In recent years deep excavation of Roman London has also revealed evidence of scattered oyster shells, the stones of cherries and of plums, the remnants of lentils and cucumbers, peas and walnuts. One surviving beaker or
The diet of the Saxon Londoner was less exotic. At the times of “noon-meat” and “even-meat,” a staple diet of flesh was enlivened by leeks, onions, garlic, turnips and radishes. An ox had a value of six shillings, a pig one shilling, but there is also evidence that at a slightly later date Londoners demanded a plentiful supply of eels. At various spots along the Thames there were eel fisheries which date back at least as far as the eleventh century. From this century, too, excavations beneath St. Pancras have uncovered more plum-stones and cherry-stones.
Bread was the most important commodity throughout London’s history. There are many city regulations of the thirteenth century concerning the conduct of bakers, whose profession was divided into those who made “white bread” and those who made “tourte bread.” “Pouffe” was French bread; “simnel” or “wastel,” white bread, fine as well as common; “bis,” brown bread; and “tourte,” the inferior bread. The principal bakers were situated to the east, in Stratford, and the loaves were carried by long carts to the various shops and stalls within the city. Bread was indeed the staple of life. Scarce supplies in 1258, for example, had the direct consequence that “fifteen thousand of the poor perished.” Shiploads of wheat and grain were imported from Germany, and certain London nobles distributed bread to the crowd, but “innumerable multitudes of poor people died, and their bodies were all lying about swollen from want.” The permanent contrast in London, between need and abundance, has taken many different forms. In the more prosperous years of the thirteenth century, however, the diet of the citizen included beef, mutton and pork together with lampreys, porpoise and sturgeon. Vegetables were not greatly in demand but there was a particular delicacy known as “soup of cabbage.” Londoners had also invented a kind of mixed meat dish, created by pounding together pork and poultry into one concoction. A household book at the end of the thirteenth century reveals that on fish days there was also a choice of “herrings, eels, lampreys, salmon” and on meat days a similar variety of “pork, mutton, beef, fowls, pigeons and larks” together with “eggs, saffron and spices.”
The records of the fourteenth century are less descriptive, but Stow denotes 1392 and 1393 as years of want, when a diet of “apples and nuts” was forced upon the poor. It is an open question whether the poor ever lived well, even in years of prosperity. The average wage of a London labourer was sixpence a day, while a capon pasty cost eightpence and a hen pasty fivepence. A roast goose could be purchased for sevenpence, while ten finches cost one penny. Ten cooked eggs also cost a penny, and a leg of pork threepence. Oysters and other shellfish were cheap, as were thrushes and larks. Here, then, is evidence of a strangely assorted diet, complemented by rich delicacies-“gruel of almondes … a potage of whelks … Blancmaung of fysshe … Gruel of porke … Pigges in sawce.” In Chaucer’s
