“What say you to a piece of beef and mustard?”: The Evolution of Public Dining in Medieval
and Tudor London
Author(s): Martha Carlin
Source: Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 71, No. 1 (March 2008), pp. 199-217
Published by: University of California Press
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“What say you to a piece of beef and
mustard?”: The Evolution of Public Dining
in Medieval and Tudor London
Martha Carlin
in shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, the third scene of act 4 unfolds in the
house of Petruchio and his new bride, Kate. Petruchio is determined to tame her, to
transform her from a shrew into an obedient wife, and one of his tactics is to starve her
into good behavior. In this scene, Petruchio’s servant, Grumio, tauntingly offers the
ravenous Kate a pretended choice of cheap dinner dishes. First he tempts her with a
neat’s foot, then a fat tripe finely broiled, and finally a piece of beef (that is, salt beef)
and mustard. Grumio here is parodying the behavior of the host of an inn or a tavern
describing the menu to a guest.
By Shakespeare’s day, dining out was commonplace. Alessandro Magno, a
Venetian merchant who visited London in 1562, noted that the English were “not
ashamed” to “eat in inns, or to drink either: if anyone wishes to give a banquet, he orders the meal at the inn, giving the number of those invited, and they go there to eat.
The inns are very clean,” he added, “and they treat well any who go there.”1 In 1599
Thomas Platter, a Swiss visitor to London, reported that there were “a great many inns,
taverns, and beer gardens scattered about the city, where much amusement may be had
with eating, drinking, fiddling, and the rest . . . And what is particularly curious is that
the women as well as the men, in fact more often than they, will frequent the taverns or
ale-houses for enjoyment.”2 Londoners of both sexes also made excursions to the suburbs to enjoy light repasts of cakes, custards, and fruit with cream, accompanied by ale,
beer, or wine.3
1. Caroline Barron, Christopher Coleman, and Claire Gobbi, eds., “The London Journal of
Alessandro Magno, 1562,” London Journal 9:2 (Winter 1983): 147.
2. Thomas Platter’s Travels in England 1599, trans. Clare Williams (London, 1937), 170. An anonymous Italian who visited England ca. 1500 noted that women, even “ladies of distinction,” also went to
the tavern to drink; C. A. Sneyd, ed., A Relation . . . of the Island of England . . . About the Year 1500,
Camden Society, o.s., no. 37 (1847), 21. On drinking-houses, see Peter Clark, The English Alehouse:
A Social History, 1200–1830 (London and New York, 1983), and Beat Kümin and B. Ann Tlusty, eds.,
The World of the Tavern: Public Houses in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot, U.K., 2002).
3. See Edward H. Sugden, A Topographical Dictionary to the Works of Shakespeare and His
Fellow Dramatists (Manchester, 1925), s. vv. “Hogsdon or Hogsden” (pp. 251–52), “Islington” (p. 274),
huntington library quarterly | vol. 71, no. 1
199
Pp. 199–217. ©2008 by Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery. issn 0018-7895 | e-issn 1544-399x. All rights reserved.
For permission to photocopy or reproduce article content, consult the University of California Press Rights and Permissions
website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/hlq.2008.71.1.199.
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martha carlin
Dining out, however, was a comparatively recent development in English
towns. Until around 1400 there were no public eating-houses at all in the City of London. In the nearby suburb of Westminster, however—the home of the royal palace, law
courts, and abbey—the cookshops were beginning to serve restaurant-style meals to
the general public, and by about 1460 this practice had spread to the cookshops, inns,
and taverns of the City itself. In the mid-sixteenth century there appeared a new form
of eating-house, the “ordinary,” which served set meals at a fixed price. This essay will
examine these developments in public dining in the capital.
Cookshops, Alehouses, Taverns, and Inns, Prior to ca. 1400
Before the fifteenth century, Londoners ate their meals at home or in the homes of family or friends; there were no public restaurants. The chronicler Matthew Paris provides a
graphic account of how unaccustomed the merchants of mid-thirteenth-century London were to dining out. In 1248 Henry III ordered that a new trade-fair be held at Westminster for two weeks every October, and he forbade any other fairs to be held in
England, or any other commerce to take place in London during that time. The merchants who attended, according to Matthew’s indignant description, “were exposed to
great inconveniences, as they had no shelter except canvas tents . . . [and so] they were
cold and wet, and also suffered from hunger and thirst; their feet were soiled by the
mud, and their goods rotted by the showers of rain; and when they sat down to take
their meals there, those who were accustomed to sit down to their meals in the midst of
their family by the fireside, knew not how to endure this state of want and discomfort.”4
Hot food and drinks by the cup were available in the City’s cookshops, alehouses, taverns, and inns in the period before 1400, but none of these served full, sitdown, restaurant-style meals to the general public. Cookshops served hot food and
sometimes ale, but not wine, and they had no seats or tables. Alehouses, which served
ale, and taverns, which served wine, had seating, but neither served meals. Inns had
seats and tables, and the better ones served full, hot meals, but only to their own guests,
not to the general public. The reasons for these limitations will be discussed below.
London boasted a cluster of public cookshops by the early 1170s, when they were
described by William Fitzstephen in his Description of London. These cookshops,
which lay on the riverside, in the district known as the Vintry, were open day and
night, and sold ready-cooked meat, game, poultry, and fish, available roasted, fried, or
boiled.5 By the early 1200s, the specialist food-vendors in English towns also included
pastelers, who sold hot pies filled with meat, poultry, game, or fish; flan-makers, who
“Newington” (p. 365), and “Pimlico” (p. 412). Henry Machyn’s diary records an outing by some London
parishioners to Hoxton in April 1557 at which they consumed 7 shillings’ worth of beer, bread, ale, and
wine; The Diary of Henry Machyn Citizen and Merchant-Taylor of London from a.d. 1550 to a.d. 1563,
ed. J. G. Nichols, Camden Society, o.s., no. 42 (1848), 132.
4. Matthew Paris, English History from the Year 1235 to 1273 [Historia Major], trans. J. A. Giles,
vol. 2 (London, 1853; reprint ed., New York, 1968), 273; see also p. 526.
5. John Stow, Survey of London (1603), ed. Charles Lethbridge Kingsford, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1908,
reprint ed., 1971), 2:222. These cookshops remained in the Vintry for at least fifty years, until the 1220s.
See Martha Carlin, “Fast Food and Urban Living Standards in Medieval England,” in Martha Carlin and
Joel T. Rosenthal, eds., Food and Eating in Medieval Europe (London and Ronceverte, W.Va., 1998), 30.
