Gone Medieval - What Did the Anglo-Saxons Eat?

Episode Date: May 17, 2022

Early medieval royals ate mostly meat, right? Wrong! A new study that’s made headlines around the world has shown that medieval kings were largely vegetarian! To help shed light on this exciting new discovery, today Cat is joined by Dr Sam Leggett of the University of Edinburgh, a bio-archaeologist and the lead author of the study.For more Gone Medieval content, subscribe to our Medieval Mondays newsletter here. If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android or Apple store.Join the History Hit Book Club in time for the June and July read of Charles Spencer's, The White Ship. Become part of a community of readers who are passionate about history and its thrilling lessons. Members read a new book every 2 months, and get a £5 Amazon voucher towards the cost of the book, as well as exclusive access to an online Q&A between History Hit presenters and the author in the second month. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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rewards of membership of History Hits Book Club. Hello and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit. I'm Dr Kat Jarvin. Now, if you were an early English king or a queen, how did you get your food? presumably you get it from taxes or food rents from their peasants in your kingdom. At least that's what the surviving texts seem to apply. And it's been a long-held assumption that the elites in early medieval or Anglo-Saxon, England, if you like, had very rich and meat-heavy diets unlike the common people.

But now a new study has just been published that really blows those assumptions out of the water. Today I'm delighted to be speaking to the lead author of that story. study, which included analysis of dietary data from nearly 9,000 individuals who lived in the early Middle Ages. Dr Sam Leggett is a Leibahum Early Career Fellow and an early medieval archaeologist and bioarchologist at the University of Edinburgh. Sam, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today. Thanks so much for having me, Kat. And congratulations on this study. It's been so nice to see it popping up in the news all over the place. You must be very pleased for that result. Absolutely. No, it's just so great and I'm just really excited everyone's finding it, you know, interesting and exciting to understand what we found, yeah.

Exactly, because it's questioning some really quite key assumptions about that early medieval society, which actually we haven't really had very much evidence for before. And we're going to get back to that in a moment. But I wondered if we can start with just talking about some of those sort of assumptions. Can you just explain those sort of assumptions and traditions that we have about these. early medieval diets and exactly what you wanted to investigate? So I think we've had for the better part of over 200 years, these sort of assumptions about this time period, what people were eating, and essentially people for a long time have thought that at least the elites were eating quite meat-heavy diets and that, you know, they had these big feasts.

And then that was a regular occurrence. That was kind of mostly what they ate day-to-day were these stonking, great, big, you know, hog roasts. And the media have been talking about them as barbecues. but I'll get into why we think that's sort of the case later. But when you actually go back to where we got that idea from, it's kind of surprising how little that's actually based on. So there's sort of two prongs to that.

One is these food rent texts or food lists, which is what we talk about in the papers, which are more or less sort of like a royal shopping list, or that's what people have thought that they are, that go, when I come to visit, I would really like to have all of this food ready for me to go. And that's what people have thought that it is. The kings sort of move around

the kingdom. And rather than doing their own cooking, they require their underlings to provide this for them. And that's how they essentially survive is off these lists being provided by, you know, their subjects. And the other thing is from back projection from the later Middle Ages. So we know from the Tudor period and a little bit before that that they thought that eating lots of vegetables was bad for your health and that you needed to eat a lot of meat. And we've got a lot more historical and archaeological evidence to back that up for, you know, the 14th, 15th, 16th century. And people just assume that that's what everyone's doing in like the 5th and 6th century because of this handful of small texts that do have a lot of meat in them. But when you try to look at

the archaeology, rubbish pits, any sort of other evidence we have for the actual food left behind themselves or what I do, stable isotope analysis, that starts to unravel. So those are kind of what everyone's just assumed to be the case. And I did want to ask you a little bit about one of those sorts of one of those lists for one of the kings that you looked at your new co-author and you actually and I love this you looked through all the foods that were listed in there and started working out things like calories I think so can you explain a bit more about that particular list and what you found yeah so enous 70.1 which is a very exciting sort of title is from some of the earliest law codes we have from this period we think they date to roughly about the seventh century

AD. And Enah lists all sorts of fantastic things that he wants to come from lands that he sort of owed rent from. And the way this happened was I was giving a talk about my PhD data to a bunch of historians at Cambridge. That's where I did my PhD. And the historians who know these texts really well went, hold on a minute. Let's break this down because what you're saying and what we've got in Enah 70.1 just don't match up because you're saying that they kind of ate all of this. So, you know, he salmon and a huge amount of weathers and so sheep and cows and butter and ale.

