I like to think of Anglo Saxon cuisine...

[bunn]

Just been watching Time Team. They were looking for a hunting lodge in South Wales, built by Harold in 1065. They didn't find it - they rarely find anything pre-Conquest - but there was much bemoaning of the lack of any pottery between the Roman and Norman periods. But it made me think of my favorite Anglo Saxon Cooking Ideas.



There has been some reporting over the past few years of there being little evidence in the genetic record of the current population* for massive population change as a result of the Anglo-Saxon invasions, and speculation that the change may have been more of a 'top of society' one backed up by cultural/ fashion changes that make people who were Romano British look Anglo Saxon. Anyway...

I like to think that the sudden absence of pots after about 500 AD is not because people had forgotten how to make them, so much as a change in cooking habits.

Let's face it, ceramics are a bit of a pain as storage. One bump and the damn things break (as I was reminded this morning when Kjetil chucked one of my flowerpots down the steps). And if you were using them for cooking, that would happen a *lot*. It did. That's why there is so incredibly much Roman pottery all over the place.

So, maybe people decided that actually, casseroles and stews and slow pot-cooked things are not that great, and became enthusiasts of fast-cooked food.

I like to think of the people of Dark Age Britain as enthusiastic spit-roasters and barbecuers. People who were excellent wood carvers would use nicely turned wooden bowls and platters that don't fall to bits the first time you drop the damn things. I bet they used a lot of woven baskets and intricately made platters as well - just look at the remaining metalwork, you can see these are people who really like to weave and wind things!

They would use wooden spits, perhaps kebab-style, or maybe there would be a treasured metal spit that was rolled out for cooking whole animals, in the manner of a village lamb-roast (am not sure if AS metalworking would be able to make something unbendy/unsnappy enough to do that or not... Maybe the thing to do would be a wooden spit with a sort of metal cuff on each end to protect it from the fire. ) Or maybe they would have useful iron grills, which when they finally died would be recycled into other objects...

I bet they were a lot warmer in their snug wooden houses than chilly people in stone buildings. Have you lived in a stone building? Brrrrrr! You have to build them insanely thick to keep the warmth in and even then the floors are chilly. Whereas the upstairs of our house is single-skin wood and it's *warm*.

In fact, generally, I like to think of the Dark Ages as a period of clever use of wood technology, now sadly lost to us as the Normans burnt a lot of it and the rest has rotted away. I have no idea if this is true, but I'm pretty sure nobody can disprove it!

* I don't quite understand how they can tell what genes are from Chepstow and which ones are from Saxony, given that people have presumably been moving about between the 2 and having sex like bunnies ever since, but I assume there is some way or someone would have pointed it out by now. Probably.

Comments

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

If you really, really want to know how they work out these genetic things, try The Origins of the British - but, be warned, it may be convincing, but it is very, very, very dry.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I've read a few things along the same lines (I don't think I've read that one) but that particular bit always seems to leech out between my ears after a while. I remember the conclusions, but forget the methodology.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

... In particular, I wonder how they compensate for chance events like, I dunno, maybe the A-S happened to have a gene that made them particularly vulnerable to the particular strain of Black Death that hit Britain or something like that. Something like that, surely you couldn't know?

Because of my innate distrust of numbers, I find the science of genetic history naturally an object of suspicion. It seems like one of those tempting theories where you start with a 'possibly' and then have to convert it to a fact in order to make it carry all the stuff you've piled on top.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

The main point is that you don't have anything to do with the entire genome - you follow the spread of specific and selected genes or gene clusters, quite often in mitochondrial DNA or on the Y chromosome, which lets you trace the lines without any breakages, and you work on percentages within a population, compared with other localised populations. Even if not mitochondrial, it may be junk DNA - what it does isn't important - and you can trace the spread in relation to, say, ice free coasts 25,000 years ago.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

It's the 'percentages within a population compared with other localised populations' bit I distrust. It seems to me to suggest the widespread tendency to consider people from the distant past as a uniform block, rather than individuals who sometimes do weird and unlikely stuff for no obvious reason.

(This suspicion is why the whole Asimov Psychohistory plot element broke my disbelief in the Foundation series).

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

Except that working with mitochonrial DNA means that it is all about individuals. It's saying that this gene is in, say 20% of the population because one particular woman or a small group of closely related women moved from A to B, and then on from B to C so many generations ago.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

That's no good for people who have no living descendents though, surely? Although you can assume that death rates would affect all families fairly equally, wouldn't an undocumented die-off in a particular group at an early time muck up the figures?

[(Anonymous)]

Of course not, but when we talk about population origins we are talking about surviving populations and nothing else. There may have been other sources of the population in the past, but little or no genetic trace remains of them in the current population.

To make up an example, because I don't know if the work has been done, but, as a thought experiment: if there are no gene traces of the Vikings in the Native America population of the East Coast, then whether or not the Vikings who came to Vinland had and left children there, they did not contribute to the current gene pool.

So, if there is both Y-chromosome and mitochrondrial DNA in the so-called Celtic fringes of Britain and Ireland that has a great deal in common with a large percentage of people up the European coast from Spain to Brittany, and very little in common with the equivalent gene groups in Southern Germany and central Europe, then we can be pretty sure that, when Britain was re-populated at the end of the last major glaciation, a large majority of those people whose descendents survive today came from the same place as people in those other coastal regions, and not from what has been considered the Celtic heartland.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

Sorry - large scale cookie failure at work. That was me.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Yes, I agree it makes sense when it comes to people who are still around today.

