When William the Conqueror won the Battle of Hastings, he became King of England in 1066. This changed the political landscape of Europe and the course of world history. For the English aristocracy and religious leaders, the world turned upside down when William replaced them with their carefully selected Normans. But what was it like for ordinary people in England? A recent study suggests that, for them, not much has changed under the new regime.
We generally view the Norman conquest from the noble and often dangerous point of view of the nobility and the clergy. The roughly 2 million ordinary people (who are based on a 1086 census) who survived the turmoil did not leave written records to tell us how they felt or what they experienced. To understand what their lives were like during the Norman conquest and the years of political, economic and social turmoil in their wake, archaeologists have to turn to other evidence.
For the new study, Elizabeth Craig-Atkins (University of Sheffield), Richard Madgwick (Cardiff University) and their colleagues improvised part of the history of the bones and teeth of the medieval British, as well as animal remains and microscopic remains that were left . in the ceramic kitchen. Together, those lines of evidence revealed what and how well people ate in the years on both sides of the Norman conquest. The results suggest that food supplies became somewhat scarce during the conquest and the sporadic struggle that followed, but some aspects of life did not change much in their wake.
“Despite the tremendous political and economic changes that were taking place, our analysis suggests that the conquest may have had a limited impact on the diet and health of most people,” said Craig-Atkins.
Kings come and go; cabbage is forever
If you want to know about the lives of ancient people, sometimes it is better to go directly to the source. So Craig-Atkins and his colleagues examined the bones of 36 people who lived around Oxford in the centuries before and after the Norman Conquest, from 900 to 1300 CE.
Malnutrition sometimes goes down to the bone: In children who don’t get enough vitamin D for a long period of time, the growing bones are weak and bend in abnormal ways, a condition called rickets. Left untreated, scurvy, the vitamin C deficiency that plagued sailors for centuries, can cause osteoporosis in some places and unusual bone growth in others. Iron deficiency anemia can make the bones around the eye socket porous and brittle.
Of course, malnutrition diseases don’t always leave a signature on the skeletons of their victims. Bones tend to reveal only the most severe long-term cases. A bad winter probably won’t leave you with scurvy bone injuries, but it could take several years. Possibly for this reason, skeletal signs of diseases such as scurvy and rickets were rare in people in the early Oxford Middle Ages, both before and after 1066. This suggests that most English commoners did not improve or worsen much after William the Conqueror landed on the British coast, at least from the point of view of putting food on the table.
That, in turn, means that people were probably not dealing with economic depression, the displacement of their homes, or other social, economic, and political disasters that can make it difficult to get enough food. In other words, ordinary people may have been much safer than English nobles and clergy in late 9/11.th century.
But many people probably felt a little pinch. Craig-Atkins and colleagues found evidence of that in the teeth of people who had been young children during the transition to the Norman government. Even a short period of malnutrition or serious illness can interrupt the development of a child’s teeth; The enamel layer that is deposited during this interruption is thinner than normal, causing what is known as linear enamel hypoplasia. Their presence suggests that some fluctuations in the English food supply occurred, which apparently improved once things stabilized.
“There is certainly evidence that people experienced periods when food was scarce,” said Craig-Atkins. “But after this, intensification in agriculture meant that people generally had a more stable food supply and a consistent diet.”
Bringing home more bacon, less dairy
A closer look, magnified at the molecular level, of medieval skeletons sheds some light on those eating habits. For example, nitrogen-15 tends to pass from plants to herbivores to predators more than the lighter nitrogen-14 isotope, so the relative amounts of those two isotopes in a person’s bones may suggest how much of their diet comes from meat instead of plants
Stable isotope ratios in the bones of people living in medieval Oxford suggested that people’s diets included meat and vegetables in roughly the same proportions after the conquest as before. That means the standard medieval English diet of grains, vegetables like cabbage, and meats like beef and lamb likely didn’t change much, either in content or portion size in the average trencher. But Craig-Atkins and his colleagues suggest that the conquest may have produced some more subtle changes in England’s agriculture, and thus in people’s diets.
Other than bone, there is no more sincere view of a person’s everyday life than their dirty dishes, even a thousand years or more after the fact. The fatty acids preserved in the clay can help archaeologists determine whether a pot contained milk, fermented dairy products, or meat, and whether that food came from sheep, pigs, or cattle. When Craig-Atkins and colleagues examined fragments of medieval ceramic cookware from across Oxford, they noticed a couple of changes in the wake of the 1066 regime change.
Cabbage and meat from sheep or goats were still staples of people’s diets, but archaeologists found far more evidence of milk fat before the conquest than after. And after the conquest, fatty acids from pork appeared much more often in Oxford pottery. The researchers then turned to animal bones to understand why pork consumption may have increased after the Norman Conquest.
Craig-Atkins and colleagues did the same type of stable isotope analysis in pig bones as in human bones. But while people’s general diets didn’t change much after 1066, pigs’ lives were apparently very different. Pigs after the Norman Conquest seemed to have eaten more animal protein, and their diets did not vary as much from pig to pig as before. That suggests that pig farming became a more standardized practice, and also that it intensified, which would have made pork much more accessible than before.
But that was the most notable change. “In addition to pork becoming a more popular food option, eating habits and cooking methods were largely unchanged,” said Craig-Atkins.
The study reveals at least one way in which the Norman conquest directly affected the lives and daily meals of ordinary people, even when the political change that swept the country largely left their lives as they always had been. Of course, that doesn’t tell us how people felt about the new regime or its local impacts, what they were worried about or what they expected. It does not tell us how the English language began to change under Norman rule. But it does provide insight into the basic fabric of an ordinary person’s life at a crucial time in history.
Plus one, 2020 DOI: 10.1371 / journal.pone.0233912 (About DOIs).
