At Home - Bill Bryson [28]
Seating was on plain benches—in French, bancs, from which comes banquet. Until the 1600s, chairs were rare—the word chair itself dates only from about 1300—and were designed not to be comfortable but to impute authority. Even now, of course, the person in charge of a meeting chairs it, and a person in charge of a company is the chairman of the board—a term that additionally, and a little oddly, recalls the dining habits of medieval peasants.
Medieval banquets show people eating all kinds of foods that are no longer eaten. Birds especially featured. Eagles, herons, peacocks, sparrows, larks, finches, swans, and almost all other feathered creatures were widely consumed. This wasn’t so much because swans and other birds were fantastically delicious—they weren’t; that’s why we don’t eat them now—but rather because other, better meats weren’t available. Beef, mutton, and lamb were hardly eaten at all for a thousand years because the animals they came from were needed for their fleeces, manure, or muscle power and thus were much too valuable to kill.
A medieval banquet (photo credit 3.1)
Even had meat been freely available, it was forbidden much of the time. Medieval diners had to accommodate three fish days a week, plus forty days of Lent and many other religious days when land-based flesh was forbidden. The total number of days of dietary restriction varied over time, but at its peak nearly half the days of the year were “lean” days, as they were known. There was hardly a fish or other swimming thing that wasn’t consumed. The kitchen accounts for the Bishop of Hereford show his household eating herring, cod, haddock, salmon, pike, bream, mackerel, barr, ling, hake, roach, eels, lampreys, stockfish, tench, trout, minnows, gudgeon, gurnet, and a few others—more than two dozen types altogether. Also widely eaten were barbel, dograves, dace, and even porpoise. For much of the medieval period the largest source of animal protein for most people was smoked herring. Until the time of Henry VIII, failing to observe fish days was punishable by death, at least in theory. Fish days were abandoned after the break with Rome, but were restored by Elizabeth in the interests of supporting the British fishing fleet. The church was keen to keep the fish days, too, not so much because of any religious conviction as because it had developed a lucrative sideline in selling dispensations.
After an evening meal, the inhabitants of the medieval hall had no bedrooms in which to retire. We “make a bed” today because in the Middle Ages that is essentially what you did—you rolled out a cloth sleeping pallet or heaped a pile of straw, found a cloak or blanket and fashioned whatever comfort you could. Sleeping arrangements appear to have remained relaxed for a long time. The plot of one of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales hinges on the miller’s daughter getting into the wrong bed in her own home, something she could hardly do if she slept in the same place every night. Until well into the seventeenth century, bed meant only the mattress and what it was stuffed with; for the frame and its contents there was the separate word bedstead.
Household inventories into the Elizabethan period show that people placed great attachment to beds and bedding, with kitchen equipment following behind. Only then did general household furniture make it onto inventories, and then generally in vague terms like “a few tables and some benches.” People, it seems, simply were not that attached to their furniture, in much the way that we are not emotionally attached to our appliances. We wouldn’t want to be without them, of course, but they are not treasured heirlooms. One other thing people recorded with care was, somewhat surprisingly, window glass. Other than in churches and a few wealthy homes, window glass was a rarity well into the 1600s. Eleanor Godfrey, in The Development