Agricultural History Review, Volume 55 Part 1 (2007), p. 128

No previous work of scholarship has accomplished the scale, coverage, and depth this book devotes to what the medieval English ate. The editors set for it two ambitious goals: to synthesize rich, new, and widely-scattered information about human diet and nutrition in England during the sixth through sixteenth centuries; and to clarify and encourage interaction between methodological approaches of archaeology and history. Much of what here serves these purposes was cooked up during a decade’s regular gatherings of the Diet Group at Somerville College, Oxford. The authors’ shared experience and mutual criticism results in a common tone and focus rarely found in collective volumes such as this.

Food in medieval England presents nineteen chapters gathered into two thematic units with introductory and concluding chapters by the editors. They are joined by ten more co- or contributing authors, many of them well known to medievalists, agricultural historians, and archaeologists.

Eleven chapters (Two to Twelve) and about two-thirds of the book survey the important classes of foodstuffs: plant materials from field and garden; domestic livestock; fish; wild and domestic birds; the hunt (‘venery’) and its take (‘venison’). Individually- or co-authored chapters sometimes blend and sometimes distinguish between verbal and material evidence (to employ terms which may better differentiate objects of particular study as historians and archaeologists together engage in a common effort to understand the past). Critical criteria for inferring past conditions and human behaviour from recovered plant remains (archaeobotany) and animal parts (archaeozoology) are especially well established. In certain situations disciplinary conclusions coincide, in others they seem to convey different slices of past human experience. As here repeatedly demonstrated, written records of production and recovered traces of consumption must be considered together. All contributors attend closely both to social and cultural differences among contemporary English eaters and to changes visible over time. Merely to sample the rich buffet: C.C.Dyer decisively establishes from widely scattered but abundant data what medieval England’s many gardens offered for both elite and common diets; D.Serjeantson judiciously assesses the scope of eleventh-century increases in consumption of marine fishes; D.J.Stone and J.Birrell respectively show surprisingly deep social strata eating more wild birds and some cuts of venison during the period after the Black Death.

The last third of the book offers six topical studies on aspects of diet and nutrition. Some of these present uniquely important summaries of the current state of knowledge. C.M.Woolgar’s essay on collective dining customs and B.F.Harvey’s on monastic pittances together weaken and nuance the stereotype of exclusively piscivorous monks. Others treat the essential ingredient of natural and cultural seasonality in human dietary regimes and the demographic consequences of known dietary conditions and changes. These essays should go straight to the table set for advanced student seminars in agrarian, economic, and social history.

Two items stun the reader with methods hitherto unfamiliar to medievalists, if not to scholars working on earlier periods. Stable chemical isotopes, trace elements, and pathologies measured in human skeletal remains pose striking new interpretative hypotheses. For example, the ratios of carbon–12 to carbon–13 and of nitrogen–15 to nitrogen–14 are well-known to differ consistently between such broad categories as foods of terrestrial and of aquatic origin or from plant or animal sources; this ratio is then preserved in the bone protein of humans who habitually consume such foods. Urban skeletons with stable isotope ratios showing more consumption of animals and animal products than was the case for rural people neatly coincide with the evidence of food remains and the written record. But G.Müldner and M.P.Richards report an unusual result from pilot isotopic analysis of large bone samples taken at three socially distinctive late medieval sites in northern England: anomalous ratios there detected argue for unexpectedly heavy eating of either omnivorous pigs or freshwater fishes. Neither dining habit would be suggested from other sorts of data. New methods open up whole new areas for inquiry.

By and large Food in medieval England achieves its editors’ goal, offering a diverse, yet smooth and thorough reappraisal of the evidence regarding what medieval English people ate and their consequent dietary conditions. Agricultural historians narrowly conceived will want closely to examine the chapters on food products of domestic plant and animal origin, but anyone interested in broader relations among human social groups and between those people and their natural environment will be rewarded and inspired by the whole collection. The editors and their collaborators earn the highest praise and thanks for serving us this rich banquet. As intended, it stimulates our appetites for extended research efforts in Britain and serious emulation on the other side of the Channel.