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public dining in medieval and tud or lond on
201
sold hot cheese flans made with eggs, bread, and cheese; and waferers, who sold wafers
and little cakes (“wafras vel lagana”) hot from the iron or oven.6
The food sold by the cookshops was “fast food”; that is, hot, ready-to-eat food,
not food cooked to order. It was meant to be eaten immediately, like a hamburger and
fries today, but no seats or tables were provided, since fast-food cooks generally
worked from cramped storefronts or from movable stalls. In Oxford in the 1250s, for
example, many cooks boiled or roasted food outside their doors,7 and in Coventry in
1421 the cooks sold their wares from “boards” in the high street.8 In London, where the
high volume of traffic required strict enforcement of the regulations against blocking
the narrow streets, most commercial cooks and pastelers seem to have operated from
shops rather than stalls.9
Fast food in London and other medieval towns was primarily consumed by the
poor, whose dwellings often lacked cooking facilities, and who could not afford to buy
expensive metal cookware or bulk supplies of food and fuel. For them, fast food was
costly but it was irresistibly convenient. To workers who craved a cooked meal in the
middle of the day, or who returned exhausted to a chilly lodging after the markets were
closed, fast-food vendors offered a tempting selection of hot foods that were ready to
eat and required no time-consuming, laborious preparation or cleanup. For the very
poor and the homeless, fast food was often their only source of hot food at all.10 Consequently, local authorities allowed the cookshops to remain open in the evening, long
after the markets were closed,11 and imposed price controls on take-away food to
enable the poor to afford it.12
6. This description comes from an English treatise that describes urban occupations. See B[ritish]
L[ibrary], Add. MS. 8167, fols. 88r–90v; printed, with an English translation, in Martha Carlin, “Shops
and Shopping in the Early Thirteenth Century: Three Texts,” in Lawrin Armstrong, Ivana Elbl, and
Martin Elbl, eds., Money, Markets, and Trade in Late Medieval Europe: A Collection of Essays in Honour
of John Munro (Leiden and Boston, 2007), 492–93, 498–501, 517–30.
7. [Great Britain, Public Record Office], Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous (Chancery) Preserved in the Public Record Office, vol. 1, 1219–1307 (London, 1916), no. 238, pp. 79–83, “The complaints
of the burgesses of the lesser commune of Oxford against the burgesses magnates,” article 18, p. 82: “no
cook should dare boil or roast [ut coquat aut hasset] any food outside his door unless first he have
given satisfaction with two or three shillings.”
8. Mary Dormer Harris, ed., The Coventry Leet Book or Mayor’s Register, pts. 1–2, Early English
Text Society (henceforth EETS), o.s., nos. 134–35 (1907), 26.
9. This is suggested by the fact that they were not among those accused of blocking the streets with
stalls in the waterfront district in 1343, or in the London Assize of Nuisance; Henry Thomas Riley, ed.,
Munimenta Gildhallae Londoniensis, II, Liber Custumarum, Rolls Series, vol. 12 (1860), 2:444–53
(1343); Helena M. Chew and William Kellaway, eds., London Assize of Nuisance, 1301–1431, London
Record Society, vol. 10 (1973).
10. See Carlin, “Fast Food and Urban Living Standards,” 41–51.
11. In medieval London, the retail food markets were open only between about sunrise and noon.
In the suburbs, Southwark (which lay on the south bank of the Thames, across London Bridge from
the City) had markets only on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, while Westminster had only a
weekly market, at Tothill, on Mondays. See Martha Carlin, “Putting Dinner on the Table in Medieval
London,” in Matthew Davies and Andrew Prescott, eds., London and the Kingdom: Essays in Honour
of Professor Caroline M. Barron, Proceedings of the Harlaxton Symposium, 2004 (Donington, Lincolnshire, 2008), 64–65.
12. In 1379, for example, the City ordered the pastelers to “bake pasties of beef at one halfpenny,
just as good as those at a penny; Henry Thomas Riley, ed., Memorials of London and London Life in the
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martha carlin
People of means, however, shunned fast food. Evidence of this can be seen in the
financial records kept by well-to-do households, which make it clear that wealthy residents and travelers alike avoided cookshops, and instead had their meals cooked to
order at their dwellings, lodgings, or inns.13 One major reason for this preference was
that privacy and exclusivity were signs of status, just as they are now. People of means
would not have joined a queue for cookshop food, or eaten it standing at a counter or in
the public street. In addition, many cookshops had developed a sleazy reputation.
Local ordinances repeatedly chastised commercial cooks for selling unwholesome
food, made of unsuitable or tainted ingredients or illegally reheated from day to day. In
London in 1380, for example, the pastelers were found to have been illegally making
pasties of unwholesome rabbits, geese, and garbage [offal],14 “sometimes stinking,”
and had also been baking beef into pasties and selling it as venison.15 In Westminster,
court records of the later 1300s and early 1400s document numerous cases of cooks accused of selling reheated, putrid meats and fish.16 By this date, seamy public cookshops
had become a stock literary image. Piers Plowman listed cooks, along with brewers,
bakers, and butchers, as the occupational groups that civic authorities regularly punished because “they poison the people privily and oft,” especially the poor.17 Chaucer
XIIIth, XIVth, and XVth Centuries . . . 1276–1419 (London, 1868), 432. Similarly, in Coventry in 1427 the
cooks were ordered to “make halpeny pyes as other townes doth,” on pain of 6s. 8d. per default; Harris,
ed., Coventry Leet Book, 111. On civic control over food prices in general in later medieval London,
see Caroline M. Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages: Government and People 1200–1500 (Oxford
and New York, 2004), 57–59, 277. In London the price of the cheapest pies evidently doubled during
the fifteenth century, from a halfpenny to a penny, since in 1495 the London Pastelers’ ordinances required the company’s wardens to inspect all cooked food for sale in the open shops, and also to see
“whether the penyworthes thereof be reasonable for the comon wele of the Kynges liege people or not”;
Cal[endar of] Letter-Books [Preserved Among the Archives of the Corporation of the City of London at
the Guildhall], ed. Reginald R. Sharpe, 11 vols. (A–L) (London, 1899–1912), L, 311. For Westminster, see
King’s Bench indictments in The National Archives, Public Record Office (henceforth TNA, PRO),
KB9/183/6 (1399); KB9/224/300 (1427), both cited in Gervase Rosser, Medieval Westminster 1200–1540
(Oxford, 1989), 128 n. 33; 129 n. 38.
13. See Carlin, “Fast Food and Urban Living Standards,” 34–38.
14. Two fifteenth-century English cookery books include recipes for “garbage” that begin “Take
fayre garbagys of chykonys, as the hed, the fete, the lyuerys, an the gysowrys”; Thomas Austin, ed., Two
Fifteenth-Century Cookery Books, EETS, o.s., no. 91 (1888), 9, 72.
15. Riley, ed., Memorials of London, 438; Cal Letter-Book H, ed. Sharpe, 139.
16. Westminster Abbey Muniments [hereafter WAM] 50699–50713 (1364–79), 50718 (1386), 50734
(1396); TNA, PRO, KB9/201/1/12 (King’s Bench indictment, 1405; cited in Rosser, Medieval Westminster,
128 n. 34).
17. The Vision of Piers Plowman: A Critical Edition of the B-Text, ed. A. V. C. Schmidt (London and
New York, 1978; available online at http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=cme;cc=cme;
view=toc;idno=PPlLan), Passus III, lines 76–84:
[Civic authorities punish] on pillories and on pynynge stooles
Brewesters and baksters, bochiers and cokes—
For thise are men on this molde that moost harm wercheth
To the povere peple that parcelmele buggen.
For thei poisone the peple pryveliche and ofte,
Thei richen thorugh regratrie and rentes hem biggen
With that the povere peple sholde putte in hire wombe.
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included among his pilgrims a London cook, “Hodge” [Roger] of Ware, who was notorious for his fly-filled shop, his soggy pies, his reheated food, his unwholesome parsley
garnishes, and his ulcerated leg, the last shown graphically in the splendid illustration
of him in the Huntington Library’s Ellesmere manuscript of the Canterbury Tales
(figure 1).
