Cover
About the Book
About the Authors
Title Page
Introduction
Meet the Lay Folk
1. The Monastic System
2. Around the Farm
3. The Animals
4. Home and Garden
5. Crafts, Skills and Trade
6. Food and Drink
7. Tudor Life
Picture Credits
Copyright
ayleaf Farmstead is in a beautiful part of West Sussex, surrounded by a mixture of green fields and woodland. There is an openness to it; it is never so hilly that you lose the horizon, yet its woods and forests provide an air of mystery.
Entering into our new guises as Tudor farmers, there was a blend of excitement and trepidation on our first day. What were we letting ourselves in for? As it turned out, life on the farm was to be a strange mix of sweat, blood and laughter. Hard work every day meant that we did perspire a lot – I don’t think our period clothes will ever recover! I also bled weekly and picked up an array of interesting bruises that only became apparent when the adrenalin had worn off and the dirt had been removed. Most importantly, though, we laughed a lot. With Peter and Ruth there was always something to enjoy, and when things went wrong, there wasn’t much else to do but throw up your hands and smile.
Almost as soon as we arrived, we saw that our commercial enterprises would have to take full advantage of our new environment. This included livestock, an arable crop and whatever raw materials we could source locally to aid our cause. The woods around our farmstead had many different species of tree, which would prove invaluable for making structures and tools. There were enough fields around that we could care for our livestock and grow our crop, all within a walk of the farmstead!
The weeks to come would be packed with everything from grappling with geese to constructing a pigsty, learning archery and blacksmithing, all rounded off with a hearty Tudor meal at the end of a long working day. We found that there’s no other way to do a project like this other than to just roll up your sleeves, get involved and give everything a go.
In the course of the months that followed, we found some strategies helped us get accustomed to Tudor life. Our three top tips for survival were as follows:
There is no such thing as a five-minute job on a farm. Every day we had an idea of what we wanted to achieve throughout our working hours, breaking the day down into morning, afternoon and evening tasks. But on a Tudor farm, plans are a nice idea at best. Two hours’ work with the cows could easily become four with very little to show for it. Inexplicably, the amount of coppice required was always more than our most prudent calculations had worked out.
We tried to keep our goals as realistic, achievable and time-orientated as possible and with time and experience we began to get a sense of how long each task would take – knowledge which in Tudor times would have been passed on from generation to generation, but which we were improvising for ourselves. (I say ‘we’ began to get a sense: Peter still believes there is such a thing as a five-minute job, even though to this day, he has never completed a job in five minutes or under. But still, you definitely can’t fault his optimism!)
Never has the expression ‘there are not enough hours in the day’ seemed so relevant as they did on our farm. Not even with early starts and late finishes did we ever feel that we were on top. As a team it was crucial to keep pushing because, as it would have been in Tudor times, survival was a team effort.
A lot of Ruth’s tasks, particularly around the house, were made harder because they were solo efforts. While Peter and I might have been involved in some big projects, we always had the luck, and sometimes joy, of being able to fall back on (or blame) someone else if things weren’t going to plan. Of course, we all know that beer tastes best after a hard day’s work, but on the Tudor farm that really was the light at the end of the farming tunnel.
“AS IT WOULD HAVE BEEN IN TUDOR TIMES, SURVIVAL WAS A TEAM EFFORT”
A high-pressure environment can often lead to mistakes and to stress. For Tudor farmers, their work was their livelihood; if a project failed, it could mean a hard year not just for them, but their family. It was a serious business, but laughter was a constant way of dealing with problems and easing some of the pressure. It allowed us to take a step back and look at why something was not working – why, for example, the geese refused to do as we wanted and then bit us for our trouble… We had to learn to take our situation seriously but also that to get through it, we had to lift ourselves. Laughter, not ale, was the answer.
A project like this can never fully recreate what the Tudors lived through but, we hoped, it would help us understand some of the hardships they faced, and to appreciate the difficulty of everyday life back at the start of the 16th century. At a time when so much could go wrong, our Tudor ancestors kept moving forward regardless, forging the way for new traditions and new technologies, some of which we still have today. All that remained was to see whether we could do the same…
I have to admit, I have always had a soft spot for the Tudor era. So when the chance came up to explore the early years, it was one that filled me with glee. Whilst the Second World War is still, just, within living memory, and the lifestyle of the Edwardian or even Victorian farmer is only just out of our reach, the life, thoughts and troubles of people who lived in 1500 are truly remote from us. It requires a leap of imagination to see yourself dressed all in wool brewing ale in a huge copper pan, beating the laundry in the stream or hauling your barley crop through the monastery gates.
