Uhtreds feast, p.1
Uhtred's Feast, page 1
Dedication
UHTRED’S FEAST
is dedicated to
Jordan Enzor
whose extraordinary knowledge helped
so much with this book.
Our thanks.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
The Making of England
Part One—Home
Historical Background
A Note on Recipes
A Note on Fat
Recipes
Meat
Pork Belly
Cracklings
Pork Chops with Apples
Roasted Leg of Pork
Salt Pork
Salted and Smoked Pork Leg (Ham)
Smoked Pig’s Head
Caraway Roasted Ribs
Garden
A Spring Pottage
Ale-Glazed Carrots
Parsnip Chips
Smothered Cabbage
Stuffed Cabbage
Cabbage with Apples and Honey
Turnips
Turnip Bisque
Braised Turnips
Panfried Turnips
Smashed Turnips
Raw Turnips
Sanx Compote
Dairy and Bakery
Egg Cake
Frittata with Beef Crisps
Bread
Rolls
Unleavened Oatcakes
Barley Flatbread
King Alfred’s Cakes
The First Victory
Part Two—Land and Water
Historical Background
Recipes
Animals
Rabbit Braised in Ale, with Leeks and Fennel
Royal Beef Stew
Brisket Hash
Braised Lamb Shank
Spatchcocked Chicken
Meatballs from Three Animals
Grilled Liver
Juniper-Spiced Boar Meatballs
Pluck Hash
Quail for Court
Pan-Braised Quail
Quail Braised in Vinegar and Tea
Braised Beef Brisket
Venison Stew
Stocks
Vegetable Stock Variation
Wild Vegetables
Cream-Braised Leeks with Nutmeg
Beetroots
Lightly Pickled Beetroots
Roasted Beetroots
Braised Greens
Fennel
Braised Fennel
Roasted Fennel
Dandelion Salad with Bacon
A Green Sauce
Foraged Mushroom Omelette
Sage and Pepper Omelette
Chanterelle Toast
Water
Grilled Trout
Eel Pie
Pickled Herring
Kettle of Fish
Oyster Stew
Haddock Simmered in Ale
Salmon Gravlax
Side of Salmon: Slow-Roasted, Seared, and Hash
Lard-Poached Salmon
Quick and Easy Salmon
Salmon Hash
Turbot Poached in Butter
Braised Fillet of Turbot
The Gift of God
Part Three—Storage
Historical Background
Recipes
Barley, Leeks, and Peas
Baked Barley and Mushrooms
Fermented Shredded Turnip
Horseradish
Marinated Horseradish
Pickled Cabbage with Apples
Pickled Fennel and Leeks
Pickled Mushrooms
Pickled Turnips
Pickled Cucumbers
Sauerkraut
Vinaigrettes
Juniper Vinaigrette
Chicken Fat Vinaigrette
Bacon Fat Vinaigrette
Pease Pudding
Spiced Walnuts
Dried Fruits
Saxon Rub
The Last Shield Wall
About the Authors
Also by Bernard Cornwell
Copyright
About the Publisher
The Making of England
I was raised on the coast of Essex, a place of marshes, tidal creeks, and rivers. From the roof of our house I could see the Thames widening into its huge estuary and could watch ships pushing upriver toward Tilbury or the London docks. Sailing ships were common; mostly Thames barges with their huge gaff-rigged russet mainsails carrying agricultural produce to the city, but I also remember being bewitched by the sight of a tall ship, all sails set, making that voyage.
What I was seeing was an echo of history. The Thames, of course, had long been a major waterway into England. Square-sailed Roman ships slid in and out of the Thames, while much later some of our most famous warships like HMS Victory were built on its banks and sailed to triumph on the world’s oceans.
As a child, however, I was more interested in other ships that had haunted the estuary, ships that had engendered terror; the longships of the folk we call the Vikings. I remember when I was six years old how Prince Georg of the Danish royal house visited the nearby village of Ashingdon and presented to the villagers a Danish flag and a fine model of a Viking longship (which still hangs in the Parish Church of St. Andrew). The reason for this generosity was to commemorate the battle of Assandun between King Cnut of Denmark and King Edmund Ironside of England. The Danes won, and Cnut subsequently became King of England. As a child I was fiercely interested in history, and the longship hanging in St. Andrew’s nave fired my imagination and curiosity.
A decade or so later I discovered the Anglo-Saxon poem “The Battle of Maldon,” which was a description of a battle between Byrhtnoth, leader of an army of East Saxons, and a Viking band that had taken up residence on Northey Island in the River Blackwater, which is not that far from Ashingdon. The Vikings won (again), but I recall a teacher telling us that the poem was “fanciful” because the East Saxons on the bank of the river could never have heard a challenge shouted from Northey Island; it was too far. That drove me and a few friends to Maldon, where we proved such a challenge was indeed audible, that expedition being the only serious original research I have ever undertaken.