And so what we did was it was a very sort of basic calculation but we went to some modern nutritional data because we don't always necessarily have the data we'd like from 7th century animals to just kind of work out how much would that be? Because it seemed like a lot to us. If we were

to cook all of that up, what would that look like? You know, it's bigger than my Christmas meal. So we wanted to calculate roughly how many calories and if you divided that up by they were very specific by the amount of bread the loaves which we think a really really small sort of like a roll or a BAP in sort of British terminology so sort of one person if you divided that up per person per loaf or per sort of gallon of ale it was obscene the amount of protein and meat and we recognise that it's not the most perfect sort of calculation I'm sure

nutritionists would want to break it down further but even on our very sort of underestimating rough calculations, oh my goodness, you would be so ill. If you sat down and ate that in one sitting. So that kind of led us to think, okay, right, could this have been spread out over more than one day? Possibly, but not for a long time, because preserving these things is quite hard to do in that period as well. And if there's 300 people there, what's this look like and how often would you have to eat it to match with the data I'm getting from their skeletons? So that's kind of how that all sort of came about was Tom and I sitting down with lots of tea, long tea breaks, just going, oh my goodness, if we calculate it this way, no, it still doesn't work.

That list has been one of the key pillars in what we think we know about these ancient royal diets and it's been that assumption. But as you say, nobody's really questioned these 300 bread rolls, which really going to keep two days or something. That, to me, was a genius sort of starting point. Okay, so let's go into more of your work then and this sort of analysis that you've done. This then has always been one of these ideas of what the elites ate. And you're looking at this quite early part of the early medieval period. So really from fifth century and for the next few hundred years. How much do we know about society then and how stratified it was? Are we talking about just one king and the rest are peasants? Or what do we know about that society?

again, not much. So we tend to back project from, well, not even the high Middle Ages. We've got a really good handle on what society looked like around the time of the Norman Conquest. We've got a lot more written documents, obviously with the Norman Conquest and having all those sort of questions about who's in control, what they're taking control over with the Doomsday Book. He was very thorough with sort of talking about how many people, how many lords. Great. For the fifth and sixth century, mostly what we're basing it on is, again, Ina's laws. Ina is kind of our main man for all of this. So we know that Britain or Southern Britain at least is divided up into multiple kingdoms or things that are kingdom like during this period where you have a couple of big sort of players controlling large swathes of land. But we're not always entirely sure how many of them are actually kicking about at the same time. There's fuzzy boundaries on where these kingdoms are. And also the role of the king is still not fully formed, at least in the fifth and sixth. century and even whether they'd call themselves a king at that point is debatable. By the 7th century when Ena's writing, he clearly thinks of himself like that and has a dynasty and is trying to, at

least in that piece of writing, sort of set himself up like that. But for the immediate post-Roman period, it's all very fuzzy. So a lot of what we're kind of basing that on is the archaeology and grave goods. And there's this really basic assumption that I think all of us as archaeologists just try not to fall into, but we do, which is the more shinies you've got in the grave equals you were richer and of higher status in life, which is a very, very simplistic sort of line to draw. So that's one thing that I had to really grapple with in this paper was, what are we defining as high status?

It's hard. It is really, really hard to kind of do that when you don't have named people with a headstone who you know a king X, XYZ to kind of go. Yeah. Your work is based on burial, so you've looked at this really huge data set. Do you then think that you have some of these elites in the data you've been looking at? I do. So I don't think we necessarily have people like Ena or Redwald, some of these big named guys, Redwald being theoretically maybe the person who was buried at Sutton Who. And if anybody's watched the dig and knows anything about that, there were no bones there.

So we kind of analysed him or whoever was in that ship. But in some of the other sites, we do have these sort of central graves that are under a big mound, a bit like at Sutton Who, who've got lots of amazing grave goods with them. And even though we can't link them as nicely to some of these named individuals from texts, they certainly stand out. They've got just amazing amounts of stuff in burials. So I can't be certain that we've got a king, but we've certainly got some of these elites who might be.

And then you've got other parts of society who else are people. who look from everything that we can work out, that they are much lower status, I suppose. Exactly. We've got sort of a whole range of, you know, people with lots of gold objects down to absolutely nothing and everything in between for having a couple of swords maybe or some really interesting jewellery.

Yeah, just completely plain and nothing in their grave, all in the same site. So we've got, you know, stratification across one sort of burial community. As I was saying in the introduction, I mean, you had thousands of thousands of, of burials that you looked like, didn't you? Just exactly how many? So I did a big study across all of Western Europe that had just under 9,000 burials. And then the data set for England is just over 2,000. So pretty big for the type of stuff we do. Yeah. Just to ask you now about more detail.