But to draw conclusions about what happened between 400 - 550AD (ish) which is what I was (sort of) doing from this evidence, then am I not drawing the potentially false conclusion that because the people who are here today are 80% primeval West European, the people who were in Britain in 475AD were also of the same composition?

So:
1 - most people today have more genetically in common with W Europe than Germany.

2 - If the population had the same composition in 475, that would be evidence that instead of replacement of actual people, the same people took up a new language and got a taste for barbecues.

3 - If the population composition has changed significantly since 550AD in a way that we cannot trace because a significant part of the population left no descendants for some reason, then statement 1 is still correct, but the if in statement 2 is unproven, so the second part is incorrect.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

Not getting into any more detail, because:

1. I can't remember it because I read it over Christmas
and
2. There's 600 odd bloody pages of it.

However, no claims are being made about the population in 475 AD - in the book I've been reading, at any rate. The claim is made that the distributions of genes show distinct patterns, with the percentages of occurance decreasing or increasing in ways that follow sea routes and landbridges at the end of the last glacial (25,000 years ago).

Interestingly, the idea that the Irish came originally from Spain is present in Irish tradition as well as in genetic drift.

Therefore, the claim is that, despite historical invasions, most of the people living here now (or at least before recent immigration) have a majority of ancestors who were living in this part of the world long before historical times, and that the various invasions (be they Gaulish, Roman, Angle/Saxon/Jute, Viking or Norman) had very little effect on the genetic base of the population. Which means they didn't leave many descendants - for whatever reasons. What is contriversial about this claim is that it means that the idea that there was a Celtic invasion from Central Europe before the Roman one is probably incorrect, and that the people living in England were never Celtic and were not displaced by the invasions of the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Vikings. It buggers up the Celts driven into the West myth. Tough.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

No, I meant that it was me making claims about the population change during the Dark Ages/ Early Middle Ages in my original post! I was doublethinking myself.

Francis Pryor has written some stuff about that period in particular which uses archaeological evidence with backup from the genetic research to make claims of that kind. It's well written entertaining and well argued stuff, but I'm not sure if I believe it.

(It is all very interesting, but head going round it all is hard. )

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

This business about cultural/technological diffusion versus actual movement of people is a fascinating one, and the new genetic studies are a real contribution to the debate. If only we could get all the people involved to agree... and if I could get my head round all those diagrams.

Edited for typo - though perhaps getting my dead around those diagrams would be more interesting.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

My understanding of the current thinking (current enough to still be a little controversial) is exactly what you say - most of the current British population is descended mostly from people who were here around the end of the last ice age.

I've also read a book (forget title) along these lines that makes the more controversial suggestion that while Old English / Anglo-Saxon was the language of an immigrant ruling class, and Welsh / Gaelic etc was the language of another immigrant ruling class in different parts of the country, English was there all along (in a form closish to Middle English) as the language of the common folk who had been around since the Ice Age. It backs this up with all sorts of linguistic analysis that seems to make sense but would be frowned upon by philologists.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

There is some backup for that in that there are fewer Celtic place names in England than you might expect. Place names tend to stick, no matter what language is being spoken around them.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

Yes, that was one of the arguments used as supporting evidence.

[chainmailmaiden]

I agree with you about the pottery, unbreakable stuff like wood is so much more practical. Woven baskets are still used in cooking by several tribes around the world. I remember seeing them on a Ray Mears program, he bemoaned the fact that they didn't leave any traces for archaeologists, as he's sure they would have been widely used everywhere at one time. Green wood works quite well as a spit and doesn't burn that quickly, especially if it's soaked in water first. Depending on the wood used, it can help to flavour the meat too.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Really, for cooking? How does that work, do they surround the basket with hot stones or something, or suspend it just high enough?

You'd think that basketware would burn though too easily, though very useful as dishes and general storage.

[chainmailmaiden]

Something like that, they can be used for cooking things like bread on hot stones. If the stuff's contained in the basket it doesn't spill or spread. They can also be used for holding things that are being smoked over a fire. Again if the materials used are fresh and soaked in water it's surprising how long they take to burn.

As you say you can use them for dishes & general storage, but also for straining things or 'boil in the bag' foods - but then you do need some sort of cooking pot too.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I spose there is no reason to assume no cooking pots, just not ceramic ones. You'd expect to see fewer remains of metal cooking pots, as they rust, and anyway, a damaged one could be melted down and re-made.

I just liked the idea of them all eating Kebabs. ;-)

[chainmailmaiden]

Yes, I'd presume that metal cooking pots would have been melted down when they wore out, I doubt people would have been as wasteful with things as they are now.

I'm sure kebabs were popular, they're easy to cook and you can even make pitta-style bread very easily on hot stones. They're unlikely to have had the chili sauce to go with them though :-D

[segh.livejournal.com]

Speculating on Anglo-Saxon cookery is fair game because nobody else seems to bother. I have several books on the history of cooking in England and only one (the British Museum cook book) covers the period between the Romans and the 14th Century (the Forme of Curye, the first cook-book in English). The BM book definitely endorses your kebabs and adds iron cauldrons and clay pots covering hot stones for baking.