New research conducted on food consumption in England during the Pre-Viking Middle Ages challenges long-held assumptions of gluttony and carnivorous habits. The pair of companion papers published in the journal Anglo-Saxon England explores the dietary behavior of both nobles and peasants using both textual references and chemical analysis of 2,023 skeletons of individuals from the same period.
“There are long-held assumptions in both archaeology and history surrounding elite diets in early medieval England,” said the researchers, “namely that higher status individuals had a more meat-heavy and therefore protein-rich diet than the lower classes, and that this was especially true for males over females.”
Banquet given in Paris in 1378 by Charles V of France (center, blue) for Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor (left) and his son Wenceslaus, King of the Romans. Illustration by Jean Fouquet, 1455–60 [Wikimedia Commons, public domain]
The trope is repeated reliably in popular cinematic imagery, from the more recent Game of Thrones to the famous representations of the Matter of Britain such as the films The Green Knight (2021), Excalibur (1981), and the musical Camelot (1967). That assumption is also re-manifested in countless Renaissance festivals and medieval re-enactment events with ubiquitous turkey legs and king’s feasts. But the permanent feasting of nobility and a great class difference in the food consumption during that time seems to be a myth.
The first part of the research consisted of deciphering existing food lists that survived from the reign of King Ine of Wessex (c. 688-726). Kings in this period are believed to have received feorm, or food-rent, from the free peasants of their kingdoms. One such relic asks the local farmers to supply ten vats of honey, 300 bread rolls, 42 buckets of beer, two oxen (or 10 sheep), 10 geese, 20 hens, 10 cheeses, a bucket of butter, 100 eels, and 5 salmon.
Bioarchaeologist Sam Leggett and his co-researcher historian Tom Lambert calculated the total caloric value of such a meal. They write, “each guest would have received 4,140 kcal from 712g of meat (beef, mutton, and poultry), another 300g of fish (salmon and eel), plus cheese, honey and ale.” They found 10 other food lists that were curiously similar, and the researchers noted that no vegetables were listed but some were likely present.
Lambert commented, “These were not blueprints for everyday elite diets as historians have assumed.”
Feorm, however, is a complicated term and generally thought to have been an exploitive system to support the royal households. The current research suggests something quite different.
The feasts would likely have been outdoor events with huge pits roasting the meats. “We’re looking at kings traveling to massive barbecues hosted by free peasants,” said Lambert, “people who owned their own farms and sometimes slaves to work on them. You could compare it to a modern presidential campaign dinner in the US. This was a crucial form of political engagement.”
During these events, Rhys Blakely notes in the Times, “the nobility rubbed shoulders with the peasantry.”
As for the amount and type of food, Leggett says “I’ve found no evidence of people eating anything like this much animal protein on a regular basis. If they were, we would find isotopic evidence of excess protein and signs of diseases like gout from the bones. But we’re just not finding that.”
There is no specific documentary attestation of this assumption, but the chemical signatures left in the skeletons suggest a more modest diet consisting primarily of grains with small amounts of meat or cheese as part of daily consumption. “We should imagine a wide range of people livening up bread with small quantities of meat and cheese, or eating pottages of leeks and whole grains with a little meat thrown in,” says Leggett in their statement.
Leggett and Lambert noted in the publication that more research should examine their conclusions. Their findings are based on a limited sample with specific challenges around chronology and which skeletons are reliably those of the elite or peasant classes. But even changes in custom, class, and funerary practices do not confound the findings around social status and diet.
Funerary and burial practice changes were important because they changed after the Roman period and because of new religious observances.
The researchers noted that other beliefs about medieval food consumption do appear to be accurate. “Most notably,” they say, “that women and younger children were more likely to be hardest hit by food shortages, and there seems to be social precedence for being served at feasts and special occasions, but the assumption of a meat- and alcohol-heavy elite diet is still pervasive.”
The research added that their data set begins to fill in gaps about daily food consumption in medieval England while also challenging long-standing assumptions that there existed an “institutionalised ‘expropriation of the poor to feed the powerful.’”
They also found in their research that those individuals with the highest meat-consumption biological markers appeared to be Scandinavian newcomers to the area or people who were “observing religious dietary restrictions.” The increased consumption of fish for example, was possibly due to the Christianization of the region and the calendarization of Christian feast days.
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