partridge and heron closely match those prevailing in the capital where a premium was paid for the acquisition of most birds. While a teal, which is marginally bigger a pigeon, cost up to 14d in London, pigeons themselves were slightly cheaper in the capital than they were in other locations; here, they could be bought for around 2d to 3d each. Some of the other birds purchased by Cecil over a six month period included

pence (d)

35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0 Newdigate, 1640 pigeon

Radcliffe, 1637 lark

Cecil, 1634 snipe

Reynell, 1627 woodcock

Shuttleworth, 1586

Petre, 1552

partridge

Figure 4.2 Typical prices of some of the more popular wild birds purchased by six households between 1552 and 1640 Sources: WCRO, CR136v140, Newdigate, 1640; Munby (ed.), Early Stuart Household Accounts, pp. 5–34 and 79–94; Gray, Devon Household Accounts, pp. 1–7; Harland (ed.), The House and Farm Accounts of the Shuttleworths, pp. 25–32; Emmison, Tudor Secretary, p. 138.

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a heron costing 3s, lapwings at 6d each, bitterns, knots, fieldfares that were winter visitors from northeast Europe and almost 2,000 larks.84 Not all of the gentry, however, sought small birds in large numbers. Reynell’s lack of enthusiasm for domestic fowl, it appears, extended to wild fowl. Despite this, the quantity of non-domestic birds paid for by the family increased year-on-year between 1627 and 1631. In that year, wild birds accounted for 3 per cent of the household’s food and drink budget between September and December.85 The species eaten at Forde and at Exeter were the same at those consumed at Gorhambury but with one important exception: the Devon locations included consumption of the ‘heath-poult’ – a much esteemed game-bird, possibly a red grouse, that inhabited the moorlands of southwest England. This rare addition to the table, weighing 1½ lb undressed and costing 14d, was only ever bought singly and would therefore have been exclusive to the top table at Forde House. The cheapest birds eaten at Forde House were larks, but when one considers their meat yield, even these could be an unjustifiable purchase for some people. The financial value of this bird had not increased for two decades however; the 300 purchased by Sir Richard Reynell between 1627 and 1631 cost the same as they had for Sir Thomas Throckmorton in September 1609 – the equivalent of ½d each.86 Prior to the four consecutive years of harvest failures between 1594 and 1597, the price of wild birds was relatively low; but whether wildfowl was adversely affected by cold springs and wet summers or whether suppliers identified a window of opportunity for profiteering at a time of dearth, it is clear from household accounts that their inflated price after the mid-1590s did not start to fall until the mid-1630s. Although they could be caught in the countryside by resourceful people who had access to nets and traps, small wild birds were luxuries to people who relied on the market to obtain them; this was because of their poor meat yield relative to their retail price.87 But wild birds were ‘necessaries’ to the well-to-do whose culinary expectations were built around variety. The luxurious context in which they were eaten also distinguished their wealthy consumers from those who were poorer. In terms of nutrition and financial outlay, they could be substituted by a cheaper alternative in the form of chicken; the appearance of small birds at the tables of the well-to-do was thus a matter of cultural expression. As it was for birds, certain types of fish could be considered luxurious if their prices were pitched beyond the reach of manual workers. One such example was fresh salmon. Although only 2 per cent of their kitchen budget was spent on aquatic food by the Puritan Newdigate family – mainly on

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Fridays – £1 5s ½d was spent on fresh salmon during the second half of the 1630s. Each salmon purchased at Arbury cost between 2s and 2s 6d, and while trout was bought for 6d, pike and carp were usually valued at around 10d.88 Although the latter two fish could grow to a weight of 7lb or more, which would have made them a viable acquisition to many people, their consumption may have been restricted, at least officially, to the few who enjoyed fishing rights over ponds and streams. Fresh seafood transported in barrels of water all the way from the coast to Nuneaton along uneven, waterlogged or bumpy roads that had the potential to damage cart wheels and axels was expensive. This was reflected in the price of seafood with lobsters costing 1s to 1s 6d each; mackerels, the favourite marine fish of the Newdigates, costing 3d to 8d; and shrimps costing 1s per 100. Thus, fresh seafood could be construed as a luxury in North Warwickshire on the grounds of price alone; and whether it was eaten by wealthy Catholic or Protestant families in the wake of the Reformation, it gave them a fish-day food with which they could mark their social and cultural identity. At Gorhambury, much of the fish purchased was of the freshwater variety, but fresh salmon – bought for up to 7s 6d each, trout, and eels costing between 1s and 1s 6d – also appear in the accounts. Sir William Cecil was more adventurous: 27 different types were purchased at Quickswood between the beginning of October 1634 and the end of March 1635. Here, £63 19s 4d was spent on this type of food, which amounted to 6 per cent of the household’s total spending on victuals.89 The prices paid by Cecil – probably for fresh varieties purchased in London – were higher than those paid five years later at both Arbury and Gorhambury and were far in excess of those paid in South Devon five years earlier (see Tables 4.3 and 4.4). While 45 per cent of the fish purchased was high volume, low-value ‘saltfish’, ‘greenfish’, whiting and herring – probably enough to feed many of the 60 servants – some of the more esteemed fish was prohibitively expensive to many and was undoubtedly expressive of the earl’s family’s eminence. Some of the 22 higher-valued species of fish, molluscs and crustaceans are noted here. With the proximity of Reynell’s estate to Newton Abbot and Teignmouth, the seafood consumed by the household during the late 1620s was purchased at a fraction of the cost incurred by other families who lived further inland. Even highly regarded fish like dory and salmon were relatively inexpensive at Forde. Although the expenditure figures in Reynell’s household accounts suggest that fish made up a large portion of the overall consumption, the picture is distorted by the fact that some of the food consumed on the estate was home-produced.

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Table 4.3 Prices of aquatic food purchased by the Cecil household in 1634 and 1635 Food

Price

Food

Price

Food

Price

Lobster

21–4

Flounders

6–7

Trout

30

Cod

24–84

Salmon

144

Pike

60–6

Sole

18–42

Gurnet

14

Bream

16–36

Skate

12–18

Turbot

90

Carp

18–36

Values are expressed in pence. Source of data: Munby (ed.), Early Stuart Household Accounts, pp. 5–62.

Despite this, the £20 16s 1d spent on seafood in 1630 was still impressive, and in addition to saltfish, herring and oysters that account for half of the family’s seafood expenditure, 23 other types of crustaceans, molluscs and fish – nearly all of which were marine species – were acquired by Reynell.90 Sir Richard may have availed himself of resources inhabiting local streams and ponds, but perhaps significantly, such fish are also absent from records of gifts given or received. Apart from lobsters and pilchards that appear regularly in the accounts, especially during the summer, there was no discernible pattern to the acquisition of ‘premium’ seafood at Forde House. Various species were bought randomly and in small quantities. It seems that marine-sourced food was valued by Sir Richard for the variety that it provided to the top table more than for its role as a staple. Although fish in South Devon marketplaces was inexpensive compared

Table 4.4 Prices of fish and other seafood purchased by the Reynells in South Devon between 1627 and 1629 Seafood

Price

Seafood

Price

Mullet

4

Bass

9

Corfish (salted)

3–5

Pilchards (per 100)

4

Poor john (salted)

1

Conger eel

36

Cod

12

Salmon

12–42

Ling

24

Peal

2

Herrings (per 5)

1

Trout

8

Dory

7–14

Oysters (per 100)

2–6

Hake

8

Lobster

3

Values are expressed in pence. Sources: Gray, Devon Household Accounts, pp. 1–58.

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to those being offered for sale in London and at inland locations, the price of foods like salmon, trout and dory still rendered them exclusive. Table 4.4 shows the usual prices of a selection of the seafood purchased by the Reynells between 1627 and 1631, and Figure 4.3 indicates the relative contribution made by each of the major types of seafood to the Reynell’s total consumption of aquatic food during the typical year of 1628. Three decades earlier, much fresh and salted fish was bought at Preston market by the Shuttleworths. Among the luxury fish purchased for consumption at Smithils were salt salmon costing on average 4s each and the flat ray-like skate. Skate, an expensive seafood, was particularly popular with the family during the 1590s. Each one normally cost between 1s 4d and 2s 4d. However, on one occasion in the dearth year of 1595, half a skate was bought for 4s.91 Freshwater fish was also purchased for consumption at Smithils during the late sixteenth century. These included bream at around 10d, tenchlings at 14d for ten and ‘freshwater trouts’. At around the same time, carp and its close relative barbell were on the Friday menu of Henry Percy at his London residence.92 Purchased in very small quantities these were costly additions to the table at 1s 4d and

4%

4% 2%

4%

23%

6%

10% 19% 13% 15% oysters 23%

ling 6%

saltfish 19%

herring 4%

cod 15%

cockles 4%

pilchards 13%

salmon 4%

lobster 10%

others 2%

Figure 4.3 Composition of aquatic food consumed by the Reynell household in 1628 ‘Others’ are mullet, hake and bass Source: Gray, Devon Household Accounts, pp. 7–35.

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1s each respectively. But such luxuries helped to define the status of an earl and his high-ranking guests and marked the difference between them and their subordinates who were provided with cheaper alternatives. In this, there was a continuity from the 1540s. While both salted and pickled herrings and ling played a significant part in the fish-day meals of the household at Ingatestone Hall, other aquatic food purchased by Sir William Petre included cod (the average price of which was 1s 4d), salmon, the less expensive plaice and oysters.93 Judging by the quantities bought, fish was often an unattractive substitute for meat in early modern England, and the association of fish with fasting and its low profile or total absence at festive occasions would ostensibly negate its inclusion into the category of luxuries. However, in a similar way to other types of foods, high-priced marine- and freshwater-sourced foods were something with which the more affluent members of society could be identified on non-flesh days. One of these other types of food was vegetables. Although they were often associated with the rural poor in times past, some herbs were ‘welcomed into upper-class diets’ in medieval times.94 But as Joan Thirsk, Adam Fox and others have reminded us, some vegetables – particularly high-priced premium produce – were increasingly identified with a broader social range of people over the century.95 Very few vegetables are recorded in the earlier accounts, and there is no reference to them in either of the selected and published accounts of Sir George Vernon or Sir William Petre in the mid-sixteenth century. But the kitchen expenses book of the Newdigates shows that by 1640, 28 different varieties of vegetables, salad items and herbs for cooking and flavouring – in addition to unspecified roots and herbs – were being purchased at least once each week.96 Although the price of ‘greens’ were not subject to annual inflation over the last five years of the 1630s, they did fluctuate seasonally. With beef costing the 2½d per lb at this time, potatoes – a New World food and relative newcomer to the English kitchen – were expensive enough at 5d per lb for most of the year; but on occasions their market price exceeded 1s per lb. While another recently introduced vegetable, the Mediterranean cauliflower, also varied in price – costing as little as 2d each or as much as 6d depending on the season – artichokes ranged from 1d to 3d each (see Figure 6.4). Cucumbers, radishes and ‘salad’ were purchased at Arbury Hall between the months of May and August; and while no individual prices for these items are given in the accounts, an average of around 3d a week was spent on them.97 The market prices of these greens, however, were considerably more expensive

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99

than those for legumes, and, as they were bought in small quantities, it is clear that they were intended for the consumption of very few people at the manor house. At Gorhambury, vegetables purchased by the Earl of Sussex account for only a fraction of those consumed by the household. In the estate’s garden, both seeds for sowing and young vegetables for growing-on were set and cared for by Radcliffe’s gardener. In addition to the 300 to 400 cabbage plants bought at a cost of 4s 6d to 5s a year, 120 artichoke plants costing 4s 6d were acquired by the earl in London in May 1638.98 As these quantities were insufficient to form the basis of a market gardening venture, providing the household with food was the reason for growing these vegetables. The extra eighteen artichokes bought for 2d each from an external supplier in October that year, together with the clear distinction the household steward made between the ‘kitchen garden’ and the ‘great garden’, supports this view. Furthermore, as the earl’s artichokes cost 2d each, whether they were of the globe or Jerusalem variety, they were exclusive luxuries to be enjoyed by a privileged few. Beets, cauliflowers, watercress and unspecified roots were also purchased for consumption at Gorhambury, and during the first week of 1638, 6lb of potatoes and 100 chestnuts were bought for 4s and 6d, respectively.99 It is possible that the potatoes and chestnuts were cooked and eaten together, for their association – in taste if not in cookery – goes back to the explorer Pedro Cieza de Leon in 1538.100 Legumes, in contrast, remained at the bottom end of the vegetable hierarchy and were still associated with impoverished people in 1639. A bushel of peas costing 3s 8d was cheaper than the equivalent weight of wheat costing 5s 7d, and while the latter was fed to his poultry by the Earl of Sussex, of the two bushels of peas that were purchased in March 1639, at least one was specifically allocated to ‘the poor’.101 At Quickswood, although most of the vegetables purchased over the winter of 1634–1635 were not itemized, 20lb of potatoes were acquired at the end of February for 3d per lb. This relatively low price may be explained by bulk discount buying at a time of year when many food prices were being reduced following the annual Christmas price hike. Camomile to the value of 1s and ‘water parsnip’ (the sweet-tasting root of an aquatic plant) worth 8d also feature as kitchen expenses.102 These herbs, if used to garnish or enhance the flavour of dishes, were bought in small quantities that restricted their consumption to all but a few within the Cecil household. In South Devon, the Reynell household consumed a variety of vegetables ranging from artichokes to peas and beans. They also bought samphire, a

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fleshy coastal plant that usually inhabits cliff faces such as the one in nearby Dawlish. Although very few vegetables were purchased from external suppliers, payments were made to at least one gardener for setting legumes during the late winter of 1627–1628.103 Four hundred and fifty cabbage plants were also purchased during March and April at the rate of 8d per 100, and there was enough work to keep two or three ‘weeding women’ regularly employed over the growing season. When Sir Richard Reynell was staying at his rented accommodation in Exeter, however, the amount he spent on vegetables, expressed as a percentage of his overall food, increased from 0.5 per cent to around 3.5 per cent (see Table 4.5). This, together with the small quantities purchased, confirms the view that certain greens had become fashionable at a high social level. This was despite the phlegmatic proprieties assigned to them by physicians. Their humoral coldness and moistness meant that vegetables were potentially dangerous if eaten in large quantities, but this problem could be circumvented by eating meals that also contained humorally warm and dry ingredients like spices. The main types of produce purchased for consumption by Reynell at Exeter, which would have been stewed or boiled with meat in a stock containing spices if cookery book recipes were being followed, were radishes, cucumbers, onions, carrots and cabbages. All this food needed to be washed down by drinking appropriate beverages. Drinking water could be hazardous in the days before purification, and tea and coffee were yet to arrive in England. Thus, vast quantities of ale

Table 4.5 Reynell’s food purchases during 1629 Type of food

Value

%

Type of food

Value

%

Animal meat

555

59.5

Animal meat

15,107

63.5

Fish

78

8.5

Fish

3,916

16.5

Birds

62

6.5

Birds

1,948

8

Vegetables

30

3.5

Vegetables

131

0.5

Dairy produce

1

—

Dairy produce

291

1

Bread

114

12

Bread

256

1

Spices and fruit

95

10

Spices and fruit

2,272

9.5

Total

935

100

Total

23,919

100

On the left is the purchase value of food bought at Exeter over two weeks in September 1629. Placed in juxtaposition is the value of the foods purchased by the Reynells during the whole year. Values are expressed in pence. Source: Gray, Devon Household Accounts, pp. 35–58.

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and beer were either brewed at the estates of the gentry or purchased for the consumption of servants and labourers employed on their estates. But in addition to this, relatively small quantities of wine were purchased. This suggests that it was usually drunk by household members, high-status household officials and important guests. The most popular types of wine were claret, Sack, Muscadine, Canary and ‘white’ wine. In contrast to beer which cost between 1d and 2d per gallon depending on its strength, red wine could normally be bought for 5d to 7d per pint. White wine was around half this price, and it was only bought occasionally – usually between May and September at Arbury Hall.104 This may have been due to the perceived humoral properties of wine, for although white wine was thirst quenching, cooling and suitable for those with hot constitutions, particularly in the summer, red wine was thought to be warmer and appropriate for most people living in the cool English climate for the rest of the time.105 While Muscadine was the favourite wine of the Cecils and Canary was enjoyed by the Radcliffs, Sack was preferred by the Reynells and the Newdigates. The Newdigates purchased wine almost every week over the five years between 1636 and 1640, and most of it was of an unspecified variety. However, they purchased small quantities of Sack on around ten occasions a year, usually, but not exclusively, in the spring and autumn. Some physicians from mainland Europe advised that wine should be diluted with water in order to prevent damaging fumes from rising to the head. This advice may have been acknowledged at Arbury Hall, for purchases of water here increased more or less proportionately to purchases of wine.106 The pattern of Reynell’s sack purchases were not dissimilar, although the Devonshire knight purchased around twice the quantity and also bought it during his stays at Exeter. In contrast, the Earl of Sussex purchased Canary wine every week between Christmas 1637 and the following spring, with five times as much as usual being bought during the festive season.107 The beverages consumed by the elite and other gentle households whose accounts I have analysed were, like their foods, the most expensive and the most prestigious that money could buy. Insofar as attempts by the elite to sharply stratify dining experiences were concerned, their estates were run as microcosms of an idealistic English society as they saw it. The gentry and nobility consumed high-priced foods at least partly as a means to express their cultural identity. To these people, expensive luxuries and high-quality variants of staple foods and drinks were necessities. They were necessary in the sense that they differentiated one ‘sort’ of consumer from another.

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On the basis of household accounts evidence, the gentry and nobility enjoyed a strikingly similar diet to each other. Apart from preferences for either beef, mutton or veal or for certain types of poultry or wild birds – both of which were influenced by local custom or traditional availability – there was little to separate their consumption patterns. Basic, inexpensive produce continued to be sourced in significant quantities by elite households throughout the century; but despite this, the luxuries that they ate increased in scope and sophistication as the century moved on. This uniformity and sophistication was due to foreign and national travel; broad-based networking; a marked increase in the demand for, and supply of, exotic foods; and an ever-growing print culture that is evident in the array of cookery books published after 1590. By using these books, both high-priced foods and staples could be transformed into luxurious dishes and become important identity markers to those who ate them. Other special foods, and the use of recipes to prepare distinctive meals, are discussed next.

Part Three

Social Relations

5

Special Foods and Their Preparation

… is never a one of you that heares mee, that cares the least for the sport, for preservation of the Game, but he would be as glad to have a pastie of Venison if you might get it, as the best Hunter would: And if the Game be not preserved, you can eate no Venison. As for Partridge and Phesant, I doe not denie that Gentlemen should have their sport, and specially upon their owne ground. But first I doe not thinke such Game and pleasures should be free to base people.1 In Chapter 4, my analyses of kitchen accounts and other historical sources showed which high-priced luxurious foods – purchased in small quantities and used sparingly – were exclusive necessities of the well-to-do within their households. These luxuries were necessary in the sense that they helped their consumers to express their elevated social identity, and, as such, they contrasted sharply with the inexpensive and (usually) easily obtainable foods that were associated with their menial servants. There are, however, other foods that were in some way special, and these too could give expression to ideas of ‘self ’ and ‘otherness’. But although the foods discussed here were also associated with the gentry household, it is known that they were acquired by all sorts of people – from traders and artisans to unskilled labourers and vagrants. This fact is alluded to in the above quotation. It is a complaint made to Parliament by King James I that not enough was being done to stop people of small worth from depleting stocks of game. In considering such foods, I look first at different types of young and tender produce, examining the possible reasons for its popularity among the well-to-do. I then focused on game – a food of eminence that was at least occasionally widely accessible. After this, I consider the acquisition of exotic ingredients such as spices and fruits – ranging from raisins and prunes to citrus and pineapple – and their roles in turning basic foods into exclusive dishes. The second part of this chapter starts by examining cookery book recipes that facilitated the

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dissemination of high fashion. These instructive guides broadened the range of tastes available to their readers and at once described increasingly sophisticated food preparation methods that restricted emulation by those of low social rank. I then look at sweetmeats and ‘banqueting stuff ’ before moving on to the production of fake luxuries – the consumption of which could fulfil a desire by some to imitate the eating habits of their social superiors.

Special foods Assigning greater value intrinsically to one food over another can be misleading. As the importance accredited to a food at any particular time depended on the function it was expected to fulfil, value clearly took on more than one meaning. Basic bread, beef and ale were important commodities to the social elite because they enabled these people to sustain their subordinates and allowed them to fulfil their moral obligations of charitable ‘giving’. Foods that were expensive or difficult to obtain, or estimable foods purchased for consumption on special occasions, were no less important. These were luxuries that could signify to oneself and to others one’s social and economic standing. But fresh, young and tender foods were no less special. If eaten appropriately, in surroundings and circumstances befitting the occasion, such foods were as much markers of refined taste – a sixteenth-century characteristic of gentility – as felicitous countenance, composure and sumptuous attire.2 Fresh, young and tender meats that had become popular with the ‘high aristocracy’ in the 1400s were, by the late sixteenth century, seen both as delicate and subtly flavoured foods that distinguished their upper- and middling-sort consumers from those who ate coarse meats, and appropriate for the digestion and health of those who were exempt from manual labour.3 One such delicacy was veal, the tender flesh of a calf. The Newdigates typically purchased veal three weeks out of every four; yet despite this level of frequency, only £33 3s 9d was spent on it during the five years up to and including 1640. The average amount spent on veal per week by the household was 4s 1d – enough to buy a neck and a breast, but not quite enough to pay for a quarter of a calf which usually cost between 4s 6d and 6s.4 This shows that few people within the household savoured this young, tender meat. Contemporaries of the North Warwickshire gentleman, the earls of Sussex and Salisbury, also purchased veal every week. But although the

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average spend-per-week by Sir Edward Radcliffe and Sir William Cecil on this product far exceeded that of Sir Richard Newdigate (£1 2s and £3 8s, respectively), it was still a relatively small sum compared to their expenditure on meats like beef and mutton.5 In 1603 at his London residence, the Lord Treasurer, Thomas Sackville, purchased around 200lb of mutton and beef each week at a cost of approximately £2 5s. Yet here too the quantity of veal consumed was comparatively small; just one shoulder was normally purchased each Wednesday for 1s 4d.6 Depending on how it was cooked – and veal was thought by physicians to be best if it was roasted because this mode of cooking removed some of the joint’s excess moisture – it might feed a family. Between thirty and forty calf carcasses a year were consumed by the Willoughby household during the 1590s; but with gentlemen servants and family members making up to 50 per cent of the household, it is probable that the meat yielded by these calves would not have been sufficient to feed lower-level servants regularly.7 As the pattern of veal acquisition in 1640 was similar to that which prevailed in our households a century earlier, where the accounting systems allow us to make this determination, continuity is evident for the status of this meat. At Haddon Hall, for example, there were nine entries for the purchases of veal over three months during 1549 by the gentleman and JP Sir George Vernon.8 The meat of calves was clearly perceived as a food for the enjoyment of those of high or middle rank. So why was veal a food of distinction? Light in colour, subtle in flavour, fine in texture and easily digested, this meat fulfilled the expectations of leisured people with cultivated taste. Its qualities contrasted with those attributed to beef, which was seen as analogous to many of its consumers – relatively strong and coarse.9 But although veal was appropriate to those of high social status, as a market commodity it could be purchased by labourers only when financial circumstances permitted. This does not mean, however, that the poor did not get to enjoy the taste of this meat, for there were other ways of obtaining veal. Records show that it was occasionally a target of theft. In April 1630, for example, two women ‘rogues’ wandering through Salisbury took a ‘limb of veal by unlawful means’.10 Although this ‘limb’ may or may not have been stolen for their own consumption, such thefts – and there were many of them – demonstrate clearly that this high-value meat was occasionally available to those who stole it – and to others who were able to buy it on the black market. Another special food of this kind was the young of domestic fowl – pullets and caponets. Although ‘pullet’ was defined more loosely by contemporaries than the months-old female bird has been in recent times, household

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Food and Identity in England, 1540–1640

accounts show that kitchen clerks were intent on differentiating them from hens, chickens, cocks and capons. Like pullets, caponets were popular with the well-to-do. Their flesh was tender and their price, compared to that of capons, was disproportionately expensive in terms of the meat that they yielded. As we saw in Chapter 4, pullets featured as a purchase in the household accounts of the Newdigate family; but while this young bird was acquired on about ten occasions annually, caponets reached the kitchen somewhat less frequently. These fowls were usually bought either singly or as a brace, and because on no occasion were there more than three purchased, it is probable that very few people Arbury Hall would have had access to their meat. The kitchen clerk here in Warwickshire was careful to make a clear distinction in his daybook between acquisitions of young, tender flesh and acquisitions of mature meat; thus geese and goslings and turkeys and poults (young turkeys) were accounted for separately. On a price/yield basis, a gosling was a premium product that cost the Newdigates over 20d per lb when it was purchased at just a few weeks old in May or June. This ‘greene goose’, like a poult, would have been exceptionally tender if it was eaten at this time of year. The absence of goslings or young turkeys in some kitchen accounts might suggest that such products were not generally consumed; however, this is not necessarily the case. Given the striking similarities between the consuming practices at early seventeenth-century manor houses, their inclusion or omission in household accounts could depend on the level of detail deemed necessary by clerks and auditors. Certainly Mark Dawson has found that ‘green’ geese were provided for the elite members of the Willoughby household in the late sixteenth century. In 1588, seventeen goslings were consumed, and in 1598–1599, thirteen of them were eaten.11 As at Arbury Hall, these young birds were acquired in the late spring and early summer only, and at an estimated edible weight of 1.1lb each, they would almost certainly have been exclusive to the eight family members and possibly just a few of the fifteen gentlemen servants that made up the 46-strong household. The probability that very young birds, like other immature produce, were consumed by the well-to-do – even if age distinction is not made in the accounts – should not be understated. Young birds attracted high prices in the marketplace, and squabs (pigeons taken from their nests at a pre-fledgling stage) may well have accounted for some of the 1,000 pigeons bought over the six months by Sir William Cecil and for some of the 200 purchased by Sir Edward Radcliffe.12 Other young, underdeveloped and costly status-marking produce included fry – the young of fish. At Forde House the recorder of Sir Richard Reynell’s

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household accounts thought it important enough to distinguish between salmon and trout on the one hand, and peal (the fry of these fish), on the other. Purchased in small quantities of four to six as they became available – usually between June and August – peal imparted a delicate flavour and light texture. Paying 10d for half a dozen, the Reynells clearly thought that they were very special.13 In March 1588, another gentleman lawyer, Richard Shuttleworth, bought ten young tench at Preston market for his family’s consumption at his Smithils home in Lancashire.14 These young freshwater fish that have a similar flavour to carp fry were purchased for 1s 2d. The records of kitchen acquisitions reveal that when immature fish was in season, household heads acquired enough to treat a few privileged people. But the well-to-do were not the only ones to acquire tasty young fish. Like veal, fry could be and was accessed by people from the lowest tiers of society – those described by clergyman and moralist William Harrison as ‘idle servingmen’ who are ‘profitable to none’ and ‘enemies to their masters, their friends and themselves’.15 This becomes clear when one considers a case presented to the Hertfordshire Assizes in the same year that Harrison’s book was published. Husbandman William Knevett and his partner-in-crime William Pryer were indicted in 1577 for illegal fishing; they had caught eighteen trout on two occasions using undersize nets.16 As the merits of peal to these and other poachers were clearly understood, it is evident that such special foods were sometimes surreptitiously available to all sorts of people. Appreciation of fresh and tender foods was not confined to flesh. A premium was also paid by those with refined taste and adequate financial resources for the flavoursome buds of plants containing undeveloped leaves or petals. Although these could be used for medicinal purposes – their properties thought to rectify imbalances between bodily humours – contemporary cookery books made it clear that they were also suitable for garnishing and improving the flavour of meals. Fresh flower buds costing upward of 8d per quart in 1640 were seasonal acquisitions at the Arbury Hall estate, with broom-buds being purchased in May and rosebuds in July. Because of their relatively long ‘shelf life’, they were sometimes bought in bulk; this meant that some could be added to meals while they were still fresh, to lend piquancy to baked or boiled dishes and that the remainder could be preserved for future use. A cookery book published shortly before Newdigate bought five quarts of broom buds advised on how to conserve them for future use in salads and cooked meals.17 Thus, the 1,200 rosebuds bought by the Earl of Sussex for 3s in July 1638 does not necessarily indicate that they were sampled by the entire household: their price

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Food and Identity in England, 1540–1640

and the knowledge of preservation techniques – with or without the ownership of kitchen manuals – suggests rather that they were used frugally.18 Like rosebuds, capers are also the buds of a perennial shrub; the latter, however, were sourced from Mediterranean regions. Costing between 1s and 1s 4d per lb in the late 1630s, this exotic food is an ever-present feature in post-1620 household accounts. It also appears in the expenses accounts of two assize judges riding the Western Circuit in the 1590s.19 The Newdigate family occasionally purchased at least 1lb of these buds at various times between 1638 and 1640, and while the Earl of Sussex bought 2½lb of capers in January 1638, the Earl of Salisbury purchased 12lb of them in January 1634(5).20 On 1 October 1630, capers to the value of 3s 6d were also bought by Sir Richard Reynell during his fortnight stay in Exeter.21 As buds were luxuries to be consumed inconspicuously, their value lay in their service to the refined, exquisite taste that was a hallmark of the gentry. If young, tender produce like this helped to set the well-to-do apart from people of lesser rank, the same could be said of fresh, young flowers and leaves. Flowers and leaves of plants such as roses, broom, marigolds and cowslips were also purchased by the gentry. Although these could be used in many ways, records show that a sizable quantity of them reached the kitchens where they would have had both medicinal and culinary uses. In October 1586, the kitchen clerk of the Earl of Northumberland purchased ‘flowers’ by the peck for consumption at his London residence.22 Paying 1s 9d for them, he described them as ‘necessaryes’. Recipes published at that time illustrate the extramedicinal use of both petals and leaves. One book published in 1573 and reprinted two years before the earl purchased his peck of flowers stated that, along with the ‘vertues’ of such items in maintaining bodily health, they also had a culinary use. The assets attributed to rose vinegar, for example, was the ‘savour and odor of the rose’.23 There was nothing new about flowers forming part of a meal at this time. Instructions on how to create a tart of marigold flowers appeared in a cookery book that was published four decades earlier.24 But young flowers and other tender green produce intended to serve the senses continued to feature in cookery books for the next century. By the late 1630s, violet and camomile flowers costing around 1s 5d per quart and 4d an ounce respectively, were purchased by the kitchen clerk at Arbury Hall. Meals containing such ingredients were expensive and complex to produce if contemporary manuals are a fair guide. Early seventeenthcentury recipes calling for the use of leaves and petals required sophisticated cooking techniques and the addition of costly spices. But as flower buds and

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the most delicate and freshest of produce could be found in fields and by the roadside, they were, of course, available to the rural peasants and to vagrants. The ‘water poet’ John Taylor, in extolling the virtues of a beggarly existence in 1621, identified some of the herbaceous food that was freely obtainable to an indigent roaming the countryside: And in the stead of Cut-throat slaughtering Shambles, Each Hedge allowes him Berryes from the brambles. The Bullesse, hedge Peake, Hips and Hawes, and Sloes, Attends his appetite where e’re he goes: As for his Sallets, better neuer was, Then acute Sorrell, and sweet three leau’d Grasse, And as for Sawce he seldome is at Charges For euery Crabtree doth affoord them Vergis …25

Yet such produce, framed within prevailing circumstances, would have taken on a different meaning. Both to masterless wanderers and to gentlemen, rosebuds were an addition to the variety of tastes available and to both ‘sorts’ of people, this food could qualify as a necessity in its own right. But the manner in which the food was prepared, and the context in which it was eaten, both characterized and delineated cultural identity. Taken at face value, there could be no ambiguity with regard to the procurement of foods of eminence, however. Some high-value prestigious foods – supposedly difficult to obtain by the non-elite for a variety of reasons – were not only meant for the exclusive enjoyment of the upper-classes and their guests, they were specifically intended to symbolize their consumers’ prominent position in society. This applied to the consumption of game – and especially to venison. And as high social status could be marked not just by the observable consumption of special foods but also by the nature of, and factors affecting their procurement, the hunting of deer for venison was circumscribed by and for the social elite through Acts of Privy Council. The attempt that was made to restore ancient royal prerogative for hunting rights to their former glory by James I, following the ‘laxity of Queen Elizabeth’s day’, does not reflect the importance attached to the status of game as a food in the latter half of the sixteenth century.26 Despite endeavours in 1603, 1606 and 1609 to limit the acquisition of deer, pheasant and partridge to the elite so that ‘men of small worth’ were excluded from obtaining them, there were many other efforts to control the supply of game before the first Stuart monarch acceded to the throne.27 On 11 November 1577, the lords of the Privy

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Food and Identity in England, 1540–1640

Council sent a letter to the Lord Mayor of London expressing the queen’s concern regarding the trade in pheasants and partridges by the city’s poulterers. Partridge consumption had expanded considerably since the Middle Ages, and because of the great numbers now being caught in the counties and subsequently being sold in London, a governmental decree forbade poulterers in the city from buying ‘any partridges or pheasantes of any personne whosoever’, or to sell any, for two years.28 This ostensibly even-handed order was, in reality, directed at the lower orders. These birds, like deer, were associated with the landowning gentry who could still gain access to game, as well the queen and her advisors knew, by hunting on their own estates and on the estates of others within their social circles. Whether this hunting was a substitute for participation in warfare, as at least one historian has reasoned, or whether it was an exclusive sport with which one might mark his or her hierarchical position, as has been indicated by contemporary books on the subject, the end result was game on the dining table.29 And as refined taste was a characteristic of the privileged elite, the foods’ ultimate consumption served to establish or reinforce a selfidentity that was appropriate to the consumer and to the occasion. Partridges and pheasants, as we will see, were given as gift-foods and featured as part of the fare at special events; but while pheasants were rarely purchased (bought only by the brace at a cost of 2s by the Earl of Sussex in 1637 and 1638), partridges occur more often in the kitchen ledgers of the elite.30 Acquired in quantities that rendered its flesh exclusive to very few household members, this bird appears only occasionally in the Arbury Hall accounts. Just twenty-one were bought on eight occasions during the last four years of the 1630s – usually between the last week in October and the third week in January.31 At Gorhambury, by contrast, around eighty partridges were purchased by the Radcliffes between December 1637 and the following March, and five years earlier, Sir William Cecil bought forty partridges for consumption at Quickswood. Cecil’s purchases of this game bird were mainly made in February.32 At their Forde estate near Newton Abbot, Sir Richard and Lady Lucy Reynell purchased game birds infrequently during the late 1620.33 The first partridges of the ‘bird-consuming season’ appear in the accounts in the last week of August; at this time, half a dozen or more were usually bought, but from then until midJanuary purchases were sporadic. Of the other game birds purchased by the Devonshire knight, the heathpoult was the most prestigious.34 The sparsity of purchases of pheasants and partridges that is adequately reflected in household accounts does not, of course, rule out further undocumented acquisitions; these could be, and probably were, made by way

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of hunting with nets, guns, traps or birds of prey. Adjoining Forde House, for example, there was a park owned by Sir Richard Reynell. And in addition to the game birds purchased by Sir William Cecil, his household accounts indicate that a number of partridges and pheasants arrived at the kitchen via the ‘huntsman’ and the ‘falconer’. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, on the eve of his becoming 1st Earl of Dorset, the Lord Treasurer, Thomas Sackville, infrequently bought a brace of partridges for consumption at his London residence. His financial outlay of 1s for each bird would have taken a London craftsman around a whole day to earn at that time. Sackville, speaking at The Bar, had made at least one outspoken appeal for greater charitable giving, but his championing of the less fortunate did not extend as far as sharing partridge meat with his servants – let alone with London’s needy.35 Both the quantity that he purchased and the association of the game bird with the well-to-do prevented this from happening. At other major households too, just enough partridges to feed a privileged minority were purchased. In the third week of October 1586, Thomas Wicliffe purchased for his master, the Earl of Northumberland, just one partridge for each of the first four days of the week, and at Ingatestone Hall, Sir William Petre’s household consumed a mere five of these birds during the second week of January 1548.36 Although their distribution within the manor houses was carefully regulated, game birds could still be bought from poulterers. Yet at these retail outlets, stocks were limited and prices were high. Even though proclamations attempted to reduce food prices that were thought to be excessive, the advised maximum prices of some game birds were still set at restrictive levels. Quails, Henry VIII ordered on 21 May 1544, should be sold at 4s per dozen (4d each), and the price of each partridge, it was proclaimed in February 1634, should be 1s.37 How, then, could they be obtained and consumed by ordinary people who would struggle to justify the expense of buying high-cost low-yield items? Eight months after the Clerk of the Market had issued the 1634 price guidelines, King Charles I expressed his concern about the depletion in England’s stock of partridges. This, he thought, was due to ‘persons of sundry quality’ using dogs and nets with which to catch them. The king warned poachers that they would be punished, but in addition to this, the Royal Proclamation stated, the dogs and nets would be destroyed.38 Scant regard must have been paid to the words of King Charles, for a repeated and more forceful warning was issued in December. Acknowledging the ingenuity of poachers of diverse social degrees, the monarch decreed that all nets and all engines manufactured for snaring both partridges and pheasants were also to be ruined.39 This shows that innovative