Putting yourself in their shoes means embracing a whole different way of thinking about the world. It was a world with very little science but a great deal of faith: one in which a woman’s hair is a private, sexualised part of the body to be seen only by her husband and where a man’s clothes reveal the shape of his legs; a world that values spiritual above physical health, at a time dogged by the horrors of the Black Death, the sweating sickness and periods of real hunger.
Venturing into the late 15th and early 16th century promised to be a voyage into a fascinatingly different life, but also one which still echoes down the years. As we moved through the daily routine, little flashes of familiarity kept popping up. Talk about ‘drying up a cold’ and you are calling on Tudor medical advice, keeping your knife out of your mouth when eating is a way to follow Tudor etiquette and porridge is a popular Tudor dish.
“AS WE MOVED THROUGH THE DAILY ROUTINE, LITTLE FLASHES OF FAMILIARITY KEPT POPPING UP”
It’s a technologically exciting moment in time, too, from the arrival of printing to the development of the blast furnace for producing better, cheaper iron. Trade is beginning to expand as merchants bring new ideas about banking and finance from Italy into their daily practice and as the technology of shipping steps up.
Perhaps most importantly of all, the disease tide is turning. From 1348 onwards, epidemic after epidemic had driven down the population of Britain from nearly seven million people to less than two and a half million. But as the Tudor era began, the Black Death and the sweating sickness began to loosen their stranglehold and the nation started their march towards a globally influential role. The year 1500 is a moment when as a people we seem to take a deep breath, gather our strength and prepare for the future.
Perhaps, then, you can see why I was so delighted to have this opportunity to delve into the realities and practicalities of Tudor life: to sleep on straw, to hand milk sheep, to boil my own salt and to wear a veil. And the experience hasn’t disappointed. I have had the chance to explore so many little niggling questions that have always bugged me and there have been so many revelations and ‘Oh, I see’ moments along the way. My brewing skills have leapt ahead. I have learned to garden with weeds (and enjoy eating them). I have been deafened by water-powered fulling mills and enchanted by sheep-grazed meadows.
I would not want to move there permanently but a prolonged visit to Britain in 1500 has been wonderful, exciting, enlightening and enormous fun.
If I were actually living in Tudor times, by now I should probably be dead, or at the very least missing a couple of limbs. To work on a daily basis doing some of the jobs I have experienced as part of the Tudor Abbey Farm series, rather than just as a one-off, my life expectancy meter would be pointing to borrowed time.
“IF I WERE ACTUALLY LIVING IN TUDOR TIMES, BY NOW I SHOULD PROBABLY BE DEAD, OR AT THE VERY LEAST MISSING A COUPLE OF LIMBS”
It was with a sense of excitement and trepidation that I donned my doublet, hiked up my hose and stepped out into Tudor England during the reign of Henry VII. I always count myself as being very lucky when I get to participate in a project like this. It is a chance to get your hands dirty, to put on the clothes and do the work of our ancestors and find out just what life was like 500 years ago.
It was a time when England was only really emerging as a nation and had yet to form a union with Scotland. The Church was the principal landowner and farming was a slightly more rural affair. I was most looking forward to getting to grips with our cows, not as livestock to be reared as food or for milk, but as beasts of burden engaged on the land doing the heavy work.
Equally the fabrics that we encounter in life – the wood, the metals and the glass – were cutting edge technologies back then. It was the monasteries and entrepreneurial farmers who were early adopters and experimenters. I find that by following a material on its journey from its raw state to a finished product you can gain a better understanding of the impact it had on society: we certainly got a strong sense of that during our time on the farm.
Each time I embark upon one of our time-travelling adventures I am always reminded just how much work was involved in doing pretty much anything – shopping, cooking, even washing up. Sometimes we can forget how hard life can be and if we learned one lesson, it was the fact that someone, somewhere has to do the hard work. In our modern lives we take so many things for granted that this trip back in time was a real reminder of the hard work and ingenuity of the Tudors that we still reap the benefits of today.
