Just as everyone lived together, hugger-mugger, so there was a surprising degree of overlap in the food habits of rich and poor. But (as with houses) differences were widening. Breakfast was not taken until late morning, 9 a.m.; the more working-class you were, the earlier you ate it. Cold meat, with beer or ale, was usual; Henrietta Maria is said to have liked broth. Not until the eighteenth century did the English take to baked goods for breakfast. Bread was both a staple and an oddity. Soldiers refer to bread all the time, and with longing, as if it were at once central to meals and hard to come by. This is probably not as different as we might imagine from civilian life for those of lower socio-economic status; one effect of war is to force some of the gentry to live the lives of the worse-off. Baking would only occur once a week even in a large gentry household, and the goal would be to bake a huge quantity at once; this was because the fire required was so large and expensive. To heat a brick oven hot enough for breadbaking might consume more fuel than a modest family would use in a month. Some cheaper bread was made not from pure wheat, but from maslin, a mixture of rye and wheat grown and harvested together. For Gervase Markham, advocate of a self-sufficiency always rare and probably becoming rarer, baking was in the same chapter as brewing, and was slightly less important: ‘forasmuch as drink is in every house more generally spent than bread … being made the very substance of all entertainment, I shall begin with it’. The two activities were bound together: both used grain transformed by yeast. For the noble or upper gentry household, the bread of every day was manchet bread, made with bolted (sieved) white flour, salted, leavened with ale barm, carefully shaped, and baked gently, said Markham. Cheat bread, made with coarser flour, was raised with sourdough, ‘a piece of suchlike leaven saved from a former batch’. Food writers who know little of artisanal breadmaking often wrongly see this kind of leaven as a drawback; it was a cheap alternative, but it was more richly flavoured and if carefully kept, more reliable. Markham gives a recipe which works perfectly well, and which has the advantage of making the gentry household independent of the brewing and baking industries. And, says Markham proudly, with this ‘you may bake any bread leavened or unleavened whatsoever, whether it be simple corn, as wheat or rye of itself, or compound grain as wheat and rye, or wheat, rye and barley, or rye and barley, or any other mixed white corn; only, because rye is a little stronger grain than wheat, it shall be good for you to put to your water a little hotter than you did to your wheat. For your brown bread, or bread for your hind servants, which is the coarsest bread for man’s use, you shall take of barley two bushels, of pease two.’ The combination of grains and legumes gives excellent protein value.
By contrast, the diet of the upper classes was becoming more and more unhealthy. This was partly due to the printing press, which began to make exciting and exotic recipes status symbols available to everyone. By the end of Elizabeth’s reign, thrilling sugar confections had begun to be made by merchants’ servants, not just aristocratic families. Thomas Tusser offered quince conserves to the countrywoman, while Partridge’s Treasurie of Commodious Conceits and Hidden Secrets was not about sexual revelations, as its title implies to our ears, but about sugar: marchpanes and tarts, sugar and spice blended into blaunch powder, syrups, flowers, Manus christi (sugar work with gold leaf) lozenges, spiced wines and cordials. The Queens Closet Opened, first printed in 1655, incorporates medicine, sweetmaking and cooking. Marzipan bacon rashers that ‘will deceive the curious, who cannot but take them for Bacon, unless you taste or smell them’. Or for the more ambitious, one could ‘make the representation of a whole world in a glass’. Having mixed chemicals to make attractive vapours, she could ‘close [the mixture] hermetically, and make a lamp fire under it, and you will see presented in it the sun, Moon, Stars, fountains, flowers, trees, fruits and indeed even all things’.
This was barely food at all. It was an installation, temporary art. Its pointlessness and excess are analogous to other court arts: the masque, the antefeast. Marzipan bacon is there to show off; it has no other purpose. This kind of etiolated aesthetic inventiveness was at odds with the concerns of health, which stressed both the need for moderation and the need for a balance of heat and cold, moisture and dryness.
