Sublime

Andrewe Boorde, an ex-monk, traveller and physician writing some twenty years later, was more concerned with what you ate at breakfast. Bacon and fried eggs, such as labouring men ate, was not good for a gentleman, in his opinion. No, a gentleman should have his eggs poached. It is our earliest record of the full English breakfast, and already it i

What I did

Some of the clergy, as Erasmus pointed out, adopted as part of their occupational identity a halting gait that was thought to denote intense internal musings, a habit (or affectation, according to your viewpoint) that was still being satirized by Jane Austen at the start of the nineteenth century.

Ambassadors at the courts of both Henry VIII and Elizabeth I were generally impressed by both the quantity and the quality of the dancing. According to the Milanese ambassador in 1515, Henry ‘exercised himself daily in dancing’. Elizabeth did too, generally as part of her morning routine before breakfast. She continued dancing both privately and pu

Spring grass made for rich, creamy milk, ideal for making butter, but as summer approached and the grass changed, milk became less creamy but much richer in caseins, a form of protein. The higher the casein content, the higher the cheese yield. So while both butter and cheese production could be undertaken throughout the milking season, good dairy

History and myth

There is no earlier period in the history of the West that it is possible to get to know quite so well or so intimately (we have nothing like such rich and varied evidence from classical Athens). It is not for more than a millennium, in the world of Renaissance Florence, that we find any other place that we can know in such detail again.