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poachers – which included labourers – were catching highly-prized birds and either consuming them themselves or supplying them, presumably at an advantageous price, to other people. The period 1594–1597 saw four consecutive disastrous harvests. During this time food was scarce, particularly in rural areas where purchasing power was relatively low, and prices rose sharply.40 In 1596, a particularly bad year, an enterprising labourer from Kent was indicted for grand larceny after allegedly stealing, among other birds, seventeen partridges valued at 8s and a pheasant valued at 2s.41 But although many food-related thefts attracted indictments at this time of severe hardship, foods that were highly regarded by the nobility and gentry were seldom targeted by thieves – at least not in Essex, Surrey or Kent. In court records, many thieves were described as simply as ‘labourers’ (a classification that included vagrants who could not be so described because vagrancy itself was a crime), and the priority of thieving manual workers in times of dearth and high-prices was often foods just beyond or at the top end of their normal diet – such as rabbits, hens and ducks. Court records also show that many alleged felons who were bought to trial for poaching salmon, trout and game were described as ‘yeomen’ or ‘husbandmen’; they too clearly aspired to the consuming standards of their immediate social and economic superiors.42 Like game birds, deer and its derivative venison was ‘perceived as currency of rank and honour’ and therefore held the potential to mark elite identity.43 Despite this, as I will demonstrate below, any concept that venison was a food enjoyed only by the elite and the middling sort would be as erroneous as it is simplistic. Venison was consumed at civic and company dinners as I showed in Chapter 3, and it did figure prominently as a gift-food as we will see in Chapter 6; but unlike game birds, this meat was not usually available as a market commodity. This means that it was not purchased overtly by labourers, and it does not feature as a kitchen expense in household accounts. Yet access by gentlepeople to this food of distinction is revealed in the accounts in at least three other ways: charges for the delivery of deer were paid; well-wishers supplying venison received financial rewards; and venison pies and pasties – described by traveller and writer Fynes Moryson as ‘a dainty, rarely found in any other Kingdome’ – are sometimes mentioned as items in stock.44 Although the acquisition of this meat in the kitchen book of Arbury Hall is not alluded to, it would appear that venison featured on at least one occasion here. Inside its front cover there is a hand-written recipe for making ‘a nornery sised pasty of venson’.45 An ordinary sized pasty was, apparently, sufficiently capacious

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to require half a peck of flour, 3lb of butter and eight eggs to be used in its manufacture. This information is particularly valuable because contemporary kitchen manuals furnished their readers with all the ingredients necessary, including the appropriate spices, but not with the weights or quantities that were to become a feature of later cookery books. Members of both the Radcliffe and the Shuttleworth households also ate venison. On 8 October 1637, a ‘red deer pie’ was carried forward as a foodstock item from the previous week at the Earl of Sussex’s Gorhambury residence, and in December 1588, Sir Richard Shuttleworth paid 5s for the delivery to Smithills of a ‘fat doe’. In the following August, a fat stag and a side of venison were also delivered to the Lancashire hall.46 Selecting fat deer rather than lean ones was not merely a question of choosing the most flavoursome food, for fat meat was also considered to be more healthful than lean meat.47 Two decades later, in January 1609(10), Sir Richard’s younger brother, Colonel Richard, paid 2s to a man who delivered venison to his house in London.48 The period was marked by continuity in the elite’s quest for venison, for Sir William Petre had owned a deer park in the mid-sixteenth century, and in September 1549, Sir George Vernon had rewarded the keeper of the Derbyshire’s High Peak with 5s for dispatching a stag – presumably from his own extensive deer park near Nether Haddon.49 The rewards that issued from country gentlemen and greater nobles for the supplying of deer and venison are indicative of gratitude for the receipt of high-value food with which they could signal their superior status. But this valuable meat, like basic beef, could also be tough for ‘delicate stomachs’ to digest; therefore, the problem of digestion was circumvented by allowing it to decay slightly over a period of time.50 This was not a problem for the hardy digestive systems of labourers, but venison was theoretically out of their reach. Despite this, and much to the annoyance of the elite and their governmental representatives, venison was sometimes accessed by those of lower social standing. On 29 November 1621, the same year in which Gervase Markham’s book on how to trap and snare fowl by using diverse ‘engines’ had been published, a letter was sent by the Privy Council to the High Sheriff of Sussex reminding both him and the Justices of the Peace of their obligation in preventing the ‘vulgar sort’51 from further depleting the stock of ‘deer, phesantes, partridges … ’, with their ‘gunes, nettes, dogges, cross-bowes … ’. Four days earlier, the Council had ordered that £4 was to be paid to the constable of Stratford Langton ‘for his paynes’ in capturing four poachers who stole deer.52

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As this luxury food was considered a resource of the social elite, it should not surprise us that representatives of the landowning class were handsomely rewarded for apprehending any of the ‘vulgar sort’ who threatened to render meaningless this important insignia of social superiority. As a counterbalance to the ‘carrot’ of reward, however, there was the ‘stick’ of punishment for anyone who aided or harboured such offenders. In 1623, a proclamation was issued for the apprehension of Henry Field who apparently made an occupation out of stealing deer and selling them. Severe punishment was promised for anyone harbouring or maintaining this man who was effectively broadening the consumer base of the cherished meat.53 And in May the following year, a proclamation for the apprehension of Edward Ekins, who had killed and stolen ‘our deare’ from a park in Higham Ferrers in Northamptonshire, warned people about the consequences of protecting him: ‘Wee will (as there is just cause) proceede against them, that shall so neglect this Our Commandement, with all severitie.’54 The severity with which accomplices were to be punished reflects not only the seriousness with which the elite-sponsored authorities viewed the theft of nobles’ property but also their anxiety at the status-marking property falling into the hands of the unentitled. As such, the felonious acquisition of large quantities of grain, cheese or ale could be, and often was, viewed less seriously than the theft of silk, silverware and deer.55 When announcing on 15 April 1587 that a stag intended ‘for the use and pleasure’ of the Queen was ‘slue and carried away’ by ‘certain lewd and licentious persons’,56 the Privy Council ordered the apprehension and commitment to gaol of the offending ‘delinquents’ ‘with all due speed’. This was because the consumption of deer by the non-gentry was intended to be by invitation only; thus, three months later, the lords ordered that ten bucks should be sent to Peterborough to be eaten at the funeral ‘supper and dynner’ of the ‘late Scottyshe Queene’.57 Portraying poachers of game in such a tone and language was neither new in James’s time nor in Elizabeth’s. On 2 May 1554, Queen Mary had issued a proclamation relating to the use and abuse of the forests of Whittlewood and Salcey in Northamptonshire. The problem of the wasteful felling of trees and coppicing that hampered the sporting pursuits of the gentry was compounded by the ‘extreme dealings of such light persons of the meaner sort’. While gentlemen were reminded that they must not kill deer out of season, the most scathing of official wrath was directed at poachers from the lower orders of society who were accused of seeking, ‘by night as by day’, ‘the utter ruin and destruction of our game for the commodity of the flesh’.58 Yet poaching was by

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no means the only method of covertly acquiring venison nor was its acquisition always effected by men. Across Western Europe, the prosperity of women is understood to have deteriorated after the Reformation, with political change that accompanied religious upheaval resulting in fewer job opportunities. Convents and brothels were closed, and in seventeenth-century Bristol, in England, noticeably fewer women prospered in skilled trades than had previously been the case.59 Increasing government control over how welfare should be administered, and who deserved or did not deserve aid, could also work against women. Unemployed females, and particularly those of childbearing age wandering from one parish to the next, may well have been seen as a potential drain on the financial resources of ratepayers; but the lack of support provided to them – as in the case of Elizabeth Sherwood discussed below – and a lack of prosperity among many low to middle-status women does not necessarily imply they were unable to enjoy estimable foods. Court records demonstrate clearly that women’s sense of luxury was finely honed, and that relatively poor women, like men in similar financial positions, could gain access to the finest luxury produce. As Garthine Walker has noted, women’s involvement in food crime was multifaceted: some stole both basic and luxury foods, either on their own or with the assistance of other women or men; they were sometimes the recipients of stolen foods; it was often they who prepared the carcasses for cooking; and it was frequently women who ‘were active in converting such commodities into tasty dishes’.60 On 3 January 1606, Elizabeth Sherwood – one of the alleged ‘foreign’ idlers and wanderers that Salisbury Council was accustomed to whipping and sending back to their place of birth – was spared the beating in consideration of her pregnancy but was given a passport to her home town of Bristol. She had compounded her sin of idleness by stealing venison from the house of a Mr. Sidenham.61 Sherwood may have been an unfortunate victim of prevailing economic circumstances in the wake of the years of high prices and food shortages; or she may have been expelled from her home as one of the perceived errant or unruly wives that Elizabeth Foyster has discussed;62 or yet she may simply have been an incorrigible rogue who neglected her social responsibilities. But one must wonder why, at this festive time, the woman chose to steal away venison in preference to an alternative type of meat that would certainly have been available and to which she would have been accustomed. This prestigious meat may or may not have been for her own festive enjoyment, but its theft by a vagrant indicates that venison was at least occasionally obtainable by many ‘sorts’ of people if they could steal it or

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afford to pay the black-market price. This obtainability extended the boundary of the food’s consumption outwards and thus threatened its capacity to mark hierarchical primacy. Another method of obtaining venison was by the use of subterfuge. Fraudulently claiming ‘fee deer’ from forests, chases and parks by ‘sundry persons under pretence of their offices’ was a concern of King Charles I. In May 1626, it was pointedly remarked that there was ‘no such right belonging to any such subjects’ other than for principal officers who had been granted that right. The tone of this proclamation, like the tenor of the previous communiqué, left little doubt that the consumption of game, and especially venison, was viewed as an identity marker of the social elite. It is equally clear, however, that such foods found their way to the tables of those of questionable pedigree. Any subjects attempting to acquire fee deer or wardens falsely serving warrants with which to obtain them, the order ominously stated, will ‘feel our displeasure’.63 Sometimes false warrants did not need to be issued for people of low rank to enjoy this food nor was there always the need to steal away deer under the cover of darkness. The fences of parks ‘were frequently in a state of disrepair’, and villagers, on seeing deer damaging their crops, or allegedly seeing them do so, took the opportunity to kill the animals – sometimes with the aid of dogs. It was claimed in a court case that smallholders in a Lincolnshire village killed forty deer between 1618 and 1620. Some of the venison was allegedly taken by villagers to unlicensed alehouses where it was ‘riotously’ consumed ‘in banqueting and feasting’, while ‘other parts thereof ’ were distributed to ‘other persons of like lewd behaviour’.64 It is clear, then, that the meat of dear, imagined by the elite of English society to be an important necessity in their social and cultural status-marking store, was at least occasionally available to some within William Harrison’s ‘great swarms of idle servingmen’.65 So what was the attraction of venison to the ‘meaner sort’ and, in this case, to the poor folk of Lincolnshire? The geographical landscape of the county and its predominant climatic conditions lent themselves to successful arable farming and root-crop growing. And although the availability of sufficient food was subject to many factors, such as those of distribution management and changes in agrarian structures and land usage, they do not seem to have been problematic during 1618, for this was a year in which the Tillage Act was repealed due to the abundance and cheapness of grain. Given the number of deer killed and consumed over the period, it is also unlikely that curiosity regarding its taste was a factor. One attraction of venison was that it could only be obtained illicitly by many; this may therefore have increased the pleasure

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of eating it. Another reason for the disposal of deer might be social protest – especially when there was unresolved dispute or altercation between a lord and his tenants. But yet another possible explanation for the meat’s consumption by ‘light persons of the meaner sort’, and by other villagers of middling-status, was their intent to express through emulation or imitation a desire to blur or to transgress the social boundaries between themselves and their superiors. If, on the other hand, the reason for its consumption can be explained by these people having obtained an appetite for the meat over time, then the perceived sophistication associated with its consumption had diffused through the ranks of society and had partially obscured signs of social differentiation. Either scenario would require the gentry and the nobility to refine their meals through the use of sophisticated culinary methods and the addition of expensive or difficult-to-obtain ingredients in order to re-establish the status quo. There were several ways in which meals could be refined. One of these involved the addition of high-priced ingredients such as spices – including dried fruits and sugar that were listed as spices in household accounts – and exotic fresh fruits. These foodstuffs were multifunctional. They enhanced dishes by changing their flavour or texture; they were beneficial to health in England’s relatively cool, moist climate; and they were reassuringly expensive to the wellto-do. These qualities combined to facilitate mealtime diversity and exclusivity for those of high social status living in urban areas. This worked in rural areas too, for although it has been pointed out that some country gentlemen may have remained reliant on home-produced or locally sourced foods, household accounts reveal that exotic foods were readily available to many of them during their occasional, if not frequent, visits to London and other towns.66 While some of these additives were bought in bulk because of their lengthy shelf-life, others – particularly fresh fruits – were usually purchased frequently but in small quantities. Expensive spices that accounted for a large proportion of the food budget of well-to-do households, especially towards the end of the period, were as symbolic as they were functional. The enduring explanation put forth by some historians regarding the use of spices in medieval and early modern cooking – explaining that they were needed to mask the tainted flavour and aroma of substandard or deteriorating meat – has correctly been challenged by others.67 While Stephen Mennell reminds us that spices were ‘expected to be used with fresh meat too’ and Paul Freedman points out that the bad taste of spoiled meat would not, in any case, be substantially allayed by spices or anything else, Christopher Dyer introduces a cultural aspect to the argument. He explains that

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spices ‘provided a link with the sophisticated Mediterranean world’.68 To these observations, I would simply add that if one was wealthy enough to buy spices costing between six and fourteen shillings per pound, one would be happy to write off spoiled meat as conspicuous wastage – which was a hallmark of the cultural identity of the elite – and buy some of better quality. Spices, whether bought for culinary of medicinal use, were expensive enough in the Middle Ages, and although their prices were declining after 1600, it was not by enough to make them more affordable to the ‘poorer sort’ and at once less appealing to the gentry. This did not occur until ‘well after’ the medieval period in France – in the era of Louis XIV (1638–1715) and then later in Italy and Northern Europe.69 The findings of Paul Freedman are substantiated by many household accounts of the early seventeenth century, confirming, as they do, that the substances continued to be much sought-after and were often purchased for special occasions.70 Freedman cites wages of skilled London craftsmen to indicate the value of spices in 1439. But in Table 5.1 their continued exclusivity is highlighted by reproducing these figures in juxtaposition to those applying to craftsmen in York two centuries later – a time when the purchasing power of artisans had fallen by 50 per cent since 1450 due to considerable erosion of the real wage.71 Donald Woodward’s data shows that in 1639 a skilled labourer’s daily wage was 14d, and in the same year Sir Richard Newdigate paid 6d, 11d and 8d for each ounce of cinnamon, mace and cloves, respectively, and 13d for 1lb of sugar.72 Thus, although it is unlikely that labourers would have bought spices by the pound, if at all, I am able to produce this table to serve as a comparison between the affordability of spices in 1439 and in 1639. Table 5.1 Relative cost of spices to a skilled labourer in real terms in 1439 and in 1639 Spice

1439

1639

Sugar

2

0.9

Cloves

4.5

9.2

Cinnamon

3

6.8

Saffron

30

–

Mace

–

12.6

The numerical values indicate the number of days a skilled labourer would have to work in order to purchase one lb of any given spice (assuming the individual received no other income and this was his or her only purchase). For examples of wages and prices used in these calculations, see the text above the table. Sources: Freedman, Out of the East, p. 127; WCRO, CR136v140, Newdigate, 1639; Woodward, Men at Work, p. 275.

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Not all well-to-do households still consumed vast quantities of spices. Mark Dawson has found that during the sixteenth century, the ‘supporting role’ of these luxury ingredients that turned food into cuisine in the kitchens of the Willoughby household was cut back significantly. By 1599, there was a reduction both in the weight and range of spices purchased, with the only apparent exception being nutmeg. This spice was often associated often with sweet dishes rather than savoury ones. There was also a reduction in the quantities of sugar purchased, with amounts at the end of the century dropping back to their 1520s level.73 At Sir John Newdigate’s Arbury Hall in 1612 and 1613, and at the London residence of the Lord Treasurer, Lord Buckhurst in 1603–1604 too, kitchen expenditure records reveal no purchases of spice – although their acquisition was undoubtedly entered into different account books.74 The cookery books discussed below still advocated the use of these ingredients. These books were not out of touch with current trends, and spices had not gone out of fashion; it is certain that they were still very much in vogue. The types of ingredients called for in some late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century printed kitchen manuals correspond closely to those bought by gentlemen and nobles such as Reynell, Shuttleworth, Richard Newdigate, Cecil and Radcliffe. Some particular spices had lost their appeal, but those used most often in the early to midseventeenth century included cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, mace, ginger, saffron, sugar, pepper and liquorice. These were deemed to be so important that they made up between 3.8 per cent and 8.1 per cent of total household expenditures on food and drink. A variety of spices including sugar and dried fruit, and fresh fruits, were bought in small quantities by the Newdigates at irregular intervals during the late 1630s, and while apples and pears were inexpensive, some of the more exotic fruits were dear to buy (see Table 5.2). In addition to the fruits listed in the table, the Arbury Hall family also purchased fresh figs, the more expensive ‘blue figs’ (probably sourced from the far east), medlars, pineapple, and both red and black cherries. These too were bought in quantities that limited their consumption to just a few people. Costs incurred at Arbury Hall for spices, nuts and dried fruits are shown together with the Newdigates’ annual expenditure on these products in Table 5.3. Figure 5.1, conveying the monthly breakdown of Newdigate’s purchases on such goods, and comparing them with those of Reynell, shows the trough in spending at Arbury Hall when the Newdigate family was away in London, and the peak in Sir Richard Reynell’s spending during October when he made extra purchases while staying at Exeter.

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Table 5.2 Prices paid for fruit at Sir Richard Newdigate’s Arbury estate in Warwickshire during 1639 Fruit

Price

Apples

1.4–4 (for 10)

Pears

1.6–3.2 (for 10)

Quinces

11–16 (for 10)

Cherries

4–8 (per lb)

Dates, fresh

24–28 (per lb)

Oranges

30 (per lb)

Values are expressed in pence. Source: WCRO, CR136v140, Newdigate, 1639.

Table 5.3 Prices of dried fruit and spices and the overall value of their purchases at Arbury in 1640 Product

Price

Value of Purchases

Sugar

13

2,886

Currants

5

258

Raisins

5

299

Prunes

2

32

Figs

4

96

Capers

14

52

Pepper

24

28

Nutmeg

64

60

Aniseed

10

4

Ginger

16

4

Cloves

128

48

Olives

2

Cinnamon

96

22

Mace

176

76

Liquorish

128

24

Almonds

16

43

Total Prices are per lb and all values are expressed as pence. Source: WCRO, CR136v140, Newdigate, 1640.

3,934

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1200

pence (d)

1000 800 600 400 200 0 J

F

M

A

M

Newdigate, 1640

J

J

A

S

O

N

D

Reynell, 1629

Figure 5.1 A comparison between the monthly fruit and spice purchases of the Newdigates in 1640 and those of the Reynells in 1629 Spices include sugar. Sources: WCRO, CR136v140, Spices include sugar. Newdigate, 1640; Gray, Devon Household Accounts, pp. 35–58.

The data extracted from Newdigate’s kitchen daybook demonstrates the importance attached by the family to these expensive and socially expressive foodstuffs. Over the five years between 1636 and 1640, 15.2 per cent of the household’s total food budget was afforded to spices and fruit. Although much of this fruit would have been added to the cooking pot in order to enhance the flavour and texture of meals, some of the fruit, the accounts make clear, was table fruit. Many raw fruits were considered by dietary writers to be humorally cold and moist; as such, they were not recommended for consumption on a daily basis because they transferred their phlegmatic properties to the consumer. Despite this, there is much evidence to suggest that dietary advice regarding the eating of fruit was at least occasionally ignored. It is not known whether Newdigate’s table fruit was eaten in an unprepared state, but if it was, circumventing the potential dietary health problem was not insurmountable.75 The fruits and spices consumed at the same time at Gorhambury are no less impressive. Those purchased by the 79-year-old Earl of Sussex matched almost exactly the types bought by the 37-year-old lawyer and future baronet from Warwickshire. The prices paid for most exotic foods by both households were comparable, but while Newdigate occasionally bought saffron to the value of 6d – a minuscule amount when one considers that the price of this spice was 5s per ounce – half an ounce was purchased by the kitchen clerk at Gorhambury and used in cooking during the New Year of 1638.76 Many apples and citrus fruits were consumed by the Radcliffe household. Purchased by quantity rather than weight, oranges and lemons cost the earl 7d for ten.

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Olives, sourced from Mediterranean countries and used in cooking and on salads were bought by the earl for 6d per pint; these were believed to stimulate thirst. And dates, bought for 2s per lb, were usually an ingredient in a cooked meal; believed to loosen the stomach, those sources from the Middle East were supposed to be the best.77 Cherries, enjoyed infrequently by the Newdigates, appear also to have been an occasional treat for Radcliffe; 6lb was purchased in London at a cost of 3s.78 Expensive spices and exotic fruit were also important to the Cecils; and, like the Newdigates, they may have eaten some of it in its raw state. Of the £66 17s 3d spent by the Earl of Salisbury on this category of food over six months, 11.4 per cent was on fruit specifically designated for the table. Such foods were also valuable to the Devonshire lawyer Sir Richard Reynell. In 1628, spices and fruit accounted for 9.5 per cent of his overall food and drink budget.79 This lawyer’s taste and sense of fashion in exotic foods may have been acquired through his networking links in London. Not all lawyers were successful, and many below the levels of benchers and barristers were poor; but both Newdigate and Reynell prospered. And as the most prosperous could earn up to £400 a term, they may well have had the means and the incentive to acquire sophisticated culinary tastes and blur the social boundary between themselves and the nobility.80 When compared to the prices paid by the Newdigates, those paid by the Reynells for spices (Table 5.4) indicate that there was little movement between 1627 and 1640. Not all spices, however, were still status markers in the early seventeenth century. Pepper, which had been very popular, was now ‘in danger of losing its position within the sphere of upper-class taste’.81 In 1627, the substance could be bought for around 24d per lb. Due to production cost-cutting measures taken to meet demand-driven expansion, its price had dipped to this value between 1603 and 1612, having been 46d per lb between 1593 and 1602.82 Thus, after 1627, it accounted for a mere 2 per cent of Reynell’s spending on spices and only 0.5 per cent of Newdigate’s. Sir Richard Shuttleworth had paid 3d per ounce for his pepper in 1583, and although other spices were sampled by him and his family – £4 17s 5d having been spent on them in London in September 1595 – the scope of those consumed by the household increased significantly from around 1605. At this time, under the leadership of Reverend Lawrence Shuttleworth who lived both at Gawthorpe Hall and in Whichford in Warwickshire, the Shuttleworth family’s taste in food had become more sophisticated.83 Mace at 7s 6d per lb, cinnamon at 4s, nutmegs at 3s 8d, cloves at 1s 10d and saffron are examples of purchases by this family in the early

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Table 5.4 The prices and value of spices bought by the Reynells between 1628 and 1631 Product

Price

Value of Purchases 1628

1629

1630

1631

Sugar

12

801

1,332

1,422

1,618

Currants

5

181

261

107

144

Raisins

3

93

151

26

21

Olives

0

32

0

42

Capers

0

0

42

0

Pepper

24

76

67

63

18

Nutmeg

64

82

16

36

0

Saffron

0

4

7

2

Aniseed

0

3

0

0

Ginger

140

14

0

4

24

Cloves

140

70

63

28

0

Cinnamon

70

36

64

45

0

Mace

168

84

84

35

0

‘Spice’

12

12

0

*640

Totals

1,449

2,088

1,814

2,509

Prices are per lb; all values are expressed in pence. *640 (£2 12s 0d) was spent on unnamed spices that excluded sugar which was purchased separately. Source: Gray (ed.), Devon Household Accounts, pp. 7–105.

seventeenth century. In 1561 Sir Edward Stanley, 3rd Earl of Derby, had over 100 staff. Many of these were gentlemen themselves, and would therefore have received meals appropriate to their elevated social standing. Because of this, Stanley spent £131 13s 4d on spices and fruits.84 Although this amounted to an impressive 8 per cent of Stanley’s overall budget on food and drink, it was still 1.5 per cent less than Reynell spent on spices and fruit relative to his overall food budget sixty-eight years later. A contemporary of Stanley was Queen Elizabeth’s suitor Robert Dudley. The future earl, who purchased high-value foods frequently, bought many spices and fruits. The fruits included quinces at 2s 6d per lb, pomegranates for 1s 4d, and ‘Genoway’ plums for an extravagant 10s per lb. English plums would have been available for a fraction of the cost; however, Mediterranean vegetables and fruit were considered more desirable from a symbolic point of view, and more healthful because climatic conditions in the Mediterranean Basin affected

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in a good way food’s humoral properties. Just as importantly, buying cheap was not in the nature of this conspicuously opulent Master of the Horse.85 Elizabeth herself, when she was a princess living at Hatfield, also purchased much in the way of fruits and spices. She spent £119 13s 7½d on this genre of food in 1551– 1552.86 The queen enjoyed eating fruit, and during her stay at Kenilworth Castle in 1575, she was seen to walk around the garden and, contrary to prevailing dietary advice, she picked a variety of fruits and ate them raw.87 Sugar was one of the main spices purchased in bulk and it was seen as a necessary component in the diets of the well-to-do. Sir William Petre, for example, bought 60 lb of sugar for a discounted price of 7d per lb; and in October 1589, ‘half a hundred’ of sugar (50 lb) was purchased by gentlewoman Joan Thynne at Longleat for just 8d per lb.88 The use of sugar appears to have increased in their kitchens of the well-to-do over the century to 1640. Although sugar was still an expensive luxury at over 1s per lb and had not yet fallen out of fashion among the rich, it was almost certainly experienced by servants as an integral component in many dishes. The eventual reduction in the economic value, and thus the retail price of luxury foods – brought about by factors such as direct trading links, development of production methods, improved transport and oversupply following demand-driven growth – helps to explain the incentive behind their widespread procurement at lower levels. It does not, however, elucidate the reason for their broader-based desirability. This can be found in the acquisition for their taste while being sampled; for although luxury foods that were necessities for the well-to-do were ‘reserved mainly for members of the family’ and others eating at the top table, they were at least occasionally ‘passed to the lower tables and to the poor’.89 In 1530, John Fitzherbert claimed to ‘have sene bokes of accompte of housholde’ that demonstrated to him that ‘spyces’, along with other ‘delycyous meates and drynkes’, were being consumed in ever-greater quantities by ‘noble me[n]’.90 This trend continued into the seventeenth century, but it was not just the social elite who bought these exotic substances. Spices, Thomas Mun claimed in a 1621 publication justifying England’s direct trading links in the international arena, had fallen in price since 1600 when the East India Company was founded. This enabled people of middling status to buy them more frequently than they had back in 1555.91 In that year, such foods were occasionally enjoyed by merchants and their social acquaintances. Merchant tailor Henry Machyn, along with acquaintance John Venor, his wife and a few neighbours, were made a supper by a ‘gentyll-woman’. Machyn noted that this was a ‘grett tabull of bankett’ with dishes of spices and fruit, marmalade, gingerbread, ‘comfetts’,

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sugar ‘plat’ and ‘dyver odur’.92 Thus, whether exotic fruits were used in cooking or whether they were eaten raw, they were already a status-marker of both the upper and middling orders in the mid-sixteenth century. Although the increased availability and lower prices made exotic foods more accessible to the middling-sort by 1620, prices were not sufficiently low to enable all labourers and the poor to buy them. Even so, Mun claimed that these people did actually benefit from the spice trade. The East India Company (for which Mun was a director) had both given generously to the poor of ‘Black-wall, Lime-house, Ratcliffe and Wapping’ and had employed those in need.93 The essence of Mun’s argument was that the consumption of luxury goods by those able to make a statement about their wealth was also beneficial to those who had no such opportunity. It is true that spices meant different things to different people: refined taste, opulence, prestige or the satisfaction of curiosity to the end-consumer; wealth to the merchant; expression of creativity to the cook; and work to the sailor. But cultural identity as expressed by the consumption of spices remained intact. But did those of low social rank have the opportunity to sample foods flavoured with such ingredients? Apparently, not the sailors whom Mun employed. The fare that they were supplied with on their journey, and of which Mun was proud, included butter, cheese, oatmeal, pork, beef and fish.94 The absence of spices for consumption by the sailors cannot be accounted for by excessive cargo loads – an excuse that was sometimes given by ship owners for cutting back on sailors’ food rations – as the space required to store these exotic substances was minuscule compared to that for salt-beef. The decision made by the East India Company, which ‘regularly’ marked up a profit of 100 per cent (and 500 per cent in 1617), to exclude sailors from eating luxury foods was made for socioeconomic reasons.95 These provisions were similar to those taken on a whaling expedition in Russian waters in 1575, except the latter also included legumes, and wine and mustard seed for consumption by at least some of the crew.96 Yet back on dry land, spices and other exotic foods could be, and indeed were, acquired by manual workers through other means. In 1596, Alexander Mallory and Ralph Ferret were allowed the benefit of clergy at Maidstone assizes after being found guilty of stealing one pound of sugar. And at Southwark a quarter of a century later, labourer John Biddle received a whipping after pleading guilty to stealing the same amount.97 While another case shows that a weaver from Brentwood confessed to stealing currants and raisins three days before Christmas 1609, there are enough examples of spices being stolen to demonstrate that more than just a few low-

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status households surreptitiously acquired them.98 Grocer Richard Slattery was indicted for stealing eighteen pounds of cloves, six pounds of cinnamon and six pounds of nutmegs from his master’s house in September 1559. He and his two partners in crime – a farmer’s wife and a baker – probably found a black market for these items that were valued at £10 8s among people of similar status. Another court case shows that in March 1577, labourers James Francis and Thomas Sympson confessed to breaking into a shop in Bishops Stortford where they stole 1lb of pepper, 1lb of ginger, 2lb of nutmeg and a range of ‘other spices and mace’ worth £1. As the overall value of the spices stolen was £2 4s, this crime was viewed as felony. Despite this, the thieves were allowed the benefit of clergy and thus avoided being sentenced to death.99 Labourer Francis Silvester of Hertfordshire, however, was not so fortunate; having been accused of feloniously stealing pepper, cloves and nutmeg worth 8s 9d, he died before being sentenced.100 This evidence does not, of course, suggest blanket consumption of spices right across lower levels of English society; it does, however, demonstrate that the gentry and middling-sort people were not the only consumers of exotic imported products. Those of lower status had a sense of luxury that grew partly from being exposed to high-society trends through contact with others. This exposure could spark curiosity and a desire for imitative consumption resulting in a discerning taste for the exotic. Accurate imitative consumption, however, needed more than simply adding exotic ingredients to dishes; it was also dependent upon the use of the right equipment and the following of certain procedures. It was partly this that enabled the well-to-do to maintain or re-establish their edible identitymarkers.

Recipes and ready-made foods The addition of exotic ingredients and the use of innovative techniques had the potential to elevate dishes to a whole new cultural level. Thus, a trend in cooking that is evident in later kitchen manuals afforded those of high and middling rank an opportunity to acquire new culinary tastes and at once restore their edible markers of social status. In Chapter 3 we saw that merchant John Johnson, at ruinous expense, made luxurious foods his necessities. This case of the draper-cum-merchant-adventurer may not be typical, but, when viewed alongside those of yeomen Henry Best and William Honnywell, it indicates the perceived need by some middling-status families to

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express their cultural identity through the medium of eating luxurious meals. Although any nourishing foods would suffice to avert hunger, expensively acquired and exquisitely cooked meals were increasingly eaten in the service of taste and prestige by the growing ranks of the middling sort. It is arguably for this reason that entrepreneur publishers of kitchen manuals were stirred into animation. As the characteristics of a market economy evolved, aided by an evergrowing print culture, those responsible for publishing cookery books had opportunities to seek out and identify ways to maximize income. In order to avail themselves these opportunities they ideally needed to demonstrate diligence in keeping their books contemporary with fashionable trends.101 Thus, the frequency with which some books facilitating ‘the process of social emulation’ were republished – incorporating ‘new’ fashionable recipes calling for the use of ingredients that traced trends in household purchasing patterns – shows that kitchen manuals, despite a claim to the contrary, were reasonably in line with culinary practices.102 A kitchen manual published in 1545 included a recipe for baking venison that required nothing more than salt, pepper and lard; even allowing for the price of pepper these were rather modest ingredients for baking a luxury dish. In the same book a recipe for roasting venison called for vinegar, sugar and cinnamon. And in order to make a beef or mutton pie, its readers were told, a commendable process was to add prunes, raisins and dates to the mince, along with salt and pepper.103 Although these ingredients were not particularly cheap there were not many of them; and as no equipment more specialized than a chaffing dish was needed in the preparation of the meals, the resulting tastes would, by later standard, have been lacking in complexity. The suggestion here is not that meals eaten prior to the late sixteenth century were uncomplicated, or that cooks then were devoid of creativity and artistic flair, but that cookery books – as potentially lucrative products of a growing print culture – were concerned with that which was likely to sell best. This included fashion-related books that were a matter of import to the swelling ranks of the middling sort. By the turn of the seventeenth century the authors (or compilers) of some books were becoming more imaginative in the techniques and ingredients that they advised their readers to use. The lard utilized in the baking of venison had been superseded in at least one recipe by sweet butter; and wine and spices such as ginger were also to be added. For roasting the same meat, a sauce containing pepper, cloves and mace – one of the most expensive spices available – was a

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recommended enhancement. In another book of the same period, veal was to be stewed with the addition of butter, verjuice, sugar and the costly spice saffron.104 This development suggests that kitchen manuals may have had the effect of influencing the culinary practices of some of their readers; indeed A good huswifes handmaide would hardly have been republished three years later if its contents were not of sufficient interest to induce people to buy it. The sophisticated techniques called for in later printed recipes – allowing for the fact that many dishes were fundamentally similar to those in earlier books – can therefore be taken as mirroring what was happening, or what was imminent, in culinary practices marked by an element of tension between the traditional and the exotic.105 It is not surprising, therefore, that while the cocktails of additives called for in recipes continued to develop, the use of the same ingredients is evident in the household accounts of the gentry whose enthusiasm for new, foreign foods is evident. In the early to mid-seventeenth century, books accredited to Gervase Markham, John Murrell and an anonymous author demonstrate the extent to which cooking had developed. The addition of exotic ingredients, and the employment of elaborate procedures, had both increased and combined to raise the culinary level of those with both the necessary resources and the desire to try European-style dishes. While some recipes written for the benefit of nationalistic-minded people proudly followed traditional English culinary techniques – and informed their readers that they were doing so – others were described as French, Italian and Spanish in origin. The advice offered by Markham for the spit-roasting of venison entailed covering it with cloves and ultimately serving it with a sauce made from the meat’s own juices, vinegar, sugar, cinnamon and ginger.106 In 1639, even roasting relatively cheap mutton entailed a complex procedure that required the use of at least three dishes and a gridiron. Added to the ‘thin slices’ of meat at various stages of preparation were slices of lemon, claret wine, nutmeg, ginger and wine vinegar.107 A year earlier Murrell brought to the attention of his readers the French techniques of hashing, boiling and roasting mutton. These also called for sophisticated methods using ingredients such as verjuice, sweet cream and sweet butter, capers, ‘raisins of the sun’, dates, wine and a variety of spices. Boiling either mutton or veal ‘on the French fashion’ in sharp broth required also the addition of some very expensive mace. Murrell’s method of hashing venison was even more intricate; the process required the meat to be part-roasted on a spit then boiled in a pipkin. It also required the infusion of flavours from cloves, rosemary, claret wine, cinnamon, ginger, mace, sugar, lemon and

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caraway.108 These recipes tend to confirm evidence from household accounts that suggest special meals containing spices and fruits were still fashionable in high circles, and indicate that such dishes were sought after by fashionconscious middle-status consumers who used them to both serve and express their fine taste. It was not just a few exotic recipes that called for the use of spices in the first half on the seventeenth century; it was most of them. If there was a lack of continuity in the popularity of these luxurious substances after circa 1500, then, as we have seen, there is evidence of a spice revival in late Tudor and early Stuart times. Medieval English cookery books had ‘called for spices in no less than 90 per cent of their recipes’.109 But this taste for the financially exclusive and exotic food was equalled, or even surpassed, in the early seventeenth century. The fifth edition of John Murrell’s culinary work, published with ‘new additions’ in 1638, incorporated a second book ‘wherein is set forth the newest and most commendable fashion’ of cooking. While 94 per cent of the recipes call for spices in the first part of the volume, the ‘second book’ advised the use of these substances in 98 per cent of food preparations. Twenty-five of the twenty-eight recipes that were predominantly dairy- or bread-based, the type that modern cookery books call sweets or desserts, required the addition of at least one spice. And while 121 of the 125 meat and poultry dishes demanded spices (quite often mace, or sometimes a combination of nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon), all twenty-one recipes for fish dishes advised that spices should be employed.110 This should not surprise us, for the hot dry humoral properties of these substances were ideal for counterbalancing the cold moist properties of seafood and freshwater fish. Fifteen years later, a book attributed to Elizabeth Grey, Countess of Kent, suggested that spices would benefit 167 of the 194 recipes listed in the cookery section. Many of these substances were supposed to be used to enhance sauces in which meats were cooked; this was in addition to an impressive array of herbs that had by now become fashionable.111 Even in 1655 spices were still perceived by at least one publisher as important enhancers of meals of the middling sort; the publication The Compleat cook called for the use of spices in 92 per cent of its recipes. High-value symbols of affluence like nutmeg, mace and cloves were joined by pepper in cocktails that were to enhance fifty-seven of the sixty mutton, beef and poultry meals. But of the sixty-one ‘sweet’ dishes that included the addition of spices, nineteen were embellished only with sugar.112 Table 5.5 shows the percentages of recipes that included spices.

