‘Venice glasses’ were widely used for drinking. English glass also was now rivalling the Venetian in quality, thanks largely to Continental craftsmen who had been brought over to impart their expertise to English glassworkers. For their beautifully wrought ironwork the English craftsmen had need of no such advice.
The meals consumed were as ample as ever, particularly dinner which was usually served between ten o’clock and noon. But the Rev. William Harrison insisted that, while a gentleman took pride in his kitchen and often employed a French chef, he was not in the habit of overeating. Nor, so a Dutch visitor observed, were most gentlemen at this period heavy drinkers. ‘At their tables, although they be very sumptuous and love to have good fare, yet neither use they to overcharge themselves with excess of drink, neither thereto greatly provoke and urge others, but suffer every man to drink in such measure as best pleaseth himself.’22
Meat and bread remained the principal foods, the ‘gentilitie’ eating wheaten bread in Harrison’s words, though ‘their household or poor neighbours in some shires [were] forced to content themselves with rye or barley, [and] in time of dearth many with bread made out of beans, peason or oats and some acorns among.’ Vegetables were still not often served with meat, although sometimes used in cooking it – chickens were boiled with leeks – and often used for making pottage. Salads, however, seem to have been popular; and dishes of cucumber, peas, olives and artichokes were more often seen than they had been in the past. The potato, encountered in America by the invading Spaniards – there were at least 220 varieties in Peru – was introduced into England during the second half of the century; but, while grown in private gardens, potatoes were not yet considered by farmers to be a worthwhile commercial crop.23 Cheese, except for soft or cream cheese which was frequently used in cooking, was now less often eaten by the rich than by the poor who seem to have enjoyed large quantities both of hard cheese, which was made of skimmed milk and became harder the longer it was kept, and of green cheese, a fresh curd cheese commonly flavoured with herbs.
Fynes Moryson, who had travelled extensively on the Continent, thought that English beef and mutton was the best in Europe and that only Westphalia had better bacon.
The English eat fallow deer plentifully [Moryson recorded], as bucks in summer and does in winter, which they bake in pasties, and this venison pasty is a dainty, rarely found in any other kingdom. England, yea perhaps one county thereof, hath more fallow deer than all Europe that I have seen.’ No kingdom in the world hath so many dove-houses. Likewise brawn is a proper meat to the English, not known to others. English cooks, in comparison with other nations, are most commended for roasted meats … The English inhabitants eat almost no flesh commoner than hens, and for geese they eat them in two seasons, when they are felled upon the stubble after harvest and when they are green about Whitsuntide. And howsoever hares are thought to nourish melancholy, yet they are eaten as venison both roast and boiled. They have plenty of conies [rabbits] the flesh whereof is fat, tender and more delicate than any I have eaten in other parts.24
Dinner was generally a leisurely pleasure, ‘the nobility, gentlemen and merchant men’ often sitting over it until ‘two or three o’clock at afternoon,’ according to Harrison, ‘so that with many it is a hard matter to rise from the table to go to evening prayers’. Wine was commonly kept in a copper tub full of water; and before a glass was refilled it was rinsed.
