Cow and corn: a vital food producing, soil-saving combination over large parts of the region where I live. And indeed, all over the world. We’ve come down from the hill to plains. This is a story of ancient food that lives under the ground; of poop and soil. What can we learn from Saxon peasants, and how does this relate to the food that could rightfully sit upon your kitchen counters today?
This is a preview of Chapter 3 (Cow and Corn) in my book, out now. See Eat Like Your Ancestors (From the Ground Beneath Your Feet): A Sustainable Food Journey Around the English West Midlands.
We start from where I left off, in hilly country on the Worcestershire/Staffordshire border. We now head round the north of Birmingham, dropping down onto lower lying ground where corn is always rotated with livestock. These are farming ways that have been in existence for thousands of years, creating our historic landscape. It’s a theme I keep coming back to in any writing about food.
This brings me to archaeology and ancient food. You might wonder how that could have any relevance to food that could rightfully sit on the countertops of your kitchen today? Look at what people ate in the past, and you might see what I mean.
Archaeology, Ancient Food and Climate Change
Dig down to find the remains of past farming lives under the plough soil. Year after year quarries expand, housing estates appear, and flood alleviation schemes criss-cross the countryside, exposing food remains surviving in hearths, corn dryers, pits and ditches. They sit alongside dark marks left in the soil by houses and field systems.
We’ve come down from the hills and now we’re on lower ground. Looking northwards from Birmingham. Beneath the newly built supermarkets and retail parks in Stafford and Lichfield are the remains of burnt down buildings, ovens and hearths that take us back to Saxon times and the middle ages.
We take a turn into Stafford and go back in time to 960 AD. On St Mary’s Grove near the centre of town there’s a woman working by a kiln or corn dryer. She’s carefully scooping out of the last of the corn dried before it goes into storage. She then rakes out the burnt dregs from the flue. Blackened grains of rye, oats, a few barley grains, chaff and straw still line the floor of the flue. Smoke rises from other ovens nearby……
Hear more about that ancient food that lives under the ground; about oats and oatcakes in the potteries, potato famine refugees that come to Stafford, and where later, archaeologists come to dig up the burnt remains inside Saxon ovens. They’re all connected. The lives of Saxon peasants has much to say about that vital connection between animal and plant foods, sustainable food and place-based diet. It is a farming strategy that is the result of long-lived traditional knowledge.
If you liked this post, you may want to take a look at the full story in my book about sustainable food. It’s centered on a journey around where I live, but it’s relevant anywhere. And, it’s out now…