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Table 5.5 Percentages of recipes containing spices in cookery books published between 1638 and 1655 Cookery Books

Percentage of recipes containing spices Meat (%) Fish (%) Dairy-based (%)

Other (%) Total (%)

Murrell 1638

97

100

89

90

98

Kent 1653

85

80

93*

55

86

W. M. 1655

95

83

94**

83

92

* In 45 per cent of these recipes the only spice was sugar. ** In 31 per cent of these recipes the only spice was sugar. Sources: Murrell, Murrels two books of cookerie; Kent, E. Grey, Countess of, A true gentlewomans delight; W. M., The Compleat cook.

We have seen that herbs and vegetables were becoming increasingly popular with the well-to-do, and this too is reflected in cookery books that demonstrate hierarchical identity could be maintained and reinforced by preparing hitherto humble foods in intricate ways. A wide range of herbs and vegetables were called for to alter the flavours and textures of dishes. Some of these were ‘novel luxuries’ that had previously been imported from the continent, but were now increasingly being sourced from local ‘specialist’ producers.113 Although this fashion was expressed in the same books, herbs did not immediately replace spices; the two types of ingredients, along with subtropical and other exotic fruits, sometimes ran in parallel in different recipes, but more often converged in the same meals. Difficulty in preparation also was a ‘characteristic of prestige foods’; these foods could be symbolic ‘markers of distance’, and could emit a messages of ‘exclusivity’.114 Thus the appeal of new or revised culinary works incorporating up-to-date fashions is obvious. The dishes that they portrayed – although making possible a wider diffusion of ‘successful culinary practices’ and allowing for improvement – would have been beyond the resources of low-income households to accomplish.115 By reinventing meals, the illicit acquisition of some superior foods by the ‘poorer sort’ could be overcome. The diffusion of luxury consumption through social strata ranging from the elite to well-to-do merchants and some yeomen farmers, which ‘significantly marked seventeenthcentury England’, is also evident in sixteenth century consumption.116 This middling-sort consumer demand in the sixteenth century – manifest in the purchasing of high-value foods and based at least in part on social and cultural aspirations, or on a desire to imitate of the consuming practices of the elite – reveals that a growing process of secularization (a change in attitude

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away from self-restraint and minimalist consumption towards a materialistic outlook) occurred long before the eighteenth century.117 However, such demand in the late sixteenth century could also be initiated by people from middling social groups redefining ‘necessity’ and what it meant to them in the light of their improved economic circumstances. As we have seen, William Harrison noted that even artificers in London in 1577 ate very well, consuming ‘nothing inferior to nobility’. What did set artisans apart from nobles, he said, were the manners, or rather the lack of manners, of some of them.118 The significance of conduct at the table, despite or because of its importance to the upper echelons of society since the earliest of times, appears to have sharpened as edible markers of social distinction became less obvious.119 Although the manners displayed by artisans may have betrayed their status, their ostensible preferences in food and drink while socializing in taverns were highly visible to commentators like Harrison. The meals of these urban craftsmen who ate out, and the meals of other people ranging from labourers to travellers who lacked cooking facilities, may therefore sometimes have included fashionable dishes that were flavoured with spices, herbs and fruit. In London, these take-away and eat-in meals could be purchased from the city’s many taverns and cook-shops. Antiquarian John Stow noted that at Cooks Row near the River Thames ‘… there dayly for the season of the yeare, men might haue meate, rost, sod or fried: fish, flesh, fowles, fit for rich and poore’. Locals and strangers alike, he said, whatsoeuer houre day or night according to their pleasures may refresh themselues, & they which delight in delicatenesse may bee satisfied with as delicate dishes there, as may be found els where.120

Spices used in cooking these ‘delicate dishes’ were also used to create another type of expensive food with which the well-to-do could identify themselves: confectionery. Sugared spices, which had originally been used for medicinal purposes, were becoming increasingly popular as ‘banqueting stuff ’ to be enjoyed not only after dinner, but also at other times.121 Comfits and suckets were banqueting stuff; and, as these could be made from sugar and a range of exotic ingredients, they were expensive confections that held the potential to be edible markers of social distinction. We saw in Chapter 3 that comfits were highly regarded, and this is reflected in household accounts. As befitting an ‘upper-middling gentry’ family the Newdigates purchased sugar candies, candied fruit and a selection of comfits throughout each year. These included sweets made with violets, caraway,

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angelica and oranges.122 While the price of sugar candies bought at Arbury was 1s 8d per lb, candied oranges and angelica were even more expensive at 2s 6d and 5s 4d, respectively. The Radcliffes occasionally bought white sugar candy costing 3s 6d per lb, but there is no mention of such sweets being bought at Quickswood four years earlier. Here however, given the significant quantities of sugar, fruit and spices purchased by the Cecils, the financial value of which amounted to approximately £1 13s per week (3.98 per cent of the entire food budget), it is quite probable that they were made in-house – possibly in the kitchen under the direction of Lady Catherine.123 Sweets may also have been home-produced at Forde House on occasions when fruit and large quantities of sugar were purchased. Before the turn of the seventeenth century there is no mention of candies in the accounts of the Shuttleworths. However by 1610 such items were being purchased by Colonel Richard Shuttleworth who was the nephew and heir of Sir Richard and Reverend Laurence. These sweets were for consumption at his two homes – Gawthorpe Hall in Lancashire and his house in Islington, Middlesex. He bought ½lb of brown sugar candy for 1s in October 1610, and eleven months later white sugar candy, along with some cloves, was purchased for 2s 8d.124 But if the fashion of eating sweets was novel to the Shuttleworths in the early seventeenth century, it should be noted that it reached Lancashire at least half a century before. As I will show in Chapter 6, gift-exchanges between Lord Edward Stanley and Master of the Horse Robert Dudley included comfits. Comfits made of pineapple or cinnamon costing 1s 2d per lb were expensive enough in the mid-to-late sixteenth century, but those made of cloves or ginger costing 4s 6d per lb were luxuries that probably few waged manual workers could justify purchasing. However, all these and ‘succade’ (candied fruit coated with sugar) were purchased by Robert Dudley who, as his accounts reveal, consumed at the cutting-edge of self indulgence long before he was granted an earldom by Elizabeth I. Dudley’s expenditures suggest that he had been leading rather than following fashions among the English elite and, at least after 1579, he owned a small container specifically for keeping comfits in. Intricately decorated with gold and silver ribbon, this box and its sweet contents would have enhanced his display of opulence that distinguished the earl from those of lesser status.125 Expensive sweets were thus purchased ‘ready-made’ by some of the gentry and nobility, and were probably made in the kitchens of others. Yet their high financial price was just one aspect of the overall cost of acquiring them, for the expenses incurred in producing confectionery were beyond the means of many

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people in another way. Although the processes used in the making of candies, marmalade and other delicacies known as ‘banquetting stuffes’ were simple enough, cookery books of the early seventeenth century advised that they required specialized equipment and cooking times often lasting many hours. Typical essentials included a deep earthenware pot, a pewter lid, fine paper, a padded mat, several ‘wires’, a straining cloth, and a silver spoon – depending on the particular recipe.126 But if this criterion could be circumvented with improvisation and the purchasing of pots of ready-conserved fruit that Anne Wilson has noted were imported from southern Europe, there were still the issues of the labour time involved and the motivation.127 As Thomas Fuller wrote, ‘dainties will cost more [than basic food] and content lesse, to those that are not criticall enough to distinguish them’.128 Those deemed critical enough were middling-status women and their men-folk. During the late sixteenth century and in the seventeenth century, many writers (or publishers) specifically directed their cookery books at women. This was because their household management roles, their sourcing of provisions – including buying exotic foods with which to make dainties, and their culinary skills, were well known. One of these writers, as Kim Hall notes, was Sir Hugh Plat (1552–1608).129 A meal including such dainties may well have been sampled by the Swiss physician and traveller Thomas Platter when he took up the invitation to dine with the Mayor of London in October 1599. Before indulging in ‘lavish dishes’ that were served one after the other with ‘delightful sauces’, delicate entrées were provided; these were all followed by sweetmeats, pastries, tarts and a selection of wines.130 Thus it was not just the gentry that enjoyed these sweet luxuries, for here we have an example of the privileges that were associated with middle-ranking civic office-holders and their exclusive circles of guests. These people, as we will see in Chapter 6, availed themselves of opportunities to consume a wide variety of luxurious foods at banquets. This is not to suggest that comfits and suckets were unattainable luxuries to low-level employees of the elite or to others of humble rank. Candies, if not appropriated by other means, could have been sampled by these people at the invitation of their social superiors who were predisposed to accommodate them within their communal sphere – at least on a temporary basis for diverse reasons. Other banqueting stuff available to those with sufficient income included ‘waters’ made with fruits and herbs. Although some household manuals emphasized the medicinal use of such concoctions, others – especially those printed towards the mid-seventeenth century – accentuated their culinary use. One of the latter books is Gervase Markham’s The English House-wife.

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Split into sections covering ‘medicines for health of the household’ and ‘skill in cookery’, ‘waters’ feature under the subsection ‘banquetting stuffe of all kinds’ in the book’s cookery chapter.131 The culinary use for waters is emphasized by Anne Wilson when she points out that the quantities of rosewater made indicates that it must have gone into many foods.132 Whether they were used as medicines, added to foods as flavourings, or drank in their own right, ‘waters’ – other than aqua vita (water of life) which was an alchemical distillate such as brandy, whisky or some other spirit – could be made by infusing the main ingredient and several spices in sack. As sack on its own typically cost 7d per pint in the year that Markham’s compilation was published, flavoured waters were expensive to make and to buy. At Arbury Hall nine different flavoured waters that included camomile, mint, black cherry, angelica, fennel, and the household’s favourite – red rosewater – were purchased on twentynine occasions between 1636 and 1640. During this period aqua vita, which in earlier times had been used mainly as a medicine, but was now used also as a beverage, was bought only once. The 3d spent on this spirit in March 1636 suggests that the Newdigates considered aqua vita a medicine.133 Earlier, rosewater had also been purchased by the Earl of Northumberland in April 1591, and by Robert Dudley in 1559.134 But although these cordials may not feature in many sets of accounts, they did feature regularly in commonplace books written and kept by households. Thus, waters were produced ‘in house’ as and when the need for them arose.135 For others who could afford to buy them, waters were available from distillers for between 5s and 8s a pottle in the early seventeenth century.136 However, it is possible that flavoured waters, like other high-value luxuries, were sporadically accessible to the less well-off through black-market trading. One such instance occurred in 1616. Recognisances were entered at Kingston assizes to give evidence against Sarah Boulds who had allegedly received these drinks as stolen goods from Henry Ball. Ball himself was indicted for stealing aniseed water, clove water, lemon water, orange water, juniper water and cinnamon water from James Hindle, distiller, of Kingston upon Thames in Surrey.137 Acquisition of such waters, if they were intended for use as beverages or flavouring in meals – which clearly they often were – could disseminate widely markers of refined taste. This may have provided the impetus for further experimentation by people who felt the need to be at the cutting-edge of fastidious consumption. Waters were added to both sweet and savoury pastry dishes. Examples given in a 1638 cookery book attributed to John Murrell included a ‘tart of pippins’ and a ‘swan or goose pudding’.138 Recipes calling for

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the use of flavoured waters were also available for those who enjoyed access to game. But those who could not get hold of venison, pheasants and other high-value meats were assisted in their attempts to imitate the foodways of the gentry by innovative writers of cookery book.

Fake luxuries Some kitchen manuals offered advice on using alternative foods that, when cooked in specific ways, were supposed to resemble luxuries. These fake luxuries facilitated the imitation of those who could acquire and eat the real thing. Venison, as we have seen, was neither a marketplace commodity nor readily obtainable in other legal ways. Mutton, on the other hand, was usually accessible – and it was reasonably priced. If baked in a pastry case in a particular way – by adding ‘a little’ spice in the way of cloves, and a few other ingredients such as fennel, vinegar, salt, lard and pepper – this meat could be made to resemble venison according to a book published in 1594.139 To be sure a dish made in this way would not have been recognisable as a venison pasty to gentlepeople who were used to the real thing, but when it was served at the tables of less fortunate people and eaten by them, the dish could bestow a sense of luxurious living and a feeling of social betterment. ‘Venison’ did not need to be encased in pastry to give the impression one was seeing and eating the real thing. By following the instructions in A book of cookrye the skilful chef could, according to A. W., ‘bake a pig like a fawne’. This entailed cooking a young piglet with the addition of pepper, cloves, mace, ‘fake’ claret wine, verjuice, rosewater, cinnamon, ginger and sugar. In order to impart the texture of a young tender fawn, it was to be laid flat and baked ‘leisurely’ in sweet butter and syrup.140 Even with the ‘fake’ wine, this was not particularly cheap to accomplish; for although cloves and ginger could be acquired for 8d and 1d per ounce, respectively, in the late 1630s, mace was 11d per ounce – a sum of money that would typically take an artificer one whole working day to earn at that time. This recipe, however, may have appealed to middling status professionals and well-to-do market farmers who could afford the ingredients, the fuel, and the time to produce it, but who did not have access to venison or to the warrants required for hunting deer. Instead of piglet, a leg of beef could be used ‘to make red deere’. This method was explained by Thomas Dawson in 1597. First, the chef needed to cut out the sinews and beat the leg in order to tenderize it. The meat was then parboiled,

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covered with lard, marinated in wine or vinegar, and seasoned with pepper, salt, cloves and mace before it was finally baked.141 Once again, the advantage of cooking accessible meat in this way lay in its supposed simulation of an inaccessible meat, rather than in cost cutting. A very similar recipe, attributed to the Countess of Kent and published during Britain’s Commonwealth period in 1653, explained how ‘to bake Beef like red Deer’. In this recipe vinegar was to be used rather than wine; and, in addition to cloves and mace, nutmeg was also called for.142 It was not only the muscle flesh of the deer that was desirable, it was also the animal’s offal. During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries many regimen guides cautioned against the eating of internal organs because it was thought that they were nauseous and produced an excess of phlegm in the body. This could be particularly problematic for people living in the cold, damp English climate – especially in the winter. Despite this, sausages and a wide range of other animal by-products, prepared by counterbalancing their coldness and moistness with hot, dry ingredients, became popular in well-todo circles.143 Before offal eventually reverted back to its ‘working class’ status as its price dropped, one particular delicacy was humble pie.144 ‘Umble pye’, made from the internal organs of deer, could, according to a recipe published in 1615, be simulated by the contents of a lamb’s head. Although a complete head could cost up to 12d, it had one crucial advantage over deer offal – its availability. The expense of a head might well have been perceived as costeffective by some middling-status readers of cookery books; for the recipe stated that ‘it will eat so like unto Umbels as that you shall hardly by taste discerne it from right Umbels’. This wording suggests that there may have been an element of pretence involved in serving up such a dish; and for those so inclined, the trick, apparently, was to mince the flesh and contents of the head with beef suet, liver, lungs and heart, and to season the meat with herbs, currants, pepper, salt and nutmeg before baking it in pastry.145 In addition to venison and deer offal, other game was subject to fakery in the kitchen. Those who had access to The treasury of commodious conceits were told how they could bake a capon ‘in steed of a Fesant’. This 96-page domestic cookery book compiled by John Partridge was ostensibly aimed at ‘good’ housewives of all degree. Although the envisaged primary readership was probably the womenfolk of middling-sort urban professionals who had disposable income, the lively trade in second-hand books did enable some inquisitive, literate people of relatively low degree to buy it. In order to cook the fattened cockerel and ‘serve it forth for a pheasant’, this 1573 publication

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informed its readers that the bird should first be dressed and trussed as a pheasant would be. Then it was to be parboiled, basted in sweetened lard, seasoned with salt and pepper and placed in a pastry case with half a dish of sweet butter. Finally, the mock ‘pheasant’ was to be baked for three hours and then left to stand before being served.146 Kitchen fakery with regard to fashioning ‘game birds’ was hardly novel to the early modern period nor was the phenomenon exclusive to English cooking. Way back in 1390 a French cookbook had claimed not only that ‘beef can be made to look like venison’ but also that ‘poussins can be made to look like partridges’.147 However, the early modern recipe for fashioning the more exclusive game bird – pheasant – shows that this meal could be prepared cheaply in the late sixteenth century. Even in the wake of the rampant inflation that gripped the nation in the late 1590s, a fatted capon could be bought for as little as 8d and while butter, salt and lard were often items in stock, the only spice called for was pepper. Apart from ginger, this spice was much cheaper than others such as cloves, nutmeg, mace and cinnamon. Like most spices and other exotic foods that reached Britain via Amsterdam or the Iberian peninsular, cinnamon was far from cheap. Those who had access to Gervase Markham’s The English House-wife, however, could find an inexpensive way of making their own ‘cinnamon’ sticks. In the chapter entitled Skills in Banqueting Stuffe, readers were told how to fashion an artificial version of this high-value spice. A close approximation could apparently be made by pounding 1oz of real cinnamon, adding 8oz of sugar, mixing the paste with gum dragon and rosewater and rolling it ‘in forme of a Cinamon sticke’.148 It is doubtful whether such a substance would have fooled a seventeenth-century connoisseur of fine food any more than it would today, but for inquisitive consumers with less discerning palates, knowledge of the true nature of this ‘spice’ may not have mattered – even if they knew what they were eating. It would be almost impossible to uncover examples of actual kitchen trickery because such activity, by its very nature, was carefully and secretively carried out. Although nebulous culinary activity occurring four centuries ago, effected by the enterprising chef with guile and dexterity is difficult to prove, it has fortunately left a shadow in the form of the books mentioned above. We do not know whether these recipes were referred to and used, but there is reason to believe that they may well have been, for they were considered to be appealing enough to the intended middle-class readership to justify their publication and republication. Where they were used, substitutes for highvalue foods bought ‘luxuries’ to a wider consumer base. Not only did they

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provide alternatives to eating estimable foods in times of general hardship, and expand the range of tastes available to many in good times, they could also serve another purpose: fake luxuries were invested with symbolic meaning and as such they could help their consumers to form and/or project a desired cultural identity. Whether such foods were eaten conspicuously or in private, they allowed for a perceived narrowing of the gap between those who ate them and the gentry who were able to acquire the genuine articles. This is not to say that fakers were preoccupied with identity construction that blurred the distinction between themselves and their social superiors – although given prevailing social mobility and contemporary observation, emulation cannot in any way be ruled out. Indeed, writers and publishers of cookbooks realized this and, in directing their works at a lucrative market that was the growing ‘middling sort’, they explained how to present meals in a manner befitting gentlemen and noblemen.149 Fulfilling a desire amongst the middling sort to imitate the eating habits of their social superiors did not just engender a feeling of getting close to those who were above them on the hierarchical ladder, it also created a mental chasm between themselves and those whom they described as ‘the meaner sort’. Seen in this way, kitchen fakery, as some publishers understood, held the potential to express ideas relating to ‘self ’ and ‘otherness’ at a time when society was becoming ever more polarized. The fare that the well-to-do enjoyed extended beyond high-priced variants of staples and the other choice foods discussed in Chapter 4. Young and tender produce such as veal, caponets and flower buds; socially exclusive game like venison and pheasant; and various imported exotic foods were necessaries that also played their part in defining the cultural identity of gentlepeople. But these foods were sometimes available to people of middling and lower status. The consumption of a broadening range of luxuries, therefore, helped to re-establish and strengthen boundaries between the wealthy and powerful on the one hand and their social inferiors who were supposedly marked by their consumption of cheap, basic fare on the other. It was not merely the foods themselves that helped to mark the statuses of their consumers however; the elaborate ways in which they were cooked could transform ordinary foods into special dishes that would circumvent the problem of emulation or imitation by those of lower rank. But the cookery books that facilitated this transformation also explained to those with limited resources how to ‘fake’ such dishes. These meals included pastries, special meats and other exotic foods, and many of these were given as gifts and featured at special events. In considering food’s role as an identity marker, it is to gift-foods and socializing that we now turn.

6

Interactions

HIS most Excellent Maiestie, taking into His Royall consideration, that the celebration of the feast of Christmasse approacheth, and how needfull it is (especially in this time of scarcity and dearth) to revive the ancient and laudable custome of this Realme, by house-keeping and hospitality, which in all parts of this Realme is exceedingly decayed, by the too frequent resort and ordinary residence of Lords Spirituall and Temporall, Kinghts, and Gentlemen of Quality, unto Cities and Townes, and chiefly into, or neere about the Cities of London and Westminster.1 In Chapters 2 to 5 I revealed the fare of labourers, the middling sort and the gentry, and I exposed the contradictions between theoretical and actual diets. I now turn to how people interacted with each other through the medium of food and drink. I start by examining the gifting of foods – looking at gift exchange between individuals and households; between family members; and through hospitality that was itself a form of gifting but, in the words of James I (above), was a laudable custom in decline. The second section considers special occasions starting with food consumption during Lent – a time of supposed abstinence – in the wake of the Reformation. It then goes on to discuss feasting at Christmas and New Year, life-cycle celebrations, assize feasts and socializing in public houses. Finally, this chapter examines criticisms of feasting. It will be shown that the gifting of food and participation or non-participation at festive occasions could be used to project and receive images of cultural and social identity and to consolidate or alter relationships in a number of ways.

Gifts and hospitality The gifting of food was an important aspect of social life that occurred for a variety of reasons. For example, it facilitated the fostering and strengthening

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of relationships that could be mutually beneficial to the parties involved, or done for the purpose of networking in the sense that generosity sometimes furthered social inclusion and self-advancement. Gifting also helped to create the conditions under which obligation could be established, and it enabled people to compete with each other through displays of conspicuous giving.2 There were, of course, seemingly altruistic acts of giving; but here, I will shed light on one aspect of the topic that has been overlooked by historians: This is the gifting of foods that was designed to provoke, or resulted in, a less than concordant response. It will be seen that, rather than always articulating shared identity, gifts were occasionally discarded – either diverted by the recipient to a third party or returned to the giver in order to signify rejection of affection or loyalty. Many household accounts, diaries and letters identify some of the items that were gifted, and sets of accounts show that food was overwhelmingly the most popular choice for gifting between individuals and families. This is typified by gifting patterns at Arbury Hall in North Warwickshire between 1614 and 1625.3 The items listed as being given and received by the family of Sir John Newdigate were mainly poultry, pigs, fruit such as apples, cherries and medlars, cakes and wine. These gifts were assigned monetary value; thus gifts were considered to be part of the fabric of economic as well as social life. Diaries and correspondences, however, go beyond listing gifts and their perceived financial values, for they sometimes reveal attendant attitudes and relationships between givers and recipients. A caveat here is that such works may have been written for a variety of reasons that affected their tone and content. Nevertheless, as scholars in recent times have pointed out, such works remain an immensely useful source.4 The subtexts of letters and diaries often reveal undercurrents and agendas regarding their meaning; and, as the more notable aspects of life tend to be recorded rather than mundane experiences, these communiqués lend themselves particularly to the subjects of gifting and special occasions. We saw in Chapter 3 that on at least two occasions the natural philosopher John Dee considered the gifts of venison that he had received from the Lord Treasurer to be noteworthy. Dee’s diary entries may not have been the report of a selfless act but rather an account of sixteenth-century networking. To mention these events in his journal, which was kept primarily for recording business meetings, reveals the significance attached by Dee not just to receiving this prestigious meat but to his relationship with Sir Thomas Cecil. This relationship was underpinned by the gift after the Lord Treasurer had first invited him ‘to

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dynner at Mr Maynards at Mortlak, where Sir Thomas Cisell and his lady wer also’.5 Beneficial relationships could thus be established or consolidated through the medium of gift-foods and foods that were appropriate to the social status of those involved could assert or emphasize that standing. If this scenario was marked by its continuity between 1540 and 1640, it also applied to those of diverse social ranks; and although one might suppose that the difference would lie in the quality and prestige of the foods that were associated with the givers and recipients, this was not always the case. An inversion of that which might be expected is sometimes revealed. The luxurious gifts sometimes given by poor people to the social elite in order to gain patronage or favour were located towards one end of the giftfood spectrum. Near to the other end was a gift presented to John Dee by an acquaintance Harry Savil, who was an antiquarian from Lichfield in Staffordshire. Dee described the gift as a ‘rather prosaic present’ of two lings and two haberdines during a stay in Manchester.6 We will recall from earlier chapters that fish was considered a poor substitute for meat and that ling and cod was fed to menial household servants and manual labourers. Although he considered this gift to be dull, unimaginative and hardly luxurious – perhaps like the cheese and butter that was presented to affluent yeoman Honnywell and like a side of bacon that was gifted to gentleman lawyer Matthew Smyth – it appears that the fish was accepted.7 This contrasts with a similar present that was received by a cousin of barrister John Manningham. In 1601, his cousin was sent a gift of ‘some fishe’ from a Joane Bachellor, ‘which she sent back again’.8 Although no explanation was given for the rejection, the barrister’s reaction to the occurrence indicates that his cousin was not averse to participating in altercations; she may therefore have found value in returning the gift-food in order to express social detachment. The importance of gift-foods to association, or in this case dissociation between the giver and the receiver, is highlighted by the fact that Manningham considered this behaviour noteworthy. Some gifts of fish were gratefully received, but these were often of the freshwater variety or highly valued seafood. During the week ending 22 October 1634, a week when the only fish purchased by Sir William Cecil was 20s worth of saltfish – enough to feed most if not all of his servants – the earl received from Lord Baldock a pike and ten perch and tench.9 These fish were highly regarded by those who liked aquatic food – and Sir William did. Six years earlier, salmon was twice received by the Reynells as gift-foods – once from ‘my Lord Bishop’ and once from someone described simply as ‘a woman’ from Exeter. She was

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‘given’ a reward of 1s 6d.10 There is no indication of the status of the woman, nor do we know if the fish was gifted in expectation of future patronage or financial reward; but the 1s 6d she received from Sir Richard would have been sufficient to purchase 8lb of beef in Devon at that time. Luxurious fish, like other estimable foods, were at times qualitatively beyond the givers’ usual diet, and may have been of insufficient bulk to feed their families; but such foods, however they were obtained by the giver, could be ‘traded’ for sufficient cash to enable him or her to buy a meaningful quantity of basic foodstuffs. Thus, both the wealthy recipient and the gift-giver benefited allowing the edible markers of social distinction to remain intact. As household accounts need to balance expenditures with income, they are replete with instances of householders tipping visitors bearing gifts. This custom of giving financial reward undoubtedly encouraged the continuance of the practice of gifting, and well-to-do people throughout the entire period often received foods perceived as desirable luxuries befitting their station. Despite this, gentlemen were sometimes ‘given’ low-value foods such as apples or pears by people described as ‘a poor man’ or ‘a poor woman’, and rewards of a few pence were usually made for these gifts too. Felicity Heal has shown that the capon was a significant gift-food, and the Arbury Hall accounts verify this; however, they also show that many gallinaceous and other domestically-bred birds featured extensively as presents both given and received.11 Entries in the early decades of the seventeenth century reveal that pullets, hens, partridges, turkeys, ducks, larks and pigeons were given frequently to friends and visitors throughout the year. Many of these birds, but especially poultry, were presented to employees at Christmas. Gifts received by the Newdigates included an undisclosed number of pigeons from ‘a woman’; for this she was rewarded with 1s. Partridges, as we have seen, were associated with the gentry – even though they could be purchased by anyone with sufficient funds; and in November 1627 a number of these game birds were gifted to the Reynells by Gilbert Gall. In return Gall received a reward of 3s.12 As the market value of a partridge was around 6d in South Devon at that time, the 3s – which was enough to pay for twelve chickens – may have been more useful than the partridges to Gall. Reynell on the other hand was pleased enough with receiving the esteemed game-birds to pay a handsome reward for them. Both turkeys and geese were popular gift-foods over the century. Sabine Johnson, the wife of successful merchant John Johnson, often sent to friends and relations a goose as a ‘remembrance’ during the mid-sixteenth century.13 And

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while turkeys, geese and ducks were gifted regularly by the Newdigates during the 1620s, a reward of 1s 6d was given by the by the Arbury Hall household in 1638 to an anonymous man ‘that bought a turkey and a goose’.14 In the same year a reward of 1s was ‘given’ by Sir Edward Radcliffe to ‘Lasbies’ daughter for ‘bringing a turkie’ to Gorhambury House, and 2s was given to a messenger that presented the earl with ‘a turkie, a pullet and two ducks’.15 As the cost of turkeys and geese in Warwickshire at that time were typically around 3s 6d and 2s 4d, respectively, Newdigate was not ‘buying’ them in the normal sense – paying a poulterer the market price. Nor was he paying a carriage cost; for 1s a week was paid to the porter who delivered all of the household’s groceries on this and most other weeks. The 1s 6d was a financial reward for the receipt of a gift. Thus while Sabine’s gift was ‘freely’ given to express affection to friends of similar rank, and would probably require reciprocation of equal value, the gift/reward interchange between gentlemen and their inferiors appears to have been incommensurate and may also have involved non-pecuniary elements not ‘picked up’ by finance clerks. Swans were occasionally gifted to Sir George Vernon in the mid-sixteenth century, and Vernon usually gave 1s reward for each one received. But although this bird was still sporadically consumed at the houses of the social elite in the seventeenth century, it appears from analysing many sets of accounts that the swan was becoming less fashionable. While acknowledging Felicity Heal’s observation that ‘vast disparities’ between accounting methods do not help in making comparisons regarding gift-foods, archaeology verifies the evidence of household accounts in respect of the swan’s diminishing status.16 The number of medieval sites in southern England at which the remains of swans have been found is no fewer than those where woodcocks and partridges have been located.17 After 1570, however, they are mentioned much less frequently as gifts in household accounts, and this apparent lack of enthusiasm is substantiated by bird assemblages that indicate the swan was losing its position as a status symbol with the social elite.18 Despite this, the bird was still deemed sought-after enough by some people in 1634 – a year during which William Cecil acquired two swans as a mark of sociability – to warrant the fixing of its maximum market price at an expensive 7s (2s more than it had been 80 years earlier).19 Often beyond the financial reach of craftspeople and labourers, but not of merchants and other professionals, its decline in popularity at the highest levels of society was because it was no longer in vogue with the elite. Quite often the birds discussed here, like fish, venison and other meats, were encased in pastry and gifted in the form of pies and pasties. Their preparation,

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which almost always included the addition of spices if published recipes were followed, could be quite elaborate. Processed foods such as these travelled well and were sent to recipients to express favourable regard on many occasions during the period between the Reformation and the English Civil War. One example of sociability through the medium of gift giving shows that a ‘lamprel’ pie, a pie made with the prestigious eel-like lamprey fish, was received by Cecil in January 1634(5).20 Other examples, as we shall see, show that fruit pies and various pasties were often given as gifts, both by and to the nobility and those of middling status. But there were many other prepared dishes that were given as gifts. These included ‘dainties’ made with sugar and spices. Comfits valued at 9s 2d were presented by Master of the Horse and future Earl of Leicester Robert Dudley to Edward Stanley, 3rd Earl of Derby, in 1558; and in the same year Dudley himself rewarded a stranger who presented him with a cake.21 Cakes and puddings were popular gifts throughout the period, and this is reflected in the fact that the Newdigate family gave 6d reward for each one received at Arbury Hall in the late 1630s. At the same time, the Earl of Sussex seems to have been even more favourably impressed with receiving cakes as gifts, for Radcliffe rewarded the givers with 1s for each such act of sociability.22 Cakes and pastries could be lovingly made using a most valuable ingredient – time. It is thus possible that a recipient’s perception in some such instances may have been altruistic benevolence and shared social or cultural, identity. This explanation for the gifting of ready-made foods is particularly valid for those exchanged within the family. Lady Brilliana, the puritanical wife of Sir Robert Harley of Brampton Bryan in Herefordshire, sent many gifts of food to her husband who was Master of the Mint, and to her son Edward who was at studying at Oxford. In October 1627 a large partridge pie that had ‘two pea chikeins in it’ was sent by courier to Sir Robert.23 Thirteen months later Lady Brilliana sent a cake to Edward with an accompanying letter advising him about the benefit of selective sociability. It cautioned him to be careful to about choosing his company at university, for ‘piche will not easely be tuched without leaufeing some spot’. Concerned about her son identifying himself with students of uncertain pedigree, Brilliana clearly thought that Edward’s company and his cake should not be shared with young people of lesser status.24 Gifts of cakes and pies containing exotic ingredients undoubtedly broadened the range of foods eaten by recipient students and their exclusive circle of friends. A letter sent to ‘Ned’ by his mother reveals that the tender flesh of young goat was probably only eaten at the institution when it was

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received as a gift: ‘I beleeue you haue not that meate ordinaryly at Oxford’ said the note accompanying ‘a kide pye’. Sent as an unmistakable mark of affection, the baking of this pie had been thoughtfully contemplated by Lady Brilliana and ingeniously effected by her chef. Half of it was ‘seasned with on kinde of seasening, and the other with another’.25 Dietary provisions for university students were not particularly indulgent if the advice of physician Thomas Cogan was followed, but victuals could be supplemented with luxurious gifts.26 In the case of Edward Harley these included both ready-made foods such as pigeon pie, violet cakes and other luxurious fare.27 As head of daily affairs at the home of the Harleys, Lady Brilliana managed the kitchen and supervised her male chef. And, like other women in her position, she also had control over matters relating to the estate’s deer park. Enjoying latitude to dispense the much-valued animals, she sent a gift of a large fat deer to her cousin in July 1639 which, she said, ‘should come very sweet’.28 Another well-to-do woman – Margaret Hoby who lived at Hackness Hall in North Yorkshire – maintained control over her estate following her marriage. Like Lady Brilliana she managed her estate’s deer park, and in July 1600 she sent a gift of some venison to one of her cousins.29 Venison occasionally features as a gift between husband and wife; but, like the fish that was rejected by John Manningham’s cousin, even this high-value meat could be rejected as an expression of an inharmonious relationship. Anne Clifford, the wife of Richard Sackville – who was the grandson of the First Earl of Dorset discussed in earlier chapters – refused to accept half a buck that she had received from her husband because of the spirit in which it was perceived to have been given. Although there may have been underlying problems within their relationship, the apparent ‘indifference’ that Richard exhibited in an accompanying letter motivated Anne into promptly diverting the gift to her cousin, Sir Edward George, and noting the occurrence in her diary.30 While gift-foods ranging from venison to fish could be rejected as a show of disaffection, the gifting of both, as we have seen, could facilitate networking between individuals and households, and could also express respect and devotion. It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that fresh sturgeon featured as a gift-food exchanged between well-to-do family members. In July 1601 Sir John Thynne, who was working in London, sent a keg of sturgeon to his wife Joan who, in his absence, remained in charge of their recently acquired family home of Caus Castle.31 Forty-three years earlier Robert Dudley also received sturgeon as a gift. He rewarded a servant of Sir Ambrose Cave, who was related to the future earl by marriage, with 3s 4d for bringing this gift-food to him.32

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The significance of the size of this reward underlines the ostentatious nature of the future earl, his appreciation of loyalty and obligation, and, not least, the high esteem in which this fish was held in the mid-sixteenth century. Sociability expressed through the medium of hospitality, which was a form of gifting, was also important. This could occur on a variety of occasions in addition to the special events discussed below. When hospitality was being extended – for reasons of charitable provision, to display opulence and cultural refinement, to foster or strengthen relationships, or to create a communal sphere which distinguished members from outsiders – relatively high-value foods were often offered to guests. In 1979 Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood wrote that food can be used in the ranking of events because there is a relationship between the frequency of consumption of items and ‘the value of the marking service that they confer’. Quality differences between goods, the anthropologist and economist wrote, can be markers of the rank of events, as well as the rank of persons; while ‘necessities’ can signal the cultural aspect of ‘low-esteem, high frequency events’, luxuries are more associated with ‘highly esteemed events’.33 Although food categories ‘encoding social events’ can be used to identify special occasions on a fine scale, I offer examples of just a few sociable events to show that high-value foods consumed at some annual and life-cycle events in the early modern period defined the individuals and communities with which they were associated.34 It will become clear that food’s cultural and communicative role in these high-tech days is not really a modern concept at all.35 Fostering a sense of cultural inclusion, commensality four centuries ago could impart a feeling of belonging, and could encompass those desired, or at least accepted, within the bounds of any specific community. But commensality, even within events, could also be used to exclude culturally those who were not considered part of the coterie. Commensality has been described by anthropologist and historian Margaret Visser as an ‘essential’ means of ‘binding families to one another and knitting society together in general’, with reciprocation ‘usually’ being promised. But the expression of togetherness and harmony that she portrays was sometimes lacking. Although the maintenance of order and the preservation of neighbourliness could be achieved through annual and life-cycle festivities, as Phil Withington has noted, eating together can carry alternative meanings to ‘proving loyalty to that group’ and ‘signifying willingness to serve its interests’.36 Not only was commensality ‘a result and manifestation of a pre-existing social group’ with the ‘limits of the group’ and ‘internal hierarchies’ defined and

