Medieval Bread: an extract from Knead to Know

In the early medieval period – the Anglo-Saxon Age – all of the major grains – rye, barley, oats and wheat – were being ground to make bread. Of these, the favourite was wheat, but whatever grain was used, bread was eaten with every meal. Indeed we get the word bread from the Old English breadru, and the word wheat from hwaéte, words that have barely changed in 1,500 years.

A maslin loaf, made with flour milled from rye and wheat grown and harvested together - the bread that the majority of people would have eaten in medieval times

One of the most important breads was made at Lammas (‘loaf-mass’) on the first day of August. It was special because the loaf would be made from the year’s first ripe wheat harvested in the fields. The Lammas bread was not eaten, though; instead it was broken into quarters and crumbled in the four corners of the corn store, a wooden box large enough to stand in on short stilts, to bless and protect it, a sacrificial food. A more common bread was bannuc, a griddle bread made from any grains that were to hand.

After the Norman conquest, wheat was even more sought after and a variety of breads were made from it. Rough ground wholewheat was made, sliced and then dried to form trenchers, which were used by diners as a plate and cutting board. Some of the wheat was sifted, the bran removed and kept to make what was called treatbread and it was lowly bread indeed. The sifted flour was rolled up loosely into white sheets which were shaken over large troughs. As they were agitated, the whitest flour would eventually filter through the weave in the fabric into the trough. It was laborious, time-consuming work, and only the highest-status individual in the community ate the bread made from this white flour. This bread was called payndemayn or manchet bread.

A manchet loaf - a white loaf eaten by the rich in the early modern period

There are many spellings of payndemayn, the root of this word being French, pain demesne, from the Latin panum dominicum, the lord’s bread. The word appears in medieval manuscripts such as the fourteenth-century Forme of Cury. It was ‘the lord’s bread’ because the small bread rolls – weighing in at around only 200 grams – were so precious that only the lord would receive one. Manchet is believed to be a contraction of the word payndemayn – main – and cheat, the name for another, similar bread made from refined flour that wasn’t quite as white as the really good stuff. Main and cheat eventually became manchet.

There are mentions of this bread all over, but there are no real recipes from the Middle Ages. We have to wait for the age of the Tudors and Stuarts to get an idea of what they were like. Gervase Markham’s recipe in The English Huswife, written in 1615, is one of the first to provide us with a good amount of detail as to how they were made, instructing us to take the risen dough and ‘mold it into manchets, round, and flat, scotch [cut] about the wast to give it leave to rise, and prick it with your knife in the top, and so put it into the Oven, and bake it with a gentle heat’. He ‘pricks’ the tops so that they don’t rise too much in the oven.

The small loaf would be cut by the lord’s server as described here in the Boke of Keruynge (Book of Carving) written in 1513: ‘take a lofe in your lyfte hand. & pare y lofe rounde aboute than cut the over cruste to your souverayne, and cut the nether crust … & touch the lofe no more after it is so served.’ The ‘over crust’, being considered the best part, was eaten by the lord, and the rest divided up and given to whomever he pleased. This is the origin of the idiom ‘the upper crust’ we sometimes use when referring to the upper classes.

This is an extract from Knead to Know (Icon Books, September 2024) by Neil Buttery and is reprinted with permission from the publisher.

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