The more Rebecca Laroche and I work with the College of Physicians manuscript, the more enmeshed we become with the religious politics of the mid-seventeenth century. Rebecca’s most recent post, on the transcription of the “Horologe” from Lancelot Andrewes’ Private Devotions, not only provides additional evidence for dating the manuscript in the 1640s, it connects the Layfield hand even more securely to the world of the church.
This new context makes our latest discovery even more exciting: we have a new idea of the person behind Hand 2, thanks to a new writing sample from the archives.
Looking for potential “E. Layfield”s while at the Folger Shakespeare Library, I stumbled across the following image of a signature from the State Papers Online.[1]
The L and y immediately caught my eye: our Layfielde, I thought, had those:
But the match isn’t perfect. For one thing, the f is substantially different in this signature, as is the e. And then, of course, there’s the spelling. As much as we know early modern people often used variant spellings of their own names, the new signature’s ei is repeated in another of Edward Layfield’s signatures of the period:
I immediately knew that I needed an expert opinion. Besides, this new signature belonged to Edward Layfield, Archdeacon of Essex, and Edward Layfield, rector of Wakes Colne from 1640 to 1666, had seemed our most likely candidate. The signatures, moreover, carried the date 1660, and our recipe manuscript’s inscription says the book belonged to a Layfield – Anne – in 1640. But the similarities made it well worth pursuing.
I consulted with Heather Wolfe and Sarah Powell at the Folger, and their verdict was a resounding maybe. The idea that the newly-found signatures belonged to the same person as the CPP manuscript’s Hand 2, they told me, was “plausible, but not provable.” They noted that the distinctive h in the letters’ archdeacon does not commonly appear in the CPP manuscript, but they also pointed out that the two new Edward Layfield signatures were different from one another as well, with substantially difference ds. in Layfield. Could Mr. Layfield’s handwriting be changing in his later years?
While this verdict from the experts surely didn’t give permission for the “eureka!” I’d been stifling, it wasn’t a reason to stop this new line of pursuit, either. So we’ll be taking it further, to see what difference it makes if we consider Edward, not Edmund, as behind the Layfield hand. Church politics will most certainly be involved. More of that to come in the next posting.
[1] Both the Edward Layfield signatures come from The National Archives of the UK, as reproduced in State Papers Online. This first image is For University Promotions or Degrees: Certificate by Edw. Layfield, Archdeacon of Essex, and three others, in favour of the petitioner’s orthodoxy and loyalty (SP 29/9 f.130), and the second is Certificate of Edw. Layfield, Archdeacon of Essex, and two others, in behalf of Rich. Beresford (SP 29/10 f.86).
Detail from the panorama of London by Claes Visscher (1616). Image courtesy of Wikipedia.
The shop down the road that sells alcoholic drinks offers such a variety of beers and ales that while shopping I sometimes imagine myself newly arrived from a communist planned economy into some bewilderingly choice-laden consumer paradise. Beer made in ever-so-small batches by Belgian monks, or by siblings in post-industrial Chicago, or wacky young guys working out of a garage in rural Oregon – all compete to position themselves as small-scale and artisanal, sharing nothing with the huge conglomerates that offer cheap prices but little taste. Such producers, as well as the growing numbers of home brewers, suggest that drinkers increasingly value the idea that beer should be a carefully-crafted product, something that connects us to a bygone (and yet recoverable) age of natural foods and careful cooking. As much as I applaud this shift in taste and values, as a historian I smile at the association between beer brewing and simpler modes of making food and drink.
This is because four hundred years ago in England the beer brewers of London operated businesses that helped inaugurate a modern world of environmentally-damaging industrial production. London, already during the reign of Elizabeth I and the career of Shakespeare, burned huge amounts of polluting mineral coal, and no one burned more of it than brewers. Hell, according to 17th-century English authors, was like the smoke emitted from a brewhouse chimney.[1]
But exactly how much Newcastle coal would be required to brew varied enormously, according to factors including the brewer’s preferred recipe and method, the kind of drink being prepared, and, in all likelihood, the brewer’s skill in conserving expensive fuel. One 18th-century expert on brewing, Michael Combrune, explained that brewers disagreed regarding how long to boil the wort, with preferences ranging from 5 minutes to 2 hours, concluding that experience and careful observation were the best guides. Once the hops were added, a further boil of 2-3 times the first was necessary. In general, he found, 6-7 hours of boiling was typical, but the entire discussion seems to be as much prescriptive and descriptive, a guide to what brewers ought to do.[2]
Jacob Adriaensz Matham, “View of the De Drie Leliën Brewery at Haarlem and of Velserend Manor, Owned by Johan Claesz van Loo” (1627). Image courtesy of the Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem.
