Gone Medieval - What Food Did Medieval People Eat?

Episode Date: December 21, 2023

In times of plenty, we stuff ourselves. When the food runs out, we're basically stuffed. How did people in medieval Britain share the riches from our fields, dairies, kitchens and seas?In this episode of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis is joined by acclaimed food historian Pen Vogler, whose latest book Stuffed: A History of Good Food in Hard Times in Britain, places food at the centre of society, of upheavals and of the development of a nation. This episode was edited by Ella Blaxill and produced by Rob Weinberg.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code MEDIEVAL - sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. I rarely need an excuse to talk about food, so I'm delighted to be devoting this entire episode to it. I'm joined by Penn Vogler, a food historian whose last book, Scoff, was a Sunday Times bestseller. Penn's new book, stuffed, a history of good food in hard times in Britain is an exploration of our relationship with food over the centuries. In good times, we're stuffed with lovely delightful food.

In bad times, we're just plain stuffed. Stuffed places food at the centre of society, of upheavals and of the development of a nation. And Penn is here to help us explore it more. Welcome to gone medieval pen. Thanks so much, Matt. It's nice to be with you. It's wonderful to have you on. The first thing I want to talk about in the book is beans,

which to me means baked beans from a tin, but in this case really means broad beans. How can beans help us to understand Anglo-Saxon estate? management. Broad beans were more or less the only type of beans we had, actually, until what's called the Columbian Exchange brought all those other kinds of beans that we now have in tins or, you know, in butter beans stew or even most of those green beans. None of those were available to us. And so there were two sorts of beans available to kind of late Anglo-Saxon, early Norman, England, right up until the 15th, 16th centuries. Field beans were quite coarse beans, which,

which later got sort of developed and became the sort of nice, rather delicate broad beans we have today. But it's probably something closer to those fuel beans, which were now used for animal feed, which is what would be available as a sort of real standby protein for that period. And what's interesting is that in those kind of late Anglo-Saxon times, there's very little insight into kind of what people ate and how people kind of live together. But one very interesting document that's come down to us seems to be a document kept by Bath Abbey. And Abys were huge landowners before the Reformation. And it explains how the person kind of who ministers the whole estate makes sure that everybody gets the most appropriate food to eat.

And beans were seen as a kind of very appropriate food all the way up to society, but particularly for people at the bottom. In an Anglo-Sax in England, those were the slaves. 10% of people around the sort of 10th to 11th century would have been slaves. And this particular estate manual for Bath Abbey explains that in Lent, you have to give female slaves a particular amount of dried broad beans as well as a few other things. It's a very interesting sort of insight into the way that society was managed, the whole kind of hierarchy of slaves, peasants, saints, all the rest of it until you get to the elite, and then finally various kings of various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. But it also shows you how limited and sort of not resilient really people's food lives and kind of well-being were at the time.

Yes, it makes it feel quite fragile and obviously frequently reliant on other people just to get the most basic staple food in your life. Everything was quite fragile and everybody has different roles. So the shepherd has to, you know, look after the sheep and the swine herd looks after the swine and all the things you expect. And it really shows you how probably most of those people in those estates didn't live in a cash economy. You know, they would have produced the cheese or they'd have kind of gathered firewood or whatever. And you can imagine this kind of quite sort of active barter economy going between these people. But also right at the top always of the estate is the abbot or the lord of the manor

or the Thane or the king. And it's those people. the person who owns the land, who has the kind of wealth and power and everything. And it's those people who oblige everybody else on the estate to kind of do things like put their own livestock on his field if he decides he wants the manure from the livestock, for example, or they have to work for him one day a week or two days a week or three or four or five days a week in kind of busy times, in harvest festivals. And then in return, he has some responsibility for making sure those people don't starve and that those people have something to eat during kind of particularly difficult

periods such as lent when you're obliged to not eat meat, milk and all the rest of it because the livestock need it for themselves to reproduce. I've got the impression in the book as well that you kind of lament the decline of the broad bean in our diet a little bit. Why do you think we neglect it so much now in favour of all of those other beans that we do get from the supermarket? We have a remarkable attitude to, in any other culture, we'd call it peasant food and we'd celebrate it. And so the kind of what, you know, we think of pasta or whatever being the sort of peasant food of Italy or risotto or something. We think of the kind of pot-of-fer being the peasant food of France. And we have a sort of slightly

dismissive attitude to our own, inverted commas, peasant food. And it includes things like peas, pudding, broad beans, hot barley, that sort of thing. We quite like those sort of basic grains, if they are introduced from abroad. So we think Queenware might be quite kind of fancy, for example, because it's introduced from somewhere else. But we're quite dismissive of our own. And I think that just goes back to a long, longstanding kind of anxiety about what food says about us and about our status and all the rest of it.

