Food and Power in Early Medieval England: Rethinking Feorm
Authors
Lambert, Tom
Leggett, Sam
Journal Title
Anglo-Saxon England
ISSN
0263-6751
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Type
Article
This Version
AM
Metadata
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Lambert, T., & Leggett, S. Food and Power in Early Medieval England: Rethinking Feorm. Anglo-Saxon England https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.81629
Abstract
It has long been accepted that royal households in the pre-Viking period subsisted on annual renders of food, sometimes termed feorm, from the free peasantry. This model of royal support is historiographically fundamental, in the sense that it is built into the foundations of much current thinking not just on the economics of kingship, but on its origins, and on the process of ‘manorialization’. This article argues that the texts which are conventionally read as references to these general-purpose food supplies are in fact concerned with feasts. This is apparent when we scrutinise both the content of food lists – which are so dominated by animal protein as to be inconsistent with the stable isotope evidence for elite diet examined in our companion article – and the contexts of documentary references to feorm and (in Latin) pastus. The article concludes with a review of the potentially far-reaching implications of this finding.
Sponsorship
Newnham College, Cambridge; the Cambridge Trust (App No: 10386281); the Cambridge Philosophical Society
Embargo Lift Date
2025-02-18
Identifiers
This record's DOI: https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.81629
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/334216
Rights
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Licence URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
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