Since the poor were the principal clientele of the London cookshops, the
cooks had little economic incentive to expand their cramped premises to offer
restaurant-style dining, with tables and table-service—their customers could not afford to pay extra for such amenities. Much the same was true of the alehouse-keepers
of London. Most alehouses were probably small, improvised establishments, located
in a room in the brewer’s or tapster’s (ale-seller’s) own house.18 Piers Plowman includes a gamy picture of a London alehouse, in which Gluttony is buttonholed on his
way to morning Mass by a female brewer who keeps an alehouse. She lures him in
with offers of ale and hot spices, and he joins a group of men and women, most of
them poor and some disreputable, with whom he drinks until he is sick. No food of any
kind is served.19
Taverns sold wine, which was much more expensive than ale, and thus catered
to a better-off clientele than the cookshops and alehouses. They also occupied larger
figure 1. The Cook, from the Ellesmere Manuscript of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, fol. 47r.
Huntington Library.
The poor are shown here as twice victimized: not only is the food unwholesome, but their poverty also
means that they have to buy it “parcelmele” (by small quantities) from regrators (re-sellers) at high prices.
18. On brewers and tapsters, see Judith M. Bennett, Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women’s
Work in a Changing World, 1300–1600 (New York, 1996), 20, 45; and Derek J. Keene, Winchester Studies,
no. 2: Survey of Medieval Winchester, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1985), 1:265–69, 276–77.
19. Piers Plowman, B-text, ed. Schmidt, Passus V, lines 298–356.
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and grander premises, with stone-vaulted cellars. In the fourteenth century the taverns
themselves were often located in the cellars,20 and they evidently did not serve meals.
Piers Plowman records fragments of the street-cries of London, in which “cooks and
their knaves cried ‘Hot pies, hot! Good geese and piglets, come dine! come dine!’” The
taverners, meanwhile, offered an array of imported wines to wash down the cooks’
roast meat, but did not offer food themselves.21 In the poem Mirour de l’Omme [The
Mirror of Mankind], written by Chaucer’s friend John Gower in the later 1370s, Gower
complains of the frauds of taverners who adulterate their wines and falsely sell cheap
wines as fine ones, but he makes no mention of any food in taverns.22 Contemporary
inventories of taverns also suggest that they did not serve meals. Inventories taken in
1376 of two London taverns, the Galley and Chichester Cellar, both in Lombard
Street, list their contents as consisting primarily of wine, empty barrels, trestle tables,
seats, and drinking pots. Neither tavern had a kitchen, and neither had any cooking
equipment, tableware, or linens.23 Similar tavern inventories survive from Winchester
(1414) and York (ca. 1415).24
Innkeeping as an occupation first occurs in English records in the 1180s, but references to it are rare for a century and longer. In London, innkeepers are first mentioned in the 1280s; outside the capital, however, commercial inns apparently were
scarce until after the Black Death (1348–49).25 In Oxford around 1400, for example,
there were twenty-one commercial inns, of which only about six had been in operation
in the first half of the fourteenth century.26 Before the Black Death, travelers commonly stayed in monastic guesthouses or in hired lodgings or private residences, and
wealthy travelers routinely carried their own household supplies and equipment with
20. John Schofield and Geoffrey Stell, “The Built Environment 1300–1540,” in David M. Palliser,
ed., The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, I, 600–1540 (Cambridge, 2000), 388–89; cf. Keene, Survey
of Medieval Winchester, 1:166–67, 274–75.
21. Piers Plowman, ed. Schmidt, Prologue, lines 226–30.
22. Mirour de l’Omme [The Mirror of Mankind], trans. William Burton Wilson, revised by Nancy
Wilson Van Baak (East Lansing, Mich., 1992), Introduction, p. xv (date), and lines 25, 981–26,124 (text).
23. A. R. Myers, “The Wealth of Richard Lyons,” in T. A. Sandquist and M. R. Powicke, eds., Essays
in Medieval History Presented to Bertie Wilkinson (Toronto, 1969), 325–26. Walter W. Skeat’s edition of
The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman in Three Parallel Texts (London, 1886; reprint ed.,
with additions to the bibliography, 1954), has Gluttony, in the B-text (1370s), Passus V, lines 381–84,
confess that “For loue of tales, in tauernes to drynke the more, I dyned, / And hyed to the mete er none
whan fastyng-dayes were.” This would appear to mean that Gluttony dined in the tavern in order to
prolong his enjoyment of the tales there. However, in the recent edition of the B-text edited by
Schmidt, Passus V, lines 377–78, instead read: “For love of tales in tavernes [in]to drynke the moore I
dy[v]ed, / And hyed to the mete er noone [on] fastyng dayes.” This reading eliminates the suggestion
that Glutton dined in taverns; rather, he drank too much there while listening to tales, and on fasting
days he improperly ate before noon.
24. Keene, Survey of Medieval Winchester, 1:275; James Raine, ed., Testamenta Eboracensia: A Selection of Wills from the Registry at York, vol. 3, Surtees Society, no. 45 (1865), 89.
25. Some earlier commercial inns may have escaped identification because they were referred
to by generic terms such as “tenement” or “messuage”; see Keene, Survey of Medieval Winchester,
1:167–69; but cf. Martha Carlin, Medieval Southwark (London and Rio Grande, Ohio, 1996), 192–93.
26. Julian Munby et al., “Zacharias’s: A Fourteenth-Century Oxford New Inn and the Origins of
the Medieval Urban Inn,” Oxoniensia 57 (1992): 303–5.
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them. For example, when Queen Isabelle, the wife of Edward II, traveled in England in
1311–12, she brought along her own bedding and kitchen gear, and even her own drinking water.27
By Chaucer’s day, in the late fourteenth century, commercial inns were developing rapidly, perhaps in part as a consequence of the fall in property values after the
Black Death. In London in 1384 there were 197 innkeepers in 17 of the City’s 24 wards,
and across the river in Southwark there were 22 innkeepers in 1381.28 Most fourteenthcentury inns were converted from existing buildings rather than purpose-built.29 They
must have been comfortable and well-appointed, however, with private rooms and
ample stabling, since household accounts show that many wealthy travelers were putting up at them. In 1391–92 even John of Gaunt, the king’s uncle, stayed at a commercial
inn on a visit to Oxford.30 The better inns were able to offer meals to their guests, both
to their own lodgers and to travelers who lodged elsewhere but who took their meals at
an inn.31 According to Chaucer, at the Tabard in Southwark—a real inn, where
Chaucer’s fictional pilgrims stayed—Harry Bailly, the innkeeper, offered “vitaille at the
beste” for supper.32 A French conversation manual written in England in 1396 includes
dialogues, set in inns, that describe the cooking arrangements. In one dialogue, a gentleman arrives at an inn and sends his servant to the market to buy fish (or, in a variant,
ducks), which the servant then brings back to the inn and cooks for his master’s supper.
In the morning, however, the gentleman is able to order fish for breakfast without having to send out for it. In another dialogue, a male traveler without a servant arrives at
an inn and arranges to pay an inclusive price of 6d. for both food and chamber. A later
version of this French manual, written in 1399, lists an inn’s set charges for wine,
cooked meals [cuissin], fruit, and cheese.33 Thus, by the 1390s, good inns could offer
27. The Household Book of Queen Isabella of England . . . 8th July 1311 to 7th July 1312, ed. F. D. Blackley and G. Hermansen (Edmonton, Alberta, 1971), 112–13: 14d. paid in London on 6 October 1311 “for
2 small barrels bound with iron to take with the queen on her travels for carrying wine and water for
her own drinking.” Other wealthy travelers paid for the use of the kitchen equipment as well as the
kitchen. For example, when the Earl of Ross traveled north from London to Scotland in October 1303,
his expenses included 2d. for the hire of kitchen utensils while staying one night at Morpeth; TNA,
PRO, E101/365/9 (Tuesday, 15 October).