Given this variety, it is no wonder that different brewers required different inputs of energy. The detailed records of the brewery within Westminster College, part of the complex surrounding Westminster Abbey, shows that in the decades around 1600 they were able to brew about 30 barrels of beer per ton of coal.[3] But in 1592 when the Brewers Company explained to the crown how much grain and fuel they required, their numbers suggest a ratio of about 3 times as much.[4] In the mid-18th century the brewhouse for Corpus Christi College in Cambridge made only about 25 barrels per ton, while at the end of the century the huge commercial brewhouse of Truman and Hanbury in London made almost 80.[5] Economies of scale must have mattered a great deal here; Truman’s produced more than 1000 times more beer than Corpus, and spent around £2000 per year on 1400 tons of coal during the 1790s. A business like that would have had both the experience and a powerful motivation to economize on fuel consumption. But even 200 years earlier some London brewers used around 500 tons per year, or 1-2 cubic meters of coal burned in a day’s brewing. Brewing, already in the 16th century, was undertaken by ambitious business people who employed dozens of workers and used a great deal of energy.
[1] This is explored in my new book, The Smoke of London: Energy and Environment in the Early Modern City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). For detailed calculations on industrial burning, see also William M. Cavert, “Industrial Fuel Consumption in Early Modern London” Urban History (2016), available here on FirstView.
[2] Michael Combrune, The Theory and Practice of Brewing (London, 1762), 186-88.
[5] Corpus Christi College Cambridge Archives CCCC/O2/2/71; London Metropolitan Archives B/THB/B/150-1.
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William M. Cavert teaches early modern English, environmental, and world history at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, MN. He is the author of The Smoke of London: Energy and Environment in the Early Modern City (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Besides urban and environmental history, he has recently turned his attention toward England during the Little Ice Age.
Participants engaging with a wide range of nineteenth-century cookbooks held at the Manchester Metropolitan University Special Collections. Photo Credit: FEAST online journal.
By Rachel Rich
Good food brings people together around a table, and apparently so too does the opportunity to look at good cookbooks. On Saturday April 16th, Catherine Bertola and I co-hosted a workshop organized by online journal FEAST and the Manchester Metropolitan University Library’s Special Collections. We had invited immersed ourselves in the Special Collection’s newly acquired Home Studies Collection, which contains several hundred books on cooking, nutrition, domestic economy and related topics. On the day of the workshop, twenty or so people gathered around a table on which I had placed several editions of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, as well as books by Charles Elme Francatelli, Alexis Soyer, Eliza Acton and many lesser know cookery cookery authors who wrote in the nineteenth century. I talked for about half on hour about the collection, the books, and my own research, after which we spent 30 minutes looking at and discussing the books in a more hands-on way. My hour was followed by an hour during which Catherine presented her work, and discussed her art as a response to the books in the collection.
I started with a general discussion about cookbooks, linked to the workshop’s title ‘Room for Food, Spaces for Eating’. I argued that we should consider the domestic dining room as two spaces sharing the same place. The dining room can be both a private space for intimate family gatherings, and a public space through which a family forges and maintains its community bonds and networks. I urged participants to observe that each book contains recipes for both simple, affordable meals and more elaborate and impressive once. Women are urged to play two parts, of the frugal holder of the purse strings, and the conspicuous consumer who displays the family’s success, two personae which must not have sat easily together.
From here we went on to discuss how cookbooks are introduced, and the very peculiar ways that author’s formulate their introductions and address their imagined audiences. In The Young Woman’s Guide to Virtue, Economy and Happiness (1803) the author, John Armstrong wrote:
To the Young Females of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, This Work is most respectfully inscribed, as a new, safe, and pleasant Guide to the purest and most lasting sources of happiness, and which essentially depends on the just performance of the various Duties of their Sex, whether as Servants, Daughters, Wives, Mothers, or Mistresses of Families.
The preface to another book began:
The Collection of Domestic Receipts now presented to the public could not have been formed in any age but the present. The wisdom of this age has been to bring science from her heights down to the practical knowledge of every-day concerns and the number of its inventions and discoveries have kept pace with the increasing wants of man. [1]
Eliza Acton was equally earnest about the task at hand, putting the fate of civilization itself in the hands of young homemakers:
It is of the utmost consequence that the food which is served at the more simply supplied tables of the middle classes should all be well and skillfully prepared, particularly as it is from these classes that the men principally emanate to whose indefatigable industry, high intelligence, and active genius, we are mainly indebted for our advancement in science in art, in literature, and in general civilization.