But it's really interesting. I am quite passionate about the broad bean because I really like them. And they're really quite hard to get hold of. I went to my local whole food shop, and they had every single type of bean in the world, it seemed to me. dried in little packets and not broad beans. And actually, if you can get hold of dried board beans, you just soak them overnight and boil them. And they're pretty delicious. And there's some great medieval recipes for broad beans as well. If we're trying to eat less meat, for example,

it's actually great to go back to medieval cookbooks because we think of them as very meaty, but because of the restrictions of lent and fasting and the Catholic Church, there's always quite a lot of vegetable-based, quite nutritious food. And there's some great. recipes for things like kind of bean burgers and frying beans and things in those cookbooks. So I suppose they had to get good at finding ways to get their calories and protein without necessarily going straight to meat as we would for those kinds of things. So there's maybe some good options in there. I feel like there's a pen and Matt's English peasant food wagon on its way.

There's a business in there somewhere. We're going to start selling peasant street food. Selling broad bean burgers, yeah. That sounds good. I'm getting hungry now. There's a chapter in the book, too, on warts. So how Anglo-Saxons and Normans used warts, to start off with, I guess, what are warts? And do we still use them today?

Well, if you go into a chemist, you might see something like St. John's Wurt or occasionally some of those other sort of medicinal herbs. And you might see me in the garden. But it was really interesting. There's a fascinating collection of Anglo-Saxon sort of science, health, remedies, food, medicine, starcraft, brought together by somebody called Oswald, Cocaine in the 18th. century and he called it leachdoms, a slightly odd word, but meaning basically medicine. And almost every single recipe for something medicinal begins with these words, take this word, meaning just take this leaf or this vegetable. And some of those might have been something that actually would be quite toxic today, you know, that we wouldn't eat necessarily. A lot of them are just things that we think of as vegetables,

like radishes or lettuces or cabbages. And some of them are things we sort of of think of as flowers. And so it was really interesting to me because it's very clear that in Anglo-Saxon, England, the idea that food and medicine are one and the same is axiomatic to them. There's no concept that what you eat doesn't make a difference to your health. And so if you're depressed, eat radishes, if you'll have a sore throat, take sage and seize it with honey and drink it. I mean, some things that actually sound quite nice and quite sensible. They always are very aware of things that we'd consider to be quite contemporary diseases like cancer and kind of cardiovascular health. And there's quite a lot of remedies for quite complex kind of medical things, childbirth and

you know, women's breastfeeding and all the rest of it. It's very interesting because it really shows you how much our society has changed our kind of minds about food and medicine for centuries in a way that maybe we're beginning to bring it back together again. You know, maybe we're now beginning to think, oh, actually the food I eat does make a difference to my health and the idea that, you know, what I eat is completely separate to the aspirin I take or the medication I take. We're beginning to question that again. And I'm not saying that the Anglo-Saxons had it right in terms of, you know, take a kind of flour from the garden and it will cure your cancer. I mean, obviously, you know, their science is very, very basic. But that concept that food and health

go together is a very, very interesting one. Yeah, they may not have had the techniques and the science right, but the idea seems to be one that we're returning to now in an age that's kind of pushing back against ultra-processed food. We're getting back to that idea that fresh food contains all the nutrients you need, and it is a form of medicine. It's what keeps your body going. Exactly.

