The Assize of Bread (and Ale)

Bread was so important to daily life, as food and even as tableware. Not every household had the time and resources to make its own bread, and had to turn to bakers for their loaves, of which there were several in any decent-sized town.

A problem for those who did not bake their own was the fluctuation of prices. This was not always the fault of the baker, however. Harvests were variable, and the price of grain rose and fell with the weather. There were cheaper breads, of course, but their prices fluctuated as well. Bakers might also indulge in what our modern era calls "shrinkflation," the reduction of the amount of goods for the same prior price, or "skimpflation," the use of less-desirable material (oats mixed in with the wheat, for example)  to make a sold good.

These changing prices affected everyone, including royal households who consumed far more than a typical family. King Henry II of England and his son John both established rules for the price of bread to make their own households run smoothly and inexpensively. It wasn't until John's son, Henry III, that a nationwide pricing structure was declared about 1266. It was initiated by bakers in Coventry who wanted standards established to save them from accusations of unfairness or price-gouging. This was the Assize of Bread and Ale.

The immediate object of the Assize was to fix the size of the loaf of bread. Whatever might be the fluctuations of the corn-market*, loaves were sold at a farthing**, or a half-penny or a penny; the size of these loaves would therefore vary according to the price of corn, becoming smaller as the price of corn rose and larger as it fell.[link]

About the Feast of St, Michael (29 September) the results of the year's grain harvest could be judged, and the prices/sizes could be determined for the next 12 months. 

This Assize was the longest-lasting law of its kind, and was not significantly amended until the Bread Acts of 1822!

As for ale, since it relied on grain:

when a quarter of wheat was sold for three shillings, or three shillings and four-pence, and a quarter of barley for twenty pence or twenty-four pence, and a quarter of oats for fifteen pence, brewers in cities could afford to sell two gallons of ale for a penny, and out of cities three gallons for a penny; and when in a town...three gallons are sold for a penny, out of a town they may and ought to sell four. [Long, George, ed. (1833) "Ale", The Penny Cyclopædia]

The Assize did not just establish prices. In order to enforce the Assize, regulatory structures were put in place with fees and penalties. Manorial lords were to hold tri-weekly sessions to enforce the statutes. Also, since the weight of bread was linked to its price in pence, half-pence, and quarter-pence, it was important that the pence itself was a reliable and expected value.

Why would it not be? Well, debasement of coinage was definitely a technique throughout history for getting more "bang from a buck" so to speak, and I'll discuss those dishonest ways next time.

*corn-market =remember that "corn" referred to any grain
**farthing = quarter of a penny

Trenchers

We've talked about bread before, way back here and more recently here, but now I want to discuss a very specific use for bread: the trencher.

The trencher existed for a very simple reason: plates were expensive. Serving food to individuals was more efficiently done if each person had a flat surface on which their food could be set in front of them. What do you use for a plate? Ceramic or pewter were expensive to make and own, but the ubiquity of using grains for bread led to a solution.

Once bread goes stale, it is firm and (if the menu does not include items with too much liquid) perfectly capable of supporting a meal. Trenchers were "scalable" as well, although they were generally made for an individual.

To make a trencher did not require refined flour. You wanted it to be coarse. Also, it was not necessarily edible. You weren't going to make it with your best wheat flour. You'd use barley, oats, rye, or a combination of them. Also, it didn't need to rise as much as a regular loaf: you want it to be dense. Then the real different part: you didn't want it to be fresh. You wanted it to be stale. What few recipes exist that explain the process make it clear that it was a flattened round loaf, allowed to sit for three days, then was sliced across the middle to make two halves, top and bottom. Each of these was a "trencher," from the Old French tranchier, "to cut."

This could now be placed in front of a dinner guest on which they would pile the meat and other foods (N.B.: no soup course here). In some medieval woodcuts and other pictures, you may now recognize them as the round items, often with crossed lines on top as decoration (which the guest would never see, since the top half would be used upside-down.