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redrawn, but relationships between those dining in the same hall could assume nuanced characteristics.37 Relationships between those feasting together could be less than amicable, either before or as a result of the event; and feasts themselves could be engineered for a variety of reasons and managed in a way that either encouraged alliance or affinity, or had an adverse effect on relationships.38 Poisoning at both private and communal events, for example, appears to have been a real concern to some people; while food could be seen as an ‘idiom’ for ‘expressing ideas about community’, poisoners – whether they were witches or other malevolent people – inverted that idiom. Thus, rather than standing for ‘inclusion, order and security’, those who used food as a medium to impair health stood for exclusion and disorder.39 Edward Stanley laid down clear rules to prevent unauthorized access to his food, and Elizabeth I, at least at social gatherings, employed a ‘lady-taster’. ‘For fear of any poison’, her job was to give a mouthful of food from each dish to the guards bringing them into the hall, and the guards themselves had been ‘carefully selected for this service’.40 But with servants having access to keys and an ‘intimate knowledge’ of security arrangements, and with strangers sometimes being able to enter the house unchallenged, poisoning was a clear possibility. This crime could be, and was, perpetrated by both women and men.41 And when one considers that 4  per cent of known murders in Kent between 1570 and 1619 were effected by the administration of toxic substances, and that many more deaths remained unexplained, fears about malevolent intentions at social occasions were not without foundation.42 Another threat to harmony that could be carried by the process of hospitality was abuse. Far from ‘knitting together’ the North Yorkshire families of the Cholmley and the Hobys, a commensal occasion in August 1600 drove them apart in a spectacular way. When Sir Thomas Hoby and his wife Margaret entertained their neighbour Richard Cholmley at Hackness Hall, the calculated abuse extended to the host family resulted in an expensive and divisive Star Chamber settlement and the pursuance of ‘a relentless vendetta’ against the Cholmley by the Hobys.43 Which foods, then, were eaten at hospitable events? In the last chapter I discussed some of the special foods that were occasionally consumed by the wellto-do. Many of these featured when sociability was important; and these were joined by high-value alternatives to basic fare. Cream, for example, cost four times as much as milk and was a rich alternative that could be added to dishes in order to luxuriate them – and hopefully to favourably impress the assembled company. Both at Arbury Hall in 1640, at Henry Best’s estate at Elmswell in

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the 1620s, and at the Willoughby residence during the previous century, cream was enjoyed as an integral component of celebratory events such as Christmas, Harvest time, and when important visitors were being entertained.44 Bread too could either be made or purchased especially refined or enhanced to suit hospitable occasions. In this way a banal ‘diet-food’ could be transformed or substituted to create an impression that was in accord with the host’s chosen identity. Thus, on 30 June 1549 Sir George Vernon’s clerk made a point of noting that ‘whyet’ bread was bought by his master for the entertainment of guests at Haddon Hall. Seven weeks later Vernon again bought ‘whyet breyde’ for the visit of Mr Corbet and his wife.45 By inference, the usual type of bread eaten at the Derbyshire estate was of a coarser variety. Almost a century later, Sir William Cecil and his important guests at Quickswood ate best quality ‘manchet’ bread; at the same time, his low-status servants and the servants of the earl’s guests were fed with inferior ‘household’ bread.46 More luxurious foods, however, featured at hospitable events, and women ate these while socializing with others of similar status, both male and female, with and without their husbands. On 4 November 1617, Anne Clifford met with friends and relations and had ‘an extreame great feast’. Details of the food eaten are not given, but it is known that Anne was no stranger to eating foods like venison and sweetbread at hospitable events. She ate the former with a ‘great company of neighbours’ at Christmas in 1617 and the latter in the form of dowsetts (buck’s testicles) given to her as a gift earlier in the year.47 The social arrangements and food consumption of Anne Clifford in Kent in 1617 closely matched those of Margaret Hoby in North Yorkshire at the turn of the seventeenth century. Margaret, the wife of protestant activist Sir Thomas Posthumous Hoby, had successfully managed for years, independently of a husband, a large mansion house that had been bequeathed to her.48 Like many other household mistresses of the time who were responsible for the preparation of meals, and who often delegated cooking and baking to servants, she held authority over the workmen and servants that she employed.49 Yet despite this, she took to the kitchen on occasions and personally prepared special foods such as sweetmeats and gingerbread in addition to entertaining and being entertained.50 At sociable events the Hobys, like many other well-to-do families, dined and entertained some of their tenants. Tenants, as Felicity Heal explains, were often ‘important beneficiaries’ of the Christmas feasting discussed below. Both Sir William Petre and Henry Willoughby, for example, gave a feast for their lessees who, along with the household, consumed vast quantities of food.51

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At Hackness Hall, however, the hospitality extended by the puritanical Hoby family was selective. Margaret’s memoirs specifically state that ‘som tenantes’ were entertained.52 We are not told which tenants attended, but the inference is that others were excluded from the communal sphere in which the Hobys were the nucleus. Exclusion could of course occur for a variety of reasons; well-to-do householders were in a strong position to decide who qualified as accepted members of their local community circle and who could be treated as outsiders – to be debarred from the gift of hospitality. This occasionally had a negative effect on community relationships; when fine foods were denied to those excluded, they could feel alienated – removed from the fellowship and repositioned outside the sphere of common interest. As has been noted, these exclusions from celebratory meals could attract complaints and even accusations of witchcraft from the disenfranchised party.53 But exclusion could also be self-imposed by those who greatly valued their independence or who did not wish to be identified with the host families on a more-thannecessary basis. The Hobys’ belligerence with their neighbours, the Cholmley of Whitby, suggests that either of these scenarios is a distinct possibility. At this higher social level, Margaret Hoby, like Anne Clifford, networked extensively in the absence of her husband. She travelled to meet and dine with friends and high-calibre acquaintances such as the Cholmley – presumably before their acrimonious dispute in the summer of 1600 – and she entertained them at Hackness Hall. This female commensality in Tudor and early Stuart England appears to have been routine. The freedom of independence or semi-independence of both married and single women from all levels of society to travel around the country, to socialize with whomsoever they wished and to procure, consume, sell or gift food independently was not at all uncommon. If she was reasonably well-to-do, her economic activities in the wider community conferred on her ‘a degree of autonomy and agency’; and if she was poor, court and council records show that she was no stranger to roving around the country, to receiving gifts of hospitality and to obtaining luxury foods – surreptitiously or otherwise – that could either be sold on or consumed at special occasions.54 Early modern theoretical guidelines on the correct conduct of women are a poor indicator of actual female roles and relationships. Guidebooks like Of Domesticall Duties written by puritanically minded moralist and clergyman William Gouge could be published for a variety of reasons – not least of which was a perception that women were now enjoying much in the way of independence and freedom of

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expression. Seventeenth-century advice to women, such as Gouge’s insistence in 1622 that a wife should obey her husband and ‘come when he calls’, may have been seen not so much timely as overdue; for in 1599, Thomas Platter, a Swiss physician, traveller and writer, observed that English women enjoyed more freedom than those ‘in other lands’.55 The sociable occasions at which they and their menfolk ate luxurious foods while consolidating or establishing cultural and other ties could include a range of life-cycle events and other secular feasts and religious festivities. It is to consumption at special occasions that we now turn – starting with the foods eaten by gentle and noble households during the supposed period of abstinence that is Lent.

Special occasions The forty-day period from Ash Wednesday to Easter Saturday known as Lent is a time of penitence and abstinence from luxurious consumption. Observed by Catholics and some Protestant faiths, it is marked by those who wish to commemorate the time Jesus spent fasting in the wilderness. While the tradition of self-denial, almsgiving and prayer had been observed by many in pre-Reformation England, household accounts of the gentry suggest that in the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, observation of Lent, insofar as food consumption was concerned, was neither total nor uniform along the lines of Catholic/Protestant divide. As in other aspects of faith in post-Reformation England, there could be more overlap than clearly defined boundaries.56 Some types of food, including the most basic of all staples – bread – was eaten all year round and was important to papists and reformers alike.57 The consumption of fish, however, was associated with fasting-days when abstaining from eating animal flesh was expected by both secular and ecclesiastical authorities. But fish was also associated with Lent – a period during which animal produce such as meat, eggs and cream were supposed to be given up. Although household accounts suggest that this practice was indeed widespread, the observation of abstinence from eating meat was by no means universal. Neither the Ninth Earl of Northumberland (who was associated with the Gunpowder Plot and who was allegedly a Catholic sympathizer) nor the household of Sir Richard Newdigate (who has been described as a Puritan), followed closely the relevant proclamations that forbade the eating of flesh on certain days of the year.58 Indeed, given the seniority of these figures within their respective local communities it is probable that they influenced both public

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opinion and the words of parish clergymen. Certainly these proclamations were ignored by many, for the government deemed it necessary to repeat the orders time and time again. So marked was the distaste among England’s population for substituting meat with fish that its continued acquisition during times of supposed abstinence resulted in butchers being threatened with the confiscation of their wares. These were then to be distributed to the poor.59 Despite this, fish, like other foods, was invested with symbolic meaning, and Lent could be an opportune time for consuming high-value fish that distinguished the foodways of the well-to-do from those of labourers who ate – or who were supposed to eat – salted and pickled fish. The Newdigates did not increase their consumption of either low- or highvalue fish during the six weeks preceding Easter; instead they continued to eat beef, mutton and veal as usual. There was, however, a contrast between this family’s fish consumption during Lent and that of the Radcliffes in 1639. While most of the Gorhambury household’s diet seems to have remained generally unaltered over the period, the quantity of fish eaten increased sharply.60 As was the case for the Radcliffes, the quantity of fish purchased by the Cecils increased significantly over Lent. The household of the Earl of Salisbury purchased twenty-six varieties of aquatic food during the Lenten period in 1634(5), and these including eel, fresh salmon, lobsters and carp.61 Although ‘basic’ meats and veal were eaten during this period of abstinence by all three of the above households, rabbits – the price of which plunged dramatically over lent – was generally avoided (see Figure 6.2). Given the quantity of fish consumed by the Reynells at Forde House near Teignmouth, one might suppose that they ate this type of food on special occasions. The ledgers reveal however, that here, as at most other gentry and noble estates, fish was not particularly popular at such times. When it did appear at the festive table, it was usually either salmon or eel. Despite this, the household’s consumption of fish during the Lenten periods between 1627 and 1631 did increase marginally, but the main difference was in the extra saltfish, cod and pilchards purchased. This may reflect a tendency to impose fish consumption upon servants while family members continued to eat veal and mutton.62 Between 1582 and 1617, despite the sporadic nature of seafood purchases at The Smithils and Gawthorpe Hall in Lancashire, the Protestant Shuttleworth family saw Lent as a time for consuming fish in large quantities. During the 40 days that preceded Easter, they purchased cockles and mussels at around 5d a peck, herrings at around 18s 6d a barrel and more expensive fish such as salmon. And at Ingatestone Hall in Essex, although both fresh and salted

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fish were purchased weekly, the quantity bought in the mid-sixteenth century peaked sharply during Lent. Here, the Catholic Sir William Petre observed the dietary requirements of Lent and other non-flesh days more rigorously than some other families.63 While household accounts show that the substitution of meat by fish at Lent – as on non-flesh days – was far from universal and that self-denial with regard to eating luxurious foods became less important as time went on, diaries confirm this trend. In the same Lenten period that Radcliffe and Newdigate enjoyed lamb, veal, pullets, capons and a range of offal products that were now fashionable, Lady Brilliana Harley, in acknowledging dietary directives, reminded her son at Oxford that too much fish ‘is not so good for you’. In terms of medical advice she was right, for the viscosity, coldness and wetness of fish could adversely affect the eater’s physical and mental well-being. It should be noted here, however, that this medical advice applied also to offal. One week later, Lady Brilliana sent her son ‘a turkey pye and 6 [other] pyes’ to enjoy ‘in Lent’.64 When Lent coincided with a festive occasion, dietary abstinence and the eating of luxurious foods did not need to impede each other. Assize court judges Thomas Walmsley and Edward Fenner who rode the western circuit in the 1590s found a clever way to express their identities as gentlemen through the medium of luxurious consumption and at once demonstrate selfdenial. Describing the requirement to moderate their diet on fasting days as an ‘inconvenience’, the problem was overcome by eating fish and dairy products at either dinner or supper and consuming a large quantity of highvalue meats at the other meal.65 Clergyman Thomas Becon had reminded his readers back in 1551 that neither reducing the quantity and variety of foods consumed on fasting days nor fasting at one daily meal and eating luxuriously at the other were acceptable options. He insisted that one must eat only to alleviate hunger.66 The evidence here, however, shows that these values were gradually slipping away, and cookery books attributed to John Murrell, Gervase Markham and Thomas Dawson published later in the period all advised their readers on ways to eat luxuriously at Lent while giving a nod in the direction of Lenten custom. Recipes described how one could prepare fish in special ways, and Dawson’s kitchen manual published in 1587 explained how to fashion ‘peascods’ (peapods) out of exotic, high-priced ingredients: Take Figs, Kaisons, and a few Dates and beate them verie fine, and season it with Cloues, Mace, Sinamom and Ginger, and for your paste seeth faire water and

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Oyle in a dish vpon coales, put therein saffron and salt and a litle flowre, fashion them then like peascods, and when ye will serue them, frye them in Oyle in a frying panne …67

Thus, the desire of the well-to-do to consume ostentatiously at this time of year was facilitated by kitchen guidebooks and some of the elite’s extravagant foodways continued, unhindered by religious and secular codes, all year round.68 The custom of eating of high-value meats and other luxurious foods, however, continued unabated at festive occasions that survived the test of time and the influence of the Reformation movement, and the time of year during which most money was spent on food was the twelve days of Christmas.69 The importance, or at least the existence, of Whitsun and Michaelmas – two periods when revelries supposedly continued after the Reformation – were acknowledged in Newdigate’s accounts, but only Christmas and, to a lesser extent, Easter were celebrated with appreciable dietary change. Like other gentry families, both the Newdigates and the Reynells increased their spending on food in the last fortnight of December and in the first week in January by up to three times the annual weekly average. Although such extravagance could be explained partly by hospitality and friendship, this spending on sociability also provided opportunity for ostentatious display which enabled host families to project images of power and opulence.70 In order to suitably impress recipients of hospitality, well-to-do families needed to provide a wide range of foods that were in some way special – either difficult to obtain, expensive, exotic or prepared is unusual and appealing ways. These foods also needed to cater for a variety of tastes and nutritional requirements. Over the entire five-year period between 1636 and 1640, only 3s was spent by the Newdigates on aquatic food during the third and fourth weeks of December – 12d on shrimps and 24d on oysters.71 During the same weeks, not only did the quantity of meat purchased greatly exceed the annual average but purchasing patterns within that category of food changed. Some household accounts indicate that fresh pork, possibly young piglets, had become more popular as a festive food at the manor after 1630, and at Arbury Hall in the run-up to the Christmases of 1636 and 1640, the quantities of fresh pork bought was roughly equivalent to the quantities bought during the whole of the rest of the year. The same pattern can be discerned at Gorhambury and Quickswood, for Radcliffe and Cecil’s purchases of pork also increased vastly during the festive season.72 The consumption of relatively small quantities of this expensive meat, compared to that of salted pork, beef or mutton, indicates

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pence (d)

limited distribution within the household thereby underlining the meat’s status as a special food.73 Pork was also bought for other festive occasions: the Newdigates purchased additional amounts in the form of joints and whole pigs for Michaelmas Day 1639 and for Easter six months later. Another estimable meat came from rabbits. This animal was subject to price hiking in the run-up to Christmas before dipping to well below average during Lent (see Figure 6.1). As this is indicative of a special-occasions food, it is unsurprising to find that the number of rabbits purchased by the well-todo increased significantly prior to festive occasions when sociability mattered. This was the case at Ingatestone Hall in 1551–1552 where rabbits figured prominently both at dinner and at supper over the Christmas and New Year period.74 It was still the case almost a century later. Between October and March, the financial outlay on rabbits made by three families, and presented below for each of the twenty-four weeks, clearly illustrates the importance attached to the meat of this animal at festive times (see Figure 6.2). Even when figures are adjusted to take account of seasonal price fluctuations, the quantity bought at Christmas was significantly higher than usual. This may indicate that household heads treated servants and labourers to rabbit meat at Christmas. Such generosity, however, may not have been extended to the servants of Sir Richard Reynell. During the week ending 10 October 1628, while the lawyer was staying at Exeter, the number of rabbits he bought was similar to the number he usually bought when at home. Over the same period not a single rabbit appears in the purchase ledgers at Forde House for consumption by the servants left at home.75 This South Devon family may not have been typical of the gentry and nobility across England, and it is likely that rabbit had become popular with many low status people after having been

14 12 10 8 6 4 2 0 J

F

M

A

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J

Newdigate, 1638

J

A

S

O

N

D

Reynell, 1629

Figure 6.1 Average monthly prices of rabbits at Forde in 1629 and at Arbury in 1638 Sources: WCRO, CR 136v140, Newdigate, 1638; Gray (ed.), Devon Household Accounts, pp. 35–58.

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1400 1200

pence (d)

1000 800 600 400 200 0

O1 O2 O3 O4 N1 N2 N3 N4 D1 D2 D3 D4 J1 J2 J3 J4 F1 F2 F3 F4 M1M2M3M4 Radcliffe, 1638/39

Cecil, 1634/35

Reynell, 1628/29

Figure 6.2 Trends in the weekly purchasing of rabbits at three households between 1628 and 1639 Financial outlay during each week between October and March. Values are expressed in pence. Sources: Munby (ed.), Early Stuart, pp. 5–62, 79–158; Gray (ed.), Devon Household Accounts, pp. 7–59.

sampled by relatives and friends of paid employees at the estates of the wealthy.76 But the animal could retain its exclusivity by chefs utilizing novel techniques and adding exotic ingredients called for in fashionable cookery books. Such specialized procedures included one that was said to be in vogue in France – it entailed boiling the rabbit in mutton broth and white wine and adding mace, lettuce and spinach. The broth was turned into a sauce by thickening it with breadcrumbs and sweet butter, and the rabbit and sauce was then served on toast with a garnish of barberries.77 The internal organs of animals had formerly been associated with the poor; yet in Chapter 4, we saw that the well-to-do’s purchasing patterns of this food, and the financial values assigned it, show clearly that by the late sixteenth century they had become fashionable. This change in status was mirrored by the authors of kitchen manuals advising their readers how to prepare and cook feet, tongues, intestines and heads using special techniques and exotic ingredients.78 But the growing prestige of offal is evident also in its prominence at festive occasions. Tripe did not feature in the Arbury Hall accounts before October 1637, but from then on it was bought with increasing frequency each year. In 1639, more was purchased at Christmas than during the rest of the year and in 1640, tripe was listed as a kitchen expense on seven occasions at a total cost of 19s 9d. Fifty-one per cent of this outlay was made during the week ending 2 January 1641.79 The Newdigates also purchased

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an udder during this week. At the same time, sweetbread and other offal products were consumed in small quantities by the Earl of Sussex. But in the first week of January 1638, the quantity of heads, feet and tongue purchased at Gorhambury increased to an extent that suggests that Radcliffe’s servants also ate offal as a festive food.80 Six years earlier, however, just four neats’ tongues, two lambs’ heads and one lb of sausage had been bought during the festive winter fortnight by Sir William Cecil.81 Depending on how it was cooked, this offal may not have been sufficient to feed the earl’s family, his three guests and their servants and the entire household of at least 16 servants receiving board-wages at that time. As integral ingredients in dishes, these foods could stretch a long way; but if they had been prepared with exotic additives, using methods described in contemporary cookery books, they would have been served at the top table as dishes in their own right. During the late 1620s, calves’ heads and neats’ tongues featured as purchases at festive times at Forde House. Although there is no evidence of udders being purchased by the Reynells until May 1630, from that time onwards they were purchased frequently – and especially just before Christmas.82 Animal by-products had been a late fifteenth-century feature of festive fare at Merton College – and one of these products was sausage.83 Household accounts of the late 1500s and early 1600s reveal, however, that sausage was also becoming more popular with the gentry at Christmas and New Year when celebrations following Advent included much sociability and luxurious consumption. Despite this, the growth in the popularity of offal was not uniform across all of England. In vogue in London and the Home Counties before the seventeenth century, Figure 6.3 shows that this type of food was purchased in Devon by the Reynells more in 1631 than it had been three years earlier with approximately the same number of servants living in the house. Thus, substantial evidence demonstrates unequivocally that suitably prepared offal was increasingly being consumed by the well-to-do. These people turned animal by-products into luxuries and made them their necessities because of a perceived need to expand their range of status-marking exclusive meals.84 Chickens were popular at Christmas, and from the second week in December the cost of purchasing this bird, like the cost of purchasing many other estimable foods, increased significantly before dipping again in midJanuary. In Warwickshire during the late 1630s, chickens were normally bought for between 7d and 10d throughout most of the year, but in December 1639, each chicken cost the Newdigates 12d as suppliers cashed in on extra

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250

pence (d)

200 150 100 50 0 J

F

M

A

M

J

J

1631

A

S

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N

D

1628

Figure 6.3 A comparison between the monthly purchases of offal made by the Reynell household in 1628 and 1631 Source: Gray (ed.), Devon Household Accounts, pp. 7–35, 83–105.

demand.85 Despite this, capons were the favourite Christmas bird of the Newdigates, and, as I showed in Chapter 5, a premium was paid for young tender caponets. This bird was also the most popular of all domestic fowl consumed by the Radcliffes over the festive season of 1637–1638. Acquired in bulk at Gorhambury during the first week of the New Year, eighteen were paid for along with seven turkeys, three geese, forty-six partridges and many other species of birds. During this exceptionally high-spend time for Radcliffe, £14 11s 2d was spent on birds: this represents 21 per cent of his overall expenditure on food and drink.86 An analysis of the household’s stable expenses over the same week indicates that the family entertained few visitors for only three extra horses received food and bedding. This suggests that many domestic fowl were gifted by the family, although some of these birds may have been cooked for the earl’s servants as a festive treat. In contrast to the households of Sir Richard Newdigate and Sir Edward Radcliffe, those of Sir William Cecil in 1634 and Sir Thomas Sackville in 1603 both favoured pullets at Christmas – with turkey and goose also making an appearance at the table.87 Both capon and turkey could be baked in the same way, and cookery writer John Murrell in 1641 explained how this could be achieved. The bird was to be boned and parboiled, then stuck with cloves, rubbed with lard and then seasoned with salt and pepper. It was then to be placed breast down in a pastry case with a ‘store of butter’ and baked. Before it was served, more butter was poured through the hole in the pastry lid.88 However they were actually cooked, the variety of wild and domestically-bred birds served up at the festive twelve-day event facilitated individual choice, nutritional balance, sociability and, not least, displays of opulence.

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As noted elsewhere in this book, some types of vegetables became increasingly popular in the late sixteenth century; this is reflected in household accounts and in cookery books aimed at the well-to-do. Most root vegetables such as turnips and parsnips were acquired during the winter at Arbury Hall; these were followed by asparagus in the spring, artichokes in the early summer and cauliflowers from June onwards. The latter became cheaper to buy in October when they were in plentiful supply. But the potato – a high-yield plant that was later to become valuable as a staple for feeding a growing population – was viewed as a ‘rare and exotic luxury’ by the elite.89 Purchased by the Newdigates in May in 1636 and 1637, they were also bought for the household’s Christmas and New Year festivities in the winter of 1639– 1640. The emergence of this tuber as a sought-after food is thus evidenced not only by the seasonal fluctuations in its price at Arbury – 5d per lb rising to between 8d and 16d but also by spending patterns over the year.90 These patterns are shown in Figure 6.4 along with their average prices over the course of twelve months. Contemporary cookery books explained how these and other vegetables could enhance meat-based meals. However, the potato was recognized as a meal in its own right – either baked, roasted or in the form of a ‘Potato Pie for Supper’. The latter recipe, in a book that combined medical and culinary instruction, called for the following procedure to be followed: 10

pence (d)

8 6 4 2 0 J

F

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artichokes (each) asparagus (bunch) cauliflower (each) potatoes (lb) peas (peck)

Figure 6.4 Monthly purchasing patterns of vegetables at Arbury in 1639 and 1640 Monetary values represent the average prices paid for vegetables. Source: WCRO, CR136v140, Newdigate, 1639–1640.

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Take three pound of boyled and blanched Potatoes, and 3 Nutmegs, and half an ounce of Cinnamon beaten together, and three ounces of Sugar, season your Potatoes, and put them in your Pie, then take the marrow of three bones, rouled in yolks of Eggs, and sliced Lemon, and large Mace, and half a pound of butter, six Dates quartered, put this into your pie, and let it stand an hour in the oven; then make a sharp caudle of butter, Sugar, Verjuyce, and white Wine, put it in when you take your Pie out of the oven.91

Although no potatoes are recorded as being purchased at Gorhambury during the first week of January 1639, cauliflowers were. This relatively recent introduction to the English kitchen was a feature of the festive dinner table here, as it was at Arbury, and £2 9s 3d was spent on this, beets and ‘roots and herbs’ over the New Year period.92 Significantly, the only time that salad items are mentioned in Newdigate’s kitchen accounts outside of their normal English growing season was in the week between Christmas and New Year 1640. During this time of Christian hospitality 2s 4d was spent on ‘sallets’ that would have provided variety in taste and texture, sharpened the appetite if eaten before the meal and promoted nutritional harmony.93 Conviviality could be helped along by hosts offering sweetmeats and banqueting stuff to guests. As we have seen, these were special foods, and it was not unusual for households’ expenditure on sugar, spices and candies to increase sharply during the fortnight preceding Christmas. During the festive season of 1640, the Newdigates spent 10s 8d on sugar infused with fruit and spices – and this was in addition to buying ready-made candies.94 Although no comfits or candies were bought by the Reynells in the period preceding Christmas 1631, entries in the Forde accounts show that £5 worth of sugar, spice and fruit were purchased. At least some of these could have been for the production of luxurious sweets at this seasonal time.95 This year was not atypical, and Table 6.1 shows that Sir Richard Reynell’s spending on sugar and other spices during the Christmas periods each year formed a considerable percentage of the overall total. It also reveals that some spices were more associated with winter festivities than others. While sugar, pepper and ginger were deemed to be special foods across the calendar year, cloves, cinnamon and mace appear to have assumed greater significance when sociability was important. At Gorhambury, much spice was bought for consumption over the festive season, and this included ½ oz of saffron. This was a considerable quantity of the expensive foodstuff obtained from the crocus flower and it is possible that those eating at lower tables availed themselves of an opportunity, either

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Table 6.1 Relationship between spices bought at Christmas and those bought during the rest of the year by the Reynells Product Sugar

Total spending on product Over 5 years

Over 5 Christmases

%

5,599

1,415

25

Nutmeg

134

82

61

Mace

203

168

83

Pepper

224

44

20

Saffron

11

0

0

Ginger

42

14

33

Cloves

161

133

83

Cinnamon Unspecified

145

100

69

1,072

1,048

98

Sir Richard Reynell’s spending on sugar and spices between 1627 and 1631. %=Christmas spending as a percentage of total spending (to the nearest 1 per cent). Values are expressed in pence. Source: Gray (ed.), Devon Household Accounts, pp. 1–105.

overtly or otherwise, to sample part of Sir Edward’s meal that was coloured and flavoured with the substance.96 Here, olives and dates were bought only for the festive season, and, as at other households, Christmas was a time for cooking with currants and raisins. Although these dried fruits were around 5d per lb in the late 1630s, pound for pound they were still twice the price of beef and mutton. Thus, eating meals cooked with these exotic ingredients could mark the status of upper- and middle-sort people. This is not to say that dried fruit, venison and other luxuries were not occasionally available to labourers and the poor for their Christmas festivities. As we have seen, surreptitious activity regarding the acquisition of estimable foods was common enough at this time of year.97 Festive sociability would not be complete without appropriate drinks, and although the spending on beer in the early 1600s did not increase significantly at any of the aforementioned estates during December, and no hops are listed as being purchased, the quantities of ale bought were slightly elevated. In general terms, ale was supposed to have been superseded by beer during the previous century, and purchase patterns revealed by household accounts tend to confirm this. Indeed, we will recall that Henry Best who farmed an estate in Yorkshire treated his labourers to best beer ale at harvest time. But the tradition of drinking ale at Christmas, perhaps mulled with some of the spices

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that households bought in bulk each December, had not disappeared entirely by 1640. This is clear from the fact that beer and ale were listed separately in accounts. The main beverage purchased for consumption over the twelve days of Christmas was red wine. This was humorally warm and warming, pleasantly cheering and, providing it was consumed in moderation, red wine was deemed by medical experts to be beneficial in many ways.98 Furthermore, unlike white wine, it was ideal for winter consumption in England’s cold climate. Most of the red wine enjoyed at the estates of the well-to-do was of an unspecified variety, but sack seems to have been particularly popular. These festive foods and drinks consumed at key times during the liturgical year, and no more so than at Christmas, fulfilled many requirements relating to sociability and image projection. Lavishing luxurious fare on guests afforded hosts the opportunity to demonstrate hospitality to their peers and charity to the less fortunate – even if this was becoming more selective as Felicity Heal has noted.99 While commensality enabled hosts to set the parameters of their communal sphere from which outsiders were excluded, choice foods and beverages prepared in special ways were necessary in the sense that they could facilitate shared cultural values and at once signal the host’s refined taste, opulence and elevated social standing. The sharing of special foods facilitated community bonding at many lifecycle events as well as at religious ones. Childbed feasts of wealthy women were exclusive events at which luxuries such as wine and sugar were shared. But whatever the social status of the mother, entertainment was normally reserved for a select circle of acquaintances that were predominantly, but not always exclusively, female.100 Expenditure on luxurious fare on these occasions may sometimes have been ruinously extravagant, for David Cressy has shown that both Chester and Leicester councils attempted to regulate the ‘excessive’ costs associated with them.101 Christening feasts too were life-cycle events at which neighbours, midwife, friends, extended family and eminent locals sometimes attended.102 These could be marked by luxurious displays – especially at christenings within gentry and aristocratic households. Drawing on several sources, Cressy shows that the well-to-do celebrated with ‘diverse banqueting dishes’ such as sugar, comfits, marmalade and biscuits.103 Food-sharing celebrations such as these and weddings that were marked by ‘superfluous eating’ could be used to encompass the wanted and reject outsiders.104 But here I consider luxurious foods and their symbolic meaning at one specific type of life-cycle feast that most people attended at some point in their lives – the funeral.

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People who attended funerary feasts of well-to-do men and women could, as members of a broad social unit who supposedly had some kind of connection with the deceased individual, expect to be fed with high-value fare. The funeral of the Catholic politician and uncle of Catherine Howard, Thomas Howard, Third Duke of Norfolk, was a most notable event in London that occurred 38 days after his passing in late August 1554. On this occasion, according to diarist Henry Machyn, luxurious foods such as veal, venison, capons, rabbits, pigeons, pike, cranes and swans were enjoyed by those who attended the feast. In addition to the more luxurious foods there was also beef, mutton, bread and beer ‘as great plenty as ever had been known, both for ryche and pore’.105 Although Machyn, a merchant tailor with a keen interest in civic ceremonies, was prone to exaggeration – using as he did superlatives such as ‘greatest ever seen’ on many occasions – his words reveal that that the poor were not always excluded from eating at funerary feasts.106 At the funeral of one ‘Ser Umffrey’ on 12 April 1555, for example, not only did the needy benefit from the customary doling of money at such events but also from inclusion at a great dinner that was apparently open ‘both to ryche and the powre’.107 David Cressy has shown that some major funerals ended with two feasts: ‘a dinner for the up-scale participants and a rowdier picnic for the poor’. It is possible that this was the case here; but even if the lowly attendants failed to sample the highest valued foods, their presence at one of the events, and the food that they did eat, could foster or develop a sense of social inclusion.108 The poor were not welcome participants at all of the festivities however. Following the funeral of the wife of Thomas Luwen [Lewin?], who was a London alderman and member of the Worshipful Company of Ironmongers, there was a ‘grett dener for as mony as wold cum’. In addition to supplying the dinner, the organizers instructed that spiced bread was to be sent to ‘evere howse and about the cette’. But Machyn noted that on this occasion the intended recipients were specifically ‘worshephulle’ men and women.109 At funerary dinners, whether the deceased was the master of the household or his wife, the food that was exclusive to invited guests was expressive of the social status of the family unit. Because of the importance attached to the social role of food in serving not just individual but also communal identity, it needed to be appealing and memorable for its extravagance in quantity and quality. It has been noted by Clare Gittings that funerary food assisted the ‘reintegration of the community’ and helped to offset destructive impulses which could ‘threaten the cohesion and solidarity of the group’. Thus, up to 50 per cent of the cost incurred at such events was catering expenses.110 But despite the obvious advantages of

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fostering communal cohesion, contemporary observation suggests that the sharing of luxury foods at large-scale socially inclusive events was in decline. By 1580, less money was being spent on the funerals of the aristocracy, and by 1631, it was noted that this was also the case for the gentry.111 No deaths of eminent gentlepeople occurred at Arbury Hall between 1636 and 1640, but in 1638, Sir Richard Newdigate and his wife Lady Juliana lost their son John. The only significant rise in food acquisitions outside of Christmas during this year occurred in mid-November. It is not known whether this was for John’s funeral, or for the birth or christening of their daughter Letice who was born in this year, or some other special event; but the piglet and other high- and low-value items bought were not enough to cater for more than a select circle of people. This decreasement in funerary sociability matched the falling off of ‘hospitalitie and the reliefe of the poore’ at Christmas that was noted by governmental representatives in repeated proclamations.112 The type of goodwill that had customarily been extended by gentlemen such as Sir William Petre, where food and conviviality was supplied to the less fortunate in luxurious surroundings, was, as we saw at the start of this chapter, undergoing a process of erosion. The diminishment of goodwill occurred because of the gentry’s alleged pursuit of individualistic pleasures and conspicuous consumption in London and Westminster during a ‘season’ that economic historian F.J. Fisher claims lasted from autumn until June.113 On 8 February 1638(9) Lady Brilliana Harley, in referring to a proclamation requiring gentlemen to leave London and return to their country seats, considered the instruction to be an imposition – the adherence to which, she complained, would be a hindrance to her family’s pursuits in the capital.114 An edict of 20 January (probably the one to which Lady Brilliana referred) was, on this occasion, concerned with the defence of the realm rather than with the issue of parochial hospitality as previous proclamations had been.115 Thus, prioritization in the mind and words of this country gentlewoman is particularly revealing about the changing nature of community values. The life cycle event of the funeral, then, had in common with the annual festival of Christmas and other hospitable occasions, the consumption and sharing of exotic and other estimable foods. But whereas even relatively poor people traditionally received gift-foods and financial assistance on occasions such as these, especially before the late sixteenth century, other special events were largely marked by their exclusivity. In Chapter 3, I discussed the connection between food consumption at civic and company dinners that were attended mainly by middling-sort tradesmen

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and their womenfolk, and affiliative social inclusion. On high-profile occasions that were more ceremonious, however, banquets presented in honour of elite guests could be spectacular. The feast served to King Charles I when he visited the Reynells at Forde House in South Devon in 1625, for example, featured a vast array of luxury foods including many birds and animals.116 Yet even this feast was eclipsed by an example of excessive resplendence in the form of a banquet given in honour of Charles by his ‘favourite’, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, in November the following year. Costing £4,000, the feast was ‘let down in a sheet upon the table, no man seeing how it came’; and ‘sweet water’, which alone was bought at a price of £200, cascaded ‘as a shower from heaven’.117 This banquet was by no means unique in its splendour. Another example of luxurious feasting by the privileged minority is evident when Charles I visited the Mayor of London, master grocer Thomas Moulson, in 1634. On 13 February, the King invited himself, Queen Henrietta and twenty-nine members of each of the four main Inns of Court to dinner at the mayor’s house. Not only did this cost the mayor (or perhaps the London public purse) £3,000 but ‘diverse houses between his house and the marchan-tailors Hall’ were ordered by the civic leader to be pulled down ‘to make way for the king to pass through’.118 On a smaller scale, but hardly less impressive, were the socially exclusive feasts of assize judges and barristers. Judges received substantial quantities of luxury foods from dignitaries in the towns holding assizes, and this left them with little to purchase for themselves and their guests. Although the charge of entertaining these upholders of the law may have been ‘a constant source of anxiety to sheriffs’, as Felicity Heal has noted, they appear to have been adequately helped by other ‘principle gentlemen’ living in the locality, and by publicly funded high-value gift-foods being ‘given’.119 In 1588(9), at Wymondham near Norwich, ‘my lorde juge’ received ‘2 gallons of wyne and one pownd of suger’ which had been charged to the town.120 The extension of generosity shown to judges (or the buying of their favour), manifest in the gifting luxurious foods, was by no means restricted to the east of England. Typical of the gift-foods presented at each town in Devon by local gentlemen were those received by Thomas Walmsley and Edward Fenner, two ‘country gentlemen’ judges who rode the Western Circuit between July 1596 and March 1601. For assizes normally lasting two or three days the following list of gifts is not atypical: bucks (sometimes up to three), veal, mutton and rabbits; birds such as turkeys, goslings, quails, grouse, pheasants, partridges, gulls and puffins; pies and pasties of venison or offal; artichokes; and a variety of expensive fish that included dory, sturgeon, lobsters, carp, bream, fresh salmon and salmon peal.121

