Castles, Customs, and Kings: True Tales by English Historical Fiction Authors (24 page)

The staff members at the long tables sit, politely silent in the presence of their lady and a priest who’s said to have second sight—some no doubt wondering if this means the harvest, so near ripening, will fail? The kitchen servants wait restively in line down the steps of the foyer, beyond the hall door. At last the Bishop makes the sign of the cross and says, “Amen,” and the meal may begin.

Servant after servant comes briskly in and offers the dish he’s bearing first to the Countess, then to the Bishop, then to Peter, last to tutor Boscellis and the boys. At the low tables Lady Mary presides and carves the trencher loaves, holding each round loaf cradled under her arm with the long knife sawing perilously toward her bosom.

Kitchen boys bring in a roast of beef and another of ham and a round of cheese. The leftovers of the dainty dishes of the high table may be offered here in the second course, and sometimes the Countess sends special samples down to Lady Mary. The cups that the staff carry tied to their belts are brought forth and filled by Garbag from the second pitcher of wine.

Non-meat dishes first are served at the high table since the Bishop will not eat red meat. A footman offers eels, caught in the abbey pond next door and baked in a crust with diced onion, ginger, currants, raisins, and vinegar. Next comes a charger of carp from Kenilworth’s Mere, served in a pond of sauce galantine (see Recipe 1 below). Then come fritters of parsnips cooked with almond milk; baked eggs with mint, parsley, fennel, rue, and tansy; bowls of pease pottage with saffron and pepper (see Recipe 2 below).

Frowning at such extravagance, Grosseteste helps himself only to the pottage, eggs, and the parsnip fritters, while Boscellis happily accepts large servings of the rich eel and carp. Countess Eleanor smiles; she’s fond of Boscellis and has told the cook to always have some fine dish for the tutor monk whose one indulgence is good food.

Peter de Montfort and the Countess herself have a taste of everything, and Peter summons back the carp for a larger serving, his trencher well soaked in sauce galantine. The boys poke at small servings of the carp, waiting for the roasts in the next course.

At the lower tables, Trubody carves the roasted meats. The staff members pass the wooden chargers laden with sliced ham or beef, pricking their choices with their dining knives. Like the diners at the high table, each has a knife case, hung with whatever other implements they need—keys, stylus, needle case, or hoof pick—from their belts.

Now at the high table the second course begins. Gobehasty brings a magnificent pastry-covered roast. On the platter, surrounding the golden dome that encases the meat, are spiced apples and pears. Into the honey-laden juices, the poured batter that covers the meat has flowed and crisped into crinkled bits, special treats for the children.

As Trubody carves and a servant takes the slices round the table, more dishes are run (coursed) from the kitchen: a pie of the spiced innards of the deer that was the main course yesterday; a capon stuffed with almonds and figs; a mawmenye of lamb with lentils, turnips, and currants (see Recipe 3 below).

Since the Earl is away and there are few guests today, the meal is not extensive. The diners at the high table spear the cut meat with the points of their dining knives, as Peter does, or delicately carry them from trencher to mouth with thumb and forefinger—or thumb and index finger—as the Countess does, with fingers not in use daintily splayed to keep them free of sauce. The wash basin and towel is brought round again.

When the second course is finished, the course of sweets is served. Dishes of home-grown sugared violets and rose petals, imported almonds, and dried cherries from the orchard are set upon the cloth as the sauce-soaked trenchers are removed.

Being thick and very dry, the undersides of the bread trenchers have left little on the table but crumbs. The poor of the manor’s village, gathering at the castle gate, will receive the sauce-laden bread from the almoner this evening.

Cook has prepared a special sweet in honor of the Bishop, a
faun tempere
—carnation flower pudding (see Recipe 4 below). Small bowls, each garnished with carnations and roses, are set at each place at the high table.

The Countess, her guests and family, Lady Mary, and the Bishop leave the hall for evening prayers in the chapel. The diners at the low tables vacate the benches, and the kitchen, serving staff, and lesser servants of the castle take their places. Garbag and Slingaway bring wooden buckets of beer from the brewing shed and the copious remains of the roast meats and cheese are heaped on the trencher slices as quickly as Cook can slice the loaves.

In the kitchen shed the hearth’s fire has been banked, the inverted kettles used for baking are cleared from the coals. The hanging kettle used for the pottage has been lifted from its trammel to the stone wash tub where, with fasces of twigs, it was scrubbed, along with the big forks and ladles, griddles and pots, in hot water from the great kettle that never leaves the hearth.

In a bucket of clean water Trubody himself carefully washes the silver goblets and the pewter ewer shaped like a knight on horseback, then he dries them and returns them to safety in the aumbry in the hall.

