Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives (5 page)

If anyone wishes to estimate the size of Rome by looking at these suburban regions, he will necessarily be misled for want of a definite clue by which to determine up to what point it is still the city and where it ceases to be the city; so closely is the city connected with the country, giving the beholder the impression of a city stretching out indefinitely.
³¹

Rome, of course, was a monstrous aberration. For a thousand years after its fall, urban civilisation would wane in Europe, as ‘barbarian’ hunting cultures restored the concept of forest as privileged territory. However, by the ninth century, the forest no longer seemed limitless. Clearances for agriculture had encroached on its vastness, and influxes of tribes from the east brought new pressures to bear. Disputes over territory became increasingly common as various powers, including the monasteries, tried to secure exclusive rights over the forest for themselves.

The spread of Frankish and Gothic tribes brought a new understanding of the forest to northern Europe. Both cultures took hunting
very seriously indeed, linking social prestige directly to its rituals. The right of Norman kings to hunt was considered a sacred privilege, and to meddle with their aim was a treasonable offence. Once William the Conqueror had defeated Harold at Hastings, he lost no time in annexing a quarter of his new kingdom as ‘royal forest’, which, as the name suggests, was territory in which the king, and only he, was allowed to hunt. Punishments for foraging and poaching were severe, ranging from the removal of one’s eyes and testicles for the killing of a deer, to the less imaginative but undeniably effective penalty of death. All this would have been harsh enough, were it not for the fact that William’s ‘forest’ included great swathes of countryside (including the entire county of Essex) which were not wooded at all, but included, as the historian Simon Schama has pointed out, ‘tracts of pasture, meadow, cultivated farmland, and even towns’.
³²
Quite what Essex Man, used to snaring himself the odd rabbit for the pot, was supposed to do under this draconian regime was anyone’s guess. It was tantamount to a life sentence of covert criminality to those who had always made their living from the woods.

The Norman land-grab signalled the start of feudalism in England, and a system of land management that would dominate in some parts of Europe until well into the nineteenth century.
³³
Feudalism came in many forms, but typically it consisted of large manorial estates or strips of land around villages or towns, which were owned by lords and worked by peasants, whose privileges depended largely on how their numbers matched up to the demand for labour. After a major plague, such as the Black Death, which wiped out a third of the population in Europe during the 1340s, a peasant’s life could be tolerable. At such times, landowners might see their way to extending peasants’ rights, allowing them to keep a proportion of their own produce, or even granting them ownership of their land, in exchange for military or other obligations. But when labour was plentiful, peasants’ lives could be bleak, and they were often treated as little better than slaves. The serfs who worked on Russian grain estates, for instance, could be branded or sold at public auction, and one law of 1649 allowed the torture of children who denied their feudal bond to lord and land.
³⁴

Feudalism didn’t spread much happiness, nor was it very good at producing food; it was the latter failing, rather than the numerous peasant revolts that characterised its history, that would eventually prove its downfall. As a system of land management, feudalism was just about capable of sustaining an essentially rural population. As a means of feeding cities, it was next to useless.

By early medieval times, urban civilisation was making a comeback in Europe. Ever since the fall of Rome, monasteries had provided some civilised sanctuary amidst the lawlessness that raged over the continent, and by the ninth century, thanks chiefly to the Christian conversion of the Frankish king Charlemagne, they had gained an impressive foothold. Some were so large, they were effectively towns in their own right: the monastery of Tours, with a population of 20,000, was one of the largest settlements in Europe.
³⁵
With their close-knit, self-sufficient communities, protective walls and market gardens, monasteries provided the template for a new kind of city. From the eleventh century onwards, fortified ‘communes’ began to appear in northern Italy and Spain, France, Germany and the Low Countries, reviving the ancient city-state in a new, Christian configuration.

One such commune, Siena, has a council chamber with one of the finest views in all of Italy. A large rectangular room set high within the city’s thirteenth-century town hall, the Sala dei Nove has a great window that looks out over a classic Tuscan landscape, with its gently rolling patchwork of vineyards, olive groves, villas and cypresses. That the landscape has barely changed in nearly 700 years becomes evident when one looks at the frescoes decorating the room, painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in 1338. To the left of the window is a fresco entitled
The Effects of Good Government on City and Country
, depicting a tidy, well-maintained Siena surrounded by a neat landscape just like the one outside. Peasants till the fields, two huntsmen set off with a pack of orderly hounds, a farmer enters the city with mules laden with corn, and another drives a flock of sheep to market. City and country exude peace
and prosperity – which is more than can be said for the scenes on the opposite wall. In
The Allegory and Effects of Bad Government
, war is raging in the countryside, the fields are a burnt-out wasteland, and Siena itself resembles a medieval sink estate, with broken windows, dilapidated buildings, and a populace intent on robbing and fighting one another. Even if the Council of Nine never uttered a word in that room, the walls themselves – and the view outside – would have carried the argument for them. Look after your countryside, and it will look after you.

