The quotation in the title is from Geoffrey Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale, describing a widow woman who lives a simple life, but it is also an indication of the perceived relationship between diet and medicine in late medieval England. This paper will attempt to look at fifteenth-century feasting from the viewpoint of people who had a definite awareness of a relationship between food and health, even though their understanding was not the same as today's.1 First, it will briefly consider the motivations which underlay a medieval feast. Then it will suggest that the cooks responsible for preparing the food had some definite ideas of what would constitute healthy dishes. Finally, the last part of this essay will examine three fifteenth-century coronation feasts in England, select several dishes served at each, use contemporary cookbooks to determine the likely ingredients in each dish, and then attempt to analyze the qualities of the finished dish with reference both to the humoral qualities and to the other medicinal qualities that a medieval cook would have understood to exist in the several ingredients. Medieval texts usually distinguished degrees in each humor, e.g. warm versus hot, or cold in the first degree versus cold in the third degree. This paper will tend to ignore such distinctions and will concentrate on the more general concepts of humoral theory, for the cooks who created and prepared the recipes would not be likely to have known the finer points of the theory.

The sources of information on the qualities and properties of medieval foodstuffs that will be used include the classical authors Hippocrates, Dioscorides, and Pliny, all of whom were known at least in part in the fifteenth century. The De animalibus of St Albertus Magnus dates to the thirteenth century and its author drew upon tradition as well as the scholar's own observations; a fair amount of his information can be presumed to have been disseminated over the next two centuries, if it was not already known. The use of Thomas Elyot's sixteenth-century The Castel of Helth as a source may be defended on similar grounds, for Elyot says plainly in his introduction that he derived much of his information

There seems to be no way to tell for certain just how widely known all this information was, but the cooks of the royal court would have known it if anyone other than the well educated did, simply due to their proximity to a group of nobles along with well-educated clergy, and their menus might be expected to reflect this fact. Many royal feasts were planned months in advance; an early example is the marriage in 1251 of Henry III's daughter Margaret to Alexander III of Scotland on December 26 in the city of York. Live beasts were already being purchased in July, to be kept and slaughtered immediately before the wedding feast. Spices and breadstuffs were ordered at least a month in advance.3 That stewards and cooks planned and purchased so far in advance indicates that incorporating ideals of humoral balance in the menus for feasts was not impossible. Coronation feasts, the sources of the menus in this paper, might be thought to have been rather more rushed in preparation, but the only such case among those used here is that of Richard III, who permitted only ten days to elapse between his enthronement and his coronation. Katherine's coronation feast was probably not unanticipated, since royal marriages were usually long planned. Henry VI's coronation feast was held some seven years after his succession as an infant to the throne, allowing more than enough time for his cooks to devise any sort of menu they wanted. Even at Richard III's feast, most of the dishes would have followed pre-established recipes rather than being wholly original creations.

As one would expect, these feasts celebrated significant events in the life of the host(ess), but there were other motivations which should be considered. A feast helped to establish the relative positions of both host and guests within the social hierarchy. The quantity, quality, and variety of foods served indicated the rank and status of the host, as well as his social class. For competition between men of the same class occurred both literally and symbolically through food; a generous lord could attract and support more retainers and thereby achieve greater social and political prominence.4 The very fact that all ate together at a feast served the political purpose of unity, but social distinctions were maintained both through the order of service and through the choice and quality of foods allotted to each diner.5 The ceremony inherent in a feast was "a visible demonstration of the ties of power, dependence, and mutual obligation which bound the host and guests."6

As another motivation, a feast provided the cooks employed by the lord with an opportunity to display their skill and worth to him. Rare ingredients, unusual techniques, and artful decorations all contributed to the splendor of the food served at a feast.7 The more skilled the cook, the better his remuneration might be, even though the cook himself generally occupied a position rather far down the social scale. He ranked low in part because of the messiness of the job, and in part because he supplied mere bodily needs rather than the spiritual needs which were generally acknowledged to be superior.8 However socially inferior cooks were considered to be, though, it was they who used their skills to dazzle their lords' guests with the magnificence of the food, by this means helping to support the system of social and political hierarchy just as they supported themselves economically.