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The gentlemen judges also drank copious quantities of wine and strong beer, with small beer – that is to say cheap, weak beer associated with the daily fare of manual workers – being ‘carefully avoided’. To supplement these extravagant gifts, they purchased crabs, capers and olives, strawberries and cherries, herbs and radishes, dairy produce and small quantities of bread – usually to the value of 1s.122 But one type of food was almost entirely absent from their diets – beef. This meat, according to Henry Butts at that particular time, was best suited to ‘youth, labourers, and great exercisers’.123 Butts, who was a fellow of Corpus Christi College and Master of Arts, and who had an understanding of and keen interest in diet and health, wrote Dyets Dry Dinner precisely because he felt that ‘simplicitie and necessitie’ in eating had been overtaken by ‘varietie and plentie’. This, he said, had ultimately led to ‘luxury and superfluitie’.124 In the case of Walmsley and Fenner, he was not wrong. This dietary extravagance occurred during a period of extreme dearth and high food prices, and while the two eminent gentlemen were enjoying a wide-ranging assortment of luxurious foods, the Privy Council of England was busying itself with combating a general food deficiency. Their actions included introducing remedial measures to lessen the impact of the severe grain shortage affecting Devon (which formed part of Walmsley and Fenner’s Western Circuit) and attempted to restrict the brewing of strong ales nationwide in order to conserve stocks of barley. The Council also voiced concerns about a perceived ‘general increase in luxury’ among the relatively well-to-do. The Council made clear that ‘ryotous consumption’ including ‘excesse in dyett’ had contributed to other people’s hardship.125 Extravagant gifts of food received by judges may, on one level, have been ‘a graceful recognition of different orders of being’,126 but on another plane, they helped to establish or maintain symbiotic relationships between judges and the well-to-do. In the West Country during the late 1590s, luxury foods were given to the champions of law and order by local worthies bedecked with knighthoods and peerages. These included the Earl of Pembroke, Sir William Eyres, the Marquis of Winchester and the Lord Bishop. This was because the law was intended to protect upper-class people from felonious activities and other wrongdoings perpetrated by miscreants of the meaner sort. Such offences, assize records clearly show, included the stealing of food.127 As it was the fourth of four consecutive years of harvest failure and high market prices, 1597 was a year of considerable hardship. Despite this, on 30 June, the judges and their officers at Dorchester Assizes received substantial food gifts from local community elders. These gifts included, but were not limited to, two bucks, half a calf,

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two lambs, twenty rabbits, two dishes of trout, fresh salmon, two goslings, two ducks, five lobsters and five crabs. On the very same day at Brentwood Assizes, Judges Francis Gawdy and Thomas Owen sentenced to death a ‘labourer’ by the name of Joseph Collyn for stealing a flitch of bacon and 2s worth of cheese.128 Labourers like Collyn were the people whom the elite felt the need to be protected from – those who stepped outside the bounds of accepted behaviour as defined by community elders. Such food-thieving felons could thus be subject to the ultimate sanction while at least some ‘country gentlemen’ expressed their elevated social status at special events by eating luxurious meals. Sociability effected through eating and drinking, however, was not dependent on attending special occasions such as those organized in advance by middling-sort groups. It could take the form of an impromptu affair in an inn or tavern catering for travellers and traders, or a get-together in an alehouse that provided ale, beer and snacks largely, but not always exclusively, to labouring men and women in a supposedly convivial atmosphere.129 These establishments, and cookshops catering for a wide variety of clientele, were by Tudor times commonplace in London and other English towns. Using literary evidence Martha Carlin has shown that, in addition to supplying take-away meals and catering for civic functions and weddings, fixed-price menus were available. While alehouses typically sold cheap snacks, a tavern, according to Thomas Dekker in 1609, might offer a range of salads, ‘followed by such seasonal dishes as capons, oysters, trout, green goose, and woodcock, with a dessert, if desired, of raw or toasted cheese, the whole washed down with sugared wine’.130 Clearly, tavern owners pitched their meals and prices at a level that would attract and enable middling-status customers like John Dee, John Smyth and John Johnson – who were discussed in Chapter 3 – to socialize with others of their sort. Alehouses for their part were the foci of local communities, supplying a valuable service that extended beyond selling ale, cheap meals of the type described in Chapter 2 and basic snacks. On the one hand, the alehouse could provide an arena for fellowship and bonding through the media of dancing, eating, drinking, gaming and conversing. But on the other hand, it could be divisive. Although landladies and landlords of these establishments were required to hold licenses and were supposed to demonstrate good order and high ethical standards while making sure the sociability of their customers did not overstep clearly defined moral boundaries, this was not always the case in practice. Cooperation between central government and local authorities was essential for effective state building in early modern England, and maintaining

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public order was an essential element in this.131 As people in the lowest tiers of society were increasingly linked with rebelliousness, disorder and even the spread of disease, governmental efforts to control the behaviour of manual workers found expression in court orders that compelled alehouse keepers to check unruliness.132 These orders show that attitudes towards victuallers who catered largely for labouring people hardened during the reign of James I as growing state formation and the need for public order on the one hand and influence by the ‘godly’ on the other combined. Conversing, eating and drinking in a convivial atmosphere was one thing, but one person’s sociability could be another person’s disorder – especially when it was rowdy or riotous. In Somerset, there were 47 alehouse-related cases bought before the quarter sessions between 1607 and 1625, and most of these were concerned with unruly behaviour; but there was a notable reduction in cases during the reign of Charles I. The main concern later on was with reducing the number of alehouses in the county. This was partly because the number of inns and taverns catering for travellers and ‘superior’ people was sufficient to meet the needs of those identified as the ‘better sort’, and partly because of the impoverishment of alehouse patrons. Due to their perceived excessive drinking, their children were increasingly becoming ‘chargeable’ to the parishes.133 Middlesex court records show that while very few drink-related cases were bought before magistrates in Queen Elizabeth’s time, there were seven cases between 1607 and 1617. These include alehouse keepers allegedly brewing and selling beer of ‘extraordinary strength’, harbouring murderers, selling food and drink to ‘rogues’ and ‘lewd’ people, assaulting a constable and uttering ‘unfit speeches’ while drunk.134 But the number of alleged offences dealt with in Middlesex pales in comparison to the number dealt with in Warwickshire. In the 1625 Michaelmas Quarter Session at Warwick Court, three of the twenty-two cases dealt with were alehouse related; and at the Trinity Quarter Session in 1638, four of the thirteen orders concerned alehouses. One case that came before the court in 1625 shows that a male and female pair of alehouse keepers in Leamington was ordered to discontinue offering ale, beer or victuals in respect of keeping an unruly house.135 The fact that one of the pair did not hold a licence compounded the problem, for unlicensed alehouses was an ongoing concern of the English Crown and its representatives at local level.136 While the same order for the same reasons was meted out to Thomas Squire and John Irons of Harbury, Robert Moore and his wife from Atherstone were banned from ever selling alcohol again. This was because of the ‘diverse lewd and disorderly persons’ eating and drinking in their house. Of further concern to the court was

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the alleged fact that many of their guests were already ‘drunk’ at the time they were served and that some of them were served during the ‘time of divine service on the Sabbath day’.137 Keeping the Lords Day special and free from drinking, dancing and gaming was an identity marker of puritanically minded people, and this in some measure was supported by the state.138 Attempts to suppress what some people considered undue socializing and tippling on days supposed to be set aside for worship were made at county level, and orders similar to the one issued to Squire and Irons are far from uncommon.139 While in the Trinity Session of 1636, a Whichford publican lost his license to sell ale and victuals because of the ‘many misdemeanours’ committed in his house,140 in 1638, there were two cases bought against the same alehouse keepers. Richard Goodall, his daughter Susanna and her husband James Brown were banned at the Easter Quarter Session from selling ale in respect of all three of them being ‘of lewd behaviour’ and keeping ‘great disorders’ at their alehouse in Atherstone. Their alehouse was close to Sir Richard Newdigate’s Arbury Hall, and while Sir Richard was away in London at that time, his brother John was a lawyer at Warwick Court. Whether or not Newdigate presided over the court affairs, Goodall and his family apparently took no notice of the order, for they appeared at Warwick Court again fifteen months later for allegedly committing the same offences.141 Things could be more serious than this, though. Alehouse keeper Edmund Tibbotes lost his license not only on account of allowing guests to be disorderly but also on account of being disorderly himself, selling beer on Sundays and serving one Robert Pettitt who was so drunk he killed William Benyon while on Tibbotes’ premises.142 It is notable that the vast majority of court orders relate to the drinking of beer and ale at premises catering largely for labouring people. Cases of alleged disorder at up-market taverns and bans from selling wine are largely but not wholly absent. One of the more notable exceptions shows in 1617, a man leaving a Westminster tavern in a drunken state and drew his sword ‘with a mischievous intent’.143 Beat Kümin has pointed out the problems associated with determining the nature of patrons at different types of public house in the early modern period;144 and although the impression gained from the evidence here might be that establishments catering for the lower orders were hotbeds of sin and immorality, we ought to be wary of generalizing for two reasons. First, it was moralists from the upper orders of society rather than the publicans and their guests that defined behavioural acceptability, and the former’s views were certainly not shared by all contemporaries. The standpoint of Somerset JP Edward Hext that ‘… they lye idlely in the ale howses daye and nyght eatinge

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and drynkynge excessively’ reveals more about this gentleman’s prejudices than it does about the ‘meaner sort’ in general.145 Secondly, because notwithstanding the dark figure of incidences that either failed to get reported or were not acted upon, records also show that there were many licensed alehouses that provided food, drink and sociability in a manner deemed acceptable to local communities. Many poor people and manual workers were law-abiding. While a bond between community leaders and their judicial representatives, strengthened by the gifting of luxury foods, helped to underpin a stratified society that was marked by consuming patterns and policed accordingly, good behaviour was required of the ‘meaner sort’ if they were to be valued as community members. Poor people who qualified as ‘deserving’ were eligible for help when food prices were high. While the Devon Bench in 1597 attempted to alleviate hunger by ordering householders to provide daily meals for up to three poor people, the eminent gentlemen judges – Messrs Walmsley and Fenner – made a token gesture in providing for those who had fallen on hard times. They customarily gave 20d to be shared between the needy of each town. To put this into context, their gift was sufficiently generous to pay for two legs of mutton. In 1601 the judges’ increased their donation to 2s.146 Due to highly inflated food prices at that time, the extra 4d would just about have covered increased costs. Like Walmsley and Fenner before them, those engaged in the legal profession in the 1630s also felt the need to express their social status through opulence at the table. We saw in Chapter 3 that John Greene, a barrister and Sheriff ’s Court judge not only consumed wine, pullets, veal, tongs, pigeons, ducks, artichoke pies and sturgeon as a matter of course but along with his colleagues he also attended venison feasts at ‘the bowlin green’. While lawyers like Greene, Reynell and Newdigate expected to eat well and consumed the type of meals that others expected them to consume, those who acted as assize judges received from community elders the kind of luxury foods and beverages that enabled them to feast and socialize at the special occasions that were the assizes.

Critiques of feasting These foods and beverages – including game, fresh, young and tender meat, many species of birds, spiced bread, exotic fruits, a wide range of pastry dishes, wine and sweet water – were necessities of the well-to-do. They were

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necessary in many senses, not least of which was their symbolic value that helped to define social and cultural status. Sumptuous feasts and displays of conspicuous consumption, however, were not acceptable to everyone. Commentators from both secular and religious spheres criticized the ways in which some people ate luxuriously – especially at times of dearth and high prices. The insensitive expression of unbridled opulence conveyed by the unpopular Duke of Buckingham at his £4,000 banquet in 1626, which was understandably considered by some as offensive, came at a time when many people were experiencing severe hardship.147 Just months before George Villiers’ splendid feast, the citizens of Dorchester collected £40 for the relief of Exeter ‘which was in great distress’. Not only were people in the city dying of plague but also of want.148 The diarist Walter Yonge, whose eldest son had participated in and was knighted at the sumptuous feast at Forde House fourteen months earlier, noted of Buckingham’s banquet that such ‘pompous vanities’ came at a time when the country was in poverty. The wasteful expenditure of this money, he wrote, could have been spent on ‘more necessary occasions’.149 There is an apparent irony in the fact that it was the same duke, George Villiers, who was in charge of the ill-fated naval mission to Cadiz a few months before the banquet. Upon the return of the fleet, we will recall from Chapter 2, the sailors complained bitterly about the quality of the food that they had had to endure.150 But rather than ironic, the apparent contradiction was in fact two sides of the same cultural coin. It was struck by the ruling elite and upon it their attitude towards hierarchical order and cultural identity was clearly stamped. Expressing one’s superior standing by feasting lavishly when others went hungry was bound to attract concern. And, as the church was considered by secular authorities both as a spiritual institution and as an agency for directing policy, governmental concerns and attempts to control or regulate excessive consumption were sometimes transmitted via the pulpit. Thus, on Christmas Day 1596, the Privy Council ordered the Archbishops of York and Canterbury to administer to the public, via the parish church, instructions for people to moderate their eating habits.151 Some clerics hardly needed prompting. In the same year, but predating the governmental order, a similar concern came from a Devonshire vicar. Reverend Radford Mavericke published a sermon in which he warned of dietary excess. The fourth of the eight golden links of St Peter’s chain, he said, was temperance. It was ‘a virtue which doth moderate the appetites and desires of meate, drink, and other things’, and the lack of this moderation, the minister added, was ‘luxuriousnes’. This included but was not

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limited to gluttony – a reccurring concern in contemporary sermons. Primarily aimed at ‘nobles and ladies’, this advice, the title page implies, was relevant to everyone.152 The eating of candies and other ‘banqueting stuff ’ also came under fire both from moderate Anglicans and ministers with puritanical leanings in the early modern period. So far as food consumption was concerned, it was not just the cardinal sin of gluttony – eating quantitatively in excess of that which was necessary while others starved – that could effect eternal damnation. This indeed was a major concern of the ‘godly’, as food historians have pointed out;153 but so too was epicurean tastes in food – the eating of delicate, dainty treats in order to serve the senses rather than simply to sustain the body. Denouncement of this aspect of consumption occurred in the sixteenth century but increased in scope and strength in the seventeenth century. In 1566, Church of England minister Thomas Becon told his congregation that they should content themselves with eating to repress hunger and preserve the health, for ‘deintie fare can not agree with all men’. Those who rightfully eat such foods, he said, ‘haue the more cause to tha[n]ke God for it’.154 Eleven years later John Caldwell, parson of Winwick in Lancashire, reproached those who both ate too much and ate ‘daintie meates’. Among those in the congregation who heard that ‘we make our bellyes our God, and our kitchens our religyon’ was Henry Stanley, Earl of Derby.155 After the turn of the century, the tone of sermons denouncing the consumption of luxurious foods gradually became more disapproving. While a sermon published by Church of England minister Lancelot Andrewes instructed people ‘not to pray for dainty meate, but such as is fit to relieve our hunger’, a 1615 sermon written by Thomas Adams was more specific about the types of delicacies that were to be avoided. Adams scathingly described the ‘epicure’ as a ‘Belly-god’. This sort of person, he said, was ‘A lover of pleasure, more then of God’. This Calvinist clergyman went on to say that the epicure believes ‘feasts, suckets & marmulads are very delectable’ and ‘fittest for the belly’.156 The epicure, who was devoted to the pursuit of luxurious pleasure that included both overeating and relishing fine foods, was roundly condemned by many ministers. Puritan minister Nicholas Byfield, for example, said in 1623: ‘the lusts of Epicurisme: Those desires after delicious or excessiue fare, or vaine apparell’ is the fourth of five lusts that are to be avoided by Christians.157 And John Harris, preaching to Members of Parliament at Westminster in 1629, stated that in biblical times: ‘For Gluttons; those Epicures that desired of the gods neckes so long as Cranes, that the delicious rellish of meats and drinkes might remaine long, were not more to be blamed than some among vs.’158

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Cheshire hack writer Philip Stubbes, in true Puritan-style language, also felt the need to critique the feasting habits of the well-to-do. In 1583, he published a 250-page pamphlet – ostensibly a discussion between two people – that denounced late Elizabethan customs and manners. In it he claimed this about ‘superfluitie & riotous excesse’ which he found ‘not tolerable’: now adaies if the table be not covered from the one end to the other as thick as one dish can stand by another, with delicat meats of sundry sorts, one cleane different from an other, and to every dish aseverall sawce appropriat to his kinde, it is thought there unworthye the name of a dinner. Yea so many dishes shal you have posteruing the table at once, as the insaciablest Helluo, the devouringest glutton, or the greediest cormorant that is, can scarse eat of every one a little.159

At least some people with puritanical ethics attempted to live up to these high moral standards. In the early seventeenth century, a group of Puritans set sail from the Isle of Wight to start a new life in Massachusetts in New England. The group included diarist and wealthy lawyer John Winthrop who, on 8 September 1612, confessed to feeling remorse after eating excessively. It was not just the quantity of food eaten that he regretted but also ‘the variety of meats’ that caused him to repent. His diary entry on 3 February 1616(7) expressed his belief that ‘a spare diet and abstinence from worldly delights, is a great means of keeping both body and mind fit and lively to holy duties’. The diet that made him ‘cheerful’ was ‘ordinarily but bread and beer’.160 Thus, luxurious foods and drinks were not just social and cultural identity markers of the well-to-do; in religious terms they also distinguish the ungodly from the righteous. But clerical advice that was designed to combat hardship by tackling luxurious food consumption may not have been followed by all clergymen. Those inhabiting the ecclesiastical sphere were drawn from corresponding levels within the wider community, and the progeny of nobles sometimes found training opportunities in the households of leading bishops.161 Clergymen’s values regarding food consumption, therefore, probably paralleled secular values. This means a variable response was likely. Depending on their status, relatively senior church ministers appear to have eaten well. And although compulsory taxes designed to help the poor could result in a negative attitude towards charitable giving, and despite some clerics prioritizing the ‘entertainment of men of influence’ above hospitality towards the needy, the soul-searching of some preachers and their audiences could effect a personal policy that matched Mavericke’s vision. John Whitgift, one of the two

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archbishops who received the Christmas Day letter from the Privy Council regarding the ‘general increase in luxury’, kept a ‘particularly open house’ on at least one special occasion a year – that of Christmas.162 But however individual ministers reacted to the governmental orders, many gentlemen and wouldbe gentlemen in secular circles – including barristers and judges – almost contemptuously remained aloof in their consumption practices. Despite admonishments uttered by church ministers and government officials, it seems that any curtailment of ‘riotous’ food consumption was only temporary. In 1632, Trinity College minister Caleb Dalechamp felt it necessary to repeat earlier concerns regarding overindulgence. In a critique of middling-sort gluttons and epicures, the clergyman scorned the excesses in banqueting and feasting that were now ‘commonly seen’. Both the quantities of food consumed and the number of delicacies served, he said, are inappropriate to the social position of many ‘feasters’. The minister complained that rich tenants and country farmers were acting like ‘kings and soveraigns’ by going ‘farre beyond their degree and calling’ – exceeding, as they were, in ‘quantity of provision’ and ‘excesse of delicacie’. For some ‘banquetters and feasters’, Dalechamp added, ‘no dainties are good enough but deare bought and farre fetcht’. In indulging in this immoderate and luxurious behaviour, he asserted, ‘we suffer the poore to starve, who might well be fed with the superfluitie thereof ’.163 So what were these dear bought and far-fetched foods to which the clergyman referred, and why were they important to middling-status consumers on festive occasions where sociability was important? As we have seen in the previous chapters, foods that were considered premium because they were expensive, exotic, young and tender, or difficult to obtain, were favoured by people of high social rank. This had also been noticed and commented upon by William Harrison sixty years earlier. Examples included Italian and Dutch dairy products, wines and fruits from the Mediterranean Basin, young birds including turkeys that had been introduced from the Americas and spices from the Far East. These products could have been consumed for a variety of reasons. While some of these foods were beneficial from a medical dietary point of view, others were not; and it should be remembered that early moderns were perfectly aware that commonplace ‘British’ foods could service their nutritional needs. It is true that expensive foreign foods provided additional flavours and textures to feasts and catered for refined tastes. But cultivated taste itself was a symbol of cultural identity. By presenting foods and drinks that had been ‘deare bought and farre fetcht’, middling-sort hosts could avail themselves of the opportunity to display

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opulence and demonstrate that they, like ‘gentleman’ farmer Henry Best, had the wherewithal to consume like their social superiors. Festive occasions at which luxury foods were presented, then, not only helped to shape and define relationships and exclude ‘outsiders’ by denying them those foods but were platforms for expressing cultural identity. While commensality demonstrated shared social and cultural values, the presenting of special dishes signalled the host’s worthiness within the group. Banqueting and feasting, however, could attract criticism, especially during times of general hardship; but admonishment of those who ate to impress by making luxuries their necessities in an era in which food was communication as much as it is now, largely went unheeded.

Conclusion: Eating to Impress

The century between the Reformation and the Civil Wars was marked by changing religious values that had an impact on many aspects of life. It was also marked by socioeconomic polarization that, against a backdrop of appreciable demographic growth, saw successful urban traders and rural businesspeople becoming richer and spending lavishly, while manual workers struggled to cope with significant erosion in the value of their wages. These factors combined to affect the way people thought about food, both in terms of sociability and in what they considered necessary fare for themselves and for others. Individual circumstances of labourers and poor people varied considerably, and although their resources could be relatively limited, their actual diets were more diverse than contemporary commentators suggested. Pooling resources, taking on more than one job as and when work became available and acquiring relatively luxurious foods by surreptitious means were strategies that enterprising men and women of low degree could and did employ. But the foods with which they were identified – those that marked their social standing – were, on the whole, the cheapest and the most commonly available in the marketplace. At the estates of the gentry, low-ranking servants also availed themselves of opportunities to sample diverse, superior-quality foods, but like other labourers they too were associated with cheap, basic fare. Unlike the well-to-do who could afford to select from a broad range of foods on a daily basis, and who had access to them through travel and networking links, manual labourers’ choice of foods – where choice was possible – was to a certain degree limited by marketplace dynamics such as price and local availability. But when these people were fed by their employers, or by institutions that catered for their needs, other factors were at play. Choice could be informed by economic considerations – by feeding workers within a budget that enabled them to perform their tasks adequately and cheaply; by employees’ perceived or expressed preference which could be based on custom; by medical dietary knowledge that assigned to manual workers ‘coarse’ and ‘gross’ foods; and by

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social and cultural distinction. These considerations were not detached from each other. Crucial to demonstrating their superior hierarchical standing through the medium of food consumption, the ‘better sort’ needed to show that base foods were not only culturally fittest for their underlings but also the most beneficial to them from a nutritional point of view. As Ken Albala has shown, this happened as cuisine increasingly informed medicine over this period.1 One of the many examples that I have cited in this book is beef – this meat supplied strength to the manual worker; it was medically approved for the labourer; it was usually commonly available; it was cheap at 3d per lb in 1640; and it was subject to refinement in the kitchens of the gentry. The diets of successful yeomen farmers and urban businesspeople were, on the other hand, more varied. They, at least occasionally, enjoyed the sort of luxury foods that the gentry and aristocracy ate regularly. Food as a symbol of real or imagined rank was important to some middling-sort people. Yeoman Henry Best, for example, communicated his preferred social identity through the medium of food consumption. Clearly aspiring to the status of gentleman, he described himself in such terms and contrasted his fare to the inferior foods supposedly eaten by people of lower rank. Best was not alone. As we saw in Chapter 3, middling-status urban ‘professionals’ like company masters, lawyers and merchants also ate extravagantly. Although this could be for any one of a number of reasons, emulating the gentry was sometimes an important factor. I have shown that the gentry and nobility enjoyed a strikingly similar diet to each other. They ate expensive luxuries that included high-quality variants of staples; fresh, tender produce; and exclusive foodstuffs that were used sparingly. Some of these high-value foods included game and an ever-expanding range of exotic items such as foreign fruits and vegetables. The basic foods that they ate, however, could still symbolize elevated social rank. This is because they were prepared and cooked in special ways. Commentators like clergyman and moralist William Harrison thought that social distinction was being blurred because people of middling and lower status were consuming ‘nothing inferior’ to gentlemen. As such, this increased sophistication in culinary practices enabled the elite to maintain or re-establish social distinction.2 Although cookery books calling for complex techniques could aid this process, some kitchen manuals explained how readers could prepare fake luxuries. These recipes enabled the well-to-do to approximate luxurious fare when times were hard, but equally they assisted their middling-sort readers – the people at whom the books were aimed – in imitating those who were

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able to acquire and eat the real thing. Accuracy in the taste and appearance of ‘venison’, ‘pheasant’ and ‘partridge’ may have been questionable to the elite connoisseur, but such simulated delicacies not only helped to instil a sense of luxurious living to people of lower status, they could also provide a feeling of social betterment. The possibility that the meaner sort might simulate the taste and texture of game was of no concern to the elite; for this did not render meaningless the latter’s cherished symbol of superiority. Occasions upon which ‘light persons of the meaner sort’ acquired unauthorized access to real game, however, were met with outright hostility from gentle people and their governmental representatives. The ferocity of verbal attacks on unwarranted hunters, on unauthorized traders, on poachers and on unapproved consumers – who, as I noted in Chapter 5, were described as ‘lewd’, ‘delinquent’ and ‘vulgar’ – demonstrates clearly that the elite viewed the acquisition of real game at least partly as an attempt at undermining their distinctive cultural identity. Nowhere is the symbolic meaning of food more in evidence than at social events, however. Thus, it was not just diet that helped to mark identity, it was also sociability – or the lack of it – on occasions at which food and beverages were used to establish, reinforce or change relationships. Such events shaped hierarchical structures and promoted symbiotic relationships while simultaneously excluding the unwanted. The life-cycle and annual festivities considered here have included Christmas, funerals, civic feasts and feasts enjoyed by barristers and judges. They show the importance that contemporaries attached to the sharing of special foods that catered for individual tastes, nutritional requirements and for the need to demonstrate hospitality and conformity to group values. These foods, which at upper and middling levels typically included veal, venison, rabbits, a selection of birds, fruits and spiced dainties, but usually excluded fish, also enabled guests to exhibit opulence befitting or exceeding their social rank. Even during Lent, abstaining from eating luxuries was circumvented in clever ways, and increasingly there seems to have been little difference across the religious spectrum in this respect. Those who continued to eat fish and other seemingly low-value foods on ‘non-flesh’ days could still exhibit affluence. Sturgeon and salmon replaced ling and herring, and artificial ‘peapods’ could be fashioned out of luxurious ingredients. Criticism of eating luxuries during supposed times of abstinence, and of feasting in general, was widespread; and while clergymen ranging from Church of England ministers to Presbyterians and others with puritanical leanings

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became increasingly hostile towards ‘banqueters’, they were not alone. While some of the more lavish banquets were denounced as immoral when it was thought that the money invested in them could have been better spent on relieving the poor, the government condemned a perceived growth in ‘ryotous consumption’. The giving and receiving of gift-foods served a similar social purpose to the sharing of foods at special occasions. The range of foods gifted was vast. They typically included venison, poultry, waterfowl, ready-made pastries, apples and plums. The latter were often given by ‘a poor woman’ or ‘poor man’ to their social superiors in expectation of financial reward. But whether gifts were exchanged between family members, peers, acquaintances or strangers, the reasons for giving, and for the acceptance or non-acceptance of presents, could be complex. Chapter 6 exemplifies that the whole process could – calculatingly or unintentionally – provoke an inharmonious response. In the pages above, I have shown that between 1540 and 1640 there was a hierarchy of foods with which diverse ‘sorts’ of people could and did relate. In 1577, William Harrison acknowledged this link, and the stereotypical imagery that assigned certain types of food to specific social groups was just as strong at the end of our period. The observations made in 1642 by writer and church minister Thomas Fuller, discussed in Chapter 5, are but one example of this.3 The words of these ministers are adequately corroborated by other types of historical evidence. Household accounts, institutional accounts, memoirs and correspondences show that while luxurious consumption associated with the gentry and well-to-do middling sort increased in scope, the foods deemed fit for labourers hardly changed at all. Although people like masterless Elizabeth Sherwood and labourer John Biddle had access to trout, venison and spices, such foods were not identified with them in the minds of their superiors. In 1628, John Ivie, a puritanical councillor in Salisbury, was in no doubt about which foods should be supplied to the unemployed people of his city. The low-value, basic and monotonous foods suggested by Ivie were, he wrote, ‘fit for them’.4 While some manual workers would undoubtedly have disagreed with the councillor, others preferred the fare that their superiors assigned to them. Six years later, a navy admiral and governor of the Providence Island Company, who himself had been a common sailor in Queen Elizabeth’s time, wrote that English seamen would not accept a relatively healthy Mediterranean-style diet because they would not be ‘weaned from their customary diet’. They were, according to Admiral Butler, averse to losing ‘the least bit of it’.5

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We have seen that the association of specific foods with sorts of people could be attributed to many factors: whether or not people had acquired, or were deemed capable of acquiring, refined taste; whether they had the wherewithal to source, prepare and cook ‘deare bought and farre fetcht’ foods in special ways; whether low-cost, easily obtainable foods were likely to suffice given individual circumstances; and whether coarse, full-bodied foods or delicate foods were required from a health or energy-providing point of view. As contemporaries knew perfectly well that a broad range of commonly available foods would serve their individual requirements, the symbolic role of food cannot be overstated. Like the other two basic necessities – clothes and shelter – food was subject to refinement and improvement, and basics could be substituted by superior alternatives with which images of the self could be portrayed. But these depictions of the self did not have to be, nor were they always, inelastic. An individual’s identity, as much in the sixteenth century as today, could be managed in order to bring to the fore specific characteristics so that image projection fitted the occasion. This is particularly evident at special occasions where sociability and conformity to type, aided by eating the right foods, were important. Thus, the well-to-do imagined luxurious foods and beverages to be their prerogatives. They were necessary at least in part because they enabled these people to conform to type and to distinguish themselves from ‘others’ who were perceived to have different values. While the theoretical diets of labouring people were largely marked by continuity, actual foodways became more polarized. Access to fashionable eating houses in urban centres, foreign travel, contact with immigrants, and the reading of cookery books that allegedly disseminated the latest trends in European cuisine facilitated the expansion of mealtime choices among the gentry and successful middling businesspeople. People had many reasons for eating the types of food that they did and for eating them in the ways that they did, but one of the reasons, early modern texts make clear, was to signify cultural and social identity during a century in which great changes were occurring.

Notes Introduction 1 2 3 4

5

6

7

8

T. Fuller, The Holy State … The Profane State (Cambridge: Roger Daniel, 1642), p. 54. C. Haigh, ‘The Recent Historiography of the English Reformation’, Historical Journal 25:4 (1982), pp. 995–1007, 995. P. Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the 16th and 17th Centuries (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1988). N. Jones, The English Reformation: Religion and Cultural Adaptation (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002); P. Marshall, Religious Identities in Henry VIII’s England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). P. Collinson, Richard Bancroft and Elizabethan Anti-Puritanism (Cambridge: CUP, 2013); P. Marshall, ‘The Naming of Protestant England’, Past and Present 214 (2012), pp. 87–128. J. Bossy, ‘The Social History of Confession in the Age of the Reformation’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th Series, 25 (1975), pp. 21–38; Emeritus Professor Bill Sheils from the University of York presented a paper entitled ‘Religious Diversity in the Local Community, 1500–1700’ at the University of Leicester’s Centre for English Local History Seminar Series on 13 March 2014. M. J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c 1550–1700 (Cambridge: CUP, 2000), pp. 1–3, 136–79; S. Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c. 1550–1640 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000). See also: S. Hindle, On the Parish?: The Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in Rural England c. 1550–1750 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004). Braddick, State Formation; A. Shepard and P. Withington, Communities in Early Modern England: Networks, Place, Rhetoric (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); P. Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (Cambridge: CUP, 2005); P. Withington, ‘Public Discourse, Corporate Citizenship, and State Formation in Early Modern England’, American Historical Review 112:4 (2007), pp. 1016–38. For a discussion on sociability and how its meaning to historians has changed since the German sociologist Georg Simmel introduced the concept in 1890 see also: B. Cowan, ‘Public Spaces, Knowledge, and Sociability’, in F. Trentmann (ed.), Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption (Oxford: OUP, 2012), pp. 251–66.

Notes 9

10 11

12

13 14

15

16

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For example see: England and Wales, James I, By the King, a Proclamation Concerning Ale-houses (London: Bonham Norton and John Bill, 1618); J. R. Dasent (ed.), Acts of the Privy Council of England, vol. 26 (London: HMSO, 1974), pp. 149, 323, 327, 335, 383–86, 429. Shepard and Withington, Communities in Early Modern England, see esp. pp. 1–15. B. Cowan, ‘New Words, New Tastes: Food Fashions after the Renaissance’, in P. H. Freedman (ed.), Food: The History of Taste (Berkeley : University of California Press, 2007), pp. 197–232. D. Woodward, Men at Work: Labourers and Building Craftsmen in the Towns of Northern England, 1450–1750 (Cambridge: CUP, 1995); S. Rappaport, Worlds Within Worlds: Structures of Life in Sixteenth Century London (Cambridge: CUP, 1989). See also: P. Bowden, ‘Agricultural Prices, Farm Profits and Rents’, in J. Thirsk (ed.), Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. IV (Cambridge: CUP, 1967), pp. 593–695. J. M. Cramer, C. P. Greene and L. M. Walters (eds), Food as Communication/ Communication as Food (New York: Peter Lang, 2011) For example: R. H. Tawney and E. Power (eds), Tudor Economic Documents: Being Select Documents Illustrating the Economic and Social History of Tudor England, vols 1 and 2 (London: Longman, 1924); R. H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (London: Longman 1912); E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (London: Merlin Press, 1991); C. Hill, The Century of Revolution, 1603–1714 (London: Routledge, 1991); C. Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (London: Temple Smith, 1972). In addition to L. Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977), other notable works by this scholar include: L. Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy (Oxford: OUP, 1965); and L. Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529–1642 (London: Routledge, 1972). See also P. Laslett, Household and Family in Past Times (Cambridge: CUP, 1972); P. Laslett, The World We Have Lost: England Before the Industrial Age (London: Methuen, 1965). Keith Wrightson’s studies include: K. Wrightson, English Society, 1580–1680 (London: Hutchinson, 1982); K. Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); and K. Wrightson, Ralph Tailor’s Summer: A Scrivener, His City, and the Plague (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). Other notable works include: Shepard and Withington, Communities in Early Modern England; Withington, Politics of Commonwealth; Withington, ‘Public Discourse’; A. Shepard, The Meaning of Manhood in Early Modern England, 1560–1640 (Oxford: OUP, 2003); A. Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500–1700 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000); A. Wood,

184

17

18 19

20 21

22

23

24 25 26

27 28

Notes The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England (Cambridge: CUP, 2007); A. Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002). J. C. Drummond, The Englishman’s Food (London: Cape, 1957); C. M. Woolgar, D. Serjeantson and T. Waldron (eds), Food in Medieval England: Diet and Nutrition (Oxford: OUP, 2006); C Muldrew, Food, Energy and the Creation of Industriousness: Work and Material Culture in Agrarian England 1550–1780 (Cambridge: CUP, 2011). C. A. Wilson, Food and Drink in Britain: From the Stone Age to Recent Times (London: Constable, 1973); R. Tannahill, Food in History (London: Penguin, 1988). J. Walter, ‘The Social Economy of Dearth in Early Modern England’, in J. Walter and R. Schofield (eds), Famine, Disease and the Social Order in Early Modern Society (Cambridge: CUP, 1989), pp. 75–128; A. B. Appleby, ‘Diet in Sixteenth Century England: Sources, Problems, Possibilities’, in C. Webster (ed.), Health, Medicine and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: CUP, 1979), pp. 97–116; P. Garnsey, Food and Society in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge: CUP, 1999). S. W. Mintz, Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the Past (Boston: Beacon, 1996). C. Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1992); B. Kümin, Drinking Matters: Public Houses and Social Exchange in Early Modern Central Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); S. Pennell, ‘Consumption and Consumerism in Early Modern England’, Historical Journal 42:2 (1998), pp. 549–64. Examples of journals dedicated to food include: Food and History; Food, Culture and Society; Food and Foodways; Gastronomica. M. Douglas, Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology (London: Routledge, 1975); J. Goody, Cooking, Cuisine and Class: A Study in Comparative Sociology (Cambridge: CUP, 1982). J. M. Pilcher (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Food History (Oxford: OUP, 2012); F. Parasecoli and P. Scholliers (eds), A Cultural History of Food, 6 vols (London: Berg, 2012). Drummond, The Englishman’s Food. Wilson, Food and Drink in Britain. S. Mennell, All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), see especially pp. 66–8, 84, 128–9. J. Thirsk, Food in Early Modern England: Phases, Fads, Fashions 1500–1760 (London: Continuum, 2007). M. Dawson, Plenti and Grase: Food and Drink in a Sixteenth-Century Household (Totnes: Prospect, 2009); A. Fox, ‘Food, Drink and Social Distinction in Early

Notes

29 30

31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

44 45

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Modern England’, in S. Hindle, A. Shepard and J. Walter (eds), Remaking English Society: Social Relations and Social Change in Early Modern England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2013), pp. 165–87. K. Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance (Berkeley : University of California Press, 2002). See, for example, pp. 193, 196, 204. R. Appelbaum, Aguecheek’s Beef, Belch’s Hiccup, and Other Gastronomic Interjections: Literature, Culture, and Food Among the EarlyModerns (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); R. Appelbaum, ‘Rhetoric and Epistemology in Early Printed Recipe Collections’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 3:2 (2003), pp. 1–35. F. Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). I. K. Ben-Amos, The Culture of Giving: Informal Support and Gift-exchange in Early Modern England (Cambridge: CUP, 2008), see, for example, pp. 156–80, 309–30; F. Heal, ‘Food Gifts, the Household and the Politics of Exchange in Early Modern England’, Past and Present 199 (2008), pp. 41–70; D. Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: OUP, 1997). J. Fitzpatrick (ed.), Renaissance Food from Rabelais to Shakespeare: Culinary Readings and Culinary Histories (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010). For a discussion on social stratification see ‘Degrees of People’, in K. Wrightson, English Society, pp. 25–46. G. Edelen (ed.), William Harrison: The Description of England (1577) (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968), p. 94. M. Dewar (ed.), De Republica Anglorum, by Sir Thomas Smith (1583) (Cambridge: CUP, 1982), p. 65–6; Edelen (ed.), William Harrison, p. 94. Edelen (ed.), William Harrison, p. 100. Edelen (ed.), William Harrison, p. 94. Edelen (ed.), William Harrison, pp. 101–2. Dewar (ed.), De Republica, pp. 66–70. For the wealth of the aristocracy see, for example, J. A. Sharpe, Early Modern England: A Social History 1550–1760 (London: Edward Arnold, 1997), p. 152. England and Wales, Elizabeth I, The briefe content of certayne actes of Parliament agaynst thinordiante vse of apparel (London: R. Jugge and John Cawood, 1559). England and Wales, Elizabeth I, By the Queene, the Quenes Maiestie callyng to her good remembraunce howe well thys realme is furnished with good lawes and orders, for redresse of many enormities (London: Rycharde Jugge and John Cawood, 1562); R. Carew, The Survey of Cornwall (London: S. S., 1602), p. 64; Edelen (ed.), William Harrison, pp. 145–8. For reputation see Sharpe, Early Modern England, p. 153. Dewar (ed.), De Republica, pp. 70–2; Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, p. 15.

