English Food History

Historical period

Neolithic farming and the Bronze Age; ROMAN BRITAIN, with vines, orchards, imported garum, and a food economy that largely collapsed with it; Anglo-Saxon bread, ale, pottage and dairy; the NORMAN CONQUEST, which put a French-speaking aristocracy over an English-speaking peasantry and is why English has Germanic animals and Romance meats — cow/beef, pig/pork, sheep/mutton; medieval monastic fishponds, markets and the spice trade; Tudor sugar; the coffee houses and the Columbian crops; Georgian cookbooks and Hannah Glasse; the ENCLOSURES and the loss of common land; Victorian industrialisation, adulteration scandals, canning, and the railway; two wars and RATIONING, which ran to 1954 and was the longest in Europe; postwar supermarkets; and the restaurant and produce revival since the 1980s.