And a sister study, published in the Anglo-Saxon England Journal on April 20, suggests that farmers would organize rich feasts for the elite instead of paying them with food as a levy. The discoveries, according to the researchers, overturned basic prejudices about medieval English history and have “major political implications”. In the first study, bioarchaeologist Sam Leggett of the University of Cambridge analyzed chemical traces of diet preserved in the bones of 2,023 people buried in England from the 5th to the 11th century. He then compared them with indicators of social classification, such as tomb objects, corpse position and grave orientation, and found no link between a high-protein diet and social status. Because so many medieval texts and historical research showed that the Anglo-Saxon aristocrats ate a lot of meat, the findings surprised the historian Tom Lambert of the University of Cambridge. So the two worked together to translate historical royal food lists and uncovered comparable serving patterns, such as a modest amount of bread, a large amount of meat, a reasonable but not excessive amount of beer and no mention of vegetables, although some were almost certainly provided. . But the total amount of food mentioned was much larger than any small dinner he could eat. “These food lists show that even if you allow huge appetites, 300 or more people must have attended,” Lambert said in a press release on April 21. “The scale and proportions of these food lists strongly suggest that they were occasional large holiday supplies rather than the general food supplies that the royal households maintained on a daily basis. “These were not plans for daily elite diets as historians have suggested.” These new data, combined with Leggett’s findings from a previous study, suggest that the large amounts of meat listed in these historical food lists were probably only consumed on special occasions. “I did not find any evidence that humans ate anything like this animal protein on a regular basis. If it were, we would find isotopic evidence of excess protein and signs of diseases such as bone gout. “But we just do not find that,” added Leggett. Even the kings, the researchers suggest, would have eaten a cereal-based diet and these rare feasts – cases of which have been found in the East of England in the United Kingdom – would have been a pleasure for them as well. “That means a lot of ordinary farmers have to be there and that has a lot of political implications,” Lambert said. “We look at kings traveling to huge barbecues hosted by free farmers, people who had their own farms and sometimes slaves to work on. This reinterpretation can have far-reaching implications for medieval studies and English political history as a whole. Prior to this research, it was widely believed that farmers paid a food gift, or food tax, to kings and the upper class. But Lambert now suggests that the term referred to a single feast attended by both peasants and kings, and not a primitive form of taxation. “You could compare it to a modern dinner for the US presidential campaign,” Lambert said. That was a crucial form of political commitment. “ Food has long influenced ideas about the origins of English rights and land protection policy, and remains at the heart of ongoing discussions about how England’s once free peasantry was subjugated.