And I think what happens is that warts or, you know, what they call works, what we might call leaves, or even vegetables or pot herbs is another word that they get called slightly later on in the record. That idea that they're not just for individual health, but they're the sort of basis of the nation's health. So going back to our idea about beans, you know, when you have a society which can't all reliably afford or get meat all the time,

the concept that actually the nation or the community or whatever sort of size you want to call the community at the time relies on grain and vegetables, leaves and all the rest of it, was a much stronger one in those days. And again, that's something that we're beginning to kind of think again about, in terms of our kind of environmental health, do we eat too much meat? You know, she'll be growing more grain, more vegetables,

about our kind of economic health, do we import too much food? We're beginning to kind of re-centre those questions in a way that would probably be quite familiar to somebody in Anglo-Saxon Times. Yeah, it's interesting to think that they would recognise that argument a thousand years ago that we're beginning to have again today. Yes, exactly. And would probably think that the other arguments that we have, that, you know, of course you should import food

or of course that, you know, you should eat kind of meat the whole time, they might feel as distant or might be quite counterintuitive for them. Having said all of that, bacon is still very important. And it always has been by the sounds of it. I thought it was interesting that the book pitches bacon as kind of the poor man's venison. So you can see that stratification of society through those types of meat. And you asked the question in the book,

whether the tension between bacon eaters and venison eaters offers a model that might suggest we ought to reintroduced forests into our food cultures and the way that we source our food. Do you think that's a valid point? What was very interesting for me is looking at the way that forests are both defined and used in that period. So, etymologically, forest is quite interesting. It shares the same route as foreign, and it means outside the park, you know, something that's sort of slightly outside the farm or the park or this kind of a defined land that's owned by somebody. And it became a bit of a kind of culture wars issue, as it were,

in the sort of 12th and 13th century. And a lot of King John's land grab was to do with grabbing what was called forest land. And it might not have been wooded necessarily. It just meant it was sort of land that people either lived on or worked. It might have been the wildland. It might have been wooded. Between William of Normandy and King John, there was a sort of royal land. grab of a lot of that forest because William was kind of renowned for loving venison and for loving

the hunt. And that impinged on the rights of ordinary people to use forests to let their pigs kind of rootle around and eat acorns and eat, you know, beach mast. And forest converted inedible protein for people like acorns into edible proteins in the shape of pork. And so forestland was really important for people. And there was this kind of clash between, you know, the kings and the royals who wanted leisure and venison and ordinary people and, you know, the barons and everything, all everybody who, you know, enforced the kind of signing of the Magna Carta, who wanted forests to be more accessible to more people because they needed them for their kind of day-to-day protein. And I think there's a kind of interesting comparison now between

the way we think about forests as leisure, which was that kind of Norman idea of leisure, for elite people. And we tend to think of it again as something that's just about leisure. They're just about enjoying the countryside, which is incredibly important. I'm definitely not denying that, you know, walking in nature is incredibly important to people. But we've sort of forgotten that they have a role or might have a role in feeding us as well. And so there's some quite interesting things that people talk about in terms of agroforestry, how to use forests so you can both have them as something that's beautiful to kind of replenish spirits, but also they might be able to produce food as well.

I guess similar to everything else that we've already spoken about, that's just about reconnecting with something that was the way things were done, but we've sort of forgotten it, become disconnected from it, and have we got the chance to remake those connections that always used to be there? Remake those connections and just remember that, you know, food has to come from somewhere. This is obviously slightly later than medieval, but Hugh Latterman that gave these beautiful sermons just around the kind of reformation, really. He's talked about the importance of forest to ordinary people and he says their bacon is their venison. And it's quite interesting that he feels

like he needs to say that. He needs to remind the people who are listening to his sermon that not everybody has access to venison and beef and some sort of what we're becoming quite elite meats and that bacon was a real essential for people. Like we talked about beans were, but bacon was the thing, you could salt it and it would keep you going throughout the winter months when all the fresh meat has gone. I quite like the idea as well that Magna Carta was essentially everyone wanting the bacon sandwich. Yes. Magna Carta has this sort of younger sibling called the Charter of the Forest, which was a few kind of clauses that were from Magna Carta that were pulled out a couple of years later in about 1217 and it was about reasserting people's rights to forest land and also trying to

kind of move back the land grab that we talked about, you know, from kind of King John and his predecessors to reassert the rights that people had to forest land. It's interesting that Magna Carta is the one that sticks when I think the Charter of the Forest was probably the one that would have had the most day-to-day impact to people living through it. That was what really affected their daily lives and their ability to gather food and their rights to work, land and things like that. But it kind of slips out as we lose that connection, I guess. I think you're right. I think you're right.