My childhood had thus given me an abiding interest in the Anglo-Saxon period, but I soon came to realize I was woefully ignorant about it. Some time between the Romans abandoning Britain and the arrival of the Normans, a whole country had been created, England, and despite a more than adequate education I had no idea how that had happened. I also realized I was not alone; that an English school curriculum suggested that English history began in 1066. It is almost as if there is no history for England before the arrival of William the Conqueror, except for the primary school stories of Alfred burning the cakes and King Cnut failing to turn back the tide.
In 1939 a song became immensely popular, recorded by, among others, Dame Vera Lynn; “There’ll Always Be an England” was the song, and it implied there always had been an England, yet in 1939 England was only a shade over 1,000 years old. The creation of England happened during that pre-1066 history. Unfortunately we can’t give an exact date to that momentous event, but at some time in the autumn of 937 the Anglo-Saxon army led by King Æthelstan destroyed a combined army of Vikings and Scots at a place called Brunanburh. Brunanburh was a major battle in England’s history and for years after was simply called “the great battle”; it even inspired the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to break into verse:
Never was there more slaughter
On this island, never as many
Folk felled before this,
By the sword’s edge—as books and aged sages
Confirm—since Angles and Saxons sailed here
From the east, sought the Britons over the wide seas,
Those proud warsmiths. They overcame the Welsh,
Glory-hungry earls, and took hold of this land.
It might have been the great battle, but it was swiftly forgotten and even the place where the battle had been fought was also forgotten. We now know the battle was fought on the Wirral, and while it is tempting to say that the conflict was the birth moment of England, it is more accurate to see it as a part of the process. That had begun much earlier, when Æthelstan’s grandfather, King Alfred, had the ambition to unite the different Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.
By Alfred’s time there were four kingdoms: Wessex in the south, East Anglia to the east, Mercia in the midlands, and Northumbria stretching to the Scottish border. Two of those kingdoms, East Anglia and Northumbria, were under Danish rule, Mercia was under constant pressure from the Danes, and only Wessex was apparently safe under Saxon governance. That changed in 878 when the Danish Vikings invaded Wessex and drove Alfred to the Somerset marshes, where he became a fugitive. Somehow he raised an army and inflicted a devastating defeat on his enemies at Ethandun, and in the subsequent years, and under his son, King Edward, Mercia became a part of Wessex, and the Saxons then inflicted defeats on the Danes in East Anglia. Alfred’s ambition had been to unite all those lands where English, the language of the Saxons and Angles, was spoken. It would not just be language that united the peoples, but religion too. The Danes and other Northmen who held so much land in Britain were pagans, and Alfred was determined that they should become Christian.
The victory at Brunanburh weakened the Northmen’s hold on Northumbria and that kingdom swiftly became a part of what was now to be called Englaland. There were to be other fights to seal the conquest, but by the time the Normans (descended from Vikings, as their name implies) invaded Englaland, they discovered
There was an irony in the story of the Saxon conquest of England. The struggle against the Northmen was almost a repetition of an earlier invasion when the Saxons had first come to Britain. That happened as the Romans were abandoning the island, leaving behind them a string of forts along the eastern seaboard designed to repel the Saxon incomers. Those forts failed, and a succession of Angle and Saxon invaders landed, pushing the native Britons outward into what is now southern Scotland, into Wales, Cornwall, and south across the sea to Brittany. There is an echo of that brutal, merciless time in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s report on Brunanburh, claiming that the famous battle marked the greatest slaughter
. . . since Angles and Saxons sailed here
From the east, sought the Britons over the wide seas,
Those proud warsmiths. They overcame the Welsh,
Glory-hungry earls, and took hold of this land.
That poem, written in 937, also contains an echo of tribal triumph over an ancient enemy and a celebration of the defeat of a new enemy, who had first been recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in the year 787. In that year three ships arrived on the coast of Wessex;
Then the reeve rode there and wanted to compel them to go to the king’s town because he did not know what they were, and then they killed him. These were the first ships of the Danish men which sought out the land of the English race.
Those three ships might have been the first, but they were not the last. More and more raiders harried the British coast. The most shocking of these raids occurred in 793, when the Northmen sacked the monasteries on Lindisfarne and at Jarrow. The ransacking and murders at Lindisfarne (clearly visible from the ramparts of Bebbanburg) appalled Saxons:
This year came the dreadful forewarnings over the land of Northumbria, terrifying the people most woefully. These were immense sheets of light rushing through the air, and whirlwinds and fiery dragons flying across the firmament. These tremendous tokens were soon followed by a great famine: and not long after, on the sixth day before the ides of January in the same year, the harrowing inroads of heathen men made lamentable havoc in the Church of God on Holy Island, by rapine and slaughter.
But these attacks were still raids; the Northmen came, they burned, stole, killed, and enslaved, then left, yet that all changed in 865 when a large army of Vikings sailed from Ireland to England and, instead of raiding and leaving, they stayed. They were led by Ivarr Ragnarson, usually known by the name Ivar the Boneless, the son of Ragnar Lodbrok, who had been killed by the King of Northumbria in 865. It seemed Ivarr wanted revenge because he led his army into Northumbria and captured that kingdom. Now the threat was not just coastal raids but the existence of Danish kings and warlords who had settled. The Danes controlled most of northern and eastern England and wanted it all. By 876 the Chronicle reports that the invaders had “shared out the lands of Northumbria and were engaged in ploughing and making a living for themselves.” Raiders don’t plow land unless they expect to be there to reap the harvest. The raiders had become settlers, and if the Saxons were to take back their land they had to defeat the settlers.