28. Of the 197 City innkeepers, almost half (95) were in the extramural part of Farringdon ward,
in Smithfield, Holborn, and Fleet Street. Three wards (Bassishaw, Coleman Street, and Cornhill) reported no innkeepers at all, and figures are lacking for the wards of Walbrook, Bishopsgate, Bridge,
and Portsoken; A. H. Thomas, ed., Cal[endar of] Select Pleas and Memoranda [of the City of London
. . .] 1381–1412 (Cambridge, 1932), 79. On the Southwark inns in 1381, see Carlin, Medieval Southwark,
193–94.
29. Many of the purpose-built inns were constructed by wealthy institutions that could afford
the capital investment; see W. A. Pantin, “Medieval Inns,” in E. M. Jope, ed., Studies in Building History: Essays in Recognition of the Work of B. H. St. J. O’Neil (London, 1961), 166–91, and plates 15–16.
30. Munby et al., “Zacharias’s: A Fourteenth-Century Oxford New Inn,” 305.
31. Thomas, ed., Cal Select Pleas and Memoranda 1381–1412, 79 (1384).
32. Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, in The Riverside Chaucer, 3d ed., General Editor Larry D.
Benson, based on The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson (Boston, 1987), “General Prologue,”
line 749. On Harry Bailly, the host of the Tabard Inn, see Carlin, Medieval Southwark, 48, 180, 197.
33. Andres M. Kristol, ed., Manières de langage (1396, 1399, 1415), Anglo-Norman Text Society,
no. 53 (1995), 11–12, 27, 38–39, 43–44, 56–59. See also Edith Rickert, comp., Chaucer’s World,
ed. Clair C. Olson and Martin M. Crow (New York, 1948), 279–81.
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their guests a selection of meals and snacks, but travelers who wanted finer fare had to
supply their own foodstuffs and their own cook. Apparently, however, English inns did
not as yet offer meals to the general public.
Several major factors probably inhibited the development of public eatinghouses in London before the fifteenth century. First, it was customary for people to
dine at home and, especially in the harsher economy of the pre-plague period, when
wages were low, potential customers who could afford to dine out regularly may have
been few. Second, the economics of the restaurant business, involving substantial capital investment in perishable foods and drinks, expensive cookware, tableware, and
linens, and the wages of trained staff, would have been prohibitive for many cooks,
tapsters, taverners, and innkeepers. Third, before the fifteenth century, high property
values in the choice commercial center of London probably helped to inhibit the expansion of cooking and dining facilities in these establishments. A fourth major factor
was the strength of local retail monopolies and licensing laws. London’s trade and craft
guilds had a monopoly on the retail vending of their own merchandise.34 In the 1360s
and 1370s, for example, London innkeepers were forbidden to buy victuals for resale,
to make bread to sell to their guests, or to sell ale to anyone except their own guests.35
Similarly, in 1383 London ordinances forbade cooks and pastelers from selling ale unless they had brewed it themselves.36 They could not sell wine at all, since that would
have infringed on the retail monopoly of the vintners and taverns.37 As a result of such
factors, there evidently were no establishments in the City at the end of the fourteenth
century that sold full, restaurant-style meals.38
The Origins of Public Dining: Westminster and London, ca. 1390–1420
Things were somewhat different, however, in the suburb of Westminster, which was
owned by Westminster Abbey and lay outside the jurisdiction of the mayor of London
and the tight regulation of the London guilds. By the mid-1370s, in Westminster’s busy
main thoroughfare of King Street (now Whitehall and Parliament Street), cooks had
begun to put out benches and chairs in front of their shops, stalls, and outdoor hearths
to make “pavement cafés.”39 By the end of the century some local victualers were sell34. See, e.g., Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages, 204, 207; Keene, Survey of Medieval Winchester, 1: 273–74.
35. Henry Thomas Riley, ed., Munimenta Gildhallae Londoniensis, III, Liber Albus, Rolls Series,
vol. 12 (1862), 277; Riley, ed., Memorials of London, 256, 323, 347–48; Sharpe, ed., Cal Letter-Book G, 149,
198. Only hucksters, who carried food around the city to sell from baskets, were legally entitled to buy
victuals for resale.
36. Sharpe, ed., Cal Letter-Book H, 209, 214. The earliest record that I have found of a London
pasteler selling ale dates from 6 July 1355, when Richard le Cook, a pie-baker of Ironmonger Lane, was
imprisoned for selling “beer” (ale) at the inflated price of 2d. a gallon; Arthur H. Thomas, ed., Calendar
of Plea and Memoranda Rolls Preserved . . . at the Guildhall . . . 1323–1364 (Cambridge, 1926), 255.
37. The Vintners’ monopoly on the retail selling of wine in London was extremely valuable. In
1365, for example, Richard Lyons paid the enormous rent of £200 a year for a ten-year lease of the
three London taverns that were licensed to sell sweet wines; Myers, “Wealth of Richard Lyons,” 301.
38. Cf. Stow, Survey of London, ed. Kingsford, 1:238.
39. Those who obstructed the street were consequently fined; Rosser, Medieval Westminster, 129;
WAM 50705 (12 June 1374). The cooks with the stalls were John atte Celer (or atte Seler) and Reginald
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ing both food and drink. In 1399, for example, six men and three women of Westminster were indicted for selling cooked beef, mutton, and poultry at excessive prices, and
seven of these nine vendors, and the wife of an eighth, were also indicted for overcharging for wine or ale or both. It is unclear whether they were selling these items together or instead selling the food from stalls or storefronts, and the drink from the
back door or from separate premises, but the likelihood seems strong that at least some
were selling them together in the form of full meals.40
These vendors were beginning to attract customers from the ranks of the junior
office workers of Westminster, who were often young and poor but socially ambitious.
The poet Thomas Hoccleve, reminiscing about the days of his youth as a civil servant at
the Office of the Privy Seal in the late 1380s and 1390s, claimed that he had been a
habitué of both the taverns and the cookshops at Westminster Gate. At the Paul’s Head
tavern, for example, he treated girls to sweet wine and thick wafers. And, because he
never argued over the bill, the proprietors always made him welcome and called him
“a verray gentilman,” which gratified his sense of self-importance, just as he was flattered into paying large tips to the London boatmen because they never called him anything but “maistir.”41 It seems that the taverns of Westminster still offered only light
bar snacks with their wines, but that the cookshops there were finally beginning to
attract genteel customers, at least among the younger civil servants. This was, I believe, the beginning of the breakthrough that led to the development of genuine public
eating-houses in the capital.
The earliest evidence that I have found of high-status diners at cookshops in the
City dates from 1410. On Midsummer Eve in that year, two of the king’s sons, Thomas
and John, and their men ate a late supper—after midnight—at the cookshops in
Eastcheap. Midsummer Eve was regularly the occasion of bonfires, block parties, and
other entertainments in London,42 and the princes’ supper ended in a riotous affray,
called a hurlyng, which, according to one chronicler, led to the imposition of a
nine o’clock curfew on all the inns, drinking houses, and cookshops in the City.43 The
Brekyndon; the cook with the bench (formulam) was Robert Kentebury. Similar fines for obstructing
the street with stalls, seating, or hearths were assessed from 1376 to 1386. WAM 50707 (1376: John atte
Celer and Reginald Brekyndon; stalls); WAM 50709 (1377: atte Seler, Brekyndon and Kentbury, purprestures); WAM 50711 (1378: Brekyndon and atte Seler, stalls and chairs); WAM 50713 (1379: Brekyndon and atte Seler, stalls and chairs); WAM 50715 (1380: Brekyndon and atte Seler, stalls and chairs);
WAM 50718 (1386: Reginald Brekyndon and John Osebarn, stalls and hearths). All Westminster Abbey
muniments are cited by permission of the Dean and Chapter.
