FOOD, GLORIOUS FOOD!

JOHN CARRINGTON was a public servant: one of the four High Constables of the Hundred of Cashio, Tax Assessor and Collector, Parish Surveyor of Highways and Overseer of the Poor. He was also a successful farmer. His Diary is a wonderful source of information on all aspects of those activities as well as market prices, the weather, family matters and, not least, the impact of the Napoleonic Wars on the local community. It is also a remarkable – and entertaining – record of what he ate.

No one reading it can be in any doubt that old John was a redoubtable trencherman who loved his food, nor that he was by no means a teetotaller. Scarcely a week goes by without mention of what he ate: when he goes to Hertford market, when he meets his fellow constables, when he visits his sister and her husband at the “Spread Eagle” in Ware, what he consumes at the houses of friends and even those from whom he collects taxes, never mind the special occasions. Neither is he at all reticent about the pubs he visits: he mentions nineteen in Hertford alone. Beating the parish bounds with the Rector and others he does not fail to mention where and when they “bevered”, nor on what.

We never hear about breakfasts, which were probably fairly basic: bread, cheese and perhaps cold cuts of meat, washed down with small beer – what we like to consider a “full English” one is almost certainly a Victorian invention. What we read about are dinners – mid-day meals – and “suppers”, which certainly weren’t little bed-time snacks but full, frequently heavy, evening meals, added to which there were the various and surprisingly frequent feasts, at which Carrington’s attendance was not only regular but often critical.

A word of caution is necessary here. What we read about is not the everyday diet of the village labourer; nor, although Carrington was by no means a poor man but a prosperous farmer, are they likely to represent the daily average of what he consumed at home which must have been distinctly less elaborate and less top-heavy with protein, otherwise he would not have been able to be as active as he was, thinking nothing of walking from Bacon’s Farm, Bramfield, to Hertford market and back, or to Ware and back, let alone unprotestingly walking ten miles at times. For we are talking of a man in his seventies who lived to the age of eighty-four, and remained remarkably fit and active until near the end. The market day dinners described were also less elaborate, though by no means spartan: “sassages”, as Carrington spells them, frequently figure, but sometimes accompanied by steaks – note the plural!

But the period never seemingly met for business without finishing with a substantial meal. This had a long pedigree: more than a century before, for example, every meeting of the Hertford Borough Months Court (roughly the equivalent of a modern Town Council) ended with adjournment to the currently favoured hostelry for a good meal, some of the bills for which survive to this day.

Additionally, the Statute or Hiring Fairs of the period invariably ended with a feast – just how one got invited is not clear, but as High Constable Carrington was obliged to attend those in his “patch”, and somehow always managed to get to others which weren’t. There were also “Rent feasts” given by local landowners to their tenants – a form of discount for prompt payment perhaps?

Tithe feasts, Wood feasts, and the annual dinners of local clubs and ‘ associations: one attended by Carrington was that provided by the Association for the Prosecution of Felons. Add to these all those family occasions, weddings and the like, and occasional but no doubt welcome surprises like the dinner provided by Moseley Gillman the Hertford brewer at the “Rose and Crown” at Tewin, where Carrington’s son Jack was landlord, whether to encourage trade or to compensate for the shortcomings of his beer, which seemingly did not always come up to expectations, is not clear.

All this meant a remarkable indulgence in vast amounts of protein and parallel consumption of alcohol. It is small wonder that gout was a common ailment of the period. Puddings frequently featured, and vegetables certainly more often than in earlier times – where they are not mentioned it is probably because they were regarded as too commonplace and obvious to be so. But it is obvious that the success or otherwise of a good meal was measured by the amount of good red meat on offer, and such was plainly Carrington’s opinion. Poultry, although acceptable, particularly in the plural, was not so highly regarded: when he attended Watton Statute Fair and dined afterwards at the “White Horse” with his opposite number the High Constable of Broadwater Hundred and a modest gathering of some seventy souls – seventy appetites, rather – there was “No meat of any sort, but fowls and geese and tongue and ham. A flummery dinner’, grumbles John.

In 1801 at Earl Cowper’s Rent Feast at Cole Green the meal comprised “Buttock of Beef, a Loin of Veal, Mutton, puddings, &c ….. plenty of good beer and punch… ” “Got drunk this time”, he confesses. It was not the first, nor the last time. At Codicote Statute in 1802, twenty dined at the “Goat” and for 2s 6d each (12½p) had “Ribs of Roast Beef, Fillet of Veal, Ham and Fowls, puddings and pies, &c.” – it sounds a good half-crown’s worth!

