A banquet shown in an 11th-century manuscript. Meat may not have been on the Anglo-Saxon menu as regularly as we’ve traditionally imagined
BRIDGEMAN
The popular image of an Anglo-Saxon hall set for a great feast, its tables laden with meat and mead, is an evocative one. But a new study suggests that rulers in the period may instead have eaten a mainly vegetarian diet.
Experts from the University of Cambridge analysed the bones of more than 2,000 people buried in England between the fifth and eleventh centuries to discover chemical clues about what they had eaten during their lifetimes. They then researched the social status of those individuals, looking to factors such as the location of their burials and the objects included in their graves. The results indicated that the elite didn’t eat more meat on a daily basis than other social groups.
The results are surprising because accounts from the period refer to highranking individuals consuming a large amount of meat. Yet the authors of the study suggest that such accounts may describe provisions for occasional royal feasts, rather than the kinds of meals served on a regular basis – which, for all members of society, would have primarily been based on cereal crops rather than meat.