Supper was usually eaten at about five o’clock, or earlier in the country where dinner might be at eleven; and, although this was meant to be a light meal compared with dinner, one gentleman living in London in 1589 did not consider it unusual to consume a roast shoulder of mutton and three fried rabbits as well as bread, beer and a pint of claret.25
Indeed, while the sixteenth-century gentlemen may not have made a habit of overeating, as Harrison maintained, it is clear that most of them and their household did not stint themselves either. The kitchen books of Sir William Petre of Ingatestone Hall, Essex – one of the few surviving records of food and drink consumed in a mid-sixteenth-century country house of moderate size – indicate that both the family and the servants fed very well. There were about twenty servants at the Hall, including the chaplain, the house steward and the acater who received no wages but were permitted instead to lease farms on the estate at low rents. There were four housemaids and one nursemaid, a housekeeper, a clerk of the kitchen, a male cook, a butler, and a part-time brewer. Outside servants included a gardener, two horsekeepers, a stable-boy, two carters and a cart-lad. All the lower servants were hired by the year, and received board and lodging, and an allowance for their grey summer and winter liveries, in addition to their wages which amounted to a total of £40 a year. The cook, butler and housekeeper each received 10s a year, the gardener 10s 6d and the part-time brewer 5s. Occasionally some of the servants were given ‘rewards’ for extra work: the nursemaid once had 6d for knitting the children ‘two pairs of hoses’ and the gardener’s wife earned a penny or two for occasional weeding. By such means they were able to accumulate a little pocket money to spend at the local fair for which they were given the day off and from which they came back perhaps with a ribbon or a fairing.26 In some other households servants’ wages were liable to be reduced by fines for misbehaviour or negligence. In the household of a Somerset high sheriff, they were fined id for swearing, untidy dress, or leaving a bed unmade after eight o’clock in the morning; 2d for not attending family prayers; and 6d for being late in serving dinner. The fines were deducted from their wages every quarter day, together with the cost of breakages, and given to the poor or to ‘other godly use’.27
If their wages were moderate the Petres’ servants had no cause to complain about the amplitude and variety of their meals. One day before the Christmas holiday of 1551, while the family were still in London, they had twelve local people for guests at dinner and between them all they consumed three joints of boiled beef and one of roasted, a neat’s tongue, a baked leg of mutton, two rabbits and a partridge. On Christmas day that year six boiled and three roast joints of beef were carried to the dinner table, a neck of mutton, a loin and a breast of pork, a goose, four rabbits, as well as eight baked pear pies.
The following year family, servants and guests at Ingatestone, in forty-six weeks, consumed seventeen oxen, one bull, fourteen steers, four cows, twenty-nine calves, 130 sheep, fifty-four lambs, three boars, thirteen bucks, five does, nine porkers, three goats, seven kids, one stag and five hogs ‘killed for bacon’. All kinds of wildfowl were also eaten, mallards, widgeons, wild ducks, teals, cranes, shovelards, woodcocks, curlews, redshanks, plovers and wild pigeons. Pigeons also came regularly from the dovecot, well over 1000 of them between Easter and Michaelmas in 1552. And, as in previous centuries, quantities of small birds came into the cook’s hands, larks, blackbirds, starlings and swallows.28
The cost of food had risen since the beginning of the century when chickens had cost about 1½d each, eggs were ¾d a dozen, rabbits 1s 4d for nine, and a gallon of gooseberries 2d. By 1558, according to the accounts of a dinner given by the master and wardens of the Stationers’ Company, gooseberries had doubled in price, rabbits had more than doubled and chickens had trebled. Seven geese cost 9s 4d, two breasts of veal 2s 4d, two necks of mutton is, and thirty-six gallons of beer 4s 8d.29
Ingatestone was unusual in having both a drinking water tap in the yard and a piped supply of ‘sweet’ spring water in the house. Yet, in compliance with Andrew Boorde’s advice that water was ‘not wholesome by itself for an Englishman’, the staff drank beer instead, consuming about eight pints of small beer each, at a cost of id the gallon.30 Wine was considerably more expensive at about is a gallon. But Sir William’s cellar was always well stocked. Shortly before Christmas 1551 the steward’s stocktaking revealed that there was a total of 584 gallons in the wine cellar, comprising:
A butt of sack and 12 gallons.
2 puncheons of French wine and 20 gallons.
An hogshead of French
wine.
An hogshead of Gascon wine with an half.
An hogshead of red wine with an half.
A piece of Rhenisen wine.
4 gallons of Malmsey.
The fish served on fast-days was equally varied. Much of it came from the Hall fish ponds, but the acater also bought ‘seafish’ from Brentwood, Chelmsford and Barking, and presents of fish were regularly received from friends and acquaintances of the family. As well as haberdine and ling, smoked herring, tench, carp, bream, roach and perch, the household also, therefore, enjoyed sole and plaice, whiting and flounders and, less often, mackerel, gurnard and salmon. Oysters were common fare even on those ‘four hot months which are void of the letter R’ during which, so Harrison said, they were ‘generally forborne’. They cost only 8d or 9d a bushel, and as little as 4d a bushel if bought at Battlesbridge at the head of the creek within twenty miles of Ingatestone.