40. Rosser, Medieval Westminster, 128; TNA, PRO, KB9/183/6. The nine were: John Cuttyng, cook;
John Weston, cook and barber; John Clynk; Agnes, wife of John Wyggemore; Isabella, wife of Thomas
Capon; Adam Cook; Adam Deye; William Willy, cook; and Agnes Blundell. Adam Cook and Adam
Deye were not otherwise indicted, but Deye’s wife, Margaret, was among those indicted for selling ale
too dearly.
41. Hoccleve, “La Male Regle” (written late 1406), lines 105–208, in Hoccleve’s Works, I, The Minor
Poems, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall, EETS, e.s., no. 61 (Oxford, 1892, reprint ed., 1937), 28–31.
42. Stow, Survey of London, ed. Kingsford, 1:101–3; 2:284.
43. Charles Lethbridge Kingsford, ed., Chronicles of London (Oxford, 1905; reprint ed., Dursley,
Gloucestershire, 1977), 268, 341; Stow, Survey of London, ed. Kingsford, 1:217; 2:312–13. Kingsford
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princes’ supper seems, however, to have been exceptional: it was probably a special
event connected with the City’s midsummer festivities, perhaps an early example of
the junior members of the royal family going walkabout. A fifteenth-century bit of
anonymous doggerel poetry suggests that the Eastcheap cookshops, like the alehouses, normally served much rougher customers, proclaiming that:
He that wyll in Es[t]chepe ete a goose so fat
With harpe pype and song
He must slepe in Newgate [prison] on a mat
Be the nyght never so long.44
A similarly rowdy image of the cookshops of Eastcheap appears in the early
fifteenth-century poem London Lickpenny, in which the Chaplinesque figure who
narrates the poem, a poor countryman from Kent, wanders haplessly around Westminster and London. In Eastcheap he is confronted by cooks crying their beef ribs and
meat pies, against the background clatter of pewter pots and the jangle of “harpe, pipe
and sawtry,” while in Cornhill a taverner plucks him by the sleeve and offers wine at a
penny the pint.45 Once again, however, things were different in Westminster. There,
the cooks at Westminster Gate had offered him a full, sit-down dinner of wine, ale,
bread, and hot ribs of beef, served at a table freshly covered with a “fair” cloth.46 This
suggests that it was the cooks of Westminster who were the first to provide true
restaurant-style dining to the general public. By offering both food and drink, served
at tables with fresh linen and attentive service, they were at last able to attract genteel
customers, or those with aspirations to gentility. Westminster was thronged with such
people—lawyers, litigants, civil servants, abbey and royal officials, court hangers-on,
London merchants, and well-to-do travelers—who shunned take-away food but
would pay for good food, drink, and service. This made Westminster the ideal location
for opening what amounted to the capital’s first restaurants.
believed that this curfew was a mistaken allusion to a proclamation of 1412 that ordered a curfew from
10:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. for all vintners, taverners, brewers, cooks, pie-bakers, hostelers, and hucksters,
but only on the eves of the feasts of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist (24 June) and SS. Peter and Paul
(29 June).
44. Trinity College Cambridge, MS. 599, fol. 208; printed by M. R. James in The Western Manuscripts in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge: A Descriptive Catalogue (Cambridge, 1901), 2:73.
45. “London Lickpenny,” in James M. Dean, ed., Medieval English Political Writings, TEAMS
[Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages], Middle English Texts series (Kalamazoo, Mich.,
1996), lines 89–96, 105–10. There are two extant manuscripts of this poem, both dating from the sixteenth century, in BL, Harley MSS. 367 (112 lines in rime royal stanzas) and 542 (128 lines in eight-line
“Monk’s Tale” stanzas). The version in Harley MS. 542 is the one edited by Dean, who says that “both
recensions of the poem contain editorial intervention, but the 542 version seems earlier and less
redacted than Harley 367; but neither can be said to witness the original poem” (p. 183).
46. “London Lickpenny,” in Dean, ed., Medieval English Political Writings, lines 57–64.
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Provincial Inns and Cookshops, ca. 1400–1420
By the early fifteenth century the cooks in provincial towns, like those in Westminster,
were beginning to attract middle-class customers, at least among travelers. A French
conversation manual, written in 1415 by the Oxford writing-master William of
Kingsmill, contains a dialogue that describes the arrival of six men and their three servants at an Oxford inn. The new guests ask about a drink and supper. The hostess tells
them that she has the best ale in town, or she can send out to one of the local taverns if
they would prefer wine. For supper, she can offer them a choice of poultry, piglets, or
wildfowl, followed by apples and pears, cheese, nuts, and eggs, or they can order their
supper to be sent in from a cookshop.47 Evidently, at least in some towns, the local
cookshops were beginning to exploit a market niche created by the recent development of commercial inns, and the inns were willing to let their guests order out.48
Kingsmill’s fictional guests have supper at their inn and sit up afterward, drinking and munching on roast apples and toast, while they decide what to order for the
following day’s dinner. They end up choosing a hearty menu of brawn with mustard,
vegetable broth [joutes] with beef, and boiled mutton and pork.49 Not all depictions of
inn food are so positive. In the “Prologue” to The Siege of Thebes, written about 1421,
John Lydgate pretends that he has joined Chaucer’s pilgrims at their inn at Canterbury
for the journey back to Southwark. The Host, Harry Bailly, asks Lydgate to join
them for supper that evening, saying:
[I pray] you soupe with us tonyght,
And ye shal han mad at youre devis
A gret puddyng or a rounde hagys,
A Franch-mole, a tansey, or a froyse.50
Despite the exotic-sounding names, these dishes represented a decidedly low-budget
menu. A pudding was a sausage or a blood pudding; a haggis, then as now, was a
47. Kingsmill’s conversation manual aimed to teach vocabulary as well as grammar and usage, so
his list of the poultry and wildfowl available for supper to guests at the Oxford inn is wildly exaggerated; Kristol, ed., Manières de langage, 73; cf. Munby et al., “Zacharias’s: A Fourteenth-Century Oxford
New Inn,” 305–6; and Brian Merrilees and Beata Sitarz-Fitzpatrick, eds., Liber Donati: A FifteenthCentury Manual of French, Anglo-Norman Text Society, Plain Texts Series, no. 9 (1993), 20–23.
48. In the anonymous “Canterbury Interlude” of ca. 1420, which describes what Chaucer’s pilgrims
did when they reached Canterbury, the Host (Harry Bailly) orders a dinner for the company of “Such
vitailles as he fond in town and for noon other sent.” It is not clear whether this dinner, which was served
at their inn, the Chequer on the Hoop (the city’s premier inn, built 1392–95), consisted of ready-to-eat
dishes from local cookshops or raw foodstuffs cooked at the inn; The Canterbury Tales: FifteenthCentury Continuations and Additions, ed. John M. Bowers, TEAMS Middle English Texts Series
(Kalamazoo, Mich., 1992), “The Canterbury Interlude and the Merchant’s Tale of Beryn,” lines 15–18
and pp. 57 (date), 165 (inn). On the development of English inns, see Carlin, Medieval Southwark,
191–200.