The Tudor period saw unbelievable changes in the political and religious fabric of England. In 1485, the Church was a constant that royal houses could only aspire to; to work as a tenant farmer on a monastic farm was to understand the whole ecosystem that one exists within.
The influences on farm life were varied but the tenant farmer on monastic land had to learn to work in subservient partnership with the monks, knowing that however hard they worked a percentage of what they grew, earned and produced would go to the monastery. The price of failure, meanwhile, could be eviction.
As a military historian, farming is not necessarily something that comes naturally (though of course, military and social history are so closely interlinked, and none more so than the Tudor period). However, as someone who is also an archaeologist, the chance to study history practically was an opportunity that does not come around regularly and was to be embraced.
Peter and Ruth are old hands at period farm life. I, on the other hand, am not and I would be lying if I said there was not some trepidation at the beginning and an uncertainty as to what I had got involved with. Reassuringly, though, the shine in Peter’s eyes as the first day approached displayed more of a boyish excitement than a maniacal glint! Working on a project like Tudor Abbey Farm can only be done if one is willing to get involved with every task and activity that comes along. The great thing about farm life in the Tudor period is the diverse range of activities one gets to experience from the more common skills like woodworking to the more wide-ranging jobs of blacksmithing or shepherding, even beekeeping.
“THE SHINE IN PETER’S EYES AS THE FIRST DAY APPROACHED DISPLAYED MORE OF A BOYISH EXCITEMENT THAN A MANIACAL GLINT!”
Preparing for Tudor farm life is difficult. Fitness is subjective but one can never fully prepare for a job like this as the body will be challenged constantly. Reading books and archaeological reports can give a view of the Tudor period but it does not prepare one physically for what lies ahead. The daily grind of our Tudor farm, however, was only part of it. An important component of the experience was the costume. On cold days it could be very comfortable and surprisingly warm. On warm days it could be very uncomfortable and even warmer! Yet the more I wore it, the more attached I became to it. I realised how important a factor period dress was to the whole experience, the benefits and the downsides.
Completing a Tudor farm project means embracing every aspect of the farm: the physical, the emotional and the spiritual. The centrality of religion to the Tudor period means that you must work within the same constraints and guidelines, and that an appreciation of the religious influence on our daily life must be sought.
he Tudor Age began with the monastic system firmly embedded in all aspects of English life: every county had at least one monastery, with 513 monasteries and 130 nunneries throughout England and Wales in total. The monasteries owned huge areas of land, with a wide variety of laymen working in, for and around them. They were focal points for trade, taking cuts of the profits and flourishing from the land they rented out to yeoman farmers. It was a symbiotic relationship between the monastery and the working man, with both requiring each other to prosper.
The physical space of the cloister stood as a symbol for the enclosed, contemplative life of the monasteries
When Henry VIII called for a full survey of all the religious houses prior to the dissolution of the monasteries, his officials recorded around 4,000 monks and 2,000 nuns. In addition there were something in the region of 3,000 regular canons and another 3,000 friars who worked among laypeople, rather than following the enclosed life. Despite being small in number, these few people and the institutions that they inhabited owned perhaps as much as a quarter of the landed wealth in England. According to the tax assessment of 1535 they received an annual income of £165,500, a sum close to twice the annual income of the King.
It is tempting to think that such small numbers in a population of around 2.8 million reflected a great falling-off in the monastic life of the country. This, though, is not so; there were never very many more people living under the monastic rule. The monasteries were not in serious decline but largely operating at full strength, with plenty of potential recruits ready to join the religious life whenever there should be room for them. Supporting someone in a purely contemplative, non-productive life is expensive, and since it is a lifelong commitment the resources required are extensive. Medieval and early Tudor Britain could not comfortably provide this lifestyle for too many healthy active adults.
As well as living a life of regulated communal prayer, monks also had to care for and supervise their large estates
Though the number of actual monks and nuns was small, the number of people whose livelihoods were bound up with the monastic institutions was much larger. Lay workers and servants directly employed by the abbeys, priories and convents far outnumbered the religious inhabitants.
At wealthy abbeys, there was a ratio of 30 workers for every monk, although the majority of poorer institutions – particularly nunneries – rarely had a ratio of more than one to one. These workers were the people who baked the bread and brewed the ale, laundered the clothes and served the meals. They cared for the horses in the stables, took the grain to the miller, dug the gardens and swept the floors. Many wealthier monks and nuns even employed their own personal servants to look after them in a style similar to that in which they had grown up.