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46 Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, p. 15. 47 Wrightson, English Society, p. 27. 48 For the prosperity of lawyers see: W. R. Prest, The Inns of Court Under Elizabeth I and the Early Stuarts (London: Longman, 1972), p. 22, 47; W. R. Prest, Rise of the Barristers: A Social History of the English Bar, 1590–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), p. 129. 49 Edelen (ed.), William Harrison, pp. 117–18. 50 For the status of yeomen see: D. Cressy, Society and Culture in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 29–42; D. M. Palliser, The Age of Elizabeth: England under the Late Tudors 1547–1603 (London: Longman, 1992), p. 84; M. Campbell, The English Yeoman under Elizabeth and the Early Stuarts (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1942), pp. 20–63. 51 Edelen (ed.), William Harrison, pp. 117–18. 52 Edelen (ed.), William Harrison, p. 118. 53 Dewar (ed.), De Republica, pp. 76–7. 54 H. French, The Middle Sort of People in Provincial England, 1620–1750 (Oxford: OUP, 2007); S. D’Cruze, ‘The Middling Sort in Eighteenth-century Colchester’, in J. Barry and C. Brooke (eds), The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England 1550–1800 (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1994), pp. 181–207. 55 Edelen (ed.), William Harrison, pp. 118–20. 56 For multi-faceted nature of labourers’ incomes see, for example, A. H. Smith, ‘Labourers in Late Sixteenth Century England: A Case Study From North Norfolk’, part 1, Continuity and Change 4:1 (1989), pp. 13–15; Woodward, Men at Work, pp. 236–41. 57 B. Coward, The Stanleys, Lords Stanley and Earls of Derby, 1385–1672: The Origins, Wealth and Power of a Landowning Family (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), p. 87. 58 See, for example, Tudor Royal Proclamations, vol. II (London: Yale University Press, 1969), pp. 210–33, 392; and vol. III (London: Yale University Press, 1969), p. 40, 122, 146, 150; Rappaport, Worlds Within Worlds, pp. 124–9; Woodward, Men at Work, pp. 261–74. 59 C. Howard, Earl of Nottingham, By the Lord Generall (London: Christopher Barker, 1599); C. Falls, Elizabeth’s Irish Wars (London: Methuen, 1950), pp. 60–1; Tudor Royal Proclamations, vol. III, pp. 19–21. 60 F. J. Snell (ed.), ‘A Devonshire Yeoman’s Diary’, Antiquary 26 (1892), pp. 255–6, 258; H. Stone (ed.), ‘A Devonshire Yeoman’s Diary’, Antiquary 31 (1893), pp. 214–15. 61 For discussions about the divergence between cuisine and medicine in late sixteenth-century kitchen manuals see: E. Spiller, ‘Recipes for Knowledge: Maker’s Knowledge Traditions, Paracelsian Recipes, and the Invention of the Cookbook, 1600–1660’, in J. Fitzpatrick (ed.), Renaissance Food from Rabelais to

Notes

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63

64 65 66

67 68 69 70 71

72 73

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Shakespeare: Culinary Readings and Culinary Histories (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 55–65; L. Hunter, ‘Women and Domestic Medicine: Lady Experimenters, 1570–1620’, in L. Hunter and S. Hutton (eds), Women Science and Medicine 1500–1700 (Sutton: Stroud, 1997), pp. 89–107, 96. S. Pennell, ‘Family and Domesticity: Cooking, Eating and Making Homes’, in B. Kümin (ed.), A Cultural History of Food in the Early Modern Age (London: Berg, 2012), pp. 123–42, esp. pp. 127–9. Compare, for example, ingredients and methods required in: Anon., A Propre new booke of cokery (London: Richard Lant and Richarde Bankes, 1545), with those called for a century later in: Anon, The Ladies Cabinet Opened (London: M. P., 1639). Mennell, All Manners of Food, p. 64. See: S. Mennell, A. Murcott and A. H. van Otterloo, The Sociology of Food: Eating, Diet and Culture (London: Sage, 1992), p. 112. Examples include: York Civic Records, vol. 4 (ed.), A. Raine (Wakefield: Yorkshire Archaeological Society, 1946), p. 79; and vol 8, p. 26, 59; P. Slack (ed.), Poverty in Early-Stuart Salisbury (Devizes: Wiltshire Record Society, 31, 1975), p. 37. These are found in J. S. Cockburn (ed.), Calendar of Assize Records for Sussex, Kent and Surrey (London: HMSO, 1945–1995). For a discussion on the value of diaries see E. McKay, ‘English Diarists: Gender, Geography and Occupation, 1500–1700’, History 90:298 (2005), pp. 191–2. For one such example see: R. Mavericke, Saint Peters Chaine, Consisting of Eight Golden Linckes (London: John Windet, 1596). Fuller, The Holy State, p. 154; C. Dalechamp, Christian Hospitality Handled Common-place-wise (Cambridge: Th. Buck, 1632), pp. 59–61. Examples include: Acts of the Privy Council of England, vol. 26 (London, 1902) 8 August 1596 and 25 December 1596; Tudor Royal Proclamations, vol. 3 (London, 1969), pp. 171–2. Edelen (ed.), William Harrison; Fuller, The Holy State. M. Overton, J. Whittle, D. Dean and A. Hann, Production and Consumption in English Households, 1600–1750 (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 87.

Chapter 1 1 2

James I, Flores Regij. Or, Proverbes and Aphorismes, Divine and Morall (London: Bernard Alsop and Thomas Fawcet, 1627), pp. 111–12. J. Sekora, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), pp. 2, 23–8. For the meaning of luxury in the early modern period see also L. L. Peck, Consuming Splendour: Society and Culture

188

3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11

12

13 14

Notes in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: CUP, 2005), pp. 6–7; J. Appleby, ‘Consumption in Early Modern Social Thought’, in J. Brewer and R. Porter (eds), Consumption and the World of Goods (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 165–6. See, for example, England and Wales, Henry VIII, Prouysion made by the Kynges hyghnes and his counsayll for puttynge aparte thexcessyue fare [and] redusynge the same to such moderacion as folowyngly ensueth (London: Richarde Pynson, 1517); England and Wales, Elizabeth I, Declaration of the Queenes Maiesties Will and Commaundement, to Haue Certaine Lawes and Orders Put in Execution Against the Excesse of Apparell Notified by Her Commandement in the Starre – Chamber (London: Christopher Barker, 1588). Sekora, Luxury, p. 52. Examples are given by Sekora in Luxury, see p. 61. J. R. Dasent (ed.), Acts of the Privy Council of England, vol. 26 (London: HMSO/ Mackie, 1902) see entries on 8 August 1596 and 25 December 1596. F. Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life 1400–1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), p. 122. M. Douglas and B. Isherwood, The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption (London: Lane, 1979), p. 84. W. D. Smith, Consumption and the Making of Respectability: 1600–1800 (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 69. M. Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth Century Britain (Oxford: OUP, 2005); M. Berg and E. Eger (eds), Luxury in the Eighteenth-Century: Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); M. Berg and H. Clifford, Consumers and Luxury: Consumers and Culture in Europe 1650–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999); Peck, Consuming Splendour. Peck, Consuming Splendour, p. 2; L. L. Peck, ‘Luxury and War: Reconstructing Luxury Consumption in Seventeenth-century England’, Albion 34:1 (2002), pp. 1–23, 2, 5; L. Weatherill, ‘The Meaning of Consumer Behaviour in Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Century England’, in J. Brewer and R. Porter (eds), Consumption and the World of Goods (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 206–27, 207. For evidence of the expansion of capitalism during the late medieval and early modern period, see K. Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 22–3; C. Dyer, Everyday Life in Medieval England (London: Hambledon, 1994), pp. 305–28; J. Whittle, The Development of Agrarian Capitalism: Land and Labour in Norfolk 1440–1580 (Oxford: OUP, 2000), pp. 17–27, 305. See, for example, T. Mun, A Discourse of Trade from England unto the East-Indies (London: Nicholas Okes, 1621). See, for example, J. Mokyr, The British Industrial: An Economic Perspective Revolution (Boulder: Westview, 1999), p. 36; N. von Tunzelmann, ‘Technology in the Early Nineteenth Century’, in R. C Floud and D. N. McCloskey (eds), The

Notes

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21

22 23 24

25

26 27

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Economic History of Britain Since 1700, vol. 1 (Cambridge: CUP, 1994), pp. 143–63; N. F. R. Crafts, ‘Macroinventions, Economic Growth, and “Industrial Revolution” in Britain and France’, Economic History Review 48:3 (1995) pp. 591–8, 595; Appleby, ‘Consumption in Early Modern Social Thought’, pp. 162–73, 162–5; S. W. Mintz, ‘The Changing Roles of Food in the Study of Consumption’, in J. Brewer and R. Porter (eds), Consumption and the World of Goods (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 261–73, 265. Smith, Consumption, p. 69; G. Clark, Symbols of Excellence: Precious Materials as Expressions of Status (Cambridge: CUP, 1986), p. 82. M. Berg, ‘From Imitation to Invention: Creating Commodities in EighteenthCentury Britain’, Economic History Review 55:1 (2002), pp. 1–30, 2–3, 6, 9. H. Sidgwick, ‘Luxury’, International Journal of Ethics 5 (1894), pp. 1–16. Douglas and Isherwood, The World of Goods, p. 69. C. J. Berry, The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical Investigation (Cambridge: CUP, 1994), pp. xi–xii, 3–12, 26–7. See, for example, the different approaches in: M. Browning and T. F. Crossley ‘Luxuries are Easier to Postpone: A Proof ’, The Journal of Political Economy 108 (2000), pp. 287–99; F. Allen and G. R. Faulhaber, ‘Rational Rationing’, Economica 58 (1991), pp. 189–98; L. S. Bagwell and B. D. Bernheim, ‘Veblen Effects in a Theory of Conspicuous Consumption’ The American Economic Review 86 (1996), pp. 349–73. T. Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Macmillan, 1899), pp. 73–5; A. Appadurai, ‘Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value’, in A. Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things (Cambridge: CUP, 1986), pp. 3–63, 38. See also: D. E. Robinson, ‘The Economics of Fashion Demand’, The Quarterly Journal of Economics 75:3 (1961), pp. 376–80; Bagwell and Bernheim, ‘Veblen Effects’, pp. 349–73, 349–52; A. Warde and L. Martens, Eating Out: Social Differentiation, Consumption and Pleasure (Cambridge: CUP, 2000), p. 15. Warde and Martens, Eating Out, p. 16. Weatherill, ‘The Meaning of Consumer Behaviour’, p. 207. For a discussion on group and individual identity see: H. French with J. Barry, ‘Introduction: Identity and Agency in English Society, 1500–1800’, in H. French and J. Barry (eds), Identity and Agency in England 1500–1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 1–37. L. Grossberg, ‘Identity and Cultural Studies: Is That All There Is?’, in S. Hall and P. Du Gay (eds), Questions of Cultural Identity (London, Sage, 1996), pp. 88–107, 91. M. Sökefeld, ‘Debating Self ’, Identity and Culture in Anthropology’, Current Anthropology 40:4 (1999), pp. 417–47, 422–4, 426. Smith, Consumption, pp. 25–7.

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28 T. E. Ford and G. R. Tonander, ‘The Role of Differentiation Between Groups and Social Identity in Stereotype Formation’, Social Psychology Quarterly 61:4 (1998), pp. 372–84, 372–3. 29 H. Braham, The Institucion of a Gentleman (London: Thomas Marshe, 1555), prologue. 30 Sökefeld, ‘Debating Self ’, p. 424. 31 T. Munck, Seventeenth Century Europe: State Conflict and the Social Order in Europe 1598–1700 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1990), p. 139–40, 181. 32 The ambiguity of the status of yeomen is discussed in D. Cressy, Society and Culture in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 29–42; D. M. Palliser, The Age of Elizabeth: England under the Late Tudors 1547–1603 (London: Longman, 1992), p. 84; M. Campbell, The English Yeoman under Elizabeth and the Early Stuarts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1942), pp. 20–63. 33 Douglas and Isherwood, World of Goods, pp. xxi, 39; J. Goody, Cooking, Cuisine and Class: A Study in Comparative Sociology (Cambridge: CUP, 1982), pp. 6, 13; G. McCracken, Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. xi. 34 C. Campbell, ‘The Sociology of Consumption’, in D. Miller (ed.), Acknowledging Consumption: A Review of New Studies (London, Routledge, 1995), pp. 96–126, 111. 35 Douglas, Implicit Meanings, p. 249. 36 Ben-Amos, The Culture of Giving; Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England. 37 Prest, The Inns of Court, p. 21; Prest, Rise of the Barristers, p. 129. For the importance of London shops as outlets for luxury foods from around the world see: A. Radeff, ‘Food Systems: Central-decentral Networks’, in B. Kümin (ed.), A Cultural History of Food in the Early Modern Age (London: Berg, 2012), pp. 29–46, esp. p. 33. 38 For concern about sumptuary see, for example, England and Wales, Elizabeth I, By the Queene. For contemporary observation with regard to fashionable consumption, see Carew, The Survey of Cornwall, p. 64. 39 Mennell, All Manners of Food, pp. 66, 128–9. 40 Mintz, ‘Changing Roles’ pp. 265–6. 41 C. Spencer, British Food: An Extraordinary Thousand Years of History (London: Grub Street, 2004), p. 101; R. A. Houston, ‘Colonies, Enterprises, and Wealth: the Economies of Europe and the Wider World’, in E. Cameron (ed.), Early Modern Europe: An Oxford History (Oxford: OUP, 2001), pp. 137–70, 161–2. 42 Examples include: P. Clark, The English Alehouse (London: Longman, 1983); B. Kümin, ‘Public Houses and their Patrons in Early Modern Europe’, in

Notes

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45

46

47 48 49 50 51

52

53

54

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B. Kümin and B. A. Tlusty (eds), The World of the Tavern: Public Houses in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 44–62; M. Carlin ‘“What Say You to a Piece of Beef and Mustard?”: The Evolution of Public Dining in Medieval and Tudor London’, Huntington Library Quarterly 71:1 (2008), pp. 199–217. Thirsk, Food in Early Modern England, pp. 27–57. See, for example, Anon, A Good Huswifes Handmaide (London: Richard Jons, 1594), p. 17; A. W. A Book of Cookrye Very Necessary (London: Edward Allde, 1591), p. 21; J. Murrell, A New Booke of Cookerie (London: John Browne, 1615), fol. 22; J. Partridge, The Treasury of Commodious Conceits (London: Richarde Jones, 1573), chap. 2. McCracken, Culture and Consumption, pp. 11–15; Governmental records suggest that giving alms in the form of food, even in times of dearth, was far from universal in the late sixteenth century: see Acts of the Privy Council, 8 August 1596 and 25 December 1596. Observations made by E. van Meteren, ‘untitled’ (1558–1612); P. Hentzner, ‘Journey into England’ (1598); J. Fernandez de Velasco, ‘untitled’ (1604); J. Ernest, ‘untitled’ (1613), all in W. B. Rye (ed.), England as Seen by Foreigners (London: John Russell Smith, 1865), pp. 72, 107, 119, 153. See also: Mennell, All Manners, p. 57. Dawson, Plenti and Grase, pp. 243–4. F. R. Raines (ed.), The Stanley Papers, 2: The Derby Household Books , original series, vol. 31 (Manchester: Chetham Society, 1853), pp. 20–2. Edelen (ed.), William Harrison, pp. 126–7; N. Tyacke, ‘The Ambiguities of EarlyModern English Protestantism’, The Historical Journal 34:3 (1991), p. 10. L. M. Munby (ed.), Early Stuart Household Accounts (Ware: Hertfordshire Record Society, 1986), pp. ix–x. N. Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilization (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 265–72; Veblen, Theory, p. 75; J. Gillingham, ‘From Civilitas to Civility’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 12 (2002), pp. 267–89. A. Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford: OUP, 1998), p. 43, 75; L. E. Klein, ‘Politeness for Plebs’, in A. Bermingham and J. Brewer (eds), The Consumption of Culture 1600–1800 (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 362–77. S.R. Robson, A New Yeeres Gift The Courte of Ciuill Courtesie (London: Richard Ihones, 1582), chapter 9; R. West, The Schoole of Virtue, the Second Part (London: E. Griffin, 1619); W. Phiston, The Schoole of Good Manners (London: W. White, 1609). Edelen (ed.), William Harrison, pp. 131–3.

192

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Chapter 2 1

2 3

4 5

6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Anon., A New Ballad, Shewing the Great Misery Sustained by a Poore Man in Essex, His Wife and Children: with Other Strange Things Done by the Devill. To the Tune of, The Rich Merchant Man (London: H. Gosson, 1640). D. Woodward (ed.), The Farming and Memorandum Books of Henry Best of Elmswell, 1642 (London: OUP, 1984), p. xl. For diversity of labourers’ incomes see Smith, ‘Labourers in Late Sixteenth Century England’, pp. 11–52, 13–15; for the regional aspect of labourers’ diets see Thirsk, Food in Early Modern England, pp. 215–26. Mennell, Murcott and van Otterloo, The Sociology of Food, p. 113. SBRO, DR10/1859 Bablake Alsmhouse Records; M. K. McIntosh, ‘Poverty, Charity and Coercion in Elizabethan England’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 35:3 (2005), pp. 457–79, 458–59, 470. T. Lodge, A Treatise of the Plague Containing the Nature, Signes, and Accidents of the Same (London: Thomas Creede and Valentine Simmes, 1603), chapter 7. M. Pelling, The Common Lot: Sickness, Medical Occupations and the Urban Poor in Early Modern England (London: Longman, 1998), p. 45. A. Bantock, The Earlier Smyths of Ashton Court From Their Letters 1545–1741 (Bristol: Malago Society, 1982), p. 71. Drummond, The Englishman’s Food, p. 56. See, for example, Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c 1550–1700, p. 111; J. Innes, ‘Prisons for the Poor: English Bridewells, 1555–1800’, in F. Snyder and D. Hay (eds), Labour, Law and Crime: An Historical Perspective (London: Tavistock, 1987), pp. 42–122, 47, 60. A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560–1640 (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 165–9. A. Raine (ed.), York Civic Records, vol. 8 (Wakefield: Yorkshire Archaeological Society, 1952), p. 11. C. I. Hammer, ‘A Hearty Meal? The Prison Diets of Cranmer and Latimer’, Sixteenth Century Journal 30:3 (1999), pp. 653–80. G. R. Batho, ‘The Wizard in the Tower, 1605–21’, History Today 6 (1956), pp. 344–51, 344–47. Nottingham, By the Lord Generall. For their pay see: Falls, Elizabeth’s Irish Wars, pp. 60–61. Nottingham, By the Lord Generall. See Chapter 4. For a discussion on bread and social stratification, see also: V. Magagna, ‘Food and Politics: The Power of Bread in European Culture’, in B. Kümin (ed.), A Cultural History of Food in the Early Modern Age (London: Berg, 2012), pp. 65–86.

Notes

193

19 See, for example, J. Walter, ‘Grain Riots and Popular Attitudes to the Law: Maldon and the Crisis of 1629’, in J. Brewer and J. Styles (eds), An Ungovernable People: The English and Their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London: Hutchinson, 1980), pp. 47–84. 20 For advice on making food in times of famine see: Sir Hugh Plat, Sundrie New and Artificiall Remedies Against Famine. Written by H.P. Esq. Uppon Thoccasion of This Present Dearth (London: Peter Short, 1596), fols A3-4. 21 One such example is: England and Wales, Elizabeth I, By the Queene the Queenes Maiestie Considering the Euil Disposition of Sundry her Subiects, to Keepe the Ancient Orders for Abstinence from Eating of Flesh, Aswell in the Time of Lent, as Vpon Other Vsuall Fasting Days (London: Christopher Barker, 1597). 22 Hughes and Larkin (eds), Tudor Royal Proclamations, pp. 19–21; England and Wales, Elizabeth I, By the Queene. The Queenes Maiestie Being Giuen to Vnderstand (London: Christopher Barker, 1588). 23 J. A. Muller (ed.), The Letters of Stephen Gardiner (Cambridge: CUP, 1933), pp. 141–45; A. Raine (ed.), York Civic Records, vol. 4 (Wakefield: Yorkshire Archaeological Society, 1943), p. 133. 24 England and Wales, Henry VIII, A Proclamation Ordained … Lymyttyng Howe and at What Pryces Beefe mutton Veale Porke Wyldefoule and Other Kyndes of Vitailes Shalbe Solde (London: Tho. Berthelet, 1544). 25 Falls, Elizabeth’s Irish Wars, p. 63. 26 Muller (ed.), The Letters of Stephen Gardiner, p. 145. 27 G. Roberts (ed.), Diary of Walter Yonge Esq., Justice of the Peace and M.P. for Honiton: Written at Colyton and Axminster, Co. Devon, from 1604 to 1628, original series, 41 (Cambridge: Camden Society, 1848), p. 89. 28 The Mary Rose Project, http://www.maryrose.org (2 January 2009). 29 M. Oppenheim, A History of the Administration of the Royal Navy (Aldershot: Temple Smith, 1988), p. 82, 140, 143, 238. 30 W. G. Perrin (ed.), Boteler’s Dialogues, 65 (London: Navy Record Society, 1929), p. 65. 31 For the possible diet of London’s poor see J. Boulton, ‘Food Prices and the Standard of Living in London’, Economic History Review 53:3 (2000), pp. 455–92, 464. 32 Such orders for food supply management include Dasent (ed.), Acts of the Privy Council of England, vol. 26, pp. 269, 541. 33 Woodward, Men at Work, pp. 236–41; Bowden, ‘Agricultural Prices, Farm Profits and Rents’, pp. 593–695, 609. 34 See, for example, Rappaport, Worlds Within Worlds, pp. 136–37, 148–49, 152; Smith, ‘Labourers in Late Sixteenth Century England’, part 2, pp. 367–94, 367–68, 370; P. Clark, ‘The Alehouse and the Alternative Society’, in D. Pennington and K. Thomas (ed.), Puritans and Revolutionaries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978),

194

35

36 37

38 39

40

41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

Notes pp. 47–72, 56; Overton, Whittle, Dean and Hann, Production and Consumption in English Households, 1600–1750, p. 65; A. Everitt, ‘Farm Labourers’, in J. Thirsk (ed.), Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. IV (Cambridge: CUP, 1967), pp. 369–465, 425–29. T. Wright (ed.), Churchwardens’ Accounts of the Town of Ludlow, in Shropshire, from 1540 to the End of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, original series, 102 (Cambridge: Camden Society, 1869); P. Northeast (ed.), Boxford Churchwardens’ Accounts 1530–1561, vol. 23 (Woodbridge: Boydell for Suffolk Record Society, 1982), p. 64. See also Hindle, On the Parish?, pp. 15–58. Fox, ‘Food, Drink and Social Distinction in Early Modern England’, pp. 165–87. W. Whiteway, William Whiteway of Dorchester: His Diary, 1618–1635, vol. 12 (Dorchester: Dorset Record Society, 1991), p. 49; Roberts (ed.), Diary of Walter Yonge, p. 60. Muldrew, Food, Energy and the Creation of Industriousness, see esp. pp. 29–163. Hughes and Larkin (eds), Tudor Royal Proclamations, vol. 2, pp. 210–33, 392; Hughes and Larkin, Tudor Royal Proclamations, vol. 3, pp. 40, 122, 146, 150; Tawney and Power, Tudor Economic Documents, pp. 334–35, 367–70. See also Rappaport, Worlds Within Worlds, p. 129; D. Woodward, ‘The Background to the Statute of Artificers: The Genesis of Labour Policy’, Economic History Review 31:1 (1980), pp. 32–44, 42–4. See the discussion and historiography in A. Shepard and G. Walker, ‘Gender, Change and Periodisation’, Gender and History 20:3 (2008), pp. 453–62. See also M. E. Wiesner, ‘Beyond Women and the Family: Towards a Gender Analysis of the Reformation’, The Sixteenth Century Journal 18:3 (1987), pp. 311–21, 313; I. K. Ben-Amos, ‘Women Apprentices in the Trades and Crafts of Early Modern Bristol’, Continuity and Change 6:2 (1991), pp. 227–52. For details see the sources listed in note 39. This is discussed in detail in Chapter 5. One of many examples can be found in J. F. Larkin (ed.), Stuart Royal Proclamations, vol. 2 (Oxford: OUP, 1983), pp. 408–11. For a discussion on agricultural labourers energy requirements see: Muldrew, Food, Energy and the Creation of Industriousness, esp. pp. 29–163. Albala, Eating Right, pp. 186–7, 271. Nottingham, By the Lord Generall. Prices taken from: Nottingham, By the Lord Generall. A. Standish, The Commons Complaint Wherein Is Contained Two Speciall Grieuances (London: William Stansby, 1611), p. 14. Thompson, Customs in Common, pp. 353, 358–9. Tawney and Power, Tudor Economic Documents, p. 342; Edelen (ed.), William Harrison, p. 141, 144.

Notes

195

51 Mintz, Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom, p. 21. A similar modern-day scenario has been identified by E. Batstone, ‘The Hierarchy of Maintenance and the Maintenance of Hierarchy’, in A. Murcott (ed.), The Sociology of Food and Eating: Essays on the Sociological Significance of Food (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1983), pp. 45–53, 45–6. 52 Coward, The Stanleys, Lords Stanley and Earls of Derby, 1385–1672, pp. 85–6. 53 E. Gooder, The Squire of Arbury: Sir Richard Newdigate Second Baronet (1644– 1710) and His Family (Coventry : Coventry Historical Association, 1990), p. 5. 54 Gooder, The Squire of Arbury, p. 1, 5. 55 V. Larminie, Wealth, Kinship and Culture: The 17th Century Newdigates of Arbury and Their World (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1995), p. 137, 181. 56 Gooder, Squire of Arbury, p. 1, 4; Larminie, Wealth, Kinship, p. 175. 57 Larminie, Wealth, Kinship, p. 7, 17; F. Heal and C. Holmes, The Gentry in England and Wales 1500–1700 (London: Macmillan, 1994), p. 133. 58 Gooder, Squire of Arbury, pp. 6–10; Larminie, Wealth, Kinship, p. 6. 59 WCRO, CR/136v140, Newdigate Accounts, see week ending 1 August 1640. 60 Munby (ed.), Early Stuart Household Accounts, p. xxi. 61 For example see: J. Harland (ed.), The House and Farm Accounts of the Shuttleworths of Gawthorpe Hall, in the County of Lancashire, at Smithils and Gawthorpe, from September 1582 to October 1621, Part 1, old series, 35 (Manchester: Chetham Society, 1856), p. 12; Woodward (ed.), Farming and Memorandum, Farming Book, p. 167. 62 T. Gray (ed.), Devon Household Accounts 1627–59, vol. 1 (Exeter: Devon and Cornwall Record Society, 1995), p. xix. 63 Gray, Devon Household Accounts, p. xxiv. 64 Gray, Devon Household Accounts, p. xxi. 65 Gray, Devon Household Accounts, pp. 27–8. 66 For Lady Lucy’s reputation see Gray, Devon Household Accounts, p. xxxvi; for two examples of Lady Lucy’s beef purchases see p. 37. 67 M. Axton, ‘Robert Dudley and the Inner Temple Revels’, Historical Journal 13 (1970), pp. 365–78; R. Zim, ‘A Poet in Politics: Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst and the First Earl of Dorset (1536–1608)’, Historical Research 79 (2006), pp. 199–223, 200–2. 68 Zim, ‘A Poet’, p. 207; J. Bruce (ed.), Diary of John Manningham of the Middle Temple, and of Bradbourne, Kent, Barrister-at-Law, 1602–1603, original series, 99 (Cambridge: Camden Society, 1868), p. 73. 69 F. G. Emmison, Tudor Secretary: Sir William Petre at Court and Home (London: Longmans, 1961), p. 301. 70 T. Tusser, Five Hundreth Points of Good Husbandry (London: Rychard Tottrell, 1577), pp. 40–2; Albala, Eating Right, p. 165.

196

Notes

71 Raines (ed.), The Stanley Papers, 2, pp. 8–9; T. Thong, ‘Performances of the Banquet Course in Early Modern Drama’, in J. Fitzpatrick (ed.), Renaissance Food from Rabelais to Shakespeare: Culinary Readings and Culinary Histories (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 107–25, 114–16. 72 The humoral body and its requirements are explained in T. Bright, A Treatise, Wherein Is Declared the Sufficiencie of English Medicines, for Cure of All Diseases, Cured with Medicines (London: H.[umphrey] L.[ownes], 1615), appendix. See also: Albala, Eating Right, pp. 48–98. 73 J. Hart, Klinike, or The Diet of the Diseased (London: Ihon Beale, 1633), p. 88; T. Moffett, Healths Improvement: or, Rules Comprizing and Discovering the Nature, Method, and Manner of Preparing All Sorts of Food Used in This Nation (London: Thomas Newcomb, 1655), p. 142. 74 T. Venner, Via Recta ad Vitam Longam (London: Edward Griffin, 1620), pp. 54–5, H. Butts, Dyets Dry Dinner Consisting of Eight Seuerall Courses (London: Thomas Creede, 1599), chapter 3; Hart, Klinike, p. 72; W. Vaughan, Approved Directions for Health (London: T. S[nodham], 1612), p. 34. 75 T. Elyot, The Castell of Health (London: Widdow Orwin, 1595), p. 48; Butts, Dyets Dry Dinner, chapter 5; Venner, Via Recta, p. 91. 76 Venner, Via Recta, pp. 18–21. 77 W. Bullein, The Gouernment of Health (London: Valentine Sims, 1595), p. 54; Venner, Via Recta, p. 138; T. Cogan, The Haven of Health Chiefly Gathered for the Comfort of Students, and Consequently of All Those That Have a Care of Their Health (London: Anne Griffin, 1636), pp. 32–3. 78 Venner, Via Recta, pp. 38–42; Elyot, Castell of Health, p. 54. 79 Vaughan, Approved Directions for Health, p. 56; Butts, Dyets Dry Dinner, fol. A1. 80 Bullein, The Gouernment of Health, p. 2; Hart, Klinike, p. 97. 81 Braham, The Institucion of a Gentleman, prologue. 82 Edelen (ed.), William Harrison, pp. 131–3. 83 Nottingham, By the Lord Generall 84 Slack (ed.), Poverty in Early-Stuart Salisbury, p. 11. 85 Albala, Eating Right, p. 191, 196, 271.

Chapter 3 1 2 3 4

England and Wales, Elizabeth, Declaration of the Queenes Maiesties will and Commaundement. Woodward (ed.), Farming and Memorandum. Woodward (ed.), Farming and Memorandum, FB 157, 220, 217. Woodward (ed.), Farming and Memorandum, FB 92, 172, 207–8, 210–13, 217, MB 5, appendices I and II.

Notes 5

6 7 8

9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31

197

L. Pollock, With Faith and Physic: The Life of a Tudor Gentlewoman, Lady Grace Mildmay, 1552–1620 (London: Collins and Brown, 1993), pp. 110–42; C. A. Wilson (ed.), The Country House Kitchen Garden 1600–1950 (Stroud: Sutton, 1998), p. 89; E. Grey, Countess of Kent, A True Gentlewomans Delight (London: G. D., 1653); W. M., The Compleat Cook (London: Nath. Brook, 1655). J. A. Sharpe, Early Modern England: A Social History, 1550–1760 (London: Arnold, 1987), p. 204. Snell (ed.), ‘A Devonshire Yeoman’s Diary’, pp. 255–8, 255–6. Snell (ed.), ‘A Devonshire Yeoman’s Diary’, pp. 255–6, 258; Stone (ed.), ‘A Devonshire Yeoman’s Diary’, pp. 214–15. For the hardship in Devon in 1596 see J. R. Dasent (ed.), Acts of the Privy Council of England, vol. 25 (London: HMSO/ Mackie, 1901), p. 323. The size of Loder’s estate is estimated in G. E. Fussell (ed.), Robert Loder’s Farm Accounts, 1610–1620, 3rd Series, vol. 53 (Cambridge: Camden Society, 1936), p. x. Reviewing the type of produce to maximize profit margins is a constant theme in Loder’s accounts. Fussell (ed.), Robert Loder’s, pp. 108, 148. Fussell (ed.), Robert Loder’s, p. 103. Fussell (ed.), Robert Loder’s, p. xxvi. See, for example, his calculation for 1612, Fussell (ed.), Robert Loder’s, p. 45. Fussell (ed.), Robert Loder’s, p. 44. See, for example, diet expenses for 1612 and 1613, pp. 44–5, 67–8. These particular spices are itemized on pp. 88, 152–3. Fussell (ed.), Robert Loder’s, p. 153. Fussell (ed.), Robert Loder’s, pp. 89, 133, 149. Fuller, The Holy State, p. 117. Raine (ed.), York Civic Records, vol. 4, p. 79. Raine (ed.), York Civic Records, vol. 8, p. 26. Raine (ed.), York Civic Records, vol. 8, p. 59. The Earl of Cumberland had previously received presents from the Council of York ‘allowyd of the common charge’. J. G. Nichols (ed.), The Diary of Henry Machyn, Citizen and Merchant-Taylor of London, from A.D. 1550 to A.D. 1563, Original Series, vol. 42 (Cambridge: Camden Society, 1848), p. 25. Heal, ‘Food Gifts’, pp. 41–70. Nichols (ed.), Diary of Henry Machyn, p. 141. Nichols (ed.), Diary of Henry Machyn, p. 208. Nichols (ed.), Diary of Henry Machyn, pp. 237–8, 260. Ben-Amos, The Culture of Giving, pp. 170–1. Ben-Amos, Culture of Giving, p. 174.