49. Kristol, ed., Manières de langage, 75; Merrilees and Sitarz-Fitzpatrick, eds., Liber Donati, 23.
“Brawn” was flesh, especially of pork, wild boar, or breast of poultry.
50. John Lydgate, The Siege of Thebes, in Canterbury Tales: Fifteenth-Century Continuations and
Additions, ed. Bowers, Prologue, lines 98–101.
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pudding of chopped sheep’s heart and other organs boiled in a sheep’s stomach; a
franch-mole was a similar pudding boiled in a cow’s stomach; a tansey was an omelet
flavored with tansey juice; and a froyse was a fried meat patty, similar to a hamburger.51
It is revealing that Lydgate’s Host, after describing this menu, advised his guest to eat
some red fennel, anise, cumin, or coriander seed at nighttime, to prevent indigestion.
Dining in the Capital, ca. 1420–ca. 1550
In London, it was the innkeepers and taverners rather than the cooks who seem to
have been the first to develop a true restaurant business. They had an advantage in that
their establishments already had rooms with seats and tables for serving meals. They
also attracted well-to-do clients, whereas the City’s cookshops, like the alehouses,
catered to poorer and rougher customers. It is unclear precisely when the inns and
taverns of London began serving meals to the general public. This transition may have
begun by about 1420, but clear evidence is scarce. From about 1460, however, the evidence is unequivocal. The household accounts of Sir John Howard (later Lord Howard;
in 1483 created duke of Norfolk), for example, record that by 1464 Sir John was accustomed to dine out at both inns and taverns in London and its suburbs.52 In addition to
feeding individual visitors and local residents, the innkeepers and taverners of London
began serving “expense-account” meals to the City’s commercial and professional
community. This development also had begun by the 1460s. For example, the accounts
of the churchwardens of St. Margaret’s, Southwark, which begin in 1444, first record
payments for such meals around 1461, when three dinners are listed, one of them at
Westminster.53 Similarly, the earliest surviving churchwardens’ accounts of St. Margaret’s, Westminster, which date from 1460–61, report the expenses of an “audit dinner” at a tavern.54 By the late fifteenth century some London brewers and alehouse
51. For franch-mole and froyse, see Constance B. Hieatt and Sharon Butler, eds., Curye on Inglysche,
EETS, supplementary series, no. 8 (1985), 189; for tansey and another version of froyse, see Austin, ed.,
Two Fifteenth Century Cook Books, 45, 86. All three items are also described in the mid-fifteenthcentury Liber cure cocorum, a recipe collection written in doggerel English verse (BL, MS. Sloane 1986,
fols. 46r, 53v; ed. Richard Morris [Philological Society, 1862], 36, 50). Cf. the Middle English Dictionary
(available online at http://ets.umdl.umich.edu/m/med/med_ent_search.html), s.vv. “froise,”
“franch(e)-mol,” and “tansei(e).”
52. Howard’s accounts survive from 1462 to 1469 and 1481 to 1483. They were originally edited in
two volumes published by the Roxburghe Club: the accounts of 1462–69 by Beriah Botfield in Manners and Household Expenses of England in the Thirteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (1841), and those of
1481–83 by John Payne Collier in Household Books of John, Duke of Norfolk and Thomas, Earl of Surrey,
1481–1490 (1844). These two sets of accounts have been reprinted, together with some additional
materials, in The Household Books of John Howard, Duke of Norfolk, 1462–1471, 1481–1483, introduction
by Anne Crawford (Stroud, Gloucestershire, and Wolfeboro Falls, N.H., 1992). See, e.g., 1:248, which
records that on 14 March 1464 Howard spent 3s. 4d. for dinner at the Bear tavern at the foot of London
Bridge in Southwark, and later the same day spent 12d. for supper at the King’s Head in Old Fish Street
in the City.
53. Metropolitan London Archive, P92/SAV/24, fol. 3r. These accounts survive in a broken series
from 1444 to 1540.
54. [John Nichols], ed., Illustrations of the Manners and Expences of Antient Times in England, in
the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centuries (London, 1797; reprint ed., New York and Millwood, N.J., 1973), 2. The surviving accounts, beginning in 1460, are in the Westminster Public Library
Archives Department; Rosser, Medieval Westminster, 409.
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keepers (who at this point began to be known as “tipplers” rather than tapsters) had
also begun to serve food as well as drink. Together, these establishments evidently succeeded in drawing customers from all classes, for in 1495 the Pastelers complained that
their company had fallen into poverty because of competition from the “vintners,
brewers, innholders, and tipplers.”55
In provincial towns, as we have seen, the cookshops were supplying meals to
middle-class travelers at inns by the early fifteenth century. In London, however, the
better-off cooks and pastelers specialized in catering the weddings, funerals, guild
feasts, and other entertainments of the middle classes, while the poorer ones continued to serve take-away food.56 Many of the latter continued to affront the respectable
public with their poor hygiene and unseemly behavior. In 1475, for example, when the
Cooks’ Company enacted new ordinances, they reiterated the long-standing regulation prohibiting the sale of reheated food, and also forbade cooks to pluck with their
dirty hands at the sleeves and other garments of passing gentlemen and common folk
alike, “whereby many debates and strives often tymes happen ayenst the peas.”57 The
cooks and pastelers suffered from unlicensed competitors who sold fast food illegally
and dodged company membership, and also from the dubious reputation of their
food.58 A wickedly funny satire of a commercial cook appears in John Heywood’s play
called The Foure P.P. (first printed ca. 1545), which features a Palmer, a Pardoner, a Potycary (Apothecary), and a Pedlar (these are the four Ps of the title). The Pardoner goes to
Hell to seek out a notorious cook, a woman named Margery Coorson, and finds her in
the master cook’s kitchen, busily turning a spit and, as usual, burning the meat on the
outside while leaving it raw on the inside:
For many a spyt here hath she turned
And many a good spyt hath she burned
And many a spyt full hoth hath tosted
Before the meat coulde be halfe rosted.
When the Pardoner takes Margery out of Hell and back to England, he says, all the devils there roared for joy at their delivery, and the chains in hell rang and all the souls
there sang.59 Such accounts help to make it clear why the saying “God sends meat, but
the devil sends cooks” had become proverbial in England by the 1540s.60
55. Sharpe, ed., Cal Letter-Book L, 310.
56. See, e.g., ibid., 310–13 (Pastelers’ ordinances, 1495). For a depiction of a London cook who
caters a wedding, see Thomas Ingelend’s interlude, “The Disobedient Child” (printed 1560), scene 2, in
Evelyn Smith, ed., Plays before Shakespeare (London, 1924; reprint ed., 1938), 76–81.
57. Sharpe, ed., Cal Letter-Book L, 129–30.
58. Ibid., 311. An entry in Letter Book O for 1531–32 reports that the cooks of London have made a list
of all persons who “occupye the feate of Cokery” in London but do not belong to the company and pay
no quarterage—the Aldermen are told to deal with this at their discretion; F. Taverner Phillips, A History of the Worshipful Company of Cooks, London (London, 1932), 47–48.
59. Rupert de la Bère, John Heywood, Entertainer (London, 1937), 219–20. I am grateful to Sheila
Lindenbaum for referring me to Heywood’s works.