In the most fundamental sense, feasts supplied the same needs as any meal; they helped to sustain life. But in medieval England as in the rest of Europe, simply eating any kind of available foods at a feast was not good enough. Not only was there a hierarchy of quality in foods, but different foodstuffs were known to

The medical community classified all materials as belonging to one of the four humors, which possessed different qualities as follows:

This scheme dated at least to Hippocrates. That ancient Greek physician also suggested that a careful diet would improve health; such a diet should "pay attention to age, season, habit, land, and physique, and counteract the prevailing heat and cold. For in this way will the best health be enjoyed."9 Galen followed in the footsteps of Hippocrates, saying of indigestion:

[W]ithout discovering the disposition of the stomach it is impossible to arrive at the appropriate remedies. If it is chilled, it should be warmed; if moistened, it should be dried; similarly if it has been immoderately heated, it should be chilled, and if dried out it should be moistened. Those are the four simple methods of curing; there are four other composite methods: if the gastric blend is colder and drier than it ought to be, then it should be heated and moistened; if it is wetter and hotter, it should be dried and chilled; and equally if it is hotter and drier, it should be chilled and moistened; and if wetter and colder, it should be dried and warmed. Thus there are eight dispositions which are responsible for the weakness (as they call it) of the stomach; and there are eight ways of curing it.10

The ideas of both Hippocrates and Galen were known to the late medieval medical community, which still largely accepted them. Treatment for a deficiency or excess of a given humor was fairly straightforward; the subject was to consume foods of the opposite qualities to the excess humor, or of the same qualities as the deficient humor. A number of manuals indicated the properties of specific plants, animals, and minerals, among them works by Dioscorides, Pliny, and Albertus Magnus. These works were often partially recopied as extracts contained within larger compendia and encyclopedias.11

Ideas about the dangers and benefits of various foods, as they were known to medieval medicine, were reasonably well known to the general public as well. The Boke of Nurture, written as a training manual for those who wanted to know how to manage a household by John Russell, usher and marshal in the household of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester in the fifteenth century, has a number of examples of this.12 In a discussion of fried meats, Russell says, "[O]ff Fryed metes be ware, for ey ar Fumose in dede."13 Of cheese and butter, he comments, "Furst he [hard cheese] wille a stomak kepe in the botom open, the helthe of euery creature ys in his condicioun; . . . buttir is an holsom mete / furst and eke last, For he wille as stomak kepe / & helpe poyson a-wey to cast, also he norishethe a man to be laske / and evy humerus to wast, and with whit bred / he wille kepe y mouthe in tast."14 Russell also suggests that particular sauces are appropriate to different meats; he does not explain why this is so, and one might think that flavor alone would be the reason, but Terence Scully has suggested otherwise in an article on "Tempering Medieval Food." He says, [T]he role of a sauce in the Middle Ages was to lend to the dish certain additional qualities inherent in the ingredients that composed that sauce. Essentially that is true; the problem is that today we tend to think in terms of a dish's flavor, or of its texture or perhaps color. For the late-medieval period we have rather to think primarily in terms of the properties of each of the dish's ingredients and, when combined, of the temperament or total complexion of the finished dish itself. Of prime importance among the qualities that constituted the nature of any substance were the humors that determined the temperament of that substance. The inherent qualities that each of the ingredients lent a culinary preparation, those that most fundamentally concerned the medieval cook, as well as the household physician and the most percipient members of the household who wished to be fully aware of the nature of what they were eating, were not those of flavor or texture but rather of "humor."15
Scully also points out that according to medieval humoral theory, the average person has a temperament that is somewhat warm and somewhat moist.16 The safest kinds of dishes for a feast should therefore be either balanced with respect to the humors or be also warm and moist, to avoid disturbing the humors of the diners. Reinforcing natural tendencies could do little harm, although achieving a kind of humoral neutrality was preferred.