But even what passed for food was not exactly a balanced diet. Take Charles I’s menus when Prince of Wales; a record exists of exactly what he and his gentlemen and servants ate. There was manchet bread for Charles, and for the servants, cheat bread. There was beer and wine. These were the staples, the main calorie sources. But they also had mutton bone, chicken bone, beef, veal, capon, partridges, and larks. The lower servants ate collops, a kind of burger made from leftovers and fatty pork. There was some kind of tart or pie, unspecified, but probably containing more meat and some spices. On a fish day, all this would be displaced by carp, ling, pike and sometimes cod. No wonder Charles had rickets. He probably had stomach problems too, since there’s very little vegetable or grain fibre. He may even have been short of crucial vitamins, minerals and trace elements because his diet so comprehensively lacked vegetables. But by the health standards of his own day, his meals were well-balanced: cold moist fish, heating inflaming meat.
The war brought such misguided consumption to an abrupt end. Even the court struggled to eat as well as it had before the war. Perhaps the new, festivity-free calendar’s constant fast days were making a virtue of necessity.
Both tried to live off the countryside, with terrible results for those caught up in the plunder. Especially where households were viewed as ‘malignants’, soldiers could be extreme, working off deprivation, fear and rage. The common soldiers ate biscuit and cheese, supplied by themselves in most cases, sometimes by the army. The biscuit was the ancestor of ship’s biscuit, a paste of flour and water beaten to make it flaky so it wouldn’t get too hard to eat. Unrelieved by vegetables, the diet meant that many soldiers experienced the early signs of scurvy. They were saved only by foraging, but their foraging became others’ starvation.
By 1644/5 desperate farmers joined forces to patrol their lands and keep them safe from soldiers; the governor of Berkeley Castle told Prince Rupert that he dare not send out soldiers to search for supplies, because ‘the country people would knock them down’; they had already killed six cavalry.
A Somerset ballad expressed the feelings of those plundered:
I had six oxen the other day
And them the Roundheads stole away,
I had six horse left me whole,
And them the Cavaliers have stole
God’s sores they are both agreed …
Here I do labour, toil and sweat
Endure the cold, the dry and wet,
But what dost think I get? …
The garrisons have all the gains
For thither all is vet
They vet my corn, my beans, my peas,
I dare no man to displease …
Then to the Governor I come
Desiring him to ease one zum
Chave nothing but a paper.
But dost thou think a paper will
My back clothe nor my belly fill?
No, no, go take thy note.
If that another year may yield,
I may go cut my throat
And if all this be not grief enow
They have a thing called quarter too,
O! tis a vengeance waster.
A plague upon it, they call it free.
I’m sure they’ve made us slaves to be
And every man our master.
Even the regional dialect can’t disguise the genuine indignation. John Taylor ‘the water poet’, a Thames waterman, made a similar complaint:
Tell me, experienced fools, did not your days
Glide smoothlier on …
When no grim saucy trooper did you harm,
No fiercer Dragon, when no stranger’s Arm,
Did reach your yellow bacon, nor envy,
The richness of your chimney’s tapestry?
When good
Dame Ellen (your beloved spouse)
Bare to the elbow in the dairy-house
With fragrant leeks did eat the cheese she wrought,
Not sent it to the Garrison for nought …
Was not your ale as brown, as fat your beef
Ere plunderer was English for a thief?
Taylor is recording what may have been many women’s feelings. The work of early modern housewifery was relentless, even heroic, when it came to food preparation. In towns, many things could be bought. In the countryside, even a woman with many servants had to be an expert cook, preserver, distiller and brewer, cheesemaker and baker, and also a gardener and small farmer, a doctor and nurse and pharmacist. The work of preserving the harvest was backbreaking – the simple labour of kneading up twenty-five pounds of flour in a wooden trough for long periods, of cutting up fruit and vegetables, of stirring cheese, of watching and waiting, balancing different tasks, directing servants … It could not be replaced. If the food thus created from raw materials was stolen, it wasn’t possible to go out and buy more. Neighbours might have supplies, but if an army had been quartered on a small village, the larder of everyone you knew might be similarly depleted. If the harvest was gone, or even part of it, the result was hunger, debilitating vitamin deficiencies and illness, and then susceptibility to infection and contagion. Early modern people knew nothing of vitamins and minerals, but they knew that if they didn’t eat well they suffered.