Recipes

1)
Sauce galantine, to serve with fowl, meats, or fish
: 1/3 cup very dry bread or bread crusts ground to a fine grain, 1 cup stock (vegetable, chicken, fish, or meat depending upon the dish to be sauced), 1 tsp ground galingale, ¼ tsp each cinnamon, ginger, and cloves, 2 tbsp vinegar for fish or vegetable dishes, 3 tbsp sherry for fowl or meats. Combine bread crumbs with the spices. Add remaining ingredients and simmer gently until sauce thickens. Season with salt and pepper to taste and serve. About 1 ½ cups.

2)
Pease pottage
: 3 cups vegetable broth, 3 lb. shelled green peas, 1 large onion, minced, 2 tbsp brown sugar, ¼ tsp salt, ¼ tsp saffron, ¼ tsp of pepper, ¼ tsp dry ginger powder. Bring broth to a boil; add all the other ingredients, cook covered over medium heat for 12 to 15 minutes, turn out and puree the pottage and return to the pot to reheat. Garnish with a slice of toasted, crusty bread for each bowl. Serves 6.

3)
Mawmenye of lamb and lentils
: 1¼ lb of lamb cut into small bite-size chunks, 1 cup chicken or vegetable broth, 4 cups beef broth, 1 cup dry lentils washed and cleansed of stones and blemished lentils, 1 cup diced turnips or parsnips, 1/3 cup chopped figs, 1 cup currants, 1/3 cup raisins, ¼ tsp cinnamon and ¼ tsp ginger (powdered), ¼ tsp pepper, ½ tsp salt, 2 tbsp butter, pale celery leaves, or yellow nasturtiums. Mix the ¼ tsp of pepper and ½ tsp of salt with the chunks of lamb and then sauté the lamb in the butter. Add chicken broth and simmer gently until lamb is cooked and tender (45 min. to an hour). Meanwhile bring lentils to boil in the 4 cups of beef broth; when boil is reached reduce heat and simmer for 15 minutes. Combine spices (additional salt may be added sparingly here, to taste) and add to turnips/parsnips, tossing to mix well. Add the turnips/parsnips, figs, and currants to the lentils and continue to cook for 10 to 15 minutes or until the lentils are tender. Stir the cooked lamb into the lentils and place in a large serving bowl. Distribute the celery leaves or flowers decoratively and serve. Serves 6 if offered with other main course dishes.

4)
Faun tempere—carnation flower pudding:
½ cup beef or chicken broth, 2½ cups milk, ¼ cup white flour, ½ cup white sugar, 5 egg yolks, 9 or 10 carnation flowers (violets or rose petals may be substituted if carnations aren’t available, but nasturtiums have too sharp a flavor), ½ cup skinned and grated almonds, ¼ tsp each cinnamon, galingale, mace and ginger powder. In a pot set into a kettle of gently boiling water (you can use a double boiler) heat milk and broth gradually. Mix the flour, sugar, and spices and gradually add to the milk and broth, stirring constantly for 12 to 15 minutes. Beat the eggs. Put ½ cup of the heated milk, flour, spices and stock into a separate bowl and gently stir in the beaten egg yolks. Add to the main pot, stirring continually as pudding thickens. Pour the pudding into separate bowls and allow to cool. Strew the top with the flowers and serve.

Further Reading

Aresty, Esther B.
The Delectable Past
. Bobbs-Merrill, 1964.

Cosman, Madeleine Pelner.
Fabulous Feasts
. George Braziller, 1976.

Sass, Lorna, S.
To the King’s Taste
. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1975.

Tannahill, Reay.
The Fine Art of Food
. New York: A.S. Barnes, & Co., 1968.

Wilson, C. Anne.
Food and Drink in Britain
. Penguin Books, 1984.

Life in a Medieval Village

by Katherine Ashe

W
hen Julius Caesar arrived in Albion, what we call Briton, he reported to the Roman Senate that here was a land completely under cultivation. A thousand years later, when William of Normandy conquered England he had
to eradicate numerous villages to plant what is still known as the New Forest to create a future supply of oak for ships.

What did this long sustained agriculture look like and how was it maintained?

We don’t know if the “three field system” was already in place in Caesar’s time—it certainly was well before the arrival of the Normans, who were using it on their home fiefs as well.

Picture a land wide open, dotted with villages here and there, a manor house, often fortified and with a bit of woodland, a hunting chase that would also supply wood for heat and cooking and occasionally a few large timbers for a crook-built building the walls of which, between the supporting timbers, would be woven willow wands—a sort of basketry—wadded with clay and horsehair (a building material called wattle and daub).