Literary as well as medical evidence exists that demonstrates the concern of the common people in medieval England with food and feasting. In Chaucer's Tale of Sir Thopas the hero orders an entertainment to be prepared; this celebration begins with a allusion to feasting which indicates that food was important and perhaps even necessary in such circumstances:
They fette hym first the sweete wyn,
And mede eek in a mazelyn,
And roial spicerye
Of gyngebreed that was ful fyn,

An anonymous fifteenth-century text called the Liber de diversis medicinis further demonstrates a perceived link between food and health. This text is a collection of medical remedies, mostly compounded of various herbs and other edible substances. Two recipes in particular read almost as if they belong in a cookbook, but both were intended as cures for the flux, or dysentery. The first instructs the sufferer to roast a cock aged over twelve months until quite dry and to eat it with salt.21 The second recipe is for a cake made of toasted wheat flour, egg yolks, and mint juice.22 Neither recipe would sound out of place at the dinner table. Furthermore, a look at contemporary ideas of the properties of the ingredients shows that they were appropriate for the intended use of the remedy. The supposed difficulty of digesting the flesh of an old cock, together with the binding and cleansing properties of salt, would presumably act to slow or stop the flux.23 As for the other recipe, wheat was considered nourishing and not especially medicinal, but Dioscorides claimed that egg yolk "stops the belly" and Pliny recommended mint juice to check bowel disturbances.24 In each case a remedy that should have been an effective cure, by all the principles of medicine as then understood, almost appears to be a simple dish for the table.

Having explored a few of the links between cooking and medicine, we will now turn to several particular feasts and investigate the dishes that were served to see how they show signs that medieval medical theories were generally known

The dish of "Great Elis poudred" will be the first example analyzed with respect to the question of whether cooks were trying to balance the humors in the dishes they prepared. Albertus Magnus had declared that fish were in general moist and cool by nature, and that the eel was excessively humid.31 The standard sauce for eels contained parsley, onions, pepper, salt, vinegar, fish broth, and bread.32 The first three ingredients were all classified as hot and dry.33 Salt was ubiquitous in recipes and so its properties may have seemed almost irrelevant, but it was thought to have a binding and cleansing effect.34 Fish broth, of course, simply repeated the properties of the eel, and bread was nourishing and usually moist, although it had a drying effect.35 Vinegar was the only added ingredient (discounting the fish broth) that medical tracts considered cooling, but it was also a digestive.36 It would seem that this dish used mostly hot and drying ingredients in the sauce to counteract the coldness and moistness attributed to the eel, with the exception of vinegar, which was cooling but promoted digestion. Then, too, the question of taste undoubtedly played a part. For all that William Mead thought that medieval cooks' one aim was to thoroughly disguise the flavor of foods and "combine as much irreconcilable material in one dish as he could without making it impossible to swallow," one must doubt that they really intended such a thing.37 John Russell in his Boke of Nurture warns against "Cookes with eire newe conceytes," but he also recommends, for example, "sawce gamely " with several kinds of fowl; this sauce was composed of white bread soaked in wine and vinegar, then strained and spiced with cinnamon, ginger, sugar, cloves, and saffron.38 Evidently complex and highly spiced sauces were not only not undesirable, but positively relished.

To return to the dishes served at Queen Katherine's coronation, the blaundesore served at the beginning of the second course was one of the few dishes on the menu that was not based on fish. Blaundesore was a thick pottage of ground almonds in meat or fish broth, sweetened with sugar and decorated with candied red anise.39 In this dish the idea of balancing the humors does not seem to be carried out, for almonds were hot and moist, sugar was temperate,

Turbot, served in the third course at Katherine's coronation,42 was unusual among fish in that physicians thought its meat was dry, as well as light of digestion.43 Albertus Magnus represented its meat as sweet and tender and it was normally sauced with verjuice alone.44 Verjuice, usually made from unripe grapes or crab apples, would probably have been considered cool and moist like the sour grapes or sour apples of which it was made and the vinegar which it resembled.45 In this case the verjuice would reinforce the coolness of the turbot, but its moist quality would have mitigated the dryness of the fish. Balance in the humors was at least partially obtained in this dish, and the cook could have expected that even a diner with a delicate stomach would be able to digest it easily.

Katherine and Henry V's son, Henry VI, was crowned at the age of eight on St Leonard's day, November 6, 1429, also at Westminster.46 The dishes served to the young king do not appear to be notably tailored to a child's taste, but Hippocrates believed childhood to be a time of warm and moist humors, and youth to be warm and dry, and as we shall see, the dishes from Henry's feast which are here analyzed show a definite tendency towards warmth.47 This may, of course, be a coincidence, but I feel that it indicates an awareness that foods which were naturally warm in nature were the most suitable for the warmth of the young king's temperament.

