an article by Bruce Parker

  
A foot-traveler collecting just on the country roads of seventeenth century England probably wouldn't walk far before thoughts of food joined in the journey.

What sort of bread, if any, he might be able to get into his hands and down his gullet would frequently depend, perhaps more than his means, on what part of the country he was in. Different soils usually meant the production of different grains. Wheat, oats, rye, or barley might be in short supply, and the breads of a region varied accordingly. If that road-slogging traveler was hungry enough, the bread would probably taste good, regardless.

In the northern regions of England, including the original Lancashire setting of Agecroft Hall, oatbread was relatively common and not necessarily bland and tasteless. Historian C. Anne Wilson noted in Traditional Food East and West of the Pennines that one traveler in that region late in the seventeenth century wrote: 

    “I was surprised when the cloth was laid they brought a great basket......full of thin wafers as big as pancakes and dry that they easily break into shivers, but coming to dinner found it to be the only thing I must eat for bread. The taste of oatbread is pleasant enough, and where it’s well made is very acceptable, but for the most part is scarce baked and full of dry flour on the outside.”

     Granted, oatbread had neither the taste nor the social cachet of white bread, made from fine flour and usually eaten in wealthy, fashionable households. But less elegant breads like oatbread helped provide sustenance for a majority of people in the land, and in times of want it was regarded as all the more of a godsend.

     In Lancashire  and elsewhere in England’s northern regions, the pancake-like oatbread was usually made without yeast, adding to the simplicity of the process. In Cornwall, Devon, and other southwestern shires, rye was more commonly grown and used in bread-making. In those regions, wrote Dr. Joan Thirsk of the University of Oxford in Fooles and Fricassees: Food in Shakespeare’s England, “people favored rye bread, particularly if they were doing heavy work, since it stayed longest in the stomach. Rye bread also remained moist longer than other breads,” Thirsk observed, adding that “more common than rye alone was a mixture of wheat and rye, for the two cereals were regularly sown together as a winter crop.” 

     She suspected that breads made from a mixture of grains were probably the most commonplace, and cited the breadmaking instructions of Gervase Markham, written in 1615 with the underlying assumption that a mixture of flours would be involved. Additional ingredients might also have been included.  “To sustain the hard labor of workers in the field, beans were added (yielding protein) and sometimes malt as well,” noted Thirsk.

    Wheat-based breads, if a Dr. Jones of Bath is to be believed, were also best made up north, in York. Writing in 1572, Jones maintained that “the mayne bread (wheaten bread baked in large loaves) of York excelleth, for that is of the finest flour of the wheat, well tempered, best baked, a pattern, of all the finest.”

     As recounted by Wilson in Traditional Food, not everyone would have agreed, at least not one hundred years later. One Thomas Baskerville wrote at that time “But that which will much disgust a south-country man when he comes to York is the bad bread he will find there, a hungry, raw-tasted manchet, and if you call for household bread, they have none but what is made of rye, and that is so course and black you will not care to eat any of it.”

      Wilson noted that perhaps Baskerville was used to manchets (small loaves) that were enriched with milk or eggs, as they often were, or whether a poor harvest might help explain the inferior quality of bread that Baskerville apparently encountered. A shortage of wheat might have meant that bran might have been used to help fill out the bread, much to Baskerville’s distaste. It could have been worse: Thirsk noted in Fooles and Fricassees that in lean years, “buckwheat (usually intended for fattening poultry), turnips, or even acorns (boiled to remove the bitter taste) had to be used.”

      Wilson, in Traditional Food, maintained that even another hundred years later, the quality of the bread in the Yorkshire region was not highly regarded when compared to the breads of other regions.

       But perhaps all these critics should have journeyed with our weary, road-haunting sojourner.  The bread would undoubtedly have tasted better.