The single village street would be lined with wattle and daub “half timbered” cottages, each set on its own little “toft”, usually planted with a vegetable garden at the back and surrounded by a willow “wattle” fence to keep in the chickens. The cottage would also possess a “croft”, another small piece of land probably planted with a few fruit trees—apple, pear, quince, cherry—and here pigs might be kept.

These cottages were not the property of the cottagers but belonged to the fief, the whole of the estate that included the village, the manor house, the fields, and the chase. Before the Conquest in 1066 these fiefs belonged to whatever Briton, Saxon, or Dane happened to hold it as overlord from time immemorial or as the results of war and apportionment to the dominant power’s friends.

With the arrival of the Normans, the fiefs were granted to William’s followers under the feudal system through the King’s direct gift of a multitude of fiefs to his most useful followers, who then apportioned the fiefs under their control to their knights to supply them with a living through specific taxes so that they were free and well supplied when their services were called upon for war.

But regardless of who might be living in, or rebuilding the great house to suit his tastes, the life of the villagers, or “villeins” as they were properly called with no disparagement intended, remained the same. Even what they paid in duties to the holder of the fief remained the same according to ancient custom.

For each village had a “wittenmote,” a group of elders who knew the customs of the place: what was owed to the lord of the manor and when, how the cultivated land was apportioned and to whom, what the penalties were for crimes, etc. Thus the wittenmote provided a continuity for village life regardless of who was the dominant force politically at any given time.

In the 13th century the royal judge Henry de Bracton made a compilation of these customary laws of the wittenmotes, and that collection lies at the foundation of the British and U.S. legal systems based upon precedent, rather than a code of law as is the practice in most of the rest of the world.

But who were these villagers who had been occupying the cottages from time out of mind?

Each cottage was held by its “house-bondsman,” the eldest son, or in the counties under the Danelaw, the youngest son. One must suppose this Scandinavian practice of making the youngest son the inheritor, on the idea that the older ones would certainly be old enough to fend for themselves long before their father died, encouraged the expansionary practice of going a-viking—from which nearly everyone in reach of Scandinavian ships suffered.

The house-bondsman, or “husbandman,” inherited the bond for the cottage and all that pertained to it: the toft, the croft, and a right to a certain number of rows, say three rows for example, in each of the three great fields surrounding the village. Since the land was not of equal quality in all of its rows, the rows were not permanently allotted to specific cottages.

Each year the fief’s husbandmen drew straws for which set of rows would be theirs to cultivate that year. The unfortunate ended up with that “short straw” and “a hard row to hoe,” but the misfortune would probably be rectified the following year.

The fields, and the rows in them, were demarcated by posts—palings or “pales.” To trespass on someone else’s row was to “go beyond the pale.” Don’t picture these rows as the little scraping of the soil you might do in your veggie garden—these rows were huge, and S shaped, giving the fields something of the look of a sea ruffled with waves as high as a man’s waist and sometimes wider than one might be able to jump over. The S shape was the result of the wide turning radius of the ox drawn plows in use.

Though the Minoans apparently had huge bulls and the Romans had what look like the beautiful modern, good-sized, and cream colored Charolais, England’s oxen in the Middle Ages were not very big at all, their backs reaching only to about the height of a man’s chest.

For those not familiar with cattle raising, oxen are castrated bull calves. Since a cow, to be milk-able, must bear a calf, and since half the calves born are likely to be male and useless as milkers, it is these bull calves that supply the meat—as of course do the old cows past milking age. When needed, a strong bull calf would be kept for breeding, or castrated and trained to the heavy wooden oxbow that would couple him to another ox and enable him to be hitched to a plow or wagon.

These little cattle were not very strong; a team for plowing would require six of them, a heavy wagon might require a team of ten or more. So the husbandman would share his two oxen with his neighbors who had rows of a sufficient distance from his that the team, wending its way through the row’s S curve, would take up the neighbor’s row at the right place in the curve.

Where were all these oxen kept when they weren’t plowing? Here we come to the three field system. The oxen lived on that year’s fallow field, helpfully manuring it. The three fields in which the principal manor lands were divided followed a regular three year cycle.

The Fallow Field, on which nothing was planted, rested and was renewed with manuring by the village animals. The next field in the cycle, known as the Spring Field, was planted with oats, peas, beans, and barley—all nitrogen-fixing plants. Because these four plantings required different growing conditions regarding moisture, the slope of the row was used like a little hillside with the four different kinds of plants each in its own row along the incline. After harvesting, these plants would be plowed into the soil, enriching it even further.