60. John Simpson, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs (Oxford, 1982), 94.
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Some London cooks eked out their livings by illegally sending out cooked food
to be hawked in the streets and lanes,61 and some by charging a small fee to bake a customer’s pies or roast a customer’s meat. In John Heywood’s play Johan Johan, which
was printed in 1533, Johan Johan, a Londoner of modest means, asks his wife Tyb where
she has been. She says that she has been making a pie with her friends Sir Johan, the
priest, who paid for the ingredients, and Margery, her gossip, who paid for the baking.
Tyb invites the priest to join her husband and herself for supper, at which she serves the
pie along with ale and bread.62 In the 1530s, dining out was still prohibitively expensive
for many working-class London families. Thrifty housewives who lacked ovens at
home prepared the dishes themselves and then, as in earlier generations, had them
baked by a commercial cook or baker.
For those who did eat out, what sorts of meals did the early eating-houses of
London and its suburbs offer? Records of expense-account meals show that many,
perhaps especially in the earlier years of public dining, were simple affairs of bread,
meat, and drink. For example, the tavern dinner consumed in 1460–61 by the churchwardens of St. Margaret’s, Westminster, consisted of bread (5d.), mutton pies (3d.), and
wine (3s.); and in 1497–98 the wardens of the London church of St. Mary at Hill spent
8d. on bread, ale, and a rib of beef for some parishioners at the Castle in Fish Street.63
When the alehouses began to offer meals, they probably were of this sort. In 1543, for
example, the furnishings of one basement drinking house owned by a London widow
consisted of a trestle table, some benches, a chest, a bread bin, and a cauldron in which
to boil meat, in all worth only 23s. 8d.64
By the later fifteenth century, however, some inns and taverns were offering a
wider menu. In the autumn of 1480, for example, three officers of Canterbury made
two trips to London to negotiate a legal dispute between the City and St. Augustine’s
Abbey. Their expenses included numerous breakfasts, dinners, and suppers at which
they entertained the arbitrators and others. At one supper in Paternoster Row they
paid 13d. for bread, ale, beer, and spices [pulvere], 16d. for a capon, 4d. for a cony, and
2d. for pork, for a total of 2s. 11d. This supper must have been ordered from the house
menu rather than privately catered, because the charges for it did not include such
things as payment for fuel, hire of utensils or tableware, or the cook’s wages.65
School texts such as Latin and French language manuals provide valuable evidence about the eating habits in general of the middle and professional classes in the
61. Sharpe, ed., Cal Letter-Book L, 311 (Pastelers’ ordinances, 1495).
62. John Heywood, Johan Johan (printed 1533), in de la Bère, John Heywood, Entertainer, 233–67,
esp. 238–47.
63. Nichols, ed., Illustrations of the Manners and Expences of Antient Times, 2; Henry Littlehales,
ed., The Medieval Records of a London City Church (St. Mary at Hill), a.d. 1420–1559, EETS, o.s., no. 128
(London, 1905), 230.
64. Ida Darlington, ed., London Consistory Court Wills, 1492–1547, London Record Society, no. 3
(1967), no. 178 (p. 102: “In the Drynkyng Howse beneith”).
65. Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, 9th Report, Appendix, Part I (London, 1883,
reprint ed., Nendeln, Liechtenstein, 1979), 134. The name of the inn or alehouse in Paternoster Row
where they had this meal is not given, but it might have been the Pannier (apud signum Le Panyer), where
they hosted a breakfast on their subsequent visit to London (p. 135).
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Tudor period. One such book, written about 1499, includes a lively dialogue between a
hungry man and the wisecracking hostess of an inn or eating-house, who offers him a
mock menu of inedible items—sprats’ tails, herring heads, and salted eel skins.66 Another, written by William Horman, vice-provost of Eton, and first published in 1519,
also reflects the new fashion for dining at public eating houses rather than at home, offering such model sentences as: “He thynketh no meet dressed so well at home: as at
the open cokes”; “That that my coke can not do: the towne coke shall fulfill”; And, “Yf
thou wylt none of this meet go to the cokes.” Horman lists numerous foods and describes how they were seasoned and cooked, giving details not always provided by contemporary cookery books. His chapter on cooks (chap. 16), for example, contains such
phrases as: “Stue me this cocke in an erthen potte”; “Let us haue trypes”; “I loue no
meate dressed vnder a bake pan”; “Cast stekes vpon the grydyron”; “Some loue garlycke sauce, some vinager and peper with rost befe.” And in his chapter on dining
(chap. 17) we read: “Let us haue a salet”; “I wyll have none oyle in my salet”; “Let us haue
chekyns in pyke sauce”; “I loue syder for I was brought vp with it”; “I loue wyne with
suger or ony other ingredient”; “Put rosmary into the cuppe”; “I loue roste meet without sauce”; “I had leuer haue a fatte trype than a capon”; “I loue no redde [smoked] herynge or sprottes [sprats]”; “He hath eate all the braune of the lopster”; “Some loue to
eate snayles”; “Gyve me a suckynge lambe”; “I loue well ryse sodde [boiled] in almon
mylke”; “Serue me with potched [poached] egges”; “Ye shall eate parmeson chese”;
“Gete fruters [fritters] and pancakes”; “Brynge fygges and raysons”; “Brynge pome
garnates [pomegranates]”; “Here is a feyre cluster of grapes”; and, “This is a very fyne
and costly cakebrede.” Horman’s book reflects not only the traditional English emphasis on meat and poultry in the diet of the wealthy but also the newer fashions for salads,
fresh fruit, imported delicacies such as Parmesan cheese, and sweets.67
The Ordinary and Public Dining in London, ca. 1550–1600
Around the middle of the sixteenth century a new institution, the “ordinary,” appeared
in English towns. An ordinary was a prix fixe meal; the word soon also came to be used
for the establishment that offered it. The ordinary may have had its origins in price regulations that were intended to ensure affordable meals for the growing numbers of the
urban poor. In mid-sixteenth-century York, for example, innkeepers were required to
66. William Nelson, ed., A Fifteenth Century School Book from a Manuscript in the British Museum
(MS. Arundel 249) (Oxford, 1956), 78–79.
67. William Horman, Vulgaria (London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1530), chaps. 16 (De coquinarijs et
macellarijs) and 17 (De tricliniaribus), n.p. For contemporary English cookery books, see “A noble
boke off cookry ffor a prynce houssolde or eny other Estately Houssolde” (late fifteenth century),
which survives in two similar manuscript versions in Holkham Hall, MS. 674, and London, Society of
Antiquaries, MS. 287. A flawed edition of the former was published by Mrs. Alexander [Robina]
Napier (London, 1882). At Longleat House there is a unique copy of a printed version of this collection,
published ca. 1500 by Richard Pynson. The Hunterian Library at the University of Glasgow possesses a
copy of A propre new booke of Cokery (London: Richard Lant and Richarde Bankes, 1545; Sp. Coll.
Hunterian Cm.2.27). A unique copy of a later edition, A Proper Newe Booke of Cokerye (London: John
Kynge and Thomas Marche, ca. 1557–58 ) in the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge,
was edited by Catherine Frances Frere (Cambridge, 1913) and more recently by Anne Ahmed (Corpus
Christi College, Cambridge, 2002).
