In this episode, we look at how our Tudor friends would have been prepping for winter right about now. For example, salting meat. Harvesting the barley. Picking herbs that will help with colds through the winter months. And lots of feasting!
Remember to grab your Tudorcon tickets at englandcast.com/Tudorcon
Transcript of Episode 182: How the Tudors Got Ready for Winter
Hello and welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast, a part of the Agora Podcast Network. I’m your host, Heather Teysko, and I’m a storyteller who makes history accessible because I believe it’s a pathway to understanding who we are, our place in the universe, and being more deeply in touch with our own humanity. This episode is all about how normal farmers and people would get ready for winter. Because it’s that time of year when we’re doing things like putting in weather stripping, and it made me think about what our Tudor friends would have been doing at this time of year, prepping for winter.
Before we get started, though, Tudorcon. Unbelievably, we’re like 9 months from Tudorcon, and I wanted to give you a quick update on speakers. We have five speakers confirmed including Seamus O’Calleigh, who has been on this show before talking about Henry VIII’s medical ailments. Also Janet Wertman will be coming back, as well as Carol Ann Lloyd – both of whom have popular podcasts, books, and even a Ted Talk. So it’s going to be amazing, and I hope you’re there. Plus, this week for Black Friday Cyber Monday you can get your ticket for $100 off. That’s right friends, enter the code TUDORCON when you check out for $100 off.
So now, let’s say you were a yeoman farmer in England, around 1510. What would you be doing this November? Well, autumn is, of course, the month where you have the most to eat, having just butchered your animals and brought in your crops. The work, though, was in prepping everything for the winter. Sometimes it seems like life was a constant cycle that was dominated by winter. Either you were planting and prepping for winter, or you were worrying about how you would get through winter, or you were actually in winter, either eating enough, or starving. So many of the rituals we have today stem from winter. There’s a reason why Lent is when it is. The early Christians knew that if you were going to ask people to give up meat, the best time to have them do it was when they were out of meat anyway. And if you’re hungry, having a context to put that hunger into makes it much more bearable. You aren’t just hungry because you’re out of food. You’re hungry because you’re getting closer to God.
Anyway, the world was dominated by winter.
Small farmers would slaughter their animals before winter, since they likely wouldn’t have enough food to keep them over the winter months. The traditional time to slaughter was on November 11 at the feast of Martinmas. St. Martin was a Roman soldier and lived from 316-397. He decided to convert to Christianity and was imprisoned because he refused to fight. He became a monk, founded a monastery and became a bishop. At one point he tried to avoid becoming the bishop by hiding in a goose pen in the monastery, but the geese barked, and he was discovered by people who carried him to the throne of the cathedral.
And so began a tradition to eat geese at Martinmas in order to help him punish the geese.
The 11 of November starts the Christmas cycle as it falls just about 40 days before Christmas. In England this was a time of plenty, with people eating lots of freshly roasted meats, and using all the animal parts, for example, making blood puddings.
As much of the meat as possible would be preserved for the coming winter, though. If you were a wealthy landowner, you would be able to afford to keep your animals fed and housed throughout the winter months, so you would have fresh meat longer. But poor people wouldn’t have the luxury of feeding their livestock when they were already struggling to feed themselves, and so animals would be slaughtered, and the meat salted.
One of the major rules around food at this period was poaching. This was when poorer people would hunt meat that didn’t belong to them – either from royal hunting grounds, or from the land of wealthy nobility. We might think it would be easy to get away with poaching – after all, how could you tell one deer from another. But in towns where everyone knew everyone else, showing up with a fresh deer that you needed skinned would draw attention. Even if you were able to sneak it in at night, throughout the winter as you had meat and others didn’t, you could be suspected of poaching. And the penalty for poaching ranged from having your hand cut off, to death by hanging. So this was something that only the very desperate would engage in.
The first thing you have to do with your animals is get them from their summer grazing yards – the common lands – herded back to their farmstead. In the 1530s, as the monasteries land was sold, flocks were broken up and large common fields were enclosed, which would lead to rebellions like Kett’s Rebellion and others. It would be hard to underestimate how much land enclosure changed England in the mid 16th century. But for now, in the early 16th century, there is still plenty of common land, and you’ve got to go out and get your animals back to your farm. This isn’t necessarily an easy task. You know the saying about herding cats? It could also apply to cows. It took several people and even dogs helping to funnel the animals back.
Once your animals were back, you needed to butcher them. Skins would be used for leather goods like shoes, blankets, or some kinds of outer clothing. But a huge job was salting the meat.
The work of making salt was done by a person known as the Waller, but there were only a few towns in England that had the ability to make salt. Most people had to buy it.
Salt has long been valuable – entire cities were built where there were salt mines (Salzburg). One tidbit about salt’s history that I love is that
The Romans valued salt so much that we still use words today that they first created to show how important salt was. For example, Roman soldiers were often paid in salt, which is where the term Salary comes from. Also, they enjoyed putting salt on fresh vegetables to give it flavor – hence the word salad.