198

Notes

32 Ben-Amos, Culture of Giving, pp. 176–7. 33 Edelen (ed.), William Harrison, p. 130; Bantock, The Earlier Smyths, pp. 8, 14–15. 34 Elyot, The Castell of Health, pp. 51, 54; Venner, Via Recta ad Vitam Longam, pp. 24–6, 34, 38. 35 Bantock, The Earlier Smyths, pp. 8, 14–15. 36 Edelen (ed.), William Harrison, pp. 131–2. 37 E. M. Symonds (ed.), ‘The Diary of John Greene (1635–57)’, English Historical Review, 43 (1928), pp. 385–94, 386, 388–9. 38 M. O’Callaghan, ‘Tavern Societies, the Inns of Court and the Culture of Conviviality in Early Seventeenth-Century London’, in A. Smyth (ed.), A Pleasing Sinne: Drink and Conviviality in Seventeenth-Century England (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2004), pp. 37–51, 37–8. 39 J. O. Halliwell-Phillips (ed.), The Private Diary of Dr. John Dee, and the Catalogue of his Manuscripts, Original Series, vol. 19 (Cambridge: Camden Society, 1842), pp. 13, 41–2. 40 B. Winchester, Tudor Family Portrait (London: Cape, 1955), pp. 131, 133, 141–2. 41 For immigrant workers in London see: J. P. Ward, ‘“[I]mployment for All Handes that will Worke”: Immigrants, Guilds and the Labour Market in Early SeventeenthCentury London’, in N. Goose and L. Luu (eds), Immigrants in Tudor and Early Stuart England (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2005), pp. 76–87, 77. 42 See, for example, J. Murrell, Murrels Two Books of Cookerie (London: John Marriot, 1638); W. M., The Compleat Cook. 43 Thirsk, Food in Early Modern England, pp. 325–6. 44 Thirsk, Food in Early Modern England, pp. 325–6; L. Luu, ‘Natural-Born versus Stranger-Born Subjects: Aliens and Their Status in Elizabethan London’, in N. Goose and L. Luu (eds), Immigrants in Tudor and Early Stuart England (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2005), pp. 57–75, 59. 45 A. Boorde, A Compendyous Regyment or a Dyetary of Healthe (London: Wyllyam Powell, 1547), fol. e3; Moffett, Healths Improvement, p. 173. 46 Butts, Dyets Dry Dinner, pp. 108–12; Elyot, The Castell of Health, p. 40. 47 Venner, Via Recta ad Vitam Longam, pp. 106–9. 48 Butts, Dyets Dry Dinner, p. 79, 83; Bullein, The Government of Health, pp. 65–7; Elyot, The Castell of Health, pp. 44, 65–7. 49 Discussed in Chapter Two is: Lodge, A Treatise of the Plague, chapter 7. 50 Elyot, The Castell of Health, p. 43; Butts, Dyets Dry Dinner, p. 76; Venner, Via Recta ad Vitam Longam, p. 58. 51 For a discussion on the dietary properties of various fruits, and of the practices of eating them see: P. Lloyd, ‘Dietary Advice and Fruit-Eating in Late Tudor and Early Stuart England’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 67:4 (2012), pp. 553–86.

Notes 52 53 54 55 56 57

199

Venner, Via Recta ad Vitam Longam, pp. 24–6. Elyot, The Castell of Health, pp. 51–2. P. Moore, The Hope of Health (London: Ihon Kyngston, 1564). See the discussion on this in Chapter 2. Braham, The Institucion of a Gentleman, prologue. Winchester, Tudor Family Portrait, pp. 129, 131–7.

Chapter 4 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

P. Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses (London: Richard Iohnes, 1583), chapter: ‘Gluttonie and drunkennesse’. The transformation of basic foods into special dishes is discussed in Chapter 5. See Lenten Foods in Chapter 6. Thirsk, Food in Early Modern England, p. 266. WCRO, CR136v140, Newdigate Household Accounts. See Cecil’s accounts in Munby (ed.), Early Stuart, pp. 10–72. See Reynell’s accounts in Gray, Devon Household Accounts, pp. 3–103. G. R. Batho (ed.), The Household Papers of Henry Percy, Ninth Earl of Northumberland, 1564–1632, 3rd Series, vol. 93 (Cambridge: Camden Society, 1962), pp. 68–70. W. A. Carrington (ed.), ‘Selections from the Stewards’ Accounts Preserved at Haddon Hall for the Years 1549 and 1564’, Journal of the Derbyshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, 16 (1894), pp. 60–81; Emmison, Tudor Secretary, pp. 137–40. Heal, Hospitality, p. 172; Wilson, Food and Drink in Britain, p. 44. WCRO, CR136v140, Newdigate. Munby (ed.), Early Stuart, pp. 83–185. Harland (ed.), The House and Farm Accounts of the Shuttleworths, pp. 212–17; Batho (ed.), The Household Papers, pp. 9–19. Carrington (ed.), ‘Selections’, p. 69. WCRO, CR136v140, Newdigate; Munby (ed.), Early Stuart, pp. 10–72. Cattle and sheep slaughtered on the Arbury estate and ‘bought’ by the kitchen were assigned financial value. Gray, Devon Household Accounts, pp. 3–103. Gray, Devon Household Accounts, pp. 27–8. WCRO, CR/1998/63/30, CR/1998/63/16a, and CR/1998/63/16b, Throckmorton Household Accounts. Harland (ed.), The House and Farm Accounts of the Shuttleworths. Raines (ed.), The Stanley Papers, pp. 1–7.

200 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33

34 35 36

37 38

39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

Notes Batho (ed.), The Household Papers, pp. 8–18; Emmison, Tudor Secretary, pp. 36–44. Woodward (ed.), Farming and Memorandum, FB 172. Woodward (ed.), Farming and Memorandum, FB 167. WCRO, CR136v140, Newdigate. Munby (ed.), Early Stuart, pp. 136–41. Gray, Devon Household Accounts, p. 9. For price differentials between best foods and second foods see proclamations issued through the office of the Clerk of the Market. One example is: England and Wales, Henry, A Proclamation Ordained. Magagna, ‘Food and Politics’, pp. 65–86, esp. p. 76. Berry, The Idea of Luxury, pp. 11–12. Munby (ed.), Early Stuart, pp. 10–72. WCRO, CR136v140, Newdigate. Boulton, ‘Food Prices and the Standard of Living in London’, pp. 455–92, 479. For a discussion on bread consumption, see also: W. Ashley, The Bread of Our Forefathers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928). Edelen (ed.), William Harrison, p. 133–5. L. A. Botelho, Old Age and The English Poor Law, 1500–1700 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2004), p. 144. See, for example, J. Fernandez de Velasco, describing a banquet given by James I in 1604; P. Hentzner, Journey into England (London: J. R. Smith, 1598); both in W. B. Rye (ed.), England as seen by Foreigners (London: J. R. Smith, 1865), pp. 106–7, 119. See also the banquet described in Gray, Devon Household Accounts, p. xxxvi. J. Ernest, describing a visit to James I on 17 September 1613, in Rye (ed.), England, p. 152. F. Moryson, An Itinerary Written by Fynes Moryson Gent, part 3 (London: J. Beale, 1617), p. 150; For an introduction to Fynes Moryson see: P. C. Mancall, ‘Introduction: What Fynes Moryson Knew’, Journal of Early Modern History, 10:1 (2006), pp. 1–9, 1–4. Wilson, Food and Drink in Britain, p. 174. WCRO, CR136v140, Newdigate. S. Adams, Household Accounts and Disbursement Books of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester,1558–1561, 1584–1586 (London: CUP, 1995), p. 158. J. Parkinson, Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris (London: Humfrey Lownes and Robert Young, 1629), p. 528. WCRO, CR136v140, Newdigate. Edelen (ed.), William Harrison, p. 126; Albala, Eating Right, p. 194. Thirsk, Food in Early Modern England, p. 278. Munby (ed.), Early Stuart, p. 83.

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47 Harland (ed.), The House and Farm Accounts of the Shuttleworths, pp. 170–231; For European cheese and its merits see Wilson, Food and Drink in Britain, pp. 174–5. 48 Gray, Devon Household Accounts, p. 14. 49 WCRO, CR136v140, Newdigate; Munby (ed.), Early Stuart, p. 10. 50 Wilson, Food and Drink in Britain, p. 14. 51 Batho (ed.), The Household Papers. See, for example, pp. 14, 18. 52 J. Thirsk, Alternative Agriculture: A History from the Black Death to the Present Day (Oxford: OUP, 1997), pp. 10–11. 53 Thirsk, Food in Early Modern England, p. 243; Wilson, Food and Drink in Britain, p. 108. 54 Munby (ed.), Early Stuart, pp. 26–32. 55 WCRO, CR/1998/63/16a, and CR/1998/63/16b, Throckmorton. 56 Batho (ed.), The Household Papers, pp. 9–14. 57 Harland (ed.), The House and Farm Accounts of the Shuttleworths, pp. 56–130. 58 For seasonal fluctuations in the price of rabbits, see Figure 6.1. 59 It has been noted by Joan Thirsk that lambs heads and calves’ feet were more common at the tables of ordinary folk than muscle meat. See Thirsk, Food in Early Modern England, p. 236. 60 P. Lloyd, ‘The Changing Status of Offal: A Fashionable Food in England between 1545 and 1655’, Food, Culture and Society, 15:1 (2012), pp. 61–75. 61 WCRO, CR136v140 and CR136a37, Newdigate. 62 Munby (ed.), Early Stuart, pp. 10–72. 63 P. Freedman, Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 41. 64 Batho (ed.), The Household Papers, p. 2. 65 Batho (ed.), The Household Papers, pp. 8–14. 66 Batho (ed.), The Household Papers, see accounts for week ending 13 February 1607, p. 19. 67 CKS, U269/A2/1, Sackville Household Accounts. 68 Emmison, Tudor Secretary, pp. 306, 308, 314. 69 Mennell, All Manners of Food, p. 312–13. 70 C. Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: CUP, 1989), p. 199; G.L.M. Strauss, Philosophy in the Kitchen, 1885 (London: Vintage Cookery Books, 2006); C. E. Francatelli, A Plain Cookery Book for the Working Classes, 1852 (Stroud: Tempus, 2007); E. Roberts, ‘Working-Class Standards of Living in Barrow and Lancaster, 1890–1914’, Economic History Review, 30:2 (1977), pp. 306–21, 313. 71 WCRO, CR136v140, Newdigate. 72 Munby (ed.), Early Stuart, pp. 5–62 and 94–158. 73 Gray, Devon Household Accounts, pp. 3–103. 74 Harland (ed.), The House and Farm Accounts of the Shuttleworths, pp. 6–211.

202

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75 The bird-eating season was approximately from September until February. Although ducks, pigeons and game birds were sometimes reared on estates, they have been included here in the wild bird category. 76 Wilson, Food and Drink in Britain, pp. 126–8. 77 WCRO, CR136v140, Newdigate. 78 Edelen (ed.), William Harrison, p. 130. 79 WCRO, CR136v140, Newdigate, week ending 1 September 1638. 80 WCRO, CR136v140, Newdigate, see entry for 12 September 1640. 81 J. Murrell, Murrels Two Books of Cookerie and Carving (London: M. F., 1641), pp. 68–9. 82 WCRO, CR136v140, Newdigate. 83 Munby (ed.), Early Stuart, pp. 79–158. 84 Munby (ed.), Early Stuart, pp. 5–62. 85 Gray, Devon Household Accounts, pp. 3–103. 86 WCRO, CR/1998/63/16b, Throckmorton (week ending 1 October 1609). 87 For the catching of wildfowl see G. Markham, Hungers Prevention: Or, The Whole Arte of Fowling (London: Francis Grove, 1621). 88 WCRO, CR136v140, Newdigate. 89 Munby (ed.), Early Stuart, pp. 5–62, 79–158. 90 Gray, Devon Household Accounts, pp. 3–103. 91 Harland (ed.), The House and Farm Accounts of the Shuttleworths, p. 102. 92 Batho (ed.), The Household Papers, p. 18. 93 Emmison, Tudor Secretary, pp. 140, 142. 94 Thirsk, Food in Early Modern England, pp. 284–6. 95 Thirsk, Alternative Agriculture, pp. 31–2; Fox, ‘Food, Drink and Social Distinction in Early Modern England’, pp. 165–88, 182–4. See also: Drummond, The Englishman’s Food, p. 96; Wilson, Food and Drink in Britain, pp. 340–3. 96 WCRO, CR136v140, Newdigate, see accounts for 1640. 97 WCRO, CR136v140, Newdigate. 98 Munby (ed.), Early Stuart, pp. 171, 185. 99 Munby (ed.), Early Stuart, p. 100. 100 R. Schlesinger, In the Wake of Columbus: The Impact of the New World on Europe, 1492–1650 (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1996), p. 95. 101 Munby (ed.), Early Stuart, p. 145. 102 Munby (ed.), Early Stuart, pp. 5–62. 103 One example may be seen in Gray, Devon Household Accounts, p. 9. 104 WCRO, CR136v140, Newdigate. 105 See, for example, T. Elyot, Castel of Health, Corrected, and in Some Places Augmented by the First Author Thereof, Sir Thomas Elyot Knight (London: Widdow Orwin, 1595), pp. 51–2.

Notes

203

106 For advice on drinking wine see, for example, G. Grataroli, A Direction for the Health of Magistrates and Studentes (London: William How, 1574), fols G-G4. 107 WCRO, CR136v140, Newdigate; Munby (ed.), Early Stuart, pp. 5–62, 79–158; Gray, Devon Household Accounts, pp. 3–103.

Chapter 5 1 2 3

4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

James I, The Workes of the Most High and Mightie Prince, Iames by the Grace of God (London: Robert Barker and Iohn Bill, 1616), p. 547. See: Edelen (ed.), William Harrison, p. 126. For the eating of these foods in the 1400s see C. M. Woolgar, ‘Meat and Dairy Products in Late Medieval England’, in C. M. Woolgar, D. Serjeantson and T Waldron (eds), Food in Medieval England: Diet and Nutrition (Oxford: OUP, 2006), pp. 88–101, 92. For the suitability of young tender meat to sedentary people and of gross meat to labourers, see: Venner, Via Recta ad Vitam Longam, pp. 54–5. WCRO, CR136v140, Newdigate Household Accounts. See the Cecil and Radcliffe accounts in Munby (ed.), Early Stuart, pp. 5–158. CKS, U269/A2/1, Sackville Accounts, kitchen expenses for 1603 and 1604. Dawson, Plenti and Grase, pp. 34–5, 83, 101–2. See Sir George Vernon’s accounts in Carrington (ed.), ‘Selections from the Stewards’, pp. 60–81. This view was expressed by many physicians including Venner, Via Recta, pp. 54–5. It was also acknowledged by others, including the protestant hack writer Philip Stubbes. See Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses, chapter ‘Gluttonie and drunkennesse’. Slack (ed.), Poverty in Early-Stuart Salisbury, p. 57. Dawson, Plenti and Grase, pp. 34–5, 83, 86, 113–14. Munby (ed.), Early Stuart, pp. 5–158. Patterns of purchases of fish may be seen throughout Reynell’s accounts: Gray, Devon Household Accounts, pp. 3–103. Harland (ed.), The House and Farm Accounts of the Shuttleworths, p. 50. Edelen (ed.), William Harrison, pp. 118–20. J. S. Cockburn (ed.), Calendar of Assize Records, Hertfordshire Indictments, Elizabeth I (London: HMSO, 1975), ref. 122. Anon, The Ladies Cabinet Opened (London: M. P., 1639), p. 48. Munby (ed.), Early Stuart, p. 173. Details of the judges’ meals are discussed in Chapter 6. WCRO, CR136v140, Newdigate; Munby (ed.), Early Stuart, p. 43, 99.

204

Notes

21 Gray, Devon Household Accounts, p. 75. 22 Batho (ed.), The Household Papers of Henry Percy, p. 18. 23 J. Partridge, The Treasury of Commodious Conceits (London: Richarde Iones, 1573), chapter 6. 24 Anon, A Propre new booke of cookery (London: Richard Lant and Richarde Bankes, 1545). 25 J. Taylor, The Praise, Antiquity, and Commodity, of Beggery, Beggers, and Begging (London: Edward Allde, 1621), fol. C1. 26 C. Kirby and E. Kirby, ‘The Stuart Game Prerogative’, English Historical Review 46 (1931), pp. 239–54, 243. 27 D. Beaver, ‘The Great Deer Massacre: Animals, Honor, and Communication in Early Modern England’, Journal of British Studies 38:2 (1999), pp. 187–216, 193; J. F. Larkin (ed.), Stuart Royal Proclamations, vol. I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), pp. 14–15, 227–8. 28 J. R. Dasent (ed.), Acts of the Privy Council, vol. 10 (London: HMSO, 1895), see entry for 11 November 1577; N. Sykes, ‘The Dynamics of Status Symbols: Wildfowl Exploitation in England AD 410–1550’, Archaeological Journal 161 (2004), pp. 82–105, 96–7. 29 R. Manning, Hunters and Poachers: A Social and Cultural History of Unlawful Hunting in England, 1485–1640 (Oxford: OUP, 1993), chapter 2. For an indication of the intended status of hunters (and thus consumers) of game, see, for example, J. Berners, Hawking, Hunting and Fishing (London: Edward Allde, 1586); T. Ravenscroft, A Briefe Discourse of the True (but Neglected) Use of Charact’ring the Degrees (London: Edward Allde, 1614); G. Gascoigne, The Noble Art of Venerie or Hunting (London: Henry Bynneman, 1575); T. S., A iewell for gentrie (London: Iohn Helme, 1614). 30 Munby (ed.), Early Stuart, pp. 79–158. 31 WCRO, CR136v140, Newdigate. 32 Munby (ed.), Early Stuart, pp. 3–158. 33 Gray, Devon Household Accounts, pp. 3–103. 34 Considering the geographical location, this bird was probably a red grouse rather than a black grouse (as defined by OED). 35 Speech of Lord Buckhurst at The Bar on 28 October 1602, in Bruce (ed.), Diary of John Manningham of the Middle Temple … Barrister-at-Law, p. 73. 36 Batho (ed.), The Household Papers, pp. 17–18; Emmison, Tudor Secretary, p. 306. 37 England and Wales, Henry VIII, A Proclamation Ordeined and Made by the Kinges Highness (London: Thomas Barthelet, 1544); J. F. Larkin (ed.), Stuart Royal Proclamations, vol. II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), pp. 408–11. 38 Larkin (ed.), Stuart Royal Proclamations, vol. II, pp. 434–6. 39 Larkin (ed.), Stuart Royal Proclamations, vol. II, pp. 444–6.

Notes

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40 For food moving away from rural areas to cities in times of dearth see: P. P. Viazzo, ‘Food Security, Safety and Crisis’, in B. Kümin (ed.), A Cultural History of Food in the Early Modern Age (London: Berg, 2012), pp. 47–64, esp. pp. 55–6. 41 J. S. Cockburn (ed.), Calendar of Assize Records, Kent Indictments, Elizabeth I (London: HMSO, 1979), ref. 2348. 42 See, for example, the court cases between 1596 and early 1598 in J. S. Cockburn (ed.), Calendar of Assize Records, Surrey Indictments, Elizabeth I (London: HMSO, 1980): J. S. Cockburn (ed.), Calendar of Assize Records, Essex Indictments, Elizabeth I (London: HMSO, 1978); and Cockburn (ed.), Calendar of Assize Records, Hertfordshire Indictments. 43 Beaver, ‘Great Deer Massacre’, p. 193. 44 Moryson, An Itinerary written by Fynes Moryson gent, p. 150. 45 WCRO, CR136v140, Newdigate, see inside front cover. 46 Munby (ed.), Early Stuart, p. 83; Harland (ed.), The House and Farm Accounts of the Shuttleworths, p. 48, 53. 47 This was the view of many physicians, including that of Henry Butts. Thomas Moffett agreed that lean meat was ‘far worse’ than fat, but thought also that ‘mean is best’. See: Butts, Dyets dry dinner consisting of eight seuerall courses, fols J1, J8; Moffett, Healths Improvement, p. 40. 48 Harland (ed.), The House and Farm Accounts of the Shuttleworths, p. 185. 49 The Vernons established their deer park near to Nether Haddon in the fifteenthcentury; see A. Wood, The Politics of Social Conflict: The Peak Country 1520–1770 (Cambridge: CUP, 1999), p. 245. 50 Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance, p. 158. 51 The ‘vulgar sort’ at that time meant common people. The term was a catch-all phrase that included all those in Harrison’s lowest tier of society. 52 Markham, Hungers prevention; J. R. Dasent (ed.), Acts of the Privy Council of England, vol. 36 (London: HMSO, 1932), see entries for 24 September and 29 November 1621. 53 England and Wales, James I, A Proclamation for the Apprehension of Henry Field (London, 1623), in Stuart Royal Proclamations, vol. I, p. 577. 54 England and Wales, James I, By the King a Proclamation for the Apprehension of Edward Ekins (London: Bonham Norton and Iohn Bill, 1624). 55 This is evident from entries in the aforementioned Calendar of Assize Records for Kent, Essex and Surrey. 56 The word ‘lewd’ in this context refers to common or uneducated people. 57 J. R. Dasent (ed.), Acts of the Privy Council of England, vol. 15 (London: HMSO, 1897), see entries for 15 April and 14 July 1587. 58 P. L. Hughes and J. F. Larkin (eds), Tudor Royal Proclamations, vol. II (London: Yale University Press, 1969), pp. 42–3.

206

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59 Wiesner, ‘Beyond Women and the Family’, pp. 311–21, 313; Ben-Amos, ‘Women Apprentices in the Trades and Crafts of Early Modern Bristol’, pp. 227–52. 60 G. Walker, ‘Keeping it in the Family: Crime and the Early Modern Household’, in H. Berry and E. Foyster (eds), The Family in Early Modern England (Cambridge: CUP, 2007), pp. 67–95, 76; G. Walker, ‘Women, Theft and the World of Stolen Goods’, in J. Kermode and G. Walker (eds), Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 81–105. 61 Slack (ed.), Poverty, p. 37. 62 E. Foyster, ‘At the Limits of Liberty: Married Women and Confinement in Eighteenth-Century England’, Continuity and Change 17:1 (2002), pp. 39–62, 46. 63 Larkin (ed.), Stuart Royal Proclamations, vol. II, p. 89. 64 Manning, Hunters and Poachers, pp. 135–6, 152–4. 65 Edelen (ed.), William Harrison, pp. 118–20. 66 F. Fernandez-Armesto, Food: A History (London: Macmillan, 2001), p. 126; Mennell, All Manners, p. 131. 67 See, for example, Drummond, The Englishman’s Food, p. 36. 68 Mennell, All Manners, p. 53; Freedman, Out of the East, p. 3; C. Dyer, ‘English Diet in the Late Middle Ages’, in T. H. Aston, P. R. Coss, C. Dyer and J. Thirsk (eds), Social Relations and Ideas: Essays in Honour of R.H. Hilton (Cambridge: CUP, 1983), pp. 191–216, 194. 69 Freedman, Out of the East, pp. 3, 46, 216–17, 220–3. See also Thirsk, Food in Early Modern England, pp. 316–17. 70 After having normally accounted for up to 5 per cent of the food expenditure of the well-to-do in medieval times (Dyer, ‘English Diet’, p. 194), expenditure on spices relative to overall disbursement appears to have fallen slightly in the 1540s before rising to 8.6 per cent in the 1630s (all data includes purchases of sugar). 71 Bowden, ‘Agricultural Prices, Farm Profits and Rents’, pp. 593–695, 599. 72 Woodward, Men at Work, p. 275. 73 Dawson, Plenti and Grase, p. 174, 187, 195. 74 WCRO, CR136a37, Newdigate; CKS, U269/A2/1, Sackville. 75 For a discussion on the values of fruit, apparent perversity towards dietary advice, and how advice and eating practices could be reconciled, see: Lloyd, ‘Dietary Advice’, pp. 553–86. 76 Munby (ed.), Early Stuart, p. 98–9. 77 Moffett, Healths Improvement, 202. See also the dietary advice offered by Butts, Dyets Dry Dinner, fol. E1. This summarizes the general medical feeling about dates. 78 Munby (ed.), Early Stuart, p. 173. 79 Munby (ed.), Early Stuart, pp. 5–62; Gray, Devon Household Accounts, pp. 7–103.

Notes 80

81 82

83 84 85 86

87

88

89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101

207

For the prosperity of lawyers see: W. R. Prest, The Inns of Court under Elizabeth I and the Early Stuarts (London: Longman, 1972), pp. 22, 47; W. R. Prest, Rise of the Barristers: A Social History of the English Bar, 1590–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 129. Freedman, Out of the East, p. 43. C. H. H. Wake, ‘Changing Patterns of Europe’s Pepper and Spice Imports ca 1400–1700’, Journal of European Economic History 8:2 (1979), pp. 361–403; Appleby, ‘Consumption in Early Modern Social Thought’, pp. 165–6. Harland (ed.), The House and Farm Accounts of the Shuttleworths, pp. 20, 104. An increase in the frequency of spice purchases is evident from p. 139 onward. Raines (ed.), The Stanley Papers, 2, p. 2. Adams, Household Accounts and Disbursement Books, pp. 92–6, 139–48. P. C. S. Smythe (ed.), Household Expenses of The Princess Elizabeth During her Residence at Hatfield, original series, 55 (Cambridge: Camden Society, 1853). R. Laneham, A Letter Whearin Part of the Entertainment vntoo the Queenz Maiesty at Killingwoorth Castl (London: S.N, 1575), p. 68, 73. See also: Lloyd, ‘Dietary Advice’, pp. 553–4, 559. Emmison, Tudor Secretary, p. 301; A. D. Wall (ed.), Two Elizabethan Women: Correspondence of Joan and Maria Thynne 1575–1611 (Devizes: Wiltshire Record Society, 38, 1983), p. 6. Thirsk, Food in Early Modern England, p. 210; Mennell, All Manners, p. 56. J. Fitzherbert, Here begynneth a newe tracte or treatyse moost profytable for all (London: Rycharde Pynson, 1530), fol. 53. Mun, A Discourse of Trade from England unto the East-Indies, pp. 33–53. J. G. Nichols (ed.), The Diary of Henry Machyn, p. 99. Mun, A discourse, pp. 33–53. Mun, A discourse, pp. 34–5. Tannahill, Food in History, p. 225; H. Kamen, European Society 1500–1700 (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 75. R. Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations (London: R. H. Evans, 1599–1600), see chapter on ‘Whale killing, the English voyages’. Calendar of Assize Records, Kent Indictments, Elizabeth I, ref. 2361; Surrey Indictments, James I (London, 1982), ref. 1328. Calendar of Assize Records, Essex Indictments, James I (London, 1981), ref. 522. Calendar of Assize Records, Kent Indictments, Elizabeth I, ref. 70; Hertfordshire Indictments, Elizabeth I, ref. 106. Calendar of Assize Records, Hertfordshire Indictments, Elizabeth I, ref. 577. For a discussion on the early modern market economy, see K.Wrightson, Earthly Necessities, p. 22.

208 102

103 104 105

106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113

114 115 116

117

118 119 120

121

Notes See Mennell, All Manners, pp. 64–5. Mennell cites Elizabeth David’s view that there was a significant time lag between kitchen practices and their representation in cookery books. See also: Appelbaum, ‘Rhetoric and Epistemology’, pp. 1–35 for a discussion on early modern cookery books and the symbolic meaning of meals. Anon, A Propre new booke, for example see fols A6, B5 Anon, A good huswifes handmaide, fols 21, 33; T. Dawson, The good hus-wives iewell (London: Edward Allde, 1597), p. 52. For a discussion on tensions between maintaining culinary tradition and desires for change, see Cowan, ‘New Words, New Tastes: Food Fashions after the Renaissance’, pp. 197–232. G. Markham, The English House-wife (London: Anne Griffin, 1637), pp. 88–90. Anon, Ladies Cabinet Opened, fol. 3. Murrell, Murrels Two Books of Cookerie, see, for example, pp. 15, 16, 57. Freedman, Out of the East, p. 20. Murrell, Murrels Two Books. Grey, A True Gentlewomans Delight. W. M., The Compleat Cook. Thirsk, Alternative Agriculture, p. 36; F. J. Fisher, ‘The Development of the London Food Market’, Economic History Review 5:2 (1935), pp. 46–64, 52–8; Drummond, Englishman’s Food, pp. 95–6. M. van der Veen, ‘When is Food a Luxury?’, World Archaeology 34:3 (2003), pp. 405–27, 411, 415. Wilson, Food and Drink in Britain, p. 210; Mennell, All Manners, pp. 67, 84. See Peck, ‘Luxury and War’, pp. 1–23, 2, 5. See also comments on and examples of social differentiation expressed through food consumption in Woodward (ed.), The Farming and Memorandum Books of Henry Best of Elmswell, 1642, MB 5; Fuller, The Holy State; Edelen, William Harrison, p. 129. See, for example, J. C. Riley, ‘A Widening Market in Consumer Goods’, in E. Cameron (ed.), Early Modern Europe: An Oxford History (Oxford: OUP, 2001), pp. 233–64, 260. Edelen, William Harrison, pp. 131–2. For the importance of manners see Gillingham, ‘From Civilitas to Civility’, pp. 267–89. J. Stow, A Survay of London (London: John Windet, 1598), pp. 60–1. See also B. Kümin, ‘Eating Out in Early Modern Europe’, in B. Kümin (ed.), A Cultural History of Food in the Early Modern Age (London: Berg, 2012), pp. 87–101, esp. pp. 89–91. C. A. Wilson, ‘The Evolution of the Banquet Course: Some Medicinal, Culinary and Social Aspects’, in C. A. Wilson (ed.), Banquetting Stuffe: The Fare and Social

Notes

122 123 124 125 126

127 128 129

130 131 132 133 134 135

136 137

209

Background of the Tudor and Stuart Banquet (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), pp. 9–35, 11–19. WCRO, CR136v140, Newdigate; The Newdigate family is described as an ‘uppermiddling gentry’ by Larminie, Wealth, Kinship and Culture, p. 17. For the authoritative and culinary roles of gentlewomen see chapter six. Harland (ed.), The House and Farm Accounts of the Shuttleworths, p. 191, 196. This sweet box can be seen at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, catalogue no. M. 665–1910. See, for example, G. Markham, Countrey Contentments (London: R. Jackson, 1623), pp. 70–1; J. Murrell, A Daily Exercise for Ladies and Gentlewomen (London: T. Snodham, 1617), recipes 26–38; Anon, A Closet for Ladies and Gentlewomen (London: F. Kingston, 1608), pp. 7–14. Wilson, ‘The Evolution of the Banquet Course’, p. 21. Fuller, The Holy State, p. 154. K. F. Hall, ‘Culinary Spaces, Colonial Spaces: The Gendering of Sugar in the Seventeenth Century’, in V. Traub, M. L. Kaplan and D. Callaghan (eds), Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture (Cambridge: CUP, 1996), pp. 168–9. C. Williams (ed.), Thomas Platter’s Travels in England 1599 (London: Cape, 1937), pp. 158–9. Markham, English House-Wife, pp. 122–31. Wilson, ‘The Evolution of the Banquet Course’, p. 26. WCRO, CR136v140, Newdigate, see week ending Saturday 26 March 1636. Batho (ed.), The Household Papers, p. 14; Adams, Household Accounts and Disbursement Books, p. 136. For the making and keeping of medicinal cordials and tinctures at home, and the use of commonplace books in home healthcare, see: E. Leong, ‘Making Medicines in the Early Modern Household’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 82:1 (2008), pp. 145–68, 159–60; E. Leong and S. Pennell, ‘Recipe Collections and the Currency of Medical Knowledge in the Early Modern “Medical Marketplace”’, in M. S. P. Jenner and P. Wallace (eds), Medicine and the Market in England and its Colonies, c.1450–c.1850 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), pp. 133–52, 134–5; M. E. Fissell, ‘The Medical Marketplace, The Patient, and The Absence of Medical Ethics in Early Modern Europe and North America’, in R. B. Baker and L. B. McCuulloch (eds), The Cambridge World History of Medical Ethics (Cambridge: CUP, 2009), pp. 531–9, 533–4. See also: W. Wall, ‘Distillation: Transformations in and out of the Kitchen’, in J. Fitzpatrick (ed.), Renaissance Food from Rabelais to Shakespeare: Culinary Readings and Culinary Histories (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 89–104, 93–4. A pottle was a container with a capacity of four pints (approx. 2.3 litres). Calendar of Assize Records, Surrey Indictments, James I, ref, 816.

210 138 139 140 141 142 143 144

145 146 147 148

149

Notes Murrell, Murrels Two Books of Cookerie, p. 25, 45. Anon, A good huswifes handmaide, p. 17. A. W., A book of cookrye Very necessary for all such as delight therin (London: Edward Allde, 1591), fol. 21. T. Dawson, The second part of the good hus-wiues iewell (London, Edward White, 1597), p. 13. Grey, A true gentlewomans delight, p. 19. Lloyd, ‘The Changing Status of Offal’, pp. 61–75. While offal is identified as a ‘working class, food in publications including: Francatelli, A Plain Cookery Book for the Working Classes; and Roberts ‘WorkingClass Standards of Living in Barrow and Lancaster, 1890–1914’, pp. 306–21, 313; a negative attitude towards this type of food at the end of the seventeenth century can be seen in Thirsk, Food in Early Modern England, p. 239. Murrell, A new booke of cookerie, p. 22. Partridge, The Treasury of Commodious Conceits, chap. 2. Freedman, Out of the East, p. 47. Markham, English House-wife, p. 127. Gum dragon, or tragacanth, is a colorless, tasteless gel obtained from some species of Astragalus shrubs, and used as a thickening and stablizing agent in catering. See, for example, Murrell, Murrels Two Books, fol. A2.

Chapter 6 1

2

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

England and Wales, James I, By the King a Proclamation Commanding Noblemen, Knights and Gentlemen of Qualitie, to Repaire to their Mansion Houses in the Countrey (London: Bonham Norton and Iohn Bill, 1622). For discussions on gifting see: I. K. Ben-Amos, ‘Gifts and Favors: Informal Support in Early Modern England’, Journal of Modern History, 72:2 (2000), pp. 295–338; Heal, ‘Food Gifts’, pp. 41–70. WCRO, CR136a37, Newdigate, 1614–17, 1621–5 fols 4, 9–13, 17–26, 32. See, for example, McKay, ‘English Diarists’, pp. 191–212, 191–2. Halliwell-Phillips (ed.), The Private Diary of Dr. John Dee, entry for 9 August 1592. S. Bond, ‘John Dee and Christopher Saxton’s Survey of Manchester (1596)’, Northern History, 42:2 (2005), pp. 275–92, 277, 288. Snell (ed), ‘A Devonshire Yeoman’s Diary’, pp. 255–8, 258; Bantock, The Earlier Smyths, p. 41. Bruce (ed.), Diary of John Manningham, p. 22. Munby (ed.), Early Stuart, pp. 13, 20–1. Gray (ed.), Devon Household Accounts, pp. 28, 31.

Notes 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35 36

211

Heal, ‘Food Gifts’, pp. 41–70; WCRO, CR 136a37, Newdigate, fols 51–89. Gray (ed.), Devon Household Accounts, p. 3. Winchester, Tudor Family, p. 136. WCRO, CR 136v140, Newdigate, see extraordinary expenses for 1638 at the end of the accounts book. Munby (ed.), Early Stuart, p. 167. Heal, ‘Food Gifts’, pp. 48–9. D. Serjeantson, ‘Birds: Food and a Mark of Status’, in C. M. Woolgar, D. Serjeantson and T. Waldron (eds), Food in Medieval England: Diet and Nutrition (Oxford: OUP, 2006), pp. 131–47, 132. Sykes, ‘The Dynamics of Status Symbols’, pp. 82–105, 92. Munby (ed.), Early Stuart, pp, 35, 72; Larkin (ed.), Stuart Royal Proclamations, vol. II, pp. 408–11; England and Wales, Henry VIII, A Proclamation Ordained. Munby (ed.), Early Stuart, p. 39. Adams, Household Accounts and Disbursement Books, p. 93. WCRO, CR 136 v 140, Newdigate, see extraordinary expenses at the end of the accounts book; Munby (ed.), Early Stuart, see, for example, p. 165. T. T. Lewis (ed.), Letters, Wife of Sir Robert Harley of Brampton Bryan, Knight of the Bath, Original Series, vol. 58 (Cambridge: Camden Society, 1853), p. 3. Lewis (ed.), Letters, pp. 10–11. Lewis (ed.), Letters, p. 53. T. Cogan, The Haven of Health Chiefly Made for the Comfort of Students, and Consequently for All Those That Haue a Care of Their Health (London: Thomas Orwin, 1588), chapter 2. Lewis (ed.), Letters, pp. 29, 31. Lewis (ed.), Letters, pp. 59, 70. J. Moody (ed.), The Private Life of an Elizabethan Lady: The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby, 1599–1605 (Stroud: Sutton, 1998), pp. xvi–xvii. See also the entry for 31 July 1600. K. O. Acheson, The Diary of Anne Clifford: A Critical Edition 1616–1619 (New York, NY: Garland, 1995), p. 86. Wall (ed.), Two Elizabethan Women, p. 20. Adams, Household Accounts and Disbursement Books, p. 65. Douglas and Isherwood, The World of Goods, p. 83; Goody, Cooking, Cuisine and Class, p. 31. Douglas, Implicit Meanings, pp. 249–51. For a discussion on food’s modern symbolic role see: Cramer, Greene and Walters (eds), Food as Communication/Communication as Food. M. Visser, The Rituals of Dinner: The Origins, Evolution, Eccentricities and Meaning of Table Manners (London: Viking, 1992), p. 84; P. Withington, ‘Company and Sociability in Early Modern England’, Social History, 32:3 (2007), pp. 291–307, 294.