Monastic houses also served as home for a number of long-term guests and their servants. Most institutions housed a few people who had, in effect, bought a pension: in exchange for a gift of money or land, these people secured a guarantee of a room and a daily food ration for life. Other guests came and went. Some just stayed the night as they journeyed across the country, others stayed for weeks or months to visit relatives within the monastery, or be near to family in the surrounding district. There were some who used the guesthouses as refuges from difficult situations at home or places to park relatives in safety until other arrangements (marriages for example) could be made. Most of the guests made some sort of financial contribution, although as surviving monastic account books make clear hospitality could be a major burden upon the order’s finances.
Our parish church was one of those where monks performed the duties of a parish priest
In total, around 25,000 people were dependent upon the monasteries for their daily bread at any one time. They all lived to a religious timetable, following, to one degree or another, the rules of the order.
“AROUND 25,000 PEOPLE WERE DEPENDENT UPON THE MONASTERIES FOR THEIR DAILY BREAD AT ANY ONE TIME”
The main purpose of the religious life was prayer: communal, formal prayer to be supplemented by periods of private devotions. Monks and nuns would come together at fixed times to recite a given round of texts suited to the time of day and the religious calendar. Several different orders maintained monasteries in Britain, including the Benedictines, Cistercians, Augustinians, Gilbertines and Brigittines.
St Benedict’s rule was perhaps the most influential, and most other houses followed a similar pattern. The religious day began according to his rule with Matins at midnight, followed by services ‘at the first, third, sixth, ninth hours, at Vesper time and at Compline’. In between these formal services were periods of rest for sleep, food and exercise, and times for private prayer. Most religious orders required long periods of silence to facilitate contemplation. The regular round of prayer was expected not only to aid the souls of the monks and nuns but also anyone who supported them practically or financially in their endeavours. They prayed for the sake of all people as an act of charity and devotion. In between their religious duties, many monks and nuns also provided the managerial element of their foundation’s needs: keeping accounts, supervising staff, and negotiating contracts for supplies or rental agreements. Around half of the resident religious had some sort of administrative role.
“THE REGULAR ROUND OF PRAYER WAS EXPECTED NOT ONLY TO AID THE SOULS OF THE MONKS AND NUNS BUT ALSO ANYONE WHO SUPPORTED THEM PRACTICALLY OR FINANCIALLY”
The regular repetition of formalised prayer formed the core purpose of monastic life
Guests and servants were not required to attend all the services but many chose to attend where it fitted into their daily routine, seeking the benefit to their souls of a proximity to and participation with the monastic round. Working within a monastery may well have been sought out as a position by poorer laypeople who felt a calling to the life of prayer, but whose social and financial position ruled out full membership of the community. The ranks of the cloister were rarely filled by members of the aristocracy, or even of the wealthiest gentry families, but equally they were not recruited from among the poor, the artisan or the labourer. Most monks and nuns had grown up in the families of the minor gentry and merchant classes, and while the orders vowed humility and poverty, life in the Church was certainly comfortable and, to Tudor minds at least, secure.
eyond the ranks of the cloister were large numbers of people for whom the monastery was the landlord. Before the Black Death arrived on these shores, the monasteries had held direct control of the farming of their lands. Monks had supervised staff in the day-to-day business of growing crops and raising sheep and had operated as vast agricultural businesses.
A chain of small daughter houses had provided accommodation to those who needed to be based far from the main monastery in order to carry out this supervisory and managerial role. By taking advantage of economies of scale and being able to hire the most skilled workers, the monasteries had been able to generate much higher incomes from the land than the peasant farmers of surrounding areas. All that, though, began to change after 1348.
When the plague struck and killed around one third of the population, the economic balance shifted. People who survived discovered that a shortage of labour offered new opportunities to those at the bottom of the pile. With fewer mouths to feed, there was less demand for grain and prices fell. Wages began to creep slowly upwards, and it became harder for landowners to enforce their rights over those who had been hitherto bound to the land by law.
The Black Death was no respecter of class or lifestyle, and monks suffered alongside lay folk
The nation’s recovery from the Black Death was slow. Wave after wave of plague continued to hit and soon the increasingly virulent ‘sweating sickness’ began to rival the bubonic plague in the death toll. In 1348 the population of England had stood at around 6.4 million; by 1400 it was hovering at around 4 million and over the next century it continued to slowly fall. By 1500 there were around 2.8 million people in England – almost exactly the same number that there had been in 1086, when the Domesday Book was compiled.