When the Romans first arrived in southern England they discovered Britons making salt by pouring brine on charcoal and then scraping off the crystals that would form, and this is the traditional way that people would make salt even into the 16th century.
North Wales had silver mines, and the Romans would mine for silver, leaving lead left over, which was used to make large pans for boiling brine to make their pan-evaporated salt.
The Anglo Saxons built on this history, and built towns around the salt works in the area. If you live in a town in England that ends in “wich” like Norwich, Droitwich, or Middlewich, congratulations – you live in a salt producing town generally associated with a brine spring. The Anglo Saxon word for those mine springs was wich, so those names are a holdover from that history. In fact, Middlewich, Norwich, and Droitwich are known as the Three Domesday Wiches because of their inclusion in the Domesday Book. The salt was taken from the Midlands on the river Mersey to the Irish Sea, where in 1207 King John gave permission for a town to be built at the end of the river, in a deep protected harbor, which is now Liverpool. The port of Liverpool became incredibly important for taking salt out of the midlands and shipping it to the rest of England, and even to Ireland.
If you wanted to make salt yourself, you needed the brine. Natural brines can occur underground as I said, or you could even use seawater. The waller woman would have had a furnace with a flat pan over top. The pan was lead, and it was very flat so that the salt could gather as the brine evaporated. Women wallers worked in walling yards, a place to make salt. As the brine evaporates, it leaves a skim surface of salt on the edge that you can scrape off.
You would want to clean the salt – of course leaves would fall into the large pan, so you’d use some type of a broom to get that out. And for the little bits floating around you would drop some type of protein into the mixture, and the bits would bind with that. So perhaps some animal blood, or eggs. Dirtier salt would be used for every day, and the cleanest salt was used for cheese. The salt would be packed into a wicker basket to take home – it would give it a nice shape, and also allow for water to drip off, and for the salt to dry, on the way home.
The housewife would have the job of salting the meat. She would cut portions, and then coat every surface of the meat with salt. You want to dehydrate the meat – the juices are what let the infections come in.
Then you store it in brine – a mixture of water, that has been boiled with salt and herbs. This also allows the salt to go further into the tissues of the meat. You leave it in the brine for 3 days. Then the meat can be packed into a barrel of salt for the final part of the preserving. During the winter you could take out pieces of meat and rinse it off to cook with it.
The other job a housewife would do is go out to the household herb garden and harvest anything she might need for the winter months. One such plant would be the hyssop. Even today, people drink hyssop tea – a member of the mint family that looks like a smaller bit of lavender.
Tea made from hyssop has been used to help treat coughs, earaches, asthma, and bloating. Today, studies are beginning to back up some of these age-old folk remedies, showing that hyssop offers some impressive health benefits. For example, hyssop is rich in flavonoids, flavorful compounds that can act as antioxidants. Eating foods rich in flavonoids may help reduce your risk of age-related conditions like cataracts, heart disease, and strokes. Herbalists also credit hyssop with reducing the risk of ulcers, asthma, and they say it can help reduce inflammation.
This is also the time when you’re trying to preserve your fruits and vegetables, which would be stored in a syrup to last through the winter.
Next up, you’re going to have to store your crop, like your wheat or barley. One way to do this is to cut the branches from a gorse bush, which were very prickly. You would put it on the floor of the barn and it would keep out mice and rats, while also letting some air in and keeping the crop from rotting. The gorse was super prickly, and you’d spread it around with long forks. The barley needed to be protected, as it was used throughout the year to make bread and ale.
Once the barn was prepped for the barley, you’d pile it all onto the cart. Everyone from the local area would come and help bring in the harvest, and after all the carts were filled, you would choose a Harvest Queen, a local young lady who would ride on the back of the final cart back to the farmhouse and barn. There was lots of celebrating for a good harvest, as that meant that people wouldn’t go hungry throughout the winter. One way they would celebrate was with games – after the final cart pulled up to the barn, the ladies would wait, forming a wall while holding jugs of water, and the men would try to break through holding a piece of the barley, and try to get it into the barn without getting it wet. So the men would get all wet and there would be much rejoicing (of course, I had to put in a Monty Python reference because that’s what I do).
At the end of september you would have celebrated Michaelmas – the feast of St Michael, the angel who protects the Christian church, and the traditional end of the farming year. This was the time of year when you could release your geese into the empty fields, and let them eat up all the crops that you weren’t able to get as you were harvesting, to fatten them up. Then throughout the end of September and October you could eat your goose, all fattened up.
So there we go – all your winter prep work. I’m glad that right now I’m just dealing with the leftovers from Thanksgiving, and figuring out how to cover up my outdoor AC unit, and not how to store a bumper crop of barley. Though that would be a much better problem than a weak crop of barley!
Anyway – hop on the website for show notes at englandcast.com/winter. And remember to grab your Tudorcon tickets for $100 off just this week at Englandcast.com/Tudorcon and enter the code TUDORCON when you check out.
Talk with you again soon!