So the type of study that you've done on these skeletons to look at diet is called stable isotope analysis. And I have to say I'm very biased here because it's something that I've done in my own work as well, so I know exactly how useful it can be. But can you just explain what exactly is it and how does Stabilisotope analysis tell us about past diets? So as part of this study, I did about 300 individuals sort of new lab work myself and then put it within this much larger data set. So what we do in the lab is essentially you take a piece of bone from a burial and you make it squishy because the squishy bit is the bit that we want that tells us about people's diet and you bang it in a thing called a mass spectrometer and it gives you these numbers. Usually carbon and

nitrogen are the ones that we sort of talk about in this paper. They're the most common. And what this is essentially giving us is a chemical sort of memory of the food that people ate. So when you eat food, your body breaks it down to turn into different parts of your body to replace things, to grow new bones, to make your hair. And so that's an indirect analysis of what you were eating. And the carbon is really good at distinguishing between sort of marine seafood, you know, things that come from the ocean and freshwater and terrestrial land-based food. So that was really helpful for us sort of looking at if people were eating a lot of food and salmon's mentioned in the list. So the carbon can kind of tease those things apart. And then the

nitrogen is a rough measure of where you are in the food chain. If anyone wants to go into the papers in depth, we talk about trophic level, but that's just where you're sit on the food chain, you know, very much the circle of life sort of Lion King type thing. So if you have lower nitrogen that's getting towards plant values, you could be talking about a very plant-based diet versus if you've got sort of higher, less negative carbon and really high nitrogen, you know, you're sitting really high up on a marine food chain, something like an orca. And so with people, you have a look at where they sit in between the plants and the animals to kind of have an idea of, Are they looking like carnivores?

Do they sort of look like they're eating a lot of meat? Are they eating a little bit of both an omnivore? Are they sort of sitting down where all the sheep and cattle are and therefore probably eating a mostly plant-based diet? How can toilet training cows help save the planet? Should we start renting our clothes? And why on earth is beds from the Happy Mondays now keeping bees? I'm Jimmy Doherty, TV presenter, farmer and conservationist.

And these are just a few of the questions we'll be answering on my new podcast on Jimmy's Farm from History Hit. Join me on the farm to hear from the likes of the founder of the Eden Project, Sir Tim Smith, Professor Dieter Helm on How to Stop Climate Change, and my old friend Jamie Oliver, listen to On Jimmy's Farm Now, wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah, what are the brilliant things about this is that it gives us that information on an individual level, so actual people. Because as we already said, we don't know that much, really, about this time period and about food and diet.

you've got those lists, but they're very specific to one part of society. What other sources could we actually have to look at diets in this period? So nothing that's quite as good on an individual level, really. So I talked a little bit about rubbish pits. So something we can look at is if you've got a settlement excavated, try to find what people have thrown out the leftovers of the food. So that'll give you an idea for the community or if it's maybe even really great sort of house-by-house base, that would be fantastic. But we often don't have that to go, okay, are we getting more sheep than cows? Or, you know, it would be amazing if we always get plants preserved, but that's really, really rare to get. So sometimes we're lucky to get that.

Digging up ancient toilets is also a really good one. So seeing what's passed through and then having a look at that. And you can do lots of great stuff with that, either things that have come out that are relatively whole or people are doing really cool work looking at the proteins and DNA left behind in poo to try to work out what was in the meat and stuff. and then dental calculus, so basically fossilized tooth gunk. So have to remember that these people didn't have the dental hygiene that we have today. So the teeth sometimes get quite crusty. And so sometimes you get nice little snapshots of basically fossils of the food,

but it's not going to get everything because once your teeth get super gunky, it kind of can't take up anything else. So that's another emerging technique that we can have a look at as well to maybe get some DNA or some proteins of the specific stuff in there. And then we can also look at the pots and any sort of cooking implements that are left behind. And likewise, try to use these sort of molecular methods to extract out any fats and things that might be stored in there to go, were they cooking meat in here, were they cooking dairy? Was it a strainer to use for cheese?

So none of them are perfect. But basically, the dental calculus and isotopes is the best shot we've got of each person having a dietary sort of profile. But to date, we haven't actually had any large scale. results like this. So that's why your study is so exciting. So tell us now then, if we were going to follow that expectation and the lists of foods and so on, then we would have expected that those higher status individuals you found had richer, more meat, rich diets, and the rest of them didn't. Is that what you found? That is not what I found at all. Which is great. Yeah. Exactly. I mean, we often sort of talk about we want to find social differences and, you know, but it's just not there.

