The Supersizers Eat... Medieval

In the BBC series The Supersizers Eat... restaurant critic Giles Coren and writer and comedian Sue Perkins experience the food culture of years gone by. Last night they went back to medieval England to live the life of a Lord and Lady in their country manor.


It was up to Anglo-Saxon lookalike Martin Blunos (who also just happens to be a Michelin-starred chef) to cook all their food for the week, which included everything from roast cockentrice - a creation made from the forepart of a chicken sewn to the rear of a piglet - to peacock, coqz heaumez (helmeted cock), suckling pig, boar's head and hippocras.


Now, it just so happens that recipes for a number of things they ate can be found in What is Myrrh Anyway? So, if you fancy finding out what frumenty tastes like for yourself or you're curious about the health benefits of hippocras (a.k.a. ypocras) then why not pick up a copy today?


There was also much discussion - mainly with monks - about fasting and what the Medieval mind considers to be fish. This is also covered in What is Myrrh Anyway? as Christmas Eve was a fast day, and fish could be eaten on fast days.

What is Myrrh Anyway? - it's not just for Christmas!

9 December - The Merry Medieval Month of December

For out Medieval forebears, December was the month of slaughter. Animals that would cost to much to feed throughout the cold winter season would be butchered at the beginning of December, with only some animals left for breeding stock for the next year. With so much fresh meat around, and with the autumn harvest still filling the storehouses, is it any wonder that the Feast of Christmas was exactly that.

A highlight of the feast was the bringing in of the boar's head, and which is where our own traditional Christmas ham originates from (in part). And of course before that the boar had to be caught, and so the Christmas hunt was also a popular part of the Medieval Christmas for those among the upper echelons of society.

Today, 9 December, also happens to be Saint Budock's feast day. Budock (aka Budoc, Budo, Budeux and Beuzec) was supposedly the son of a king of Brittany and of Azenor, the daughter of the ruler of Brest, in France. Azenor is said to have been exiled in a cask, and Budock was born at sea, attended by Saint Brigid. He was raised in a monastery near Waterford, in Ireland, and became first the abbot of the house and then bishop of Dol, in Brittany. Budock ruled there for twenty-six years. However, another tradition claims that Budock was an Irish hermit who settled in Budock, near Falmouth, England.

The original Stag-do

One of the things you can read about in What is Myrrh Anyway? (when it's published in October) is how the traditional mummers' plays helped influence the development of the popular pantomime.

The words ‘mummer’ and ‘mumming’ either come from the German mumme, meaning a ‘mask’ or ‘masker’, or the Greek momme, meaning specifically ‘a frightening mask’. To hide their true identities (disguise being an important part of the mummers' ritual performance) many mummers wore masks made to look like different animal heads. One of these was the stag.

Just such a 'classic' Medieval mummer mask appears in an fourteenth century illuminated manuscript in the Bodleian Library of Oxford University. A marginal panel in the lower right corner of the verso of Plate 21 shows a stag masked mummer leading four other dancers (two women and two masked men) to a musical tune provided by a man playing the lute.

The stag mask itself is particularly ancient, dating to the stone age in Europe. A painting on the wall of a cave named Le Trois Freres in France clearly shows a shaman wearing a stag mask and costume. The style of the paintings in the cave place the image at the end of the Ice Age, around 15,000 to 10,000 BC!

Modern Wiccan believers see the stag as representing the powerful male spirit of the animal world, 'the source of masculine energy; he is the raw force, wisdom and law'. Some Medieval writers also identified the stag as a force for good, determined to stamp out evil, as in the natural world the animal will trample any snakes it comes upon.