Unlike the feast at his mother's coronation, Henry's feast was not held on a fast day. Some fish appeared on the menu, but most of the dishes included either meat or fowl.48 A "furmentie, with venyson" began the first course. Furmenty was a popular soup made of hulled wheat simmered in milk, thickened with raw egg yolk and spiced with saffron, sugar, and salt; pieces of meat, fish, or fowl were often added.49 Venison was thought to be cold and dry, producing melancholy, but milk was supposed to be good for the melancholic.50 No physician seems to have ascribed specific humoral qualities to eggs; possibly it depended on the type of bird from which they came. When poached they were supposed to be most wholesome, and most cooks would probably recognize that raw eggs beaten into warm broth loosely resemble poached eggs in cooking method.51 Hippocrates considered wheat with the bran removed to be especially nourishing and somewhat moist; other texts named sugar as also nourishing and temperate, and saffron as an anti-intoxicant and diuretic which was warm, dry, and good for the stomach.52 Here again the humoral qualities of the ingredients tended to balance out, producing a dish that would have been inoffensive to the humors of any who partook of it. The anti-intoxicant quality of saffron would have been highly appropriate to the dish which began the feast, too.

The "chikyns endored" in the second course were an appropriate food to serve to the king, since endored meant painted golden; his cooks accomplished

Another of the fancifully decorated foods set before the young Henry VI appeared near the end of the third course: "A colde bakemete like a shelde quarterly redde and white, set with losengs and gilt, and flours of borage."56 It can probably be identified with the "bake mete ryalle" of a fifteenth-century cookbook, a pie made of cooked ground chicken and pork, seasoned with cloves, mace, cubebs, chopped marrow, and sugar.57 Concerning pork, Thomas Elyot in the sixteenth century wrote, "Aboue all kyndes of fleshe in nouryshynge the body, Galene most commendeth porke," although Albertus Magnus described its meat as cold and greasy.58 The warmth of the chicken would balance the pork, however, aided by the spices, for cloves and mace were both hot and dry.59 Marrow was phlegmatic, both cold and dry, and nourishing although somewhat hard on the stomach.60 Cubebs acted as a confortative for the hot heart, and since a confortative comforted the affected part and mitigated the effects of other substances, cubebs may be presumed to have been considered to be warm and dry like the other spices.61 Once again the recipe's ingredients approached a balance of the humors, although perhaps somewhat lacking in the quality of moistness. The trimming on the top of the pie would have remedied this lack to an extent. The cooks probably achieved the decorative red and white quarterings by using saunders (sandalwood) for the former and white sugar for the latter.62 Sugar was temperate, while sandalwood was supposed to be good for the melancholic, and so presumably warm and moist.63 The menu gives no indication as to why someone chose to color the pie red and white particularly; perhaps the child-king liked these colors. They were not the colors of the royal arms, which were Gules three Lions passant guardant Or, quartered with Azure three Fleurs de lis Or.64 The borage flowers that finished the dish were, like the sandalwood, hot, moist, and good for the heart and stomach.65 Such a dish should indeed have strengthened the belly of the young King Henry.

Some fifty-six years later, at the coronation of Richard III, the feast again began with furmenty with venison, an indication of the popularity of that dish.66 However, the menu as a whole was of course not identical. Roasted crane was another of the first-course dishes served to Richard III.67 The cook would have prepared a typical sauce for the crane, composed of pepper, ginger, mustard, vinegar, and salt; the carver would then have minced the bird at the table and poured the sauce over it.68 The sources are not clear as to what humor or qualities the crane specifically was supposed to possess, but it was presumably warm, like most birds,69 and would probably have been considered moist since it spends much of its time near the water.70 Unlike fowls in general, though, the crane was considered hard to digest, but according to Elyot, "beinge hanged vp longe in the ayre, he is the lasse vnholsome."71 As for its sauce, pepper, ginger, and mus-

