MEDIEVAL HOUSEKEEPING

Waipa Post, Volume 41, Issue 3186, 9 August 1930, Page 2

MEDIEVAL HOUSEKEEPING

A GLIMPSE AT THE LARDER. Having industriously delved into old records, Miss M. Christable Draper, writing in the National Review (England) for June, is enabled to present a curiously intimate picture of the domestic economy of long ago. A glance into two fourteenth-century larders shows the provisions which played a part in the English housekeeping of the time. The first described is a storeroom at Fynchate in 1311; the second is taken from the words of Piers Plowman. At Fynchate there were stored "the carcases of 20 oxen and 15 pigs, of herrings 8000, of dogrades (a sea fish) seven score, 20 lbs of almonds, 30 of rice, six barrels of lard, enough oatmeal to last until Easter, and two quarters of salt." A few years later Piers Plowman complains: " I have no penny pullets for to buy, nor neither geese nor pigs, but two green cheeses, a few curds and cream, and an oaten cake, and two loaves of beans and bran baken for my children. I have no salt bacon, but I have parsley and leeks and many cabbage plants, and a cow and a calf and a mare." The storerooms of the great nobles, however, were far more capacious. Their administration required the entire time and care of two gentlemen clei-ks of the kitchen. In the princely home of the fifth Earl of Northumberland during the reign of Henry VIII. more than 100 officers and servants were housed, and visitors of high renown were frequently entertained. The first duty of the clerks was to stock the castle with provisions from year to year, and they scoured the country for necessaries which could not be made or grown on the estate. Among other things they had to be prepared to supply at a moment's notice were—the spelling is the clerks' own — " paycokkes, bastardes, ternes, quailles, for my lord's own table and no other and at the principal feasts only; also woodcokks, swannys, pertridges, caponnes, pidgeons, seegullis, mutons, lambes, beiff, saltfisch, red herynge, and solmoun. Other necessities were wine, beere, hoppys, prones, raeyns, allmonds, datys, sugour, hony, oile, wax wrought in torches, parish candle, gaggotts, and also see cholys, and char cholis, and 64 lood of great wood, which ys because colys will not byrne withoute wood."

Evidently a strict record was kept of all stores, and stock was taken at frequent intervals. Failure to balance was called a de-faultts. In one place in the Book of the Household strict injunctions were entered that in future no bread, beer, vinegar, or herbs be iTsed, " except they came from my lord's bakery, brewery, and garden"; mustard, too, was no longer to be bought ready-made from the sawcemaker, but " made within my lord's hous andone be providit to be grome of the skullery than can make it." There was to be no extravagant use of lamb, as will be seen from the specific instruction " that there be no lambes bought when they are at the dearest without it be for my lord's boorde and chamberlayns messe. And let their be no comon servyce of them through the hous when they be dere." When the earl went away in state the clerks of the kitchens had to supervise the packing of the whole of the household goods, with beds, clothes, stores, and effects, into 16 carriages and a chariot. Each clerk travelled in a carriage with three other clerks. They were allowed two beds among the four of them.

Among household hints it is said that cockroaches in the storeroom might be got rid of by introducing a few hedgehogs. Moles could be got rid of easily by laying onions about. Pennyroyal spread on the floors of bedrooms freed the rooms of " spritely insects too indelicate to name."