This was the economic reality that monasteries had to cope with: a small population, falling grain prices, low levels of profit from arable land, and a workforce that could now up and leave if it wished to. In many areas of the country, monasteries had responded after the first crash in population by becoming sheep farming specialists. Unable to find cheap labour to plough and sow, they allowed land to revert to pasture. Farms without tenants were allowed to fall into disrepair, before finally being pulled down. All the while, large flocks became larger, tended by a few shepherds ranging over areas that had once been corn fields. The monasteries managed to survive, but at the cost of whole villages disappearing from the landscape.
“THE MONASTERIES MANAGED TO SURVIVE, BUT AT THE COST OF WHOLE VILLAGES DISAPPEARING”
By 1450 monks had largely stopped direct farming; now they rented out their lands to people like us
By 1450, monastic farming had shifted again. Other European regions had improved the quality and quantity of their sheep flocks, depressing the market for British fleeces and reducing the profits from the sale of raw wool. The nature of the wool trade had changed from the exporting of raw material to finished cloth instead, and monasteries were not well placed to make the same move. It was merchants who could invest in the manufacturing side of the business that were coming to the fore.
Agricultural profits, both arable and livestock, had become uncertain and unpredictable, and monks and nuns had to adjust their strategy. As major landowners they began to lease out their land for fixed rents to independent tenants. This shifted the risk away from them and onto the tenant farmers: once the agreement was signed, the monastery could be assured of a stable income whatever the weather or market forces brought. Monasteries no longer operated as powerful agri-businesses, but as great landowners with a diversified portfolio. Most monasteries held some land directly to grow food for the monks. Many continued to use hilly areas as sheep farming land and others maintained an interest in mining or the dues from parish churches. Rents from farmland, however, had become a crucial, possibly the major, source of their income.
The marketplace: a focus for the more ambitious members of the agricultural community
It was as this new breed of tenant farmers that we were to enter the scene. The monastery was our landlord: tying us to the economic life of the monks. Monasteries generally preferred to rent out their farms to the more prosperous and successful of the peasant farmers: those who would be able to pay higher rents and who were less likely to fail. They often chose to offer slightly larger blocks of land than that which formed the usual peasant holding. This was because it was much easier to manage a small number of medium-to-large sized units than a plethora of small blocks of land.
“THE MONASTERY WAS OUR LANDLORD: TYING US TO THE ECONOMIC LIFE OF THE MONKS”
Wealthier farmers also brought more complete stocks of tools and farm equipment with them, releasing an abbey from the need to provide such things as part of the tenancy agreement. In return, these prosperous farmers expected to rent better quality land and farm buildings in a good state of repair. In the uncertain economic climate of the late 15th and early 16th century, the arrangement was a sensible one for the religious houses.
Our home was large and well maintained; a real ‘des res’
As the economy began to pick up pace later in the century, it put those monastic tenant farmers in a very good position to make the most of the new opportunities. It was to be farmers like us who would rise to be the prosperous yeomen – the new middle classes – of the future.
Monastic rents could be paid in cash or kind, or very occasionally in labour. Although cash was increasingly popular with landlords, the monasteries retained some rents in kind, in particular malted barley (for the monks’ ale) or wool to help make up the monasteries’ own ‘clip’. The quality of goods paid as rent in kind was naturally a matter of great concern to the monks and regular inspection visits and long discussions about farming practice was expected of a well-managed religious community. Monastic landlords could be quite ‘hands on’ with those farms that lay in close proximity to the community, keeping an eye on building repairs, fences, ditches and stocking levels to prevent long-term overgrazing.
On a purely practical and business footing, we were to have many dealings with the monks outside the religious and spiritual relationship. With such vast swathes of land being owned by the monastic houses, our experience of life as tenants to the monks was a common one. It was also an experience that reflected those whose landlord was a layperson. Monasteries as landlords appear in the records as neither particularly generous, nor particularly hard-hearted. They followed the society-wide patterns of land holding, attempting to maintain their income in fluctuating economic circumstances.
ood and drink played a central role in the monastic life, and not just because they were large communities that needed to eat and organise their provisioning. The charitable giving of food formed a large part of their daily work and a carefully-controlled diet was also, in theory at least, part of their religious observance.