It was considered improper to eat the trencher at a feast. What, then, was its final fate? After all, despite the stale nature, it was now soaked with juices from meat and vegetables, so surely it wasn't rock-hard and would have some flavor? Yes, but not for refined company. The trenchers were given to the dogs or distributed to the poor, waiting outside the gates for this largesse.

So that is why the story of the death of Godwin, Earl of Wessex, makes sense (if we are willing to believe Aelred of Rievaulx).

Ah, bread! Staple of life. So important that its price had to be regulated, and that's what Henry III did for his people. I'll say more on that tomorrow.

The Islamic dirham

We have previously mentioned the dinar here and here. Usually of gold, it was used alongside the dirham, usually of silver and of a lesser value.

Also spelled dirhem or drahm, the name comes from the Greek drachma, because it was originally a silver coin circulated in the pre-Islamic Mid-East out of Byzantium. Persia adopted the word drahm to refer to it, and near the end of the 7th century the Islamic world started minting its own version. Originally the dirham bore the head of the caliph, but that was considered idolatry, so the caliph's image was replaced with verses from the Koran. They were also commonly imprinted with the phrase "Muhammad is the messenger of God" and a statement of the year and location of their minting.

Used widely around the Mediterranean coasts (North Africa, Egypt, the Eastern coast, Moorish Spain), through trade and plunder it wound up in places as far-off as Britain and Sweden. It was so ubiquitous that Jewish Orthodox law even used the dirham as a unit of weight to indicate requirements in religious functions, such as the "dough portion" the proportion of your bread dough that should be offered to the kohen, the Jewish priest. Maimonides (1138 - 1204), an extremely influential philosopher and scholar of the Torah, calculated the dough portion at "520 dirhams of wheat flour." He was referring specifically to dirhams minted in Egypt, which were 3.333 grams each (3.8 pounds is a lot of bread dough!). Other locations minted dirhams that may have been consistently different by fractions of a gram.

The dirham is still used as a unit of currency in several countries as a division of the dinar.

There is an interesting variation of the dirham called the "Moses coin" from the Khazar region. A handful exist (one was found in the Spillings Hoard), and the inscription on them—specifically the mint location and date—raises more questions than answers. I'll tell you about them tomorrow, and why what appeared to be an Islamic coin is called a "Moses coin."

Medieval Grains

We cannot underestimate the ubiquity of grain in the medieval diet. This was, of course, not a medieval discovery: different grains had been used for thousands of years (at least 75,000, according to this) and adapted to the climate and culture of the consumers. Grain was used three ways: turned into bread, drunk as beer, and eaten as pottage.

Finding out what grains medieval England had access to comes from a surprising source: extant thatched roofs, some of which have "roots" going back to the 14th and 15th centuries. The stalks used for thatching—in many cases preserved by fireplace soot—show the presence of bread wheat, rivet wheat, rye, barley, and oats. It was important to cultivate different varieties of grain because their different ripening times and grain yields ensured a steadier supply than cultivating a monoculture.

Bread wheat was the most common wheat grown. Rivet wheat is not grown so much today (although it is considered ideal for pasta), but it made higher quality straw for thatching. Different varieties of wheat were not differentiated in manorial harvest records, however, the word frumentum ("crops" or "grains") being used for any grains meant for consumption. But rather than discuss bread again, or beer, let's talk about pottage.

Pottage, also spelled potage (the word is from Old French pottage, meaning food cooked in a pot), is a thick soup or stew made by boiling grains and whatever vegetables were at hand. If available, meat could be added, but the base was grains in liquid boiled until it became a thick sludge or slurry (those are not culinary terms, but they seem appropriate to me based on my imagining the pottage process).

The boiling would take several hours, and in fact the pottage could be kept on the fire for days, adding liquid and ingredients over time to keep the meal going indefinitely. Upper classes could afford to add meat, but without meat this was a staple peasant dish from the 9th through 17th centuries. The constant boiling ensured it was not only safe to eat but made it easier to eat, the grains being reduced to a porridge-y consistency.