Another bird that either Richard III himself or his court had a chance to eat at this feast was pigeon.73 This also appeared minced in a sauce, but a rather different one composed of parsley, onion, garlic, salt, and vinegar.74 Unlike crane, pigeon was easily digested and good for the phlegmatic and melancholy;75 therefore it had the quality of heat and was probably neither dry nor moist particularly. Parsley was good for the stomach, helped prevent flatulence, and sweetened breath; its qualities were warmth and dryness.76 Onion was also hot and dry; it caused flatulence and was difficult to digest but nevertheless promoted good health.77 Garlic had properties essentially the same as onion and was also an aphrodisiac.78 Vinegar, once again present, was a cool, moist digestive; salt was cleansing.79 Once more a dish of fowl ended up with an overbalance towards heat, but the diner would have considered this a healthy dish otherwise, since the anti-flatulent property of parsley and the digestive qualities of both parsley and vinegar would have countered those less desirable qualities of the onion and garlic, difficulty of digestion and promotion of flatulence. It is interesting to note that all the preparations of fowl examined so far have been essentially warming; this quality seems to have been either unimportant or actually desirable to medieval cooks since they made no apparent effort to counteract it with the other ingredients in the dishes.

The last dish on the menu for the coronation feast of Richard III, excluding an unnamed subtlety, was "Quynces bake."80 A recipe for this dish directed the cook to core the quinces, fill the spaces with ginger and sugar, and then bake the whole in a pastry coffin.81 Elyot considered quinces cold and dry.82 Pliny and Hippocrates disagreed about the other properties of quinces; Pliny thought that they acted as a laxative, at least when raw, but Hippocrates considered them astringent and said that they "do not pass easily by stool."83 Ginger was hot and dry, aiding digestion.84 Sugar was temperate, also good for the stomach, and preferable to honey for the choleric;85 hence it probably cooled and moistened the stomach to a certain extent. Overall dryness predominated in this dish, although it was fairly well balanced in respect of temperature. Whatever the presumed consequences of eating a plain raw quince, the medieval cook would have known that baking it with ginger and sugar would certainly increase its digestibility and make it sufficiently elaborate to grace a royal feast as well.

The only drink specified in any of the three coronation menus was "mamory riall" in the first course at Richard III's coronation.86 This drink was undoubtedly the same as in the recipe for a "maumenye ryalle" composed of vernage (a strong Tuscan wine),87 cinnamon, pine nuts, sugar, saunders, cloves, almonds, ale, chopped partridge or capon, ginger, salt, and saffron; the whole simmered together, then strained and served hot.88 Different wines were considered to

A common festival drink not named in any of these menus was hippocras; it was popular enough that John Russell gave a long and careful explanation of its method of preparation in his Boke of Nurture. The cook had to simmer and strain hippocras at least three times; the beverage's ingredients included ginger, cinnamon, grains of paradise, sugar, turnsole, long pepper, and a strong red wine such as vernage.95 This wine, as previously noted, was warm and moist.96 Ginger, cinnamon, and long pepper were all hot and dry, and the first two assisted the digestion and the kidneys respectively.97 Sugar was temperate and also good for the stomach.98 Grains of paradise, known today as cardamom, were warm;99 turnsole, or heliotrope, does not appear to have been associated with any particular humor, but cooks used it to dye foods purple and Pliny recommended it as a gentle laxative.100 This drink, too, was most definitely warming in nature, but probably was only slightly dry, since the larger quantity of the moist wine should have balanced the dryness of the several spices.

Overall the various recipes have a definite tendency to exhibit either balanced humors, medicinal characteristics appropriate to the heavy eating of a feast, or both. I believe that this marked propensity is too distinct to be sheer chance, and that the medieval cook must have had some awareness of what physicians and natural philosophers considered to be the properties and humoral qualities of foodstuffs to have been able to create dishes with such balance. This theory is supported by the close links which can be seen between medical remedies and festival recipes, by the evidence in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales of such an awareness, and by books on household management such as John Russell's Boke of Nurture. The latter two also show that non-physicians had some idea of the medical properties of various foods. The modern concepts of vitamins, minerals, fiber, and so forth did not exist, but the need to balance the humors of the foods ensured that cooks would include many different ingredients in their dishes and would unwittingly help to provide what today would be considered a balanced meal. The importance of food and feast as symbols could not to be denied, but