And I think it's quite interesting, isn't it? Because, you know, there's a lot of discussion about Magna Carta is who's it really for, you know, is it really for commoners or is it just for the barons, you know, I mean, who benefits from it? Whereas the Charter of the Forest is actually, although we think about it, less is much more, like you say, about the rights of individuals, not maybe the poorest of individuals, but those sort of people we might now kind of think of as kind of workers or middle class in inverted commas and kind of medieval sense who had traditional rights over land. and they were incredibly important.

There's a section in the book two on bread and ale and you pitch them very much as staple foods for medieval England but pretty rubbish ones in that they're hard things for an individual to produce by themselves. So in turn that creates this kind of communal reliance and cooperation just to create the staples of everyday food and drink that become a core feature of medieval society and do things like the sizes of bread and ale in the 13th century, does that shift the balance?

Do we see a move away from more individual responsibility to collective responsibility to feed the community? It's fascinating, isn't it? Why bread becomes the most important thing to feed people? Because, as you're saying, bread is a sort of slightly rubbish. It's staple because it's so complicated. You have to have a huge amount of grain. You know, you have to obviously cut the grain. You have to thresh it.

you have to grind it, you need a big oven to bake it, you need yeast, you need expertise, and a lot of time. So it's a whole chain of people. And if you think about the kind of traditional medieval village, individuals would not have had ovens, they would not have been able to grind stuff themselves. I don't know if you ever seen a quern or an old grindstone, but Anglo-Saxon and earlier, from Roman times, people would maybe grind their own grain. And it's back-breaking work. of one stone on top of another in a handle and you kind of grind it round and round and it probably gave you a real kind of backache. And so as those jobs became sort of more communally determined, it means you have to have a miller, you have to have a baker, and then the Lord of the Manor

has to kind of decide who gets what in that whole kind of situation. And I think actually it's the very complexity of that circle that makes bread and ale, the sort of ideal. The sort of ideal basic food for communities because the whole community has got to be involved. Whereas if you're thinking about something like pot barley, it's in some ways much more suitable because it takes less before you can actually start to cook it. And one, all you need to do is put it in a pot over a fire and everybody had a fire in the middle of their dwelling, even if you didn't have an oven. Pot barley was incredibly important in medieval times, but it's not the thing that grabs everybody's

attention. And bread has kind of biblical overtones. You know, it's talked about a lot through the Bible. It has very kind of moral overtones. And those ideas of what bread stands for lasts for hundreds of years, you know, your daily bread and what side your bread is buttered and all those kind of bready expressions are really resonant because it was such an important thing to us. And because of its complexity, it gave rise to what you're talking about, the asizes of bread and ale, which is probably the longest ever running piece of food and drink legislation. It was extraordinary. It started around 1256 and runs up to the early 19th century. And it means basically that whereas the price of grain might go up and down, the price of a loaf of bread stays the same. These days,

we might call it shrinkflation. If grain gets more expensive, your little loaf of bread just gets smaller and then if grain gets cheaper and you have a good harvest and your loaf of bread can get bigger. But this essentially means that medieval government can be seen to be protecting the poor. I think seeing it is an obvious way of saying if you have a penny, you can always afford a penny loaf. It might get bigger, it might get smaller. You can always afford a penny loaf. So it was a very overt legislation that protected everybody's interests. It's interesting to see that as an emergence of a kind of consumer and retail local economy because no longer are people creating their own food, their own staple diet. The core of your staple food now relies on a whole chain of people to create

it for you at which you're just the end consumer who buys the product at the end. Exactly. And what it does very successfully, of course, and this is not overt, but I think it's probably implicit. What it does very successfully is it shifts the attention away from the landowner who's producing the grain to the baker. If you think back to the pandemic when we were running out of pasta and running out of bread and we were running out of all these staples. And so nothing happened except the supermarkets just went, okay, we're going to do the rationing. We're going to ration what people can buy because people are panicking, bulk buying, stocking up and all the rest of it.

And that felt comparatively normal to us as a nation. And I think you can sort of trace that back almost to the sizes of bread when the legislation said basically the retailers, the bakers, the people who are selling you, your food, are going to be the visible organizers for who gets what. And it kind of shifts the limelight away from the landowners onto the middle class bakers, the retailers, in a way that was probably quite convenient for the landowners because obviously there were riots, there were bread riots,

there were grain riots. But a lot of that attention goes on to the bakers. And so the bakers get this rather strange status in medieval times. they're never celebrated. They're always criticised or hated even. And if a baker puts rubbish in his bread, he gets pulled around the streets on a hurdle with kind of mouldy bread around his neck

and people pelt him with stuff or he gets put in the stocks or whatever it is. The story of carp is a fascinating one that appears in the book too. How did carp become a delicacy in late medieval England? It's a fairly late arrival in our time frame, isn't it? Yeah, it's interesting. we don't really know how it was introduced actually to England.

