Food History

Dave Postles is someone I want to meet one day. He is consistently generous with his research results, making sure that anyone with an interest in any of his subjects is well-treated. Once he sent me a book on names and I kept meaning to email a thank-you, but then I changed computers and lost his email. So he doesn’t know me from a bar of soap, unless he remembers me very slightly as an ungrateful Australian.

Anyhow, his latest gift to the world has some food history connotations, so I thought you needed to know about it and about him. He has put a whole book of his online, free for the taking. It’s called Oseney Abbey Studies and was officially published in Leicester in 2008.

The whole book is full of fascinating stuff for other types of history, but the bits of particular interest for food history start on p. 124, where he talks about markets in Oxfordshire from 1086-1350. These aren’t the international cloth markets or places to buy high-bred horses or Spanish leather, but markets for rural produce, some of which might have been the Medieval equivalent of the market I bought my persimmons at today. (I was going to write a post about those persimmons and their strange relationship with medlars, but it can wait. If you don’t want it to wait too long, though, you might have to remind me.)

I’ll skip his general introduction to markets. The book is, after all, online and free and if you want to learn something about the shape and pattern of markets in medieval England, best go straight to the book itself rather than having me paraphrase it. He has footnotes, after all, which lead to studies, which lead to enough reading to keep you out of mischief for a fair while. You can download the book and a bunch of other things here. Don’t forget to read the footnotes.

The question that’s of importance this instant, to me, is what Postles has to say about foodstuffs. Since his focus is on the structure of markets and how they operate with each other in a region and over the annual cycle, we’re not talking about masses of information.

The structure of the markets and how they relate one to another is, in itself, important. You could do a little calendar of where you could obtain specialist products or where producers could talk to each other or sell stock for breeding and so forth. Food can’t be taken away from the economic structure of the society it feeds.

This means that the most important data Postles has for food (oh, but sounded almost as if I knew what I as talking about!) is when he argues that a “A natural ranking … existed amongst the market towns and vills of Oxfordshire by the time of the lay subsidy of 1334. Oxford, ranked ninth of all English towns, had assessed wealth of £914, followed by Banbury at £267.” He goes forth down the lines.

It would be interesting to know (though I don’t know if we have the sources to find out) if the higher the rank of the market the lower the prevalence of foodstuff at that market. Postles talks about the concentration of craftspeople and service trades being important to the difference between markets in city-type places than in rural. This suggests that food might also change in proportion. Or maybe even in type. At which markets were the luxury foodstuffs available? Who bought what from where? How far did folks have to travel for what sort of product?

We have some answers for the spice trade, since some parts of it are so very luxury that the big market centres (eg London) are crucial to their dissemination, but Postles is looking at a particular region, with quite different characteristics to London.

In fact, the chief commodity Postles talks about is grain, where it might play a larger part than scholars thought in the economy of the Chilterns – not an exciting insight, but an important one – trade in grain equals bread and drink production.

Dave Postles also quotes a thirteenth century treatise on estate management which says that stuff produced on the demesne of an estate should be sold at market wherever possible, because it will get a better price and is less likely to be dissipated by fraud. This can’t just refer to grain (other foodstuffs must be implied), though Postles talks about the importance of grain. Grain, you see, is economically crucial for the English economy, given a certain lack of potatoes.

Alas, looking at big ticket items like grain means we can’t see the whole picture. We can’t even see a clear bit of the picture, looking at it from a food history point of view. We already knew how important grain was to the English diet, after all.

This additional data helps us understand how it was distributed and who had access to what and how poor years could be remedied through buying in from elsewhere and so on. Big stuff. But it doesn’t show us foodways or how much food of other types was eaten or even how the grain was prepared. We do know that it wasn’t just wheat that was sold – it was also legumes and oats and that they could travel quite far and go to very interesting places (now I have a mental image of a single oat dressed for travel – this is a silly image and I must banish it forthwith).

It’s worth checking the chapter, because he has more detailed information. Not a lot, but enough so that if you have an interest you can get a bit more of an understanding of just how production and distribution worked together to get beans from Oseney Abbey to an Aylesbury butcher.

I wish I knew more about that Aylesbury butcher.