Richard II's cookbook The Forme of Cury had a few pottage recipes, including meat of course, but peasants could alter it with egg yolks, with bread crumbs, or with spices. Frumenty was made by boiling wheat grains until they burst, allowing the mixture to cool, then boiling with broth and milk or almond milk; it could be thickened with egg yolks and have sugar and spices added. Different types of pottage had names like egerdouce, brewet, the thinner ronnyng, and (what I think would be my favorite) mortrews.

The word "pottage" these days may bring to mind the story of Jacob and Esau and the "mess of pottage" given to the hungry Esau in exchange for his birthright. A "mess of pottage" is now used to denote a short term bargain that is detrimental in the long term. Technically, it was a red lentil stew. Interestingly, the knowledgeable Dioscorides warns that lentils were hard to digest and caused nightmares, sentiments that were repeated by medieval authors like the 14th century Pietro de Crescenzi.

Pietro de Crescenzi might have been wrong about lentils, but he has a place in history as the first "modern" agronomist, and it is in that context that I will tell you about him tomorrow.

Attacks on Flemings

Whan Adam delf, and Eve span,
Wo was thanne a gentilman?

This was part of a sermon allegedly delivered in Blackheath the night before that group of peasants descended upon London during the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. Although the catalyst for the Revolt may have been a poll tax, resentments against the upper classes were always ready to boil over. Flemings were not generally a large part of the countryside peasant population.

Flemings were, however, mentioned specifically in one account of the Revolt, and it has two curious features. The account in MS Cotton Julius B.II. ends with the lines:

...and many fflemynges lost here heedes at that tyme, and namely they that koude nat say 'breede and chese", but "case en brode".

It was curious that Flemings were mentioned specifically. Also, contemporary references to language in the 14th century are extremely rare, so why distinguish these foreigners with a reference to their tendency to idiomatically express "bread and cheese" as "case and brode." (Modern German for cheese is still "Käse" and for bread is "Brot" with a long ō sound.)

One of the targets for destruction was the "stews" or brothels of Southwark, just south of London across the Thames. It was an area well known for prostitution, and that particular profession at that time was dominated by Flemings. One particular Fleming-run brothel was invaded and destroyed by the mob, but it was owned by the mayor of London, William Walworth, so the destruction may have been aimed at him as a representative of the upper classes—in the spirit of the first quotation above—rather than the foreigners specifically.

But it seems likely that the Revolt, as often happens, "broadened its scope" as the angry mob let its anger focus on several different targets, whether they were a rational reason for the start of the Revolt or not. Xenophobia has been a part of human culture since the beginning of human societies, I would wager, and 14th century England was no different. Distinguishing foreigners by their idiomatic expressions of everyday objects like "bread and cheese" is petty, racist, and perfectly believable.

There was, in fact, other acts of violence against Flemings on the same day of the Revolt, 13 June, as well as the following day, that are not mentioned in any chronicle of the Revolt itself, but come from the law courts. There is a pardon for a man from Holborn who killed seven Flemings just north of London, at Clerkenwell, on 13 June. On 14 June, 35 Flemings were dragged from St. Martin Vintry church and beheaded. The official London records confirm that rebels dragged Flemings from houses and churches in Vintry ward, resulting in 40 decapitated bodies in the street.

Hostility against Flemings continued in the week after the Revolt, and at various locations not connected to the Revolt. Chaucer even refers to the attacks on the Flemings. He was a likely witness to the event, since he was living in an apartment at one of the city gates at the time. In the Nun's Priest's Tale he refers to the shrill voices of the rebels as they killed Flemings.

Why the Peasants' Revolt turned into an opportunity to show extreme prejudice against Flemings particularly is unclear. Flemings would not have been the only foreigners in London, nor did they represent the upper classes, which was one of the targets of the Revolt. It may have been a case of "foreigners taking our jobs." Coastal flooding several years earlier in the Low Countries had caused many weavers from Flanders to seek a living elsewhere, and there was an influx of Flemish weavers into the English textile scene in the 1370s that caused hostility from the English weavers. This was not a new development, however: Edward III had encouraged Flemish weavers in the 1330s to settle in England. Of course his wife, Queen Philippa, was from the Low Countries, and his suggestion may have been at her suggestion.