The monastic rule dictated the times of meals and the quantity and type of food and drink on offer, as well as outlining a calendar of feast and fast that formed the ritual year. Monks had dinner every day (a meal taken in the late morning, around 11 o’clock) but supper (served at around 6 o’clock) was only served from Easter until 13th September (and not on Wednesdays and Fridays). Dinner consisted of two cooked dishes alongside the daily ration of bread and ale (wine in the Mediterranean original) and the meat of four-footed animals was entirely prohibited. Supper was unspecified but seems to have been intended to be simply bread and ale.
Bread and ale, then, were the most important foodstuffs, just as they were for the lay population. The rule in most foundations allotted one large loaf of bread and one gallon (or eight pints) of ale a day to each monk. The bread was pure wheat bread in most cases, although sometimes maslin (a mixture of approximately 80% wheat and 20% rye) appears in the record. The flour was sifted to remove most of the bran, yielding a fine, high quality white loaf that weighed around 2 lb: such a loaf has been calculated to provide 2,550 calories. The ale was also a superior product and was made from the first mash: this could have delivered another 1,280 calories. Together with the two cooked dishes a day at dinner, this was a very substantial amount of food, although concentrated for many days of the year into just one daily meal.
“THIS WAS A VERY SUBSTANTIAL AMOUNT OF FOOD CONCENTRATED INTO ONE DAILY MEAL”
Monastic food was often simple but very plentiful
The portions of other foods served to the monks were also generous with, for example, about one and a half pounds of fish being allocated to each monk. This was divided between the two different dishes that the rule allowed. By contrast, a main course fish dish at most modern restaurants would usually weigh between a quarter and a third of a pound – a comparison which highlights the protein and calorie rich nature of the monastic diet.
By 1500, however, the actual diet of both monks and nuns had wandered somewhat from this standard. Those who still came closest to it were the inhabitants of the poorest houses, generally nuns, whose income permitted little else and who were most influenced by a culture that lauded female restraint, poverty and asceticism.
Communal eating and dietary restrictions were an important element of religious life
For the majority of early Tudor religious brethren, meat had crept in to the main diet (poultry had never been forbidden, except on fish days). A distinction was made between butcher’s meat, which continued to be restricted, and all the other offcuts: offal, fat, gelatine and trimmings now entered the ordinary diet of monks, with the argument that they did not really constitute ‘proper’ meat. Meaty dishes as opposed to dishes of meat were happily served and consumed in the refectory.
“OFFCUTS NOW ENTERED THE ORDINARY DIET OF MONKS, WITH THE ARGUMENT THAT THEY DID NOT REALLY CONSTITUTE ‘PROPER’ MEAT”
A further refinement of the special pleading was made between pure slabs of meat and bits of meat that were simply one ingredient among several; a beef pottage that also contained beans and vegetables was acceptable in many religious houses, even if a joint of roast beef was not.
The dietary restrictions were circumvented still further in many monasteries by building a totally separate room for eating. St Benedict’s instructions concerned only food that was eaten in the abbey’s refectory. So, increasingly, monks would also dine in a separate room, generally called a misericord, which was taken to be outside the rule and not subject to its restrictions.
‘Meaty’ dishes, where meat was combined with other ingredients, had come to be seen as acceptable – they didn’t count as ‘meat’
At Westminster Abbey, a Benedictine foundation, the monks appear to have operated a rota system: some ate in the refectory where meaty dishes could be served, whilst others enjoyed plain meat in the misericord (the exception was on fish or fasting days when everyone ate together in the refectory). The rota allowed everyone a chance to enjoy the richer diet whilst fulfilling (to the letter, if not the spirit, of the law) the injunction to eat together according to rule in the refectory. Misericords are to be found at most of the 800-plus monastic communities; kitchen accounts, where they survive, confirm that this was a widely established practice.
The meat served in the misericord consisted primarily of mutton and beef, with pork and veal not all that far behind: the offal and trimmings of cows, sheep and pigs would appear in the meaty dishes of the refectory on the same days. Portion sizes, again, were vast. In the refectory something in the region of three quarters of a pound of meat and offal was available in the two permitted dishes, while in the misericord it was around three times that amount.