William of Malmesbury, as we have seen before, tells us that the Anglo-Saxons indulged in great feasting, and lived in very mean houses; whereas the Normans eat with moderation, but built for themselves magnificent mansions. Various allusions in old writers leave little room for doubt that our Anglo-Saxon forefathers indulged in much eating; but, as far as we can gather, for our information is very imperfect, this indulgence consisted more in the quantity than in the quality of the food, for their cookery seems to have been in general what we call “plain.” Refinement in cookery appears to have come in with the Normans; and from the twelfth century to the sixteenth we can trace the love of the table continually increasing. The monks, whose institution had, to a certain degree, separated them from the rest of the world, and who usually, and from the circumstances perhaps naturally, sought sensual gratifications, fell soon into the sin of gluttony, and they seem to have led the way in refinement in the variety and elaborate character of their dishes. Giraldus Cambrensis, an ecclesiastic himself, complains in very indignant terms of the luxurious table kept by the monks of Canterbury in the latter half of the twelfth century; and he relates an anecdote which shows how far at that time the clergy were, in this respect, in advance of the laity. One day, when Henry II. paid a visit to Winchester, the prior and monks of St. Swithin met him, and fell on their knees before him to complain of the tyranny of their bishop. When the king asked what was their grievance, they said that their table had been curtailed of three dishes. The king, somewhat surprised at this complaint, and imagining, no doubt, that the bishop had not left them enough to eat, inquired how many dishes he had left them. They replied, ten; at which the king, in a fit of indignation, told them that he himself had no more than three dishes to his table, and uttered an imprecation against the bishop, unless he reduced them to the same number.
But although we have abundant evidence of the general fact that our Norman and English forefathers loved the table, we have but imperfect information on the character of their cookery until the latter half of the fourteenth century, when the rules and receipts for cooking appear to have been very generally committed to writing, and a certain number of cookery-books belonging to this period and to the following century remain in manuscript, forming very curious records of the domestic life of our forefathers. From these I will give a few illustrations of this subject. These cookery-books sometimes contain plans for dinners of different descriptions, or, as we should now say, bills of fare, which enable us, by comparing the names of the dishes with the receipts for making them, to form a tolerably distinct notion of the manner in which our forefathers fared at table from four to five hundred years ago. The first example we shall give is furnished by a manuscript of the beginning of the fifteenth century, and belongs to the latter part of the century preceding; that is, to the reign of Richard II., a period remarkable for the fashion for luxurious living: it gives us the following bill of fare for the ordinary table of a gentleman, which I will arrange in the form of a bill of fare of the present day, modernizing the language, except in the case of obsolete words.