So anybody that I did have that had this high nitrogen, which equates to sort of more protein in their diet, most of them ended up being individuals from the Viking age onwards. And we've got huge archaeological and other evidence to suggest that diets should be different from that period. So I can get into that later if you want to. But for the earlier periods from the fifth to sort of the eighth century before the Vikings arrive, we cannot equate people with lots of cool stuff in their graves to more meat. It's just, it's not there at all. Most people day-to-day are eating mostly plant-based foods,

and these sort of big meat eating events, which we think is what these food lists are actually sort of hinting at as big festivals or special occasions is rarer, which when you then start to think about what we know about farming and economy in this period makes a lot of sense. you're not going to be killing animals to eat every week, every day. And dairy is really seasonal. This is before we've sort of optimized dairy cows to give us dairy all the time.

So you can't get milk all the time. And cheese is maybe the best way to try to get that. But that's also hard to do. So when you start to actually have a look at the isotope data and think about exactly what that would mean people to try to sustain this all year round, it makes sense. But it's actually quite a staggering, result because this is really showing that the evidence on the real individuals isn't showing that

sort of contrast between the rich and poor diets as it were, which is fantastic. But I know you also looked at gender, didn't you? So look to see if there's a difference between men and women, because another assumption has been that men had much more rich meat diets than women. Did you find any evidence of that? No. So there's a couple of men who do stand out, who do have this sort of high nitrogen, but we've got really good evidence from the site where they're buried to suggest that they were monastic community, they were monks, and they are more likely to have a slightly different diet based on religious dietary rules. So they weren't these big warrior men with these lavish burials like the men at Sutton Hood. They were buried with almost nothing,

probably in a very early monastery. So yeah, there isn't this big difference between men and women either. So all these ideas we have from, you know, poems like Beowulf of the men coming back from a battle and feasting, the women were there too possibly. And this wasn't what the men were doing on a regular basis either. You know, the men weren't having more meat than the women. Everybody was pretty much eating the same thing, regardless of how sort of high status you were, whether you were a man or a woman, give us a much more sort of flat social status marker for diet. I think that's so interesting. and because especially because it gives us the kind of everyday perspective, so the real life every day.

And then presumably, as you've already hinted to, these lists actually may well then relate more to special occasions and feasts. And would you think then perhaps that that is more where that status difference comes out, that, you know, the wealthy people can have feasts like that and they can have luxuries and special occasions? Is that what the explanation is then, do you think? Well, we actually think. that even though the kings and the elites are maybe ordering these big feasts to take place,

they're the ones who are kind of the reason why this is happening, the sheer amount of people you'd need to consume all the food that they're asking for at these things would mean that everybody's turning up, possibly from quite a large radius. This is a really sort of depopulated landscape compared to what we're used to now. There's lots of people around, but it's not, you know, huge metropolitan areas. So to get 300 people at one of these events, which we think is kind of the order of magnitude we're looking at here, that's not just the king and his immediate sort of retinue turning up. So we think where the sort of social status might come in at these events is actually the order in which he was served. So the king or the lord getting the first offer of, you know, the best cut of meat.

But he's not necessarily eating more meat that would show up isotopically throughout the year. he's just getting the best of the best there while he's sat, you know, in state at the top, but everyone else is eating essentially the same thing as him. He's just getting the nice little bit at the beginning and possibly more booze as well. Yes, of course. I guess that sort of demonstrates some of the limitations, doesn't it? That those things we cannot detect with these methods and, you know, we can't see who drank the most and what sort of quality.

Maybe in the future, but for the moment. So, I mean, do you think, does that seem to be the main limitation then of the work that you do the fact that we can't get those finer details because also it's an average isn't it over a number of years as well so we don't get the sort of precise fine data set exactly we're mostly looking at rib bones which will give you about a 10 year average closer to the end of their life as well so it is yeah a big average that we're looking at like you say that sort of day to day if it changed from one day to the next or one month to the next that's really hard to get at but some cool new techniques that starting to gain a lot of traction is incremental dentine.

So you can look at childhood diet by looking at your tooth root because we've got a really good handle thanks to dentists on exactly when those teeth form. So you can pick teeth to kind of know between the ages of roughly like 12 to 16 what was somebody eating. So that's kind of the next steps with this. I've got some data like that. And you can do tiny little slices to look at sort of monthly signatures or, you know, probably more like yearly signatures. so we can get to that level. But yeah, getting exactly day to day or week to week is, you know, at the moment, like you say, really hard to do. I can't wait to see those results and that's going to be very exciting. Yeah.