212

Notes

37 C. Grignon, ‘Commensality and Social Morphology: An Essay of Typology’, in P. Scholliers (ed.), Food Drink and Identity (Oxford: Berg, 2001), pp. 23–33, 24. 38 See J. MacClancy, Consuming Culture: Why You Eat What You Eat (London: Chapman, 1992), p. 108–9. 39 W. B. Smith, ‘Food and Deception in the Discourse on Heresy and Witchcraft in Bamberg’, in T. J. Tomasik and J. M. Vitulio (eds), At the Table: Metaphorical and Material Cultures of Food in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Turnhout, Antwerp: Brepols, 2007), pp. 107–22, 109. 40 Raines (ed.), The Stanley Papers, pp. 8–9; P. Hentzner, ‘Journey Into England (1598)’, in W. B. Rye (ed.), England as seen by Foreigners (London: J. R. Smith, 1865), p. 106. 41 A Flather, Gender and Space in Early Modern England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007), pp. 51, 62. 42 J. S. Cockburn, ‘Patterns of Violence in English Society: Homicide in Kent 1560–1985’, Past and Present, 130 (1991), pp. 70–106, 80. 43 J. Binns (ed.), The Memoirs and Memorials of Sir Hugh Cholmley of Whitby 1600– 1657, vol. 153, Boydell (Woodbridge: Yorkshire Archaeological Society, 2000), pp. 4–5. 44 WCRO, CR136v140, Newdigate, see week ending 31 December 1640; Woodward (ed.), Farming and Memorandum Books, FB157; M. Dawson, Plenti and Grase: Food and Drink in a Sixteenth-Century Household (Totnes: Prospect Books, 2007), p. 103. 45 Carrington (ed.), ‘Selections’, pp. 62–81, 67, 69. 46 Flour quality ratios produced from the wheat purchased each week and the number and status of visitors to Quickswood indicate that this was usually the case. 47 Acheson, Diary of Anne Clifford, esp. pp. 86, 94, 96. 48 Moody (ed.), Private Life, pp. xvi–xvii. 49 Moody (ed.), Private Life, see entry for 17 October 1601. 50 Moody (ed.), Private Life, see entries for: 10 October 1599, 18 December 1599 and 6 August 1600. 51 Heal, Hospitality, p. 68; Dawson, Plenti and Grase, pp. 267–9. 52 Moody (ed.), Private Life, see entries for December 1599. 53 Heal, Hospitality, p. 384. 54 See: C. Peters, ‘Single Women in Early Modern England: Attitudes and Expectations’, Continuity and Change, 12:3 (1997), pp. 325–45, 325–6, 340; E. Longfellow, ‘Public, Private, and the Household in Early Seventeenth-Century England’, Journal of British Studies, 45:2 (2006), pp. 313–34. For examples of council and court records showing that relatively poor women procured food and drink, either for themselves or others, see Chapter 5.

Notes

213

55 W. Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties Eight Treatises (London: Iohn Haviland, 1622), fols A1-2; Williams (ed.), Thomas Platter’s Travels, p. 182. 56 See the discussion on this issue in the introduction. 57 Magagna, ‘Food and Politics’, pp. 65–86, esp. p. 76. 58 See the consumption patterns in these sets of accounts: Batho (ed.), The Household Papers; WCRO, CR 136v140, Newdigate. 59 Three typical proclamations are: England and Wales. Elizabeth I, By the Queene, the Queenes Maiestie; England and Wales, James I, By the King, a Proclamation for restraint of killing, dressing, and eating of flesh in Lent, or on fish dayes (London: Bonham Norton and Iohn Bill, 1626); England and Wales, Charles I, By the King, a proclamation commanding a due execution of lawes, concerning Lent and fasting dayes (London: Robert Barker, 1632). 60 WCRO, CR 136v140, Newdigate. Purchases during Lent 1637 and 1638 show that, apart from one salmon and one trout, respectively, very little fish was purchased. In the same periods, as much meat as usual reached the Arbury Hall kitchen. See also: Munby (ed.), Early Stuart, pp. 79–158. 61 Munby (ed.), Early Stuart, pp. 55–61. 62 Gray (ed.), Devon Household Accounts, pp. 3–103. 63 Harland (ed.), The House and Farm Accounts of the Shuttleworths, pp. 43, 50; Emmison, Tudor Secretary, pp. 139–40. 64 Lewis (ed.), Letters, pp. 29, 31. 65 W. D. Cooper (ed.), The Expenses of the Judges of Assize Riding the Western and the Oxford Circuits, temp. Elizabeth, 1596–1601, from the MS Account Book of Thomas Walmsley, One of the Justices of the Common Pleas, Miscellany, Original Series, vol. 73 (Cambridge: Camden Society, 1858), p. 6. 66 T. Becon, A Fruitful Treatise of Fasting (London: Ihon Day, 1551), chapter 10. 67 Murrell, A New Booke of Cookerie, 11–12; Markham, Countrey Contentments, pp. 100–1; T. Dawson, The Good Huswifes Iewell (London: Iohn Wolfe, 1587), fol. 29. 68 Mark Dawson has also noted this trend, and says that the Willoughbys’ strict observance of fasting-days was in decline towards the end of the century. He notes also that the family appears to have had fasts observed by their servants. See: Dawson, Plenti and Grase, pp. 222–3. 69 For change and continuity in the observance of the festive calendar see: R. Hutton, The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain (Oxford: OUP, 1996), esp. pp. 244–8, 348–51; D. Cressy, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1989), esp. pp. 6–9. 70 For the importance of generosity and hospitality see: Thirsk, Food in Early Modern England, p. 210; Heal, Hospitality, pp. 70–4; Heal and Holmes, The Gentry in England, p. 288.

214

Notes

71 WCRO, CR 136v140, Newdigate. This seafood was purchased in the week ending 29 December 1638. 72 WCRO, CR 136v140, Newdigate, 17 December 1636 to 5 January 1637; Munby (ed.), Early Stuart, pp. 29–35, 90–4. 73 A quarter of a porker (a pig that had been fattened) cost around 4s 2d in the late 1630s. 74 Emmison, Tudor Secretary, pp. 144–5. 75 Gray (ed.), Devon Household Accounts, pp. 27–8. 76 Thirsk, Alternative Agriculture, pp. 10–11. 77 Murrell, A New Booke of Cookerie, p. 9. 78 For example: Anon, A Good Huswifes Handmaide, fols 15, 22, 33; Murrell, A New Booke of Cookerie, fol. 7; Anon, The Ladies Cabinet Opened, fol. 3. 79 WCRO, CR 136v140, Newdigate, see especially weeks ending 21 December 1639 and 2 January 1641. 80 Munby (ed.), Early Stuart, pp. 94–7. 81 Munby (ed.), Early Stuart, pp. 29–35. 82 Gray (ed.), Devon Household Accounts, p. 83. 83 Woolgar, ‘Meat and Dairy Products’, pp. 88–101, 93–4. 84 Lloyd, ‘The Changing Status of Offal’, pp. 61–75. 85 Newdigate, CR136v140, see week ending 4 January 1639. 86 Newdigate, CR 136v140, week ending 30 December 1637; Radcliffe, p. 96. 87 CKS, U269/A2/1, Sackville Accounts, Christmas and New Year 1603–1604; Munby (ed.), Early Stuart, pp. 31–5. 88 Murrell, Murrels Two Books of Cookerie, p. 35. 89 Schlesinger, In the Wake of Columbus, p. 94. 90 WCRO, CR136v140, Newdigate, see weeks ending 28 December 1639 and 4 January 1640. 91 E. Grey, Countess of Kent, A Choice Manual of Rare and Select Secrets in Physick and Chirurgery (London: W.I., Gent., 1653), pp. 117–18. 92 Munby (ed.), Early Stuart, p. 97. 93 WCRO, CR136v140, Newdigate, week ending 2 January 1641. 94 WCRO, CR136v140, Newdigate, see the single entry for the fortnight ending 2 January 1641. 95 Gray (ed.), Devon Household Accounts, p. 103. 96 Tracy Thong has noted that in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, servants clearing the dining table ready for the banqueting course had the opportunity to help themselves to leftovers. She also notes that in The Roaring Girl by Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker, those of low social status had to seize the opportunity to partake of banqueting stuff as and when they could. See: Thong, ‘Performances of the Banquet Course’, pp. 107–25, 114, 116.

Notes 97 98 99 100

101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111

112

113

114 115 116

215

See Chapter 5. Grataroli, A Direction for the Health, fols G-G4. Heal, Hospitality, pp. 72–4. D. Cressy, ‘Purification, Thanksgiving and the Churching of Women in PostReformation England’, Past & Present, 141 (1993), pp. 106–46, 113–14; A. Rowlands, ‘The Conditions of Life for the Masses’, in E. Cameron (ed.), Early Modern Europe: An Oxford History (Oxford: OUP, 2001), pp. 31–62, 39–40. Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, pp. 84–5. P. Clark, British Clubs and Societies c. 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational World (New York, NY: OUP, 2000), pp. 29–30. Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, pp. 166–7. For examples of excessive eating at weddings see: Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, pp. 352–5. Nichols (ed.), Diary of Henry Machyn, p. 70. Nichols (ed.), Diary of Henry Machyn. See, for example, pp. 5–6, 25, 70. Nichols (ed.), Diary of Henry Machyn, p. 17. Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, p. 444. Nichols (ed.), Diary of Henry Machyn, p. 295. C. Gittings, Death, Burial and the Individual in Early Modern England (London: Croom Helm, 1984), pp. 154–9. Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, p. 577; E. Goldring, ‘ The Funeral of Sir Philip Sidney and the Politics of Elizabethan Festival’, in J. R. Mulryne and E. Goldring (eds), Court Festivals of the European Renaissance: Art, Politics and Performance (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002).p. 204; Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, p. 445; Heal and Holmes, Gentry in England, p. 140. Examples of orders that indicate diminishing hospitality include: Hughes and Larkin (eds), Tudor Royal Proclamations, vol. II, pp. 171–2; Larkin (ed.), Stuart Royal Proclamations, p. 169. See, for example, England and Wales, James I, By the King, a proclamation commanding the repaire of noblemen and gentlemen into their seuerall countreys (London: Robert Barker, 1614); James I, By the King, a proclamation commanding noblemen. See also: Heal, Hospitality, pp. 143–4. F. J. Fisher, ‘The Development of London as a Centre of Conspicuous Consumption in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th Series, 30 (1948), pp. 37–50, 40, 43, 46. Lewis (ed.), Letters, pp. 29–30. England and Wales, Charles I, By the King. A Proclamation Commanding the Repair of Noblemen, Knights, and Gentlemen (London: Robert Barker, 1629). A list of food items thought to have been included at this banquet may be found in Gray (ed.), Devon Household Accounts, p. xxxvi.

216 117 118 119 120

121 122 123 124 125

126 127 128 129 130 131

132

133

134

Notes Roberts (ed.), Diary of Walter Yonge, p. 98. Whiteway, William Whiteway of Dorchester, pp. 138–9. Heal, ‘Food Gifts’, p. 61. J. Wilson, P. Howard and A. Hickey (eds), Country and City: Wymondham, Norwich and Eaton in 16th and 17th Centuries (Norwich: Norfolk Record Society, 70, 2006), p. 43. Cooper (ed.), The Expenses of the Judges, pp. 4, 6. See also the lists of gifts given to the judges throughout the set of accounts. Cooper (ed.), The Expenses of the Judges, pp. 11–14. Butts, Dyets Dry Dinner, chapter 3. Butts, Dyets Dry Dinner, fol. A2. Dasent (ed.), Acts of the Privy Council vol. 26, pp. 149, 323, 327, 335, 383–6, 429. For a discussion about the Privy Council’s concern for the poor at this time within the context of a campaign for hospitality see: S. Hindle, ‘Dearth, Fasting and Alms: The Campaign for General Hospitality in Late Elizabethan England’, Past and Present, 172 (2001), pp. 44–86. Pelling, The Common Lot, p. 41. See Chapter 5 for examples of food-theft cases and how they were dealt with. Cockburn (ed.), Calendar of Assize Records, Essex Indictments, Elizabeth I, ref. 2837. For a discussion on alehouses, alehouse keepers and customers see: Clark, The English Alehouse, esp. pp. 73–7, 175. Carlin, ‘What Say you to a Piece of Beef and Mustard?’, pp. 199–217, 210–16. Braddick, State Formation, pp. 1–3, 136–79; Shepard and Withington, Communities in Early Modern England, pp. 1–15; Withington, ‘Public Discourse, Corporate Citizenship, and State Formation’, pp. 1016–38. See also: Hindle, The State and Social Change, pp. 66–115. For example see: England and Wales, James I, By the King, a Proclamation Concerning Ale-Houses. For a discussion on legislative measures affecting public houses see J. Hunter, ‘English Inns, Taverns, Alehouses and Brandy Shops: The Legislative Framework, 1495–1797’, in B. Kümin and B. A. Tlusty (eds), The World of the Tavern: Public Houses in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 65–82. E. H. Bates (ed.), Quarter Sessions for the County of Somerset, vol. 1 (London: Somerset Record Society, 1907); E. H. Bates (ed.), Quarter Sessions for the County of Somerset, vol. 2 (London: Somerset Record Society, 1908), pp. 160, 248. J. C. Jeaffreson (ed. ), Middlesex County Records vol. 2: Indictments, Recognizances … Orders and Memoranda, temp. James I (London: Middlesex County Records Society, 1887), pp. 33, 76, 96, 120, 129, 133, 140–1.

Notes 135

136 137 138

139

140 141 142 143

144 145

146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156

217

S. C. Ratcliff and H. C. Johnson (eds), Warwick County Records (vol.1): Quarter Sessions Order Book, Easter 1625 to Trinity 1637 (Warwick: L. Edgar Stephens, 1935), p. 17. See, for example, Essex, At a General Assembly of the Justices of the Peace (Cambridge: P. Legge, 1608). Ratcliff and Johnson, Warwick County Records (vol.1), pp. 21, 22. England and Wales, Charles I, ‘Orders and Directions, Together with a Commission for the Better Administration of Justice and More Perfect Information of His Majesty’, in Book of Orders (London: Robert Barker, 1630). See other cases in S. C. Ratcliff and H. C. Johnson (eds), Warwick County Records (vol.2): Quarter Sessions Order Book, Michaelmas 1637 to Epiphany 1650 (Warwick: L. Edgar Stephens, 1936), p. 22. Ratcliff and Johnson, Warwick County Records (vol.1), p. 249. Ratcliff and Johnson, Warwick County Records (vol.2), pp. 20, 46. Ratcliff and Johnson, Warwick County Records (vol.2), p. 49. For differences between taverns and alehouses see J. Pennington, ‘Inns and Taverns of Western Sussex, England, 1550–1700: A Documentary and Architectural Investigation’, in B. Kumin and B. A. Tlusty (eds), The World of the Tavern: Public Houses in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 116–35, esp. p. 117; Middlesex County Records, vol. 2, p. 129. Kümin, ‘Public Houses and their Patrons in Early Modern Europe’, pp. 44–62. Letter from ‘Edward Hext to Lord Burghley’ (1596): in R. H. Tawney & Eileen Power (eds), Tudor Economic Documents, vol. 2 (London: Longman, 1924), p. 342, 344. Cooper (ed.), The Expenses of the Judges, p. 13. Roberts (ed.), Diary of Walter Yonge, p. 98. Whiteway, William Whiteway, p. 76. Roberts (ed.), Diary of Walter Yonge, p. 98. Roberts (ed.), Diary of Walter Yonge, p. 89. Acts of the Privy Council of England, vol. 26, see entry for 25 December 1596. Mavericke, Saint Peters Chaine Consisting of Eight Golden Linckes, pp. 105–8. See, for example, Mennell, All Manners of Food, pp. 104–5; P. Singer and J. Mason, The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter (New York: Rodale, 2006), p. 3. T. Becon, A New Postil Conteinyng Most Godly and Learned Sermons (London: Thomas Marshe and John Kingston, 1566), p. 59. J. Caldwell, A Sermon Preached Before the Right Honorable Earle of Darbie (London: Thomas East, 1577). L. Andrewes, Scala Coeli: Nineteene Sermons Concerning Prayer (London: N. Okes, 1611), p. 170; T. Adams, Mystical Bedlam, or the World of Mad-Men (London: George Purslowe, 1615), p. 48.

218 157 158 159 160 161 162

163

Notes N. Byfield, A Commentary: Or, Sermons Vpon the Second Chapter of the First Epistle of Saint Peter (London: Humfrey Lownes, 1623), p. 406. J. Harris, The Destruction of Sodome: A Sermon Preached at a Publicke Fast (London: Humphrey Lownes and R. Young, 1629), p. 37. Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses, chapter: ‘Gluttonie and drunkennesse’. J. Winthrop, Experiencia, http://www.millersville.edu/~winthrop/jwexp.html (accessed 3 September 2009). Coward, The Stanleys, Lords Stanley and Earls of Derby, 1385–1672, p. 85. Drummond, The Englishman’s Food, pp. 59–60; F. Heal, ‘The Archbishops of Canterbury and the Practice of Hospitality’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 33 (1982), pp. 544–63, 560–1. For charitable giving see: Ben-Amos, ‘Gifts and Favors’, p. 331; I. K. Ben-Amos, ‘“Good Works” and Social Ties: Helping the Migrant Poor in Early Modern England’, in M. C. McClendon, J. P. Ward and M. MacDonald (eds), Protestant Identities: Religion, Society and Self-Fashioning in Post-Reformation England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 125–40, 125–6, 139. C. Dalechamp, Christian Hospitality, pp. 59–61.

Conclusion 1 2 3 4 5

Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance, pp. 186–7, 271. Edelen (ed.), William Harrison, pp. 131–2. Edelen (ed.), William Harrison, pp. 123–39; Fuller, The Holy State, pp. 113–21, 153–4. Slack (ed.), Poverty, p. 11. Perrin (ed.), Boteler’s Dialogues, p. 65.

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Index acorns, famine food 37, 41 Adams, Thomas 173 ale (see also beer) as alms 38, 106 drinking 16, 40, 60, 66, 78–9, 100, 116, 162–3 licensing 168–71 almond 122 alms 32–3, 52 Andrewes, Lancelot 173 angelica 134, 136 apple 63, 121, 122, 123, 124, 142, 144, 180 aqua vita 60, 136 Archbishop of Canterbury 4, 39–40, 172, 175 of York 172, 175 army provisions 14, 19, 40–4, 48, 51, 56–7, 70 artichoke 86, 98, 99, 160, 166, 171 Ashton Court 39, 66 asparagus 160 Atherstone 169–70 bacon (see also pork) 42, 60, 143 banquetting 19, 30, 54, 83, 118, 133–9, 161–3, 166, 172–6, 180 barberry 157 barley 41, 48, 62, 66, 82, 167 Bath 80, 87, 88, 90 beans (see also legumes) 40, 41, 44, 56, 80–1 Becon, Thomas 154, 173 beef home rearing 62, 79 as a luxurious food 129, 131, 137, 138–9 nutritional qualities 39, 55, 70, 107, 115 as a staple 39–40, 42–4, 50–3, 79–80, 85, 106, 127, 153, 164, 167 beer (see also ale) as alms 33 brewing 42, 45, 52, 62, 66

drinking 14, 39–43, 47, 51, 54, 56, 60, 78–80, 101, 162–4 licensing 169–70 beggars 3, 38, 57, 111 Berkshire 161–3 Best, Henry 38, 51, 59–61, 63, 74, 80, 82, 128, 162, 178 biscuit 43, 163 blacksmiths 165 Boorde, Andrew 70 Braham, Humfrey 29, 57, 73 bread household 82, 150 mancheat 82, 150 rye 39, 41, 80, 82 spiced 65, 82–3, 164, 171 wheat 40, 41, 82 Bristol 39, 66, 117 broom 109, 110 Buckingham, 1st Duke of see Villiers, George Bullein, William 56, 71, 73 Bury, Lancashire 39 butchers 4, 41, 57, 63, 88, 153 Butler, Admiral Nathaniel 44, 180 butter cooking with 93, 115, 129–30, 137, 139, 157, 159, 161 making 52, 79 nutritional value 56–7, 70 price 42, 47, 53, 79 as a staple 40–4, 50, 60, 79–80, 127 Butts, Henry 55, 56, 70, 71, 73, 167 Byfield, Nicholas 173 cabbage 99, 100 cake 40, 68, 142, 146–7 Caldwell, John 173 calf (see also veal) 106–7, 167 feet 88 head 88 Cambridge 48

240 camomile 99, 110, 136 capers 93, 110, 122, 125, 130, 167 capon caponet 107–8, 140, 159 gifting of 10 nutritional value 39, 71 price 48, 90, 139 as provision of 41, 71, 78, 91, 168 as a special occasions food 65, 138, 144, 154, 159, 164 caraway 131, 133 carrot 100 Catholic 4, 77, 81, 95, 152, 154, 164 cattle (see also beef; calf; veal) 55, 61, 76, 79 cauliflower 98, 99, 160, 161 Caus Castle 147 Cecil, Thomas 68, 142 Cecil, William diet of 78, 82, 85, 87–8, 93, 95–6, 99, 112–13, 134 gifting 143–4, 145, 146 provisioning by 33, 51, 53, 76, 79, 91, 108 special occasions 11, 150, 153, 155, 157–8, 159 charity 30, 38, 53, 82, 106, 113, 148, 163, 174 Charles I, King 6, 83, 113, 118, 166, 169 cheese gifting of 85, 143 making 52, 79 nutritional value 55–6 premium quality 84–5 price 40, 47 as a staple 42, 43, 60, 62, 79–80, 127 cherries 63, 65, 67, 83–4, 121, 122, 124, 136, 142, 167 Chester 163 chestnut 99 chicken nutritional value 39 price 48 as provision of 40, 76, 78, 90, 91, 144 as a special occasions food 158 choleric see humoral temperaments cider 79 Cieza, Pedro 99

Index cinnamon acquiring 60, 62, 120–2, 124, 125, 128, 134, 136, 162 artificial 139 cooking with 129, 130, 131, 161 nutrition value 70 Civil War 5, 6, 146, 177 Clifford, Anne 147, 150, 151 cloves acquiring 60, 62, 120–2, 124, 125, 128, 134, 161, 162 cooking with 129, 130, 131, 137–8, 159 nutrition value 70 cockerel 89, 91, 138 cockles 97, 153 coffee 15, 26, 100 Cogan, Thomas 56, 147 comfits (see also suckets) 65, 69, 133–4, 135, 146, 161, 163 confectioner 69, 133, 134 Cornwall 31 Coughton Court 79, 87 courtesy (see also etiquette; manners) 33 cowslip 110 Cranmer, Archbishop 39 cream 83–4, 86, 130, 149–50, 152 cucumber 98, 100 Cumberland, Earl of 63 currants (see also dried fruit) 60, 62, 122, 125, 127, 138, 162 Dalechamp, Caleb 175 dates 122, 124, 129, 130, 154, 161, 162 Dawson, Thomas 137, 154 dearth 19, 24, 58, 65, 85, 94, 97, 114, 167, 172 Dee, John 68, 71, 142, 143, 168 deer (see also venison) 63–5, 68, 111, 114–16, 118–19, 137–8, 147, 150, 166, 167 Derby, 3rd Earl of see Stanley, Edward Derby, 4th Earl of see Stanley, Henry Derbyshire 17, 77, 91, 115, 150 Devon 14, 17, 51–2, 60–1, 74, 81, 91, 94–6, 144, 166–7, 172 dietaries (see also regimen guides) 9, 18, 47, 54, 70–2 Dorchester 45, 167, 172 Dorset, Earl of see Sackville, Thomas

Index dried fruit (see also currants; raisins) 119, 121–2, 162 duck 67, 92, 114, 144, 145, 168, 171 Dudley, Robert 84, 125, 134, 136, 146, 147 Dutch food 44, 70, 84, 175 East India Company 126, 127 eggs 40, 47, 50, 53, 60, 78–80, 85, 93, 115, 152, 161 Elizabeth I, Queen 4, 42, 76, 83, 111, 116, 126, 134, 149, 180 Elyot, Thomas 55–6, 70, 71, 72 Essex 53, 77, 114, 153 etiquette (see also courtesy; manners) 3, 33 Exeter 52, 79, 91, 94, 100–1, 110, 121, 143, 156, 172 famine 7, 37 fasting 4, 10, 41, 47, 76, 98, 152–4 figs 44, 121, 122 fish carp 95–7, 109, 153, 166 cod 76, 77, 96, 97, 143, 153 dory 95–7, 166 eel 40, 95, 96, 153 green fish 76 haberdine 55, 77, 143 hake 96, 97 herring 39, 42, 43, 77, 95, 96–8, 153, 179 lamprey 146 ling 40, 77, 96–8, 143, 179 mackerel 76, 77, 95 mullet 96–7 perch 143 pike 95, 96, 143, 164 pilchards 77, 96–7, 153 plaice 98 salmon 52, 65, 68, 94–8, 109, 114, 143, 153, 166, 168, 179 saltfish 39, 40, 42, 55, 76, 77, 95–8, 143, 153–4 skate 96, 97 sole 96 sturgeon 67, 68, 147, 166, 171, 179 tench 97, 109, 143 trout 95–7, 109, 114, 168, 180

241

Fitzherbert, John 126 France 8, 120 French food 5, 44, 69, 89, 130, 139, 157 frugality 30, 33, 92, 110 Fuller, Thomas 3, 20, 63, 135, 180 Gawthorpe Hall 78, 84, 91, 124, 134, 153 ginger 60, 62, 70, 121–2, 125, 128–30, 134, 137, 139, 154, 161–2 gingerbread 126, 150 Glapthorn Manor 67, 73 gluttony 19, 57, 173–5 goose 90, 91, 108, 136, 144–5, 159, 168 gooseberries 83 Greene, John 66, 67, 171 Grey, Elizabeth (see also Kent, Countess of) 131, 132 grocers 65, 166 grouse 94, 166 gruel 37 gull 166 gum dragon 139 Harbury, Warwickshire 169 Harley, Lady Brilliana 146–7, 154, 165 Harris, John 173 Harrison, William on almsgiving 33 on food 20, 66, 84, 92, 175 on sorts of people 10–15, 34, 49, 57, 73, 75, 109, 118, 133, 178 Hart, James 55, 56, 73 Hatfield 33, 126 hen 63, 89–90, 91, 108, 114, 144 Henry VIII, King 4, 6, 42, 113 Hertfordshire 51, 87, 93, 109, 128 Higham Ferrer 116 hippocras 66 Hoby, Margaret 147, 149, 150–1 Honnywell, William 14, 60–1, 63 hospital 19, 43 Howard, Charles 40–2, 43, 48, 52, 56, 57, 85 Howard, Thomas 164 humble pie 138 humoral temperaments choleric 56, 70, 71 melancholic 55, 70, 71 phlegmatic 55, 70, 71, 100, 123

242

Index

lamb 39, 40, 53, 87–8, 138, 154, 158, 168 Lancashire 17, 48, 51, 79–80, 84, 91, 109, 115, 134, 153, 173 lark 93, 94, 144 Leamington 169 legumes (see also beans; peas) 54, 56, 76, 80, 81, 99–100, 127 Leicester 163 Leicester, Earl of see Dudley, Robert lemon 123, 130, 136, 161 lettuce 157 Lincolnshire 118 liquorice 121, 122 lobster 77, 95, 96–7, 153, 166, 168 Loder, Robert 61–3 Lodge, Thomas 39, 71 London (civic authorities) 64, 65 Louis XIV, King 120

Machyn, Henry 64, 126, 164 Manchester 143 manners (see also courtesy; etiquette) 3, 12, 31–4, 133, 174 Manningham, John 143, 147 marigold 110 Markham, Gervase 115, 130, 135, 136, 139, 154 marmalade 65, 126, 135, 163, 173 Mary I, Queen 116 Mary Rose 43 Mavericke, Radford 172, 174 Mayor of Bristol 66 of Dorchester 45 of London 63, 64, 65, 112, 135, 166 of York 63–4 Mediterranean food 44, 70, 98, 110, 120, 124, 125, 175, 180 medlars 121, 142 melancholic see humoral temperaments Middlesex 134, 169 Mildmay, Lady Grace 60 milk as a luxurious food 84 making 52, 79 price 16, 79, 149 as a staple 60, 62, 78, 79, 83 Moffett, Thomas 55, 70, 84 Moore, Philip 72 Moryson, Fynes 83, 114 Mun, Thomas 26, 126, 127 Murrell, John 130, 131, 132, 136, 154, 159 mussels 153 mustard 62, 127 mutton home rearing 79 as a luxurious food 81, 129, 130, 131, 137, 157, 166 nutritional qualities 55 price 16, 40, 42, 45, 87, 107, 162 as a staple 39, 40, 50–3, 71, 79–80, 85, 107, 153

mace acquiring 62, 120, 121–2, 124–5, 128, 161–2 cooking with 93, 129, 130, 131, 137, 138, 154, 157, 161 nutrition value 70

navy provisions 43–4, 47, 51, 57, 76, 127, 172, 180 Nether Haddon 115 Newdigates of Arbury diet of 60, 76, 78–9, 83, 85–92, 95–8, 101, 106–10, 121–4, 133, 136

humours bile, black 54, 70 bile, yellow 54, 70 blood 39, 54, 55, 66, 71 phlegm 54, 66, 138 husbandmen 13, 29, 45, 59, 60, 109, 114 Ingatestone Hall 53, 77, 80, 89, 98, 113, 153, 156 Inns of Court 31, 50, 67, 68, 166 Ipswich 39 Ireland 42, 66 ironmongers 164 Islington 134 Italian food 5, 34, 67, 70, 84, 120, 130, 175 Ivie, John 57, 180 James I, King 11, 23, 83, 105, 111, 116, 141, 169 Johnson, John 68, 69, 73–4, 128, 144, 168 Kenilworth Castle 126 Kent 114, 149, 150 Kent, Countess of (see also Elizabeth Grey) 131, 132, 138

Index gifting 142, 144, 145, 146 provisioning by 50, 80 special occasions 153–6, 157, 158–61, 165 Newton Abbot 52, 95, 112 Northamptonshire 68, 73, 116 Northumberland, Earl of see Percy, Henry Norwich 166 nutmeg acquiring 60, 62, 120–2, 124, 125, 128, 134, 136, 162 cooking with 129, 130, 131, 161 nutrition value 70 offal 87–9, 138, 154, 157–9, 166 olives 44, 122, 124, 125, 162, 167 onion 100 orange 65, 122, 123, 134, 136 Oxford 39, 50, 146–7, 154 oyster 40, 77, 96–7, 98, 155, 168 Parkinson, John 84 parsnip 160 partridge acquisition of 92–3, 105, 111–14, 115, 159, 166 fake 32, 139, 179 gifts of 144–6 price of 45, 92–3, 113 Partridge, John 138 pastries 62, 65, 114–15, 135, 136, 137–40, 145, 146, 159, 171, 180 pear 63, 121–2, 144 peas (see also legumes) 40, 41, 42, 44, 48, 56, 80–1, 99, 130, 154–5 pepper acquiring 26, 60, 62, 121–2, 125, 128, 161, 162 cooking with 129, 131, 137, 138, 139, 159 nutrition value 70 price of 122, 124–5 Percy, Henry 40, 77–8, 80, 86–8, 90, 91, 97, 110, 113, 136, 152 pesthouse provisions 38–9 Peterborough 116 Petre, William 53, 77, 81, 89, 93, 98, 115, 126, 150, 154, 165 pheasant 32, 111, 112, 113, 114, 137, 138–9, 140, 166, 179

243

phlegmatic see humoral temperaments pigeon 41, 48, 63, 67, 71, 92–3, 108, 144, 147, 164, 171 pineapple 105, 121, 134 plague 38–9, 65, 71, 172 Plat, Sir Hugh 135 Platter, Thomas 135, 152 plums 63, 125, 180 poisoning 54, 149 pomegranate 125 Poor Law 38 pork (see also bacon) home rearing 62 nutritional qualities 70 price of 42 as a special food 137, 155–6, 165 as a staple 39, 42–3, 44, 53, 76, 127 porridge 42, 60 potato 98, 99, 160–1 pottage 37 poulterer 112, 113, 145 poultry see capon; chicken; hen; pullet; turkey Preston 51, 97, 109 Privy Council 3, 5, 20, 24, 61, 111, 115–16, 167, 172, 175 Protestant 4, 41, 66, 76, 81, 95, 150, 152–3 puffin 166 pullet gifting of 144, 145 nutritional value 39 price 90 as provision of 39 as a special food 52, 67, 89, 91, 107–8, 154, 159, 171 Puritan 4, 50, 58, 94, 146, 151–2, 170, 173, 174, 179, 180 quail 92, 113, 166 quince 63, 122, 125 rabbit acquisition of 40, 41, 52, 61, 63, 71, 86–7, 114, 157 nutritional value 71 price of 48, 153, 156 special occasion food 86, 156, 164, 166, 168

244 Radcliffe, Edward diet of 78, 81–2, 88, 90, 93, 99, 107–8, 112, 115, 123–4, 134 gifting 145, 146 provisioning by 14, 51, 53 special occasions 153, 154, 155, 157–8, 159 radish 98, 100, 167 raisins (see also dried fruit) 60, 62, 93, 105, 122, 125, 127, 129, 130, 162 regimen guides 9, 15, 18, 47, 54–6, 58, 70–2, 138 Reynell, Richard diet of 81–2, 88, 90, 91, 93–7, 99–100, 109–10, 112–13, 121, 123–5 food production 79, 81 gifting 84–5, 144–5 provisioning by 14, 51–3, 76–7 special occasions 153, 155, 156–7, 158–9, 161, 162, 166 rice 44, 62 rose buds 109, 111 flowers 110 leaves 110 rosewater 60, 136, 137, 139 Sackville, Thomas 53, 77, 85, 88, 107, 113, 147, 159 saffron 60, 120, 121, 123, 124–5, 130, 155, 161–2 sailors see navy provisions salad 16, 52, 63, 98, 109, 111, 124, 161, 168 Salcey Forest 116 Salisbury 57–8, 107, 117, 180 Salisbury, Earl of see Cecil, William samphire 99 sauce 63, 129, 130, 131, 135, 157 sausage 87, 88, 138, 158 Shakespeare, William 54 sheep 52, 61, 76, 79 shrimps 52, 95, 155 Shuttleworths diet of 78, 79, 84, 87, 90, 91, 93, 97, 109, 124, 134 provisioning by 51, 76 special occasions 115, 153

Index skinners 65 Smith, Thomas 10–13 Smithills 87, 115 Smyth, John 66, 168 Smyth, Matthew 143 Smyth, Thomas 39 snipe 61, 93 soldiers see army provisions Somerset 169, 170–1 Spanish food 69, 70, 130 spinach 157 Staffordshire 143 Standish, Arthur 48, 92 Stanley, Edward 11, 14, 54, 80, 89, 125, 134, 146, 149 Stanley, Henry 11, 14, 33, 53, 173 strawberry 65, 67, 83, 84, 167 suckets (see also comfits) 65, 133, 135, 173 Suffolk 38, 82 sugar acquisition of 26, 57, 62–3, 65, 84, 119–23, 125, 126, 127, 168 cooking with 119 , 129, 130, 131–2, 133–4, 137, 139, 146, 161–3 nutritional value 71 sumptuary 3, 12, 24, 31, 47, 61 Sussex 115 Sussex, Earl of see Radcliffe, Edward swan 136, 145, 164 sweetbread 87, 150, 158 sweetmeat 106, 135, 150, 161 tabling 38, 46, 47, 61, 89 tailors 13, 64, 126, 164–5, 166 Taylor, John 111 tea 15, 26, 100 Teignmouth 77, 95, 153 tenants 12, 13, 119, 150–1, 175 thefts of food 19, 38, 107, 109, 113–16, 117–18, 127–8, 136, 167, 168 Throckmorton 79, 87, 94 Thynne, John 126, 147 Tower of London 40, 88 turkey 90, 91, 108, 144–5, 154, 159, 166, 175 turnip 160 Tusser, Thomas 53

Index vagrants 14, 33, 105, 111, 114, 117 Vaughan, William 55, 56, 73 veal acquisition of 39, 40, 52, 53, 102, 106–7 cooking 130 nutritional value 107 price of 106, 107 special occasion food 67, 153, 154, 164, 166, 171, 179 venison (see also deer) consumption 10, 11, 43, 63–5, 67, 71, 114–15, 140, 150, 164, 171 cooking 68, 71, 72, 114, 129, 130 fake 32, 137, 138, 139, 179 gifts of 10, 61, 68, 142, 147, 166, 180 stealing 115, 117–18 Venner, Tobias 55, 56, 70, 71–2 Vernon, George 77, 78, 81, 90, 98, 107, 115, 145, 150 Villiers, George 11, 166, 172 vinegar 110, 129, 130, 137, 138 violet 110, 133, 147

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Warwick 169–70 water parsnip 99 watercress 99 wheat 40, 41, 44, 45, 48, 62, 82, 99 Whichford, Warwickshire 124 Whittlewood Forest 116 Willoughby 32, 107, 108, 121, 150 Wiltshire 45 wine cooking with 71, 93, 129, 130, 137, 138, 157, 161 gifting 142 nutritional value 56, 66, 71–2 ,101 price 101 provision of 40, 41, 65, 101, 127, 168, 171 special occasions 65, 84, 135, 163, 167 Winthrop, John 174 woodcock 61, 93, 145, 168 Yonge, Walter 172 York 39, 42, 63–4