It's kind of natural home is sort of southeastern Europe, but somehow it did become into England. It's kind of glimpsed in the records around 1460. The Duke of Norfolk has ponds. There were carp swimming in those ponds. And then a bit later, there's a lovely book called a Treatise of Fishing with an Angle, an Angle being literally an angle, which is literally like a hook, published around 1496.

And the legend has a... it that it was written by an abbess called Dame Juliana Burgess. It might have been. It might not have been. But in that book, carp is already seen as a queen of the river. You know, this celebrity fish that is really wonderful to catch. And carp were caught then for food, no doubt about it. And there's lovely descriptions of people. John Evelyn, for example, this is a bit later on. He goes to a sort of grand house and the cook takes them all to the pond and they all point at the carp that they want. the cook to catch and prepare them for dinner. And in Isaac Walton's book,

The Complete Angler, he gives you a recipe for cooking carp. So everybody expected to eat it. And that changes, of course. We sort of stop eating cart. We start seeing it as just a fish that you angle for leisure, but never eat. And that journey is a really remarkable one in the way that we've changed the way we think about a fish.

It was introduced as a protein, source and then it ends up being a leisure activity. Yeah, it's an interesting kind of birth of that connection between stopping being food and just being sport. So we know that medieval nobleman would hunt for pleasure, but they would tend to eat what they caught at the end of it. And suddenly at the end of the medieval period, that seems to be evolving into literally just catching animals for sport that you have no intention of eating.

Yeah, and you get that today. You know, on grouse mares, you get people who go and shoot on grouse mares. nobody actually wants the grouse at the end of it. And, you know, they bulldoze them into the ground because nobody actually wants to eat the stuff. And yes, that kind of divorce between food and kind of leisure seems really quite wrong. But it's quite interesting the carp journey, actually, because, I mean, in some ways, it's a very positive story because what's happened is that carp has seen as a fish of canals, of ponds.

it's something that angling societies from cities, from industrial cities started to catch. And there's this kind of gross of an idea that these angling societies were often quite, you know, working class men who just wanted to go out and have some time away from the town. It starts to be a development of this idea that they have a very solid responsibility to their brother anglers, as Isaac Newton would have called them, to not take all the fish. It's like a really good example of a really good management of the commons. They manage those common resources well by agreeing that there's not enough fish for everybody to catch and take home with them. Therefore, fishing becomes a kind of leisure activity.

And obviously now, you know, you have a fishing licence and you're allowed to catch a certain amount, but you have to throw most of it back. But I think it's not just the licence. I think it's also this idea that anglers today have responsibility to the commons, to the water, to the fish, to each. other to catch these huge, amazing carps, photographed themselves and then chuck them back. And that collective responsibility seems like a real hangover from the medieval period that we've lost in so many other areas of life that it still exists there, even if it's a leisure activity rather than something to do with food. Yeah, no, I think that is right, yeah. Although, I mean, going back to the Magna Carta, one of the clauses of the Magna Carta is to stop

people putting what are called fish weirs. They were kind of complicated baskets that meant fish would get stuck in them, couldn't turn around and swim out again. And it meant that if you took all the fish from your section, the river, it meant that your neighbour upstream from you wouldn't have any, you know, if the fish were swimming upstream to migrate and to spawn. So it's not an ideal society by any stretch of imagination. You know, we have to be judicious about what we think they got right and what wrong. Having said that their hospitality seems to play a key part in the story of food throughout the medieval period and places like monasteries in particular are expected to provide hospitality almost on a day-to-day basis. And I got the impression that there was always a

need to balance giving proper hospitality with appearing to be too much of a soft touch. Is that fair? Yeah, definitely. Hospitality is fascinating because particularly before the plague, so up to the kind of middle of the 14th century, there was an idea that if you were travelling, you could call anywhere as a sort of castle or a monastery and you would be looked after. Now that's probably because most of the people travelling would have been of a kind of higher status. Because actually, if you were very low status, you wouldn't be allowed to leave your village without your lord's permission. And even if you had his permission, where would you go? I mean, you know, why would you want to go somewhere else unless it was to go and get married to somebody in the next village or something? So most