In the area around a garrison, ordinary life was about survival as the soldiers sucked in every scrap of food and fuel to withstand a possible siege. Taunton, for instance, managed to hold out because it was well provisioned. Many commanders forgot to pay for the foods they requisitioned. Or they had no money, only the dreaded Royalist tickets. Or they had just their guns. Trees, too, were chopped down for siege equipment and fuel, and straw and furze faggots requisitioned for gun emplacements. This could leave villages dangerously short of fuel and feed for animals. When towns changed hands often, the soldiers defending would try to create an area of clear, open ground immediately inside their line of defences. This was essential to provide an unobstructed line of fire, to deny cover to attackers. But it involved tearing down people’s houses and often destroying their means of making, preparing and storing food.
‘They gave them whole great loaves’, recalled Nehemiah Wharton in 1643, ‘and cheeses, which they triumphantly carried away on the point of their swords.’ However, ‘they’ were what Wharton termed ‘papists’, and ‘they’ were not generously supporting the army, but acting upon compulsion. The food was carried like a trophy because that is what it was.
Hunger such as that to be experienced by Essex’s defeated army in the West or even by the trained bands before Newbury made the soldiers more likely to plunder, and so create extreme hunger in others. The effect of hunger on Civil War soldiers can be understood best through one crucial study, conducted in the United States immediately after the Second World War. Over six months, a group of men were restricted to approximately half their former food intake and lost, on average, 25% of their former weight. Although this was described as a study of ‘semi-starvation’, this privation was less extreme than that experienced by Civil War armies, since the men were not marching across miles of rough terrain with pounds of kit on their backs at the same time as consuming a restricted diet.
The starved men in the American study began hoarding objects for which they had no need. According to the original report, hoarding even extended to non-food-related items. This general tendency to hoard has been observed in starved anorexic patients and even in rats deprived of food. Perhaps acts like the violent plundering of Lord Robartes’s house in Cornwall were not always inspired by revenge, but by an obscure physiological response to prolonged hunger. The subjects of the experiment also became violent, and sometimes harmed themselves as well as others; and when the men regained access to food, they binged frantically, sometimes eating all day. Another hallmark was decreased ability to bear cold, a significant drawback in army conditions during the Little Ice Age, when average temperatures were an estimated two degrees lower than today, and the Thames froze in London every winter. It is notable that the diarists and letter-writers who complain of hunger almost always bewail the cold as well. In the US study, emotional disturbances persisted even after refeeding began; the men became progressively more withdrawn and isolated. This suggests that some at least of the army agitation that was to dominate the later years of the war was caused by two years or so of semi-starvation. English liberty was born wailing from an empty, aching belly, a body so depleted that its owner at last became too angry for social control.
As the men in the US study grew hungrier, they became obsessed with food; they dreamed about it, they began to read cookbooks. And the effects were so lasting that after the experiment two became chefs. This experience is reflected in the writings of Civil War soldiers; even when addressing loved ones, they write incessantly and obsessively about food; the loaf finally obtained, the hunger on the march. So it is not surprising that the English Civil War gave birth, among other things, to several cookbooks written by its survivors, testimony to a preoccupation with food born during the hungry years.