Bread was eaten plentifully, the Hall ovens baking the equivalent of about 20,000 loaves of good to medium quality a year. Cheese, butter and eggs were also in good supply. In 1552 about 2664 pounds of cheese were consumed, possibly as much as 970 pounds of butter and certainly no less than 2657 eggs. As in the past most cooked dishes were highly flavoured. As well as salt and pepper, cloves, mace, saffron, ginger and cinnamon were all bought in large quantities.
Little else, however, had to be purchased, for Ingatestone Hall was largely self-sufficient. All fuels for heating, cooking and brewing came from the estate, as well as most food and most timber for building. What the estate could not supply was generally bought from local joiners, carpenters, turners, wheelwrights and smiths who could put their hands to making furniture and carts, farm implements, garden tools and horseshoes. Bricks were also made locally; so were shoes and pots. Only occasionally did a purchase have to be made further afield, a saddle, for instance, from Chelmsford, a plough and ‘two hogsheads’ for fish from Billericay, dried fruit, ink, salt and plate and, of course, expensive plate and jewellery and fashionable clothes from London.31
17 Animals and Sportsmen
The maintenance of Ingatestone Hall and of his London house at Aldersgate – where there were, as in Essex, several servants, including a housekeeper, laundress and cook – cost Sir William Petre about £250 a year. But when the queen came to stay on one of her periodical progresses throughout her realm, by which she showed herself to her people at little expense to herself, he would be expected to spend more in a single day than he would otherwise spend in a month. There was extra silver and plate to buy, new hangings for the rooms to be set aside for the queen as a royal suite, supplies of food and drink to lay in for her entourage, of paper, ink and wax lights. There were new buildings to be erected: on the occasion of her visit to Ingatestone in 1561, Petre’s accounts mention, in addition to page after page of unusual expenses, a sum of £3 8s 2d paid to bricklayers, carpenters and labourers, for ‘making ranges, sheds and other necessaries against the queen’s Majesty’s coming’. Even so, Petre’s expenses were modest compared with the outlay required of others. A visit of four or five days to Hedingham Castle cost the Earl of Oxford £273; and a visit of similar duration cost Lord Rich of Leighs Priory £389. In 1577 Sir Nicholas Bacon had to spend £577 on entertaining the queen for four days; and in 1602 a three-day visit to Lord Keeper Egerton cost no less than £2000.1
Travelling with a huge retinue, which required over 300 carts and more than 2000 horses, the queen obliged some of her subjects not merely to convert their houses but even to enlarge them for her. Presence and audience chambers had to be provided, as well as privy chambers and lodgings for officials, attendants and courtiers, for their servants and their servants’ servants. Lord Burghley’s household at Theobalds, where the queen was a frequent visitor, was constantly disrupted by these visitations. His own servants had to move out of the house to sleep in a storehouse and they were obliged to have their meals in the joiners’ workshop.