travellers probably had quite a high status. And what's really interesting about the plague is that that changes because we lose maybe between a quarter and a third of the population in the Great Plague. And suddenly, people who have been working on the land all their lives have a reason to move because their work, their kind of manpower is much more valuable. And they kind of take advantage of the kind of supply and demand curve. And they go, right, well, if you're not going to pay me more money, I'm going to go somewhere else that will. And people start moving to the towns and the cities and getting kind of better jobs. And so suddenly that idea that every single kind of kind of passing stranger gets given hospitality starts to look a little bit shaky. And there's this

great example in my book, actually, of a manner in Wales. And the owner is so worried about the fact that he's turning away people from his door. And remember, there's that bit in the Bible that says, you mustn't turn away somebody from your door in case they're an angel or in case they're Christ. So there's this idea that you have a kind of Christian responsibility to look after the stranger. And if you do look after the stranger and they are of the right status, words spreads about your lovely hospitality and everybody thinks what a great person you are. But if you look after the strangers and there's the wrong status, word spreads about what a soft touch you are. And our medieval Welshman actually wrote to the Pope and said, I don't really

know what to do about this. You know, I don't want to give all these kind of local-ass people hospitality, but I'm worried that it makes me look on Christian. The Pope said, don't worry about it. judged on the kind of the quality of your welcome and not the quantity of it. So basically go ahead and turn away all the sort of low status people if you need to. It's an interesting juxtaposition though, isn't it, between people's responsibility again to the community, even if it's more of a spiritual one, but also you can't feed everybody, otherwise you won't have enough food for yourself. So there is always a balance to be maintained there. And I guess we see that, you know, we have a flourishing hospitality industry in the world today. Now people have to pay to go and receive

that stuff. So that idea of getting it for free is gone. But the idea of other people providing you with food and shelter, albeit you have to pay for it, is still there. Yes, it's really interesting, isn't it? Because I think if you read, you know, kind of travel accounts of people sort of travelling around the world, you quite often find accounts where people say there are no inns in this part of the world. So for example, Samuel Johnson in the 18th century goes off to the highlands of Scotland. There's no chance that there's an inn for him to stay because nobody does that kind of traveling. And so he says, you either stay with a poor family and they give you a roof over your head, but nothing else because they've got nothing else to spare, or you go and

stay with the lead, and he'll feed you. You know, so we think that kind of it's normal to have pubs and inns and restaurants and cafes, but they're very kind of culturally produced. They come from a culture which enables and values travel, commuting and sort of going somewhere. And out of that has arisen our culture of kind of going to restaurants and going to pubs for pleasure as well as for kind of need. So throughout the book and throughout the centuries and the types of food and the changes that it deals with, do you think it means anything for us that some of our staple foods and even some things that were once considered delicacies in the medieval period have pretty much vanished from our diet today? Does it point to kind of changing tastes or attitudes

or just forgetting how we used to have to survive? Yeah, I think there's lots of things we could do better with environmentally. We eat too much meat. We all know this. It's hard to give it up. But there are kind of medieval ways of eating, which would be helpful. So, for example, in medieval times and Anglo-Saxon times, they had a lot more what you might now call scotch broth.

You know, it might be some dried peas and some pearl barley and it might have a tiny bit of mutton in and loads of vegetables or something. And that's quite an ancient idea. You know, you have grain, you have vegetables, you have a bit of meat, just to kind of flavor it throughout. And that might be called a potage after the Norman or it might be a brew it, which is an earlier name. But if you think of when we think of a stew, on the whole, stew is a plate of chopped up meat and maybe a few bits of carrots and all the rest of it. And you have it with potatoes, but the grain isn't sort of integral. And I think that's something that we could do well to remember.