It might also be that they wanted to help Fleming peasants who had held their own uprising a few years earlier, which we will look at next.

Local Government, Part 2

A modern Aleconner [link]

We know that, in medieval London, an alderman held an assembly called a Wardmote every other year, at which attendance by every male in the ward over a certain age (with some exceptions) was required. The purpose of these meetings was manifold.

One major occurrence was to administer the "Oath of Frankpledge"; this was an oath that imposed upon each attendee an obligation to civic duty. (Knights and some others were exempt, since they owed allegiance to different authority.) The oath:

You shall swear, that you shall be good and true unto the King of England and to his heirs, Kings, and the King's peace shall you keep; and to the officers of the City you shall be obedient, and at all times that should be needful, you shall be ready to help the officers in arresting misdoers, and those disobedient to the King's peace, as well denizens as strangers.  And you shall be ready, at the warnings of the Constables and Beadles, to make the watches and other charges for the safeguard of the peace, and all the points in this Wardmote shown, according to your power, you shall well and lawfully keep. And if you know any evil coven within the Ward of the City, you shall withstand the same or unto your Alderman make it known. So God you help, and the Saints.

Regarding the line "as well denizens as strangers": A "citizen" was a native; a "denizen" was a foreigner residing locally; a "stranger" was someone present without a fixed local address. The potentially disruptive behavior of strangers (who of course had no oath of obligation to the municipality) was a constant concern. Since visitors had to stay somewhere, innkeepers were made responsible for the actions of their temporary tenants. In 1384, in London, innkeepers were required to answer for the customers' actions if the customers stayed longer than a single day and night. A guest whose behavior required the attention of the authorities could cost the innkeeper a fine of £100.

After the oath came the elections. Various positions needed to be filled by the male citizens. The Beadle [Old English bydel: "a person who makes a proclamation] was responsible for disseminating information orally in a society without Twitter or newspapers. He was the first "social medium." Also elected for a two-year term were aleconners, whose enviable job was to test bread, ale, and beer for quality. Scavengers had the less enviable task of finding and removing trash from public spaces.

These practices helped to maintain order in a large city such as London, by dividing it up into Wards of a more manageable size and putting responsibility into the hands of people who were neighbors of those they policed and served. Although written laws and contracts were used at this time, the verbal contract of the frankpledge served to bind the men to their obligations. The frankpledge quoted above comes from the Liber Albus, the White Book. We should talk about that next.

Our Daily Bread

Bread has all the characteristics of a staple food: the plant is easy to grow, the product is relatively easy and cheap to produce, and it is adaptable to various shapes and uses. Human beings have been eating it for about 30,000 years, based on residue of starch found on tools used for pounding grain into meal.

The earliest breads were probably flatbreads, before rising or leavening agents were discovered. Some leavening would take place naturally, by airborne yeasts landing on dough left out. Pliny the Elder reported that Gauls and Iberians added the foam from beer to make bread that was lighter in texture.

The earliest known Arabic cookbook, The Book of Dishes, by Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq (10th century), explains:

Wheat bread agrees with almost everybody, particular varieties made with a generous amount of yeast and salt and allowed to fully ferment and bake well. Such breads are lighter and digest faster. Jizmazaj (thin bread with tamarisk seeds) and ruqaq (very thin bread) are by comparison less nourishing and digest much faster. Bread baked in malla (pit with hot ashes and stones), tabaq (large flat pan) and any other similar varieties that do not ferment or bake well are hard to digest and cause stomach aches. Only people used to strenuous labor can eat them more often.

Bread was considered so important to people and the economy that it was heavily regulated. The Assize of Bread and Ale during the reign of Henry III (1207 - 1272) determined "proper" weight and price and quality of bread.

Bread was such an important part of daily life that the name for someone with whom you spend a lot of time, companion, comes from the Old French compaignon, "one with whom one shares bread" (from Latin com="with" and panis="bread").