The Lorenzetti fresco captures a unique moment in urban history: one in which city and country co-existed in relative harmony. Unlike ancient city-states, whose rural hinterlands were owned almost exclusively by urban elites, the farmland around Italian communes was managed by city councillors, whose mercantile instincts brought a completely new perspective to farming. Recognising the value of maximising agricultural yields, many communes released their serfs to become land-owning peasants, or
contadini
, encouraging them to work the land far harder. In 1257, Bologna freed 6,000 serfs in one go in exchange for the receipt of half their produce every year – a move considered by the sociologist Henri Lefebvre to have marked the arrival of the world’s first capitalist agriculture.
³⁶

Italian communes were in many ways ahead of their time, but their intimate involvement with their rural hinterlands was far from unique in the pre-industrial world. City-dwellers all over Europe retained close links with the countryside. Rich townsfolk often had country estates from which they kept themselves supplied with grain, poultry and vegetables, while poorer ones had smallholdings that they would periodically leave the city in order to farm. When the merchant classes, or bourgeoisie, came on the scene, they operated somewhere in between, building themselves country houses in order to imitate the lifestyles of the rich, but also making money from commercial farming. As a result, the suburbs of Renaissance Rome were almost as full of farms and villas as they had been in ancient times, with the difference that the typical fifteenth-century farmer possessed his own olive grove or vineyard and tended it himself. The city became so deserted at harvest times that a statute had to be passed suspending civic justice during those periods.
³⁷

Not only did pre-industrial city-dwellers go regularly into the countryside, many also brought the country to the city. People commonly kept pigs and chickens in their houses, and grain and hay were often stored in yards too. Many houses resembled urban farms – an appearance that was not to everyone’s taste. The eighteenth-century German economist Ernst Ludwig Carl deplored the ‘piles of dung’ clogging up the nation’s cities, suggesting it would be far preferable ‘to ban all farming in towns, and to put it in the hands of those suited to it’.
³⁸
But despite such protestations, people continued to farm in cities until well into the nineteenth century – even those as large as London. In 1856, the Victorian historian George Dodd described one ‘extraordinary piggery at Kensington’ as follows:

A group of wretched tenements, known as ‘The Potteries’, inhabited by a population of 1000 or 1200 persons, all engaged in the rearing of pigs; the pigs usually outnumbered the people three to one, and had their sties mixed up with the dwelling-houses; some of the pigs lived in the houses and even under the beds.
³⁹

Whatever they might have thought of farming, no pre-industrial city-dweller could forget it existed. As the social historian Fernand Braudel remarked, ‘Town and country never separate like oil and water. They are at the same time separate yet drawn together, divided yet combined.’
⁴⁰

Despite the close links between town and country in early modern Europe, the idea that urban life was civilised and rural life boorish frequently prevailed. Although the vast majority lived on the land, social life in Tudor England revolved increasingly around cities, with the landed gentry deserting their estates every winter for London; the beginnings of the so-called ‘London Season’. Urban life was compared favourably to the ‘great rudeness and barbarous custom of dwelling in the country’, while cities themselves were small and, in the opinion of
their inhabitants, perfectly formed, often being described as ‘fair’ and ‘pretty’.
⁴¹

However, things were about to change. As cities grew larger (and smoggier, thanks to the increasing use of coal), their perceived moral stock began to decline. In 1548, Hugh Latimer, Bishop of Worcester, delivered a lacerating sermon on the steps of St Paul’s, accusing Londoners of ‘pride, covetousness, cruelty, and oppression’, and assuring them that ‘if the ploughmen in the country were as negligent in their office as prelates be, we should not long live, for lack of sustenance’.
⁴²
Latimer’s use of the plough as an image of virtue was to become a recurrent theme in centuries to come. As cities prospered and glittered, the rural view of them became increasingly jaundiced, as the admirably succinct 1630 ditty ‘The Poor Man Paies for All’ suggests:

The King he governs all,

The Parson pray for all,

The Lawer plead for all,

The Ploughman pay for all,

And feed all.
⁴³

By the seventeenth century, it wasn’t just country folk who found cities distasteful. Poets and philosophers were also starting to show a preference for the countryside; for, as the prominent Quaker William Penn put it, ‘there we see the works of God; but in cities little else but the works of men’.
⁴⁴
Penn demonstrated his love of nature by departing for somewhere he could get his paws on plenty of it: North America, a large tract of which (Pennsylvania) still bears his name.
⁴⁵
While Penn and others sailed off to pastures new, the nation they abandoned remained in the grip of a pastoral obsession. The purity and innocence of the countryside were extolled in paintings, poetry and plays, such as John Fletcher’s
The Faithful Shepherdess
, performed at court in 1633 with the inclusion, at the author’s insistence, of real shepherds and sheep. But as the historian Keith Thomas pointed out in his book
Man and the Natural World
, such fantasies were born of the increasing distance between town and country: ‘… the growing tendency to disparage urban life and to look to the countryside as a symbol of
innocence rested on a series of illusions. It involved that wholly false view of rural social relationships which underlies all pastoral.’
⁴⁶

Meanwhile, the countryside of Stuart England was fast becoming a manmade landscape, as it scrambled to meet the cities’ growing demand for food. Agricultural improvement was the new moral imperative; the question was, how was it to be achieved? The answer came from the one nation that was predominantly urban earlier than England: the Netherlands. By the mid seventeenth century, more than half the Dutch lived in towns, and the land (much of which had been reclaimed from the sea) was working overtime to feed the population. Dutch farms consisted of small, sandy plots made fertile by deep digging, constant weeding and plenty of fertiliser, much of the latter provided by the towns in the form of wood ash and manure. Country and city were linked by a close network of canals, which carried waste from the towns to the farms and brought food back in the opposite direction. But perhaps the most important legacy of Dutch farming was the use of fodder crops, both to improve the soil and to provide winter feed for animals, which hitherto had to be slaughtered in late autumn. The value of these techniques was noted by English farmers, particularly those in the south-east, who enjoyed close trading links with the Dutch. The planting of fodder crops, popularised by Charles ‘Turnip’ Townshend at the start of the eighteenth century, was a symbol of the English Agricultural Revolution, but it had been practised in the Netherlands – and parts of East Anglia – for decades before he was even born.