And the other thing that I think just coincidentally, not because medieval people has a sort of better idea of health, but they had a much better attitude to sugar because sugar just was much, much more expensive. And so sugar was a delicacy in the same way that spices were, for example, that they didn't have what became called the sugar islands. You know, there wasn't the Caribbean, it wasn't sort of Jamaica and Barbados and all the rest of it, sugar was cane sugar, it came from North Africa. And so that idea that sugar is somehow something just to sort of sweeten, you know, it might be an occasional treat, it might be used like as salt, pepper, spice, just to kind of enhance the flavour of something, which was a very medieval idea. I think we'd all be better off, probably health-wise, if we went back to those concepts of eating. And it does feel a little bit like we're getting there, aren't we? We're relearning what we used to know, albeit for different reasons, having had the best. bad experience of ultra-processed foods and too much sugar in our diets and all of those kinds of things. We're slowly moving back towards what might be more recognisable as a medieval way,

a medieval relationship with food. Yes. There's a lovely line in the Canterbury Tales and it talks about the Franklin. The Franklin was called St. Julian in his own country and St. Julian's the patron saint of hospitality. And there's a kind of a couple of lines that describe the way that it kind of snowed meat and drink in his house. But basically it says that his servants, they brewed their own beer, they made their own bread, you know, they kind of grew their own vegetables and all the rest of it. And it's this rather lovely description of what we would now call, you know, locally sourced, organic, farmer's market, you know, farm to fork kind of food, you know, the sort of thing that we prize. So, you know, in some ways have kind of lost sight of in the kind of intervening centuries.

If you could bring back one medieval dish back into our diet today, what would you pick? Well, we talked a lot about beans at the beginning. I guess I'd bring back at least access to broad beans, at least to encourage people to sell them in supermarkets or dried in health food shops or something. That's a bit of a boring answer. I mean, there are some delightful medieval foods. There's lots of fun and lots of playfulness. I've always really loved making march pain.

Very, very simple. Armands, sugar, a little bit of. alcohol or even just lemon juice. And you have this wonderful edible clay that you can make into little animals or hedgehogs, you know, stick it through the almonds on in the back and all the rest of it. So there's lots of kind of fun and playfulness in medieval food, which I think is great. And we think now of sort of playfulness as being something for children, you know, like the kinder egg or food that looks like toys, whereas actually in previous eras, people would be horrified

that you'd waste all that kind of expensive sugar or expensive stuff on kids, you know, because actually that's what you would have delighted your guest with. So yeah, on the one hand, the kind of very basic staple, broad beans. On the other hand, something quite kind of elegant and fun. Yeah, broad beans sounds good. And it's definitely going to be the staple of our medieval peasant street food van that will be seen on the street somewhere soon. Thank you so much for joining us, Penn. It's been fascinating to talk through all of this stuff. I think one of the interesting things out of the book is that it kind of also, points at an argument that's really current today about kind of whose responsibility is it to feed us.

You know, in the past, it's been an individual responsibility. It's become a communal responsibility. Should the government feed us? Should we take more responsibility for feeding ourselves? And I think one of the things that the book explores really interestingly is that kind of current argument about levels of responsibility in society. Where does individual responsibility end and where does the government's job begin kind of thing? Exactly. And where does business fit into it? And I did start off with that question about kind of responsibility and really tried to kind of figure out for myself where I thought it lay. Then I came to the conclusion, which many people would just come to conclusion in a kind of

heartbeat, whereas it took me a whole book to work it out. But I think people do have individual responsibilities. We should be trying to eat well. We should be trying to look after each other. We should be trying to look after ourselves. But you only have responsibility proportionate to the amount of agency or the amount of power you have. You know, if you're right at the end of or tethering, or trying to feed loads of kids and kind of work two jobs and all the rest of it, you maybe don't have a huge amount of power. And so it is the government's responsibility to make a society where we can actually make good choices for ourselves. So in the end, that's how it kind of felt those divisions of responsibility lay for me.

And so that means that it is the government's responsibility to mandate that food companies and supermarkets treat our well-being and our health seriously. It would just be one example of that. Wonderful. Thank you so much for joining us. I've thoroughly enjoyed that. I'm very hungry now. And I'm going to go and start planning the menu for our food wagon. I'm going to go have a cup of tea. A very un cup of medieval tea. Penn's fantastic new book, Stuffed. A History of Good Food in Hard Times in Britain is out now and offers a fascinating and entertaining journey through our relationship with food over the centuries.

There are new episodes of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please join us next time for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us wherever you get your podcasts from and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. If you get a moment, please do drop us a review or rate us everywhere that you listen to your podcasts. It really does help new audiences to find us. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis, and we've just gone medieval with history hits.