Plenti and Grase

"I like this book for very similar reasons. There’s a wonderful book by Barbara Harvey, an academic who I think has now retired from Oxford, called Living and Dying in England 1100-1540: The Monastic Experience . In that book she took the accounts of the monks of Westminster and subjected them to minute detail in order to work out how people really lived their lives. Where was their food coming from? What was their life expectancy when they became members of the monastery? This author, Mark Dawson, has been inspired by Barbara Harvey’s book and he’s decided to do something similar for a 16th century aristocratic household, namely the Willoughby family of Wollaton Hall near Nottingham. He has gone to great depths working out what food they really ate, when they ate it, when they travelled etc. It’s rare to find a book that detailed, that scrupulous, that full of information which is reliable, with all this great context of this family house, which still stands by the way . It’s provided so many answers to questions I was asking, and it’s beautifully written as well. I thoroughly enjoyed Mark Dawson’s book because I’m fascinated by the reality of the past: not just the stories people told, but the way people physically did things, the things they ate. I really got a lot out of his book. I recommend it to anybody who is interested in how the great and the good lived in the late 16th century. I’m interested in diet and health, so having detailed accounts for when they stopped eating fish, for example. At what period did the Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday fish-eating days decline? Did they eat breakfast? That’s something I’ve written about at an academic level and he has some evidence to show for that. Lots of details like that, but also details of what was in the buildings, what was in the rooms. It’s a really brilliant study. Before about 1600 people tended not to eat breakfast. It’s in the last decades of the 16th century that breakfast became habitual. In the Middle Ages you would eat breakfast if you were going on a long journey and therefore getting up early, or if you were a worker working in a field, on a harvest day, which might be a 16 or 18 hour long working day. But on the whole most people didn’t eat breakfast. They had dinner in the late morning and then supper in the mid-to late afternoon. Those were the two meals of the day. There were a few exceptions – aristocratic families who started having ceremonial breakfasts in the 16th century and if you were ill you might have breakfast as well. But in the 16th century all the times started to get shifted around, because people increasingly worked for other people, rather than sorting out their own times of working during the day. Therefore they have to stay at work till much later, so they can’t have supper till much later, so they start eating lunch instead of dinner in the late morning and they have to have breakfast before they start. So there is a shift to a three meal pattern. The Willoughby family didn’t. Some of their staff who went on journeys did have breakfast, but on the whole it’s a very conservative, Catholic household. They didn’t eat much breakfast."