My house at Theobalds [Burghley told a friend] was begun by me with a mean measure but increased by occasion of Her Majesty’s often coming, whom to please I never would omit to strain myself to more charges than building it. And yet not without some special direction of Her Majesty. Upon fault found with the small measure of her chamber (which was in good measure for me) I was forced to enlarge a room for a larger chamber; which need not be envied of any for riches in it.2
As well as Theobalds, Burghley owned Burghley House in Northamptonshire, an enormous mansion where the queen also stayed on several occasions at a cost to its owner of £2000 to £3000 for each visit. Immense as this sum then was, there were several other great men in the country who were anxious to have the honour of entertaining the queen and who waited for a visit in vain. Holdenby House in Northamptonshire – which was built at vast expense by the Lord Chancellor, Sir Christopher Hatton, and all but ruined him – stood ready for ten years, full of servants waiting for the queen to come to stay. During the whole of that time she never did come. Hatton died a bachelor at the age of fifty-one, leaving Holdenby and his debts to a nephew who could not afford to live in it. It was sold a few years later and within fifty years had been demolished.3
The better the hunting the more the queen was likely to enjoy herself. Many country houses had two deer parks, one for red, the other for fallow deer. Foxes and badgers were occasionally ‘preserved by gentlemen to hunt and have pastime withal’, but deer were the principal quarry. They were hunted both in the park and, beyond its pales, in the open countryside where heavy horses thundered over the grass in the wake of the greyhounds and spaniels which all true English gentlemen were said to love. There was, indeed, a familiar proverb: ‘He cannot be a gentleman who loveth not a dog.’ And greyhounds and spaniels, as well as other breeds, were frequently given as presents in those regular parcels which passed from hand to hand in Tudor England in recognition of past services or in hope of benefits to come. In the Lisle Letters references are made not only to presents of food and wine, quails, parrots, oranges, lengths of satin, hawks, singing-birds, monkeys, gold, books, puffins, baked cranes, haunches of venison, marmosets, coral beads, purses and tips of unicorns’ horns, but also to frequent gifts of ‘pretty dogs’, greyhounds, mastiffs, bloodhounds and water spaniels. Many were sporting dogs but others were lap-dogs, one of which, Purkoy, a present from Lord Lisle, gave great pleasure to Anne Boleyn who ‘setteth much store by a pretty dog’. ‘Her Grace delighted so much in little Purkoy,’ so Lady Lisle was told, ‘that after he was dead of a fall there durst nobody tell her Grace of it.’4
The eastern view of dogs as scavengers, so Keith Thomas has observed, had been transmitted to medieval England by means of the Bible and was still widely held in the sixteenth century.5 Dogs were still used to turn kitchen spits by running around in ‘dog-wheels’ and were trained to the task by having hot coals placed beneath their paws to keep them on the move.6 But attitudes were changing. Distinctions had long been made between the mongrels of tinkers and the watchdogs of merchants on the one hand and the greyhounds and setters of the aristocracy on the other; and in 1567 the mayor of Liverpool had ordered that householders’ watchdogs must be kept tied up ‘for avoidance of sundry inconveniences as for hurting of greyhounds, hounds and spaniels, that is gentlemen’s dogs’, the kinds of dogs, in fact, to be seen as emblems of fidelity at the feet of their masters’ effigies on tombs.7 Yet by this time dogs were being praised for their faithfulness, their affectionate natures and powers of observation, irrespective of their breeding. In his epigram In Cineam of 1594, Sir John Davies wrote:
Thou sayest thou art as weary as a dog,
As angry, sick, and hungry as a dog,
As dull and melancholy as a dog,
As lazy, sleepy, idle as a dog.
But why dost thou compare thee to a dog?
In that for which all men despise a dog,
I will compare thee better to a dog.
Thou art as fair and comely as a dog,
Thou art as true and honest as
a dog,
Thou art as kind and liberal as a dog,
Thou art as wise and valiant as a dog.8
Attitudes to cats, too, were gradually changing. Kept in the Middle Ages as a protection against vermin, ‘unclean and impure beasts’ that lived by ravening, cats were frequently left unfed to improve their performance as mousers. Keith Thomas cites an early Tudor textbook which contains for translation into Latin the simple sentence and commonly held sentiment, ‘I hate cats.’9 Dick Whittington, four times Mayor of London, who died in 1423, was not provided with his cat until the legends accumulated around his name almost two hundred years later.10 Yet long before Samuel Johnson became so celebrated as a cat-lover – going out to buy his beloved Hodge oysters in case his servants, being put to that trouble on a cat’s behalf, might take against the ‘poor creature’ – there were numerous examples of men as devoted to cats as he, among them the Earl of Southampton who was comforted by the presence of his pet during his imprisonment in the Tower after Essex’s rebellion; John Harrison, the Leeds merchant who had holes cut in his doors so that the cats could enter ‘even the best rooms of the house’; and Archbishop Laud who was given one of the earliest tabbies to be imported into England. By the time of Charles II there were said to be few London familes without a pet cat, ‘some having several, sometimes five or six in a house’.11
The English: A Social History, 1066–1945 (Text Only) Page 28