Colin Mackenzie made extraordinary claims for the usefulness of cookbooks:
In truth, the present volume has been compiled under the feeling, that if all other books of Science in the world were destroyed, this single volume would be found to embody the results of the useful experience, observations, and discoveries of mankind during the past ages of this world.[2]
This last example led to a discussion of the importance of the concepts of science, rationality and modernity in nineteenth-century cookbooks. Victorians’ commitment to these ideals has been well documented, but few historians (with the notable exception of Caroline Lieffers) have linked this to the kitchen. Yet in so many books, the title itself is an attempt to capture the reader’s imagination, praying on the middle classes’ commitment to progress and improvement.[3]
In explaining her work, Catherine discussed the ways that the books can make a reader feel trapped in endless housework. She evoked women imprisoned in an endless round of tasks which are never completely done and always need to be redone. Her comments reminded me of Margaret Beetham’s analysis of women’s magazines, and in particular of her argument that women’s magazines—and I would suggest that the same can be said of cookbooks—present femininity as ‘at once axiomatic and fractured.’ Though the assumed reader is a woman, she is also presented to herself as being continually in the process of becoming a woman, because there is no possible endpoint to this project, no conceivable point at which a woman can be imagined to be allowed to be satisfied with herself or her accomplishments. Catherine’s work here, and elsewhere where she has, for example, worked with dust itself as a way of engaging with the endlessness and futility of domestic work, seem to be a manifestation of the impossibility of living up to the high standards set by cookery writers.
Participants ranged from graduate student to artists to members of the public who like thinking about cooking. The atmosphere was informal and discussion seemed to come effortlessly as participants passed around the cookbooks and exchanged memories and experiences from their own culinary lives. Though the consensus was that nineteenth-century recipes are not appetizing to twentieth-century palates, the desired effect of mealtime sociability—getting everyone around a table to make connections—clearly worked.
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Rachel Rich is History Programme Leader at Leeds Beckett University. Her research interests include food, eating and domesticity. Rachel is a member of the editorial boards of Food and History and Women’s History as well as being an occasional contributor to The Recipes Project.
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[1]The New Family Receipt Book, Containing One Thousand truly Valuable Receipts in Various Branches of Domestic Economy (1837)
[2]Five Thousand Receipts in all the Useful and Domestic Arts, (1823)
[3] Some examples from within the Home Studies collection include: Alexis Soyer A Shilling Cookery for the People: Embracing an entirely new system of plain cookery and domestic economy (1855), Anon, The Family Cookery Book, or Improved system of Domestic Economy containing above eight hundred valuable receipts, many of which are entirely original, the whole forming a most useful ECONOMICAL COMPANION (1812), and Mrs Mary Holland (Professed Cook), The Complete Economical Cook, and Frugal Housewife: An Entirely new system of Domestic Cookery (1835)
Johan van Beverwijck (1594-1647), who we introduced in our first post, was one of the most prominent medical authors of the Dutch seventeenth century. His Steen-stuck [Treatise on the Stone] (1637, 1649, 1656) was the first of his publications in which he proposed not only how to prevent a disease, but also how to cure it. The treatise was rather conventional in its structure however. Being a learned physician, Van Beverwijck discussed where in the body gravel and stones occured, their cause and signs or symptoms and prevention as well.
The compiler of our manuscript (BPL3603) was exclusively interested in chapter eleven, about both medicinal and surgical treatments.
Similar to his dealings with Van Helmont´s work on the plague, the compiler consulted a treatise about the particular affliction he was interested in. He copied five passages from Steen-Stuck into the manuscript, alongside his discussion of master Reijmers, which I examined previously.
As a “Nota” to Reijmers´ recipe, the compiler first copied a recipe that Van Beverwijck singled out amongst several compound medicines.
University Library Leiden, MS BPL3606, p. 121 (selection): first passage copied from Steen-stuck under the page heading “Tried remedies to break the stone”.
The use of the word “Nota” signals that Van Bever- wijck´s recipe functioned as a comment on Master Reijmers´ , as another example of a stone-breaking remedy. The compiler cited Van Beverwijck as its source, rather than “Dr. Quercetanus´ Pharmacop. Dogm.”, to which Van Beverwijck referred.
The compilers´ choice for this recipe as the first passage to copy from Steen-stuck, deserves further attention because it shows how he read Van Beverwijck´s treatise. The recipe wasn’t the first in the chapter and earlier passages in the source text are copied later in the manuscript.
The content description at the start of the chapter explains the compilers´ choice. The eleven chapter parts are numbered and named. They move from the lightest treatments to the severest: that is, from treatments that would make it easier for a stone to move out from the bladder naturally, to those requiring an operation to remove it. The compiler disregarded this structure and skipped to number six, “on compound medicines to break the stone“. This brought him straight to the recipe that he copied under the page heading “Tried remedies to break the stone“. The content description thus helped him find what he was looking for, information about stone-breaking compounds.
Van Beverwijck had built in a structure by which Steen-stuck could be read from front to back, from the causes of stones to their cure. The content descriptions at the beginning of each chapter however, facilitated different ways of reading the treatise. From this manuscript, we can tell that the compiler used this navigation aid quite effectively.
After including the anecdote about the hare-catching boy in the manuscript, the compiler apparently returned to this chapter in Steen-stuck. His interest in stone-breaking remedies brought him to number four in the chapter, to “those <medicines> that break the stone”. From there, he read through the rest of the treatise and selected four more passages to copy into his manuscript. These selections I will cover in part two of this post.