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offer soldiers, strangers, “poor suitors,” and servingmen a set meal, “ordinarily boyled
& rost beif or motton &c,” at a price not to exceed 4d. In 1562 this fourpenny “Ordynarie dynar or suppar” consisted of pottage (soup or stew), one boiled meat and one
roast, served with “sufficient” bread and ale or beer, and the innkeepers also were required to offer an eightpenny dinner or supper to gentlemen and “other honest personages that will have bettar fare.” 68
The better fare demanded by the middle and professional classes included a
large quantity of high-quality meat, and this English love of meat was remarked on by
foreign visitors. Alessandro Magno, the Venetian merchant who visited London in
1562, noted in his travel journal that the English were “great meat-eaters,” and he marveled at the “extraordinary” quantity and quality of the beef and mutton consumed in
London. “Truly,” he remarked, “for those who cannot see it for themselves, it is almost
impossible to believe that they could eat so much meat in one city alone.”69 Magno reported that at his London inn (the Ball, kept by an Italian called Master Claudio), he
and his companions had “a choice of two or three kinds of roast meat at a meal, or as an
alternative, meat pies, savouries, fruit tarts, cheese and other things—and excellent
wine. Whenever we wanted something else, we had only to say the word and it was
provided.” Magno observed that the English preferred roast beef to veal, that chickens
and other poultry were to be found “everywhere,” and that there was an abundance of
swans, game, rabbits, and deer. He himself did not like English beer, which he described as “healthy but sickening to taste. It is cloudy like horse’s urine and has husks
on the top.” As a Venetian accustomed to fresh sea fish, he also disliked eating the ubiquitous stockfish (dried cod), which was beaten to soften it and then generally boiled
and served with mustard. To Magno, it was “tough and flavourless.” He greatly enjoyed
the fresh fish and shellfish he was served, however, reporting that “amongst the best
[fish] are pike and very large flounders: these they cut up into fillets and cutlets which
they eat grilled. Best of all, though, is the salmon, which is similar to the Venetian sturgeon . . . They have and enjoy great quantities of oysters . . . They serve them roasted,
stewed, fried with butter and in every possible way; but for preference they eat them
raw before a meal with barley bread—and they are delicious”70 (see figure 2).
By the late 1580s the ordinary had become a standard feature of English towns.71
Thomas Dekker, in The Guls Horn-Booke (1609), devoted one chapter to describing
“How a yong Gallant should behave himselfe in an Ordinary.” According to Dekker, he
should arrive about half-past eleven and take snuff before joining a table of other diners to partake of such dishes as stewed mutton, goose, and woodcock, with fruit and
cheese for dessert. The fixed price for such a dinner was 12d.; wine was extra. For poor
68. Peter Brears, “The Food Guilds of York,” in Eileen White, ed., Feeding a City: York. The Provision of Food from Roman Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century (Totnes, Devon, 2000), 96.
69. Barron et al., eds., “London Journal of Alessandro Magno,” 143, 146.
70. Magno paid 10d. a day “for a meal, room, and a bed,” and 8d. “for the servants”; Barron et al.,
eds., “London Journal of Alessandro Magno,” 141, 143, 146–48.
71. The Oxford English Dictionary cites, as the earliest usage of “ordinary” in this sense, Robert
Payne’s A Briefe Description of Ireland: Made in This Year 1589 (1841): “A man may be as well and
cleanely tabled at an English house in Ireland . . . as at the best ordinarie in England.”
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public dining in medieval and tud or lond on
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figure 2. Osias Beert, Still Life with Oysters, Pastry, and Fruit (ca. 1610), oil on canvas, 48.5 × 69.0 cm.
Staatsgalerie Stuttgart.
men, there was a threepenny ordinary that Dekker considered too base to describe.72
We learn of a typical menu, however, from Middleton and Dekker’s play The Roaring
Girl (1611), in which a gentleman gives his servant three halfpence to eat at a London ordinary. The servant complains that this sum will only cover the cost of the mustard, oil,
and vinegar, reckoned at a halfpenny each, with nothing left for the pickled herring.73
Ordinaries were to be found in inns, and perhaps in cookshops and alehouses,
but not in taverns. In 1599, for example, the Swiss visitor Thomas Platter noted that the
taverns of London, unlike the inns, offered food on an à la carte basis only, and that
afterward, “one checks up the items and reckons the amount, for they will not serve
one for an inclusive charge, indeed it works out very dear for one person alone desirous
of making a good meal and drinking well.”74 At a tavern the menu was much more varied and elegant than at an ordinary. Dekker advises a gallant who dines at a tavern to
scan the bill of fare, and then begin with an array of salads, followed by such seasonal
72. Thomas Dekker, The Guls Horn-Booke (London, 1609), chap. 5; facsimile of the original edition
available online at http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/dekker2.html [seen 13 September 2006].
73. Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker, The Roaring Girl, ed. Andor Gomme, New Mermaids
edition (London and New York, 1976), act 2, scene 1, lines 105–15. For the date of this play, see P. A. Mulholland, “The Date of The Roaring Girl,” Review of English Studies, n.s., 28:109 (February 1977): 18–31.
74. Thomas Platter’s Travels, trans. Williams, 189.
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martha carlin
figure 3. Frans Francken II, Lazarus at the Rich Man’s Table (ca. 1605), oil on wooden panel,
74.5 × 106.5 cm. Collection Museum of Bread Culture.
dishes as capons, oysters, trout, green goose, and woodcock, with a dessert, if desired,
of raw or toasted cheese, the whole washed down with sugared wine75 (see figure 3).
Thus, in Elizabeth’s reign, the better eating-houses of London were offering a
varied and cosmopolitan cuisine, one that impressed even a sophisticated Venetian
traveler such as Alessandro Magno. And Shakespeare’s audiences, laughing at poor
hungry Kate in The Taming of the Shrew, would have been accustomed to a much
finer array of dining options than Grumio’s spurious menu of neat’s foot, tripe, or
beef with mustard.
university of wisconsin-milwaukee
75. Dekker, Guls Horn-Booke, chap. 7, “How a Gallant should behave himself in a Taverne.” Taverns
also demanded a cover charge for bread, beer, salt, napkins, and trenchers, and their staff were notorious for rounding up the bills and inflating them with extra items. See, e.g., Thomas Heywood, The Fair
Maid of the West, Parts I and II, ed. Robert K. Turner Jr. (Lincoln, Neb., 1967), Part I (ca. 1597–1604),
act 2, scene 1, lines 112–45; and Dekker, Guls Horn-Booke, chap. 7. In June 1585 the mayor of London
complained that the city’s cooks, “tabling-houses” (gaming-houses, or possibly eating-houses) and
taverns were selling stolen venison; [Great Britain, Public Record Office], Calendar of State Papers,
Domestic Series, Elizabeth, 1581–1590 (London, 1865; reprint ed., Nendeln, Liechtenstein, 1967), 245.
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public dining in medieval and tud or lond on
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abstract
By Shakespeare’s day, dining out was commonplace in London, but it was a comparatively recent development in English towns. In the London suburb of Westminster, the home of the royal palace, law
courts, and abbey, fast-food cookshops were beginning to serve restaurant-style meals to the general
public by the mid-1370s, but it was not until about 1460 that this practice spread to the cookshops, inns,
and taverns of the City itself. In the mid-sixteenth century there appeared a new form of public eatinghouse, the “ordinary,” which served set meals at a fixed price. In this article, Martha Carlin examines
how and why these developments occurred in the capital. Keywords: public cookshops in twelfthcentury London, public dining in fifteenth-century London, innkeeping in England around 1400,
meals for travelers in fifteenth-century England, the “ordinary” in fifteenth-century London
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