Hannah Wolley was the first English Delia Smith, the first Fannie Farmer, the first to instruct a nation in cooking and household arts. There had been cookbooks before, but Wolley was a general household guru. And – incongruous as it may seem – she and her enterprise were the results of the war. Not everyone was broken by its impact; some were elevated, and she was one example. She also represents a class of person whose historical significance is usually regarded as slight, but who lived and suffered through the war just as their more powerful contemporaries did: servants. Brilliana Harley was concerned for her servants, but their stories disappear from view when hers ends. Yet when Brampton Bryan was abandoned and then slighted, their lot must have been bitter; thrown out of work in an area of England hostile to them as servants of Parliament’s supporters. The Harrisons, too, had servants, some of whom had to be dismissed when the war depleted the family coffers. These stories were repeated across England as the war continued. Hannah Wolley was in service with a Lady Anne Wroth before the war. Hannah, however, managed to turn her difficult experiences into a source of entrepreneurial ideas and initiative. Other cookbook authors were also trained in great households; Robert May, a chef who roamed from household to household during the war years, and William Rabisha.
Robert May learned to cook not from books, but from his father, whom he calls ‘one of the ablest cooks of his time’. This method of learning was typical of pre-print culture. Everything from cobbling to ship design was taught from mouth to ear as a trade secret, often to family members only. Ann Fanshawe’s receipt book, destined for her daughter, is a surviving example of this way of preserving and handing on knowledge; it was emphatically not for publication. However, the relaxation of censorship and the resulting expansion of print and reading during the war years did not only open the way for political discussion; it also allowed tradespeople to sell their once-secret knowhow to a wider reading public. It might seem odd to describe cookbooks as a product of political liberation, but Hannah Wolley’s works were to open a new way of learning to those not born to the trade. They were part of a democratization of knowledge which in turn may have had political impact. Monarchy makes sense in a world where younger servants learn from older servants in a strict hierarchy. Once print made it possible to learn outside that hierarchy, the existence of privileged knowledge and even privilege itself could be called into question. Then, too, ordinary working people like cooks experienced the pressing weight of hierarchy less in terms of legislation and tax than in terms of trade guilds and the agonizingly slow transition from apprentice to master. Partridge’s opening poem implies as much, claming ‘to frame/ A happy common weale:/ And which at large reveals/ That time did long conceal?/ To pleasure everyone’. Has not the smallest he the same right to sweets as the greatest he
? There is always something a trifle levelling about print. Partridge also says that the rich are not friendly to him for giving away their secrets.
As often with those below the gentry, our knowledge of Wolley’s life is sketchy. We are not even sure how she liked her last name to be spelled; like Shakespeare she seems to like variety. We know she was born around 1622–3. Like most girls, she was instructed in domestic skills by her mother and sisters, especially in how to prepare medicines: ‘my mother and my elder sisters were very well skilled in Physic and surgery from whom I learned a little’, she writes. This allowed her to become a servant to a noblewoman; her first mistress was Lady Anne Wroth, wife of Sir Henry Wroth, to whom she dedicated her second book, The Cook’s Guide. But Hannah was orphaned at the age of fourteen, so she depended on her domestic skills to survive. She had somehow learned fluent French, which might have allowed her to read French recipe books, then called receipt books, with profit. Many of her recipes have a French flavour, including French Bread, made with eggs and milk, a kind of rich pain de mie. The Wroths were Royalists, and Hannah says she once cooked a banquet for King Charles himself. It was exactly this kind of claim that made her cookbooks such a success. They represented a glorious vanished past, a golden age Before The War to which some of the nation longed to be restored.
She had a wartime wedding. In 1646 she married Benjamin Wolley, who taught at the Free Grammar School in Newport, near Saffron Walden. The war didn’t stop their enterprises. They moved to Hackney in 1653, and opened a boarding school for boys. But Benjamin died in 1661, leaving Hannah without an income; she also suffered some kind of paralytic attack, a stroke, which left her lame. She decided to earn her living by sharing her domestic expertise with a Restoration world eager to recapture its past. Her writings were plainly prompted by Benjamin’s death, since her first book, The Ladies Directory, appeared in the same year. It struck a nerve because it focused on preserving (a kind of hoarding?), a skill which the war had shown to be vital. Her next, The Cook’s Guide, promised rarities, recipes ‘never before printed’.
The English Civil War: A People’s History (Text Only) Page 42