Fantastic. So I just wanted to go back a little bit to talk to you about fish as well. We've talked mainly about meat here. You mentioned salmon being on that list. But what about fish consumption more generally in this data set? Were people eating? Fish? Not much. So like you say, there is salmon a mention in quite a few of these food lists, and we've got fish traps from all sort of rivers that have been radiocarbon dated to this sort of period.

So we think people were eating some fish, but it doesn't seem to be a big part of their diets until we get the Scandinavian contact and something called the fish event horizon, which is one of my absolute favorite archaeological terms, which is essentially in the Scandinavian context. the zoo arc so the remains of the fish. Archaeologists have seen a big uptake in the amount of fish they're finding on sites from roughly about the year 1000 AD and the isotopes initially seem to also back that up but that was from a handful of sites where we do have quite strong Viking contact and Scandinavian settlement. So before 1000 AD I'm really not saying much and then when you get to sort of that eighth, ninth, tenth, tenth century in the lead up to, I've recently done some work and It's what my current project's really trying to get in on, that most people who are looking fishy

are first-generation migrants from Scandinavia. So that's a really cool finding as well. So people are exploiting fish, but it seems to likewise be as sometimes food. So it's not the dominant part of their diet, not the dominant protein that they're having until much, much later. But that is such an exciting results, I think. And I'm not, again, I'm biased, I know, because I study the Vikings and Scandinavian. but actually to show you that incoming cultures have such an impact on foodways, economy and all of that. So that's really quite staggering, actually.

And does that tell us something about the sort of magnitude of people coming in? Or do you think it's more that that becomes popular? It becomes more economically viable to eat fish? Or what are the sort of explanations do you think? So I think it's really interesting when we look at sort of a cemetery by cemetery basis and you have a look at other isotopes which can tell you if someone's born locally or if someone might have been born further afield, that could be in a different part in England or Scandinavia or somewhere else. And then you have a look at their diets and if they're similar

or not. And I think that's where the magic is sort of starting to happen in stable isotope studies where we can have a look at these communities and how they then change their foodways with incoming groups coming in. And some of them do change quite a lot. Some of them to adapt to these new sort of fish consumption patterns that we're seeing in some other sites that doesn't happen. And so then there's a question of, okay, you have these people coming in who had been eating a lot of fish in their childhood, but by the time they're buried at this site, they're not eating fish. So is that just because they're further inland and that's really hard to then get these fish? You know, you have to think about getting them multiple kilometers inland

in early medieval England might have been hard to do. So we're starting to get to ask those questions now of, okay, why would people want to do that? Why people didn't? And it doesn't seem to be the same everywhere in England. So some places really adopt this and really go, yes, these new people are bringing in this new foodway. That's fantastic. We love it. We can get fish. This is great. And other people aren't. So is that an economic decision because it's harder in certain areas to do that. You might not have the trade relations or it's just really hard for you to get out to the coast or that bit of coast might be really bad fishing. And we're getting that level of detail now, which is really exciting.

It's fantastic. And also what I really like about it is this is very much the general public, isn't it? This is your sort of every man. Those written sources are so heavily biased to one very particular part of society. And it might not even be objective. You know, this might just be what they want to reflect or represent

and it's what's been preserved. But actually the sort of material you're looking at is actually you and me living in 7th century England or, you know, whatever. And that, I suppose, is one of the big differences. Definitely. And that's what I think makes this type of study so exciting. Because, like you say, you can just get to everyday people

and you don't have to necessarily rely on those texts that are what King, I know, might have wanted to have eaten, but whether or not he actually did, I think we've proven, he probably didn't. So, yeah. One of these big issues in this period of what we often refer to as Anglo-Saxon, England, and, you know, people talk about these Anglo-Saxon migration. and all of that, which again, huge big other topic, we're not going to talk about, but the idea of actual migration, how many people are coming in.

So really what you're saying is that that's something we can see with the food that they eat. Exactly. So there's some really cool data I have, which you can see that there's lots of different food ways being reflected in people's diets from childhood, and it's really diverse with what people seem to be eating. And then that becomes relatively standardized as they've all come to be, in a community together, living, eating the same food, growing the same crops and working together over time. So that's definitely something we can start to get at is where people might be from

based on their childhood diets. And then also the process of them all living together for decades in England in, you know, these communities. So it's really quite nice to see that sort of cultural integration and people living and working together through their food ways. Fantastic. Absolutely love that. Sam, I can't wait to follow up your work and see what you come out with next. But thank you so much and congratulations again on the study. And thank you so much for coming to talk to us about it today. No worries. Thanks so much, Kat. It's been great. So this has been the latest episode of Gone Medieval talking today about early medieval diets. Thank you so much all for listening. And do please subscribe to the podcast if you haven't

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