Friday, 4 May 1804 seems to have been quite a day! In the morning he went to the “Bull” at Ware to pay Thomas Hope Byde, the Receiver-General for East Herts, £90 in taxes collected, then dined at the “Spread Eagle” with five other assessors on roast leg of mutton, pies and puddings, and afterwards went to the “Great Dinner at John’s”, i.e., that given by Moseley Gillman the brewer at the “Rose and Crown” at Tewin. The menu included salmon, ham, veal at1d a quarter of lamb, plus the seemingly inevitable pies and puddings, etc. Curiously, seeing who was providing the fare, there was only wine to drink. “Given” is perhaps an inappropriate word, since the guests, including the Mayor of Hertford, one of the Aldermen, the Hertford gaoler and Earl Cowper’s Steward, each paid nine shillings for the privilege.

Just over a fortnight later Carrington went to the “Rose and Crown” again to a wedding dinner for some of the Hasler in-laws. There was fillet of veal, ham, lamb, puddings and pies and – you can almost hear him smacking his lips – “plenty of good currant wine”. “All free,” he chortles. But at the “White Horse” after Hertingfordbury Statute in September he once more complains that twenty-six of them sat down to fowls and ham, geese, those perpetual puddings and pies and plenty of wine – but no beef and no mutton! At the Association for the Prosecution of Felons dinner in November six shillings (30p) apiece brought them, inter alia, loin of roast beef, turkey and mock turtle – presumably the soup.

Staggering repletely on to 1808 – and remembering that this is a man over eighty – one February evening he went to his sister’s at the “Spread Eagle” in Ware to celebrate the end of his nephew’s apprenticeship to a London tailor. Eleven sat down to a little supper snack of roast leg of mutton, ham and fowls (always, be it noted, mentioned in the plural), and roast rabbits. No drink is mentioned, but it would not have been water. On Michaelmas Day that same year he went to dinner at his son’s at the “Rose and Crown”, “a dinner,” says John, “he gave to a few friends”. Ten sat down to two geese – Michaelmas was the traditional start date for eating that rich bird – six fowls, four partridges, ham, the inevitable puddings and pies, plenty of wine and punch, and fruit – grapes, nuts, fine pears and, unusually, melon. “And nothing to pay,” Carrington notes complacently.

Next day he was off to Whitwell Statute Fair, where twenty paid fifteen shillings each (“the dearest Statute ever”, grumbles John) for buttock of beef, fowls and ham, geese and ducks, pies, etc. And the man never complains of biliousness!

Something rather out of the ordinary, and rather splendid, was the Bramfield Jubilee Feast. This, to celebrate George Ill entering the fiftieth year of his reign on 25 October 1809 (surely a bit prematurely?) was given, at parish expense, to the parish poor and other poor men who worked in the parish, and all farm servants (which underlines what I said above about the diet of the village labourer). “Given three rounds, one arch bone, two mouses – not to be confused with “mice”!!!  – but apparently the piece of beef between topside and leg, a cheap cut – buttocks of beef, two shoulders, one leg and two necks of mutton, suet puddings and plum dumplings, twenty quartern loaves, one bushel of carrots, ditto of turnips, ditto of potatoes, and “plen1y of table beer with their dinner, and after dinner each man and woman one quart of strong beer and the children one pint each”. We are not told how many sat down to this repast, nor the age of the children thus imbibing, nor how much the fourteen stone of beef and mutton cost, but Mrs Deards at the “Grandison” was paid £7. 8s 2d (£7.41) for beer, bread, flour, salt and her trouble.

On Sunday 29th the eighty-three year old complained, I think for the first time, that he actually had no appetite! Mention of the beer served at the Jubilee feast, and perhaps· with visions of tipsy little boys and girls before our eyes, it is perhaps appropriate to mention that the bulk of beer drunk, like that table beer, would have been young and of low alcohol content, perhaps as low as 2% and certainly no higher than 3%, and that children would have been brought up on it – it was safer to drink than water, and tea, despite its increasing popularity, was still a luxury. Nevertheless, however weak the beer, if drunk in quantity it could be potent enough: unsurprisingly, at one point Carrington, after drinking ten pints, confessed to “going home fuddled”! And it is not surprising that he often went home tipsy, “crazy” – I like that one! – merry, and sometimes just plain drunk, sometimes falling off his horse – “oh, for shame!” It was not unusual for him to visit three pubs on his way home from market, inevitably drinking in each; similarly, on his tax-collecting rounds, while he might often come away empty-handed, he seldom came away thirsty. There is some evidence that his kidneys became diseased in later life: one wonders, too, about the state of his liver. But, for those with the where with all to indulge, this was an age of excess: drunkenness was famously an English complaint from which even the clergy were not immune – and Britain’s prime minister drank himself to death in 1806 aged only 37. Carrington did live to be eigh1y-four: what a constitution! What, I wonder, did he look like? What a pity we have no portrait!

The above article is a slightly edited version of the talk I gave at the Society’s Carrington evening at Bromfield in September. The source is, of course, “Memorandums For …..”, the diary of John Carrington, edited by the late W. Branch Johnson (1973). Despite its age, the best guide to the diet of our forefathers over the ages remains Drummond and Wilbraham’s “The Englishman’s Food”, originally published in 1939, revised edition 1991.