In 878, before the battle of Ethandun, it must have seemed that the Saxons had been overcome and the proud warsmiths were the Danes, and the fate of the Saxons would be to follow the Britons into exile. Alfred defied that fate by defeating the Great Army at Ethandun and so preserving his kingdom of Wessex, and it was from Wessex that the crusade to unite the Saxon kingdoms into one country began.
And it was a crusade. The Saxon invaders had occupied a land where Christianity had been introduced by the Romans, and the new owners of that land were pagans, preferring the old northern gods like Odin and Thor. It was not until the seventh century that a missionary effort initiated by Pope Gregory I succeeded in converting the pagan Anglo-Saxons to Christianity. That conversion was not instant, but the “new” religion gradually replaced the old pagan creed, with Northumbria the last of the four kingdoms to institute Christianity as the official religion. An optimist might have thought that worshipping the Prince of Peace would end the violence between the Saxon kingdoms, and between those kingdoms and the neighboring Scots and Welsh, but the spoils of war were more attractive than the rewards of peace, while the necessity of spreading the gospel meant that warfare against pagans was regarded as virtuous. Alfred was intent on regaining as much Saxon land as possible, but alongside that ambition was another: to convert the pagans. The struggle to unite England was as much religious as territorial.
At the heart of the struggle was the attraction of England: not the concept of a nation, but the nature of the territory that would eventually belong to the English. On the whole the Northmen came from lands that did not offer wide pastureland and rich crops; Britain did. This was a period when men and women had to live off the land, and the more fertile the land, the better the living, and England, like Ireland, had vast amounts of good farmland. This was the prize that the Saxons had won from the Britons and were now losing to the Vikings. And, just as the Saxons had taken over working farmsteads, so now did the Vikings; they were capturing and exploiting an existing economy: a rich agricultural economy.
The conquered Saxons, like the defeated Britons before them, undoubtedly resented their new rulers, but life would not have changed much, a life dictated by the seasons and the need to tend crops and livestock. For a Saxon farm laborer it probably made no difference that he was ditching for a Viking instead of a Saxon, at least not until his daughter married one of the Viking’s followers and his grandchildren grew up speaking a melange of both languages. They did not expect eyren for breakfast, but asked for eggs instead, and as those children grew, they assimilated more and more Viking words into the English language. In The Stories of English David Crystal lists two dozen words that have survived from their Norse origin into today’s English: anger, awkward, bond, cake, crooked, dirt, dregs, egg, fog, freckle, get, kid, leg, lurk, meek, muggy, neck, seem, sister, skill, skirt, smile, Thursday, window.
That is a brief list; there are many many more words in modern English that were introduced by the Scandinavians, like they, their, and them. In short, despite the warfare and religious enmity, the invaders were being assimilated. They did more than contribute words and DNA to their new land, they changed its names too. If you live in the north or east of England in a place whose name ends in by, toft, or thorpe, then almost certainly you live on land once possessed by the Vikings. I grew up in an Essex village called Thundersley, which stood on a prominent ridge overlooking the Thames Estuary. The name appears to mean “Thunor’s ridge,” Thunor being the god Thor. It was probably a Saxon name, commemorating their old allegiance to Thor, but there were certainly Viking settlements nearby, and local lore insisted that the Bread and Cheese Hill, which led to the ridge’s summit, was named for the battle cry of Saxons wielding their “broad and sharp” swords as they charged the Vikings. I have long wanted to believe that, but am yet to be convinced.
I was fortunate to grow up in a place that was layered with history, even if I did not entirely understand how tangled those layers were, but fate could have landed me on the Northumbrian coast where, in the middle of the sixth century, an Angle warlord named Ida the Flamebearer led his warriors ashore and captured a wooden fortress built atop a massive volcanic rock. His grandson hugely expanded the lands controlled by the fortress, and on his death left it to his wife, Bebba, and so it became known as Bebbanburg; Bebba’s fortress. Bebbanburg still exists, only today it is called Bamburgh Castle and is built of stone instead of the wooden walls that Ida conquered and inhabited.
None of this would have meant anything to a small boy living on Thor’s Ridge in the county named for the East Saxons far to Bebbanburg’s south, but in middle age I discovered my natural father, who was living in British Columbia, and he had a family tree stretching all the way back to Ida the Flamebearer and beyond to Odin himself. By that time I had decided I wanted to write a series of novels that would more or less tell the tale of England’s creation and, delving into my family tree, I discovered some ancestors named Uhtred who had lived through that period. At birth I was given my mother’s surname, but my father, who never married her, was called Oughtred—the link was obvious, and I decided to tell the story of England’s birth through a character named Uhtred.
