Liza Picard > Quotes

“I am not a properly trained historian. I am a lawyer by trade, and an inquisitive, practical woman by character.”
― Liza Picard

“There was a tendency for men following the same trade to live near each other, so some wards drew their wealth from plutocratic residents, such as the goldsmiths or the mercers, while others were home to poor artisans such as the tallow chandlers.”
― Liza Picard, Chaucer's People: Everyday Lives in Medieval England

“Bread was normally made commercially. The bakers had been organized into a company as early as 1155. Each baker had to have his own seal, impressed on every loaf he sold.”
― Liza Picard, Chaucer's People: Everyday Lives in Medieval England

“By Chaucer’s time the cooking fire had usually moved from the centre of the ground-floor hall to the side wall of the kitchen, with a chimney and a flue. There might be a bracket let into the wall beside the fireplace with a horizontal arm, so that a cauldron could be swung over the fire. In front of the fire would be a rack holding one or more spits, probably of different sizes. Ovens were separate structures from the cooking fires, although they might be built into the side of the chimney. The heat source was logs from the fire, put into the oven while burning and removed once the clay walls of the oven were hot right through, so that they retained the heat for bread-baking. Once the loaves were done the residual heat could be used for other things, such as pies and joints brought in for baking by paying customers. Where we wrap a joint in foil, to keep it tender and retain the juices, the medieval cook achieved the same result by enclosing the joint or bird in a ‘chest’ or ‘coffin’ of plain flour and water, which was not meant for eating.”
― Liza Picard, Chaucer's People: Everyday Lives in Medieval England

“The Ancient Britons’ secret weapon? Woad could be mixed with yellow from the meadow plant weld, or from another native plant, dyer’s greenweed (genista tinctoria; despite its English name it dyed yellow), to give the green that Robin Hood and his merry men famously wore. Red, another favourite medieval colour, could be obtained from the roots of another native plant, madder. Mixed with woad it produced a soft purple. A deeper purple came from a lichen, orchil, imported from Norway, or ‘brasil’, a wood imported from the East Indies and correspondingly expensive. The deepest purple came from kermes, derived from insects from the Mediterranean basin called by the Italians ‘vermilium’ (‘little worms’, hence vermilion) and by the English ‘grains’. Its cost limited it to the most luxurious textiles. A good pink could be had from the resin of dragon’s blood trees, although some medieval authorities traced it to the product of a battle between elephants and dragons in which both protagonists died. Most of these dyestuffs needed a mordant to give some degree of light-fastness – usually alum, imported from Turkey and Greece.”
― Liza Picard, Chaucer's People: Everyday Lives in Medieval England

“Pastees’, or pies, were the fast food of the day, sold on the streets, popular with people who had no cooking facilities at home, which would be the mass of Londoners and other town dwellers.”
― Liza Picard, Chaucer's People: Everyday Lives in Medieval England

“leading members could plan concerted drives to increase prices by threatening to withdraw their labour. Such ‘combinations’ – the early form of trade unions – were anathema to the authorities. Trade unions were not decriminalized until 1867.”
― Liza Picard, Chaucer's People: Everyday Lives in Medieval England

“Once more it was transported by horse-drawn carts across country to Ham, and then by barge down the Thames to its present site.”
― Liza Picard, Chaucer's People: Everyday Lives in Medieval England

“An inventory of the items in the kitchen of Richard Toky, a member of the prosperous Grocers’ Company, in 1391 gives some idea of fourteenth-century kitchen equipment. It included: for food preparation – two mortars and two pestles, two meat-hooks, two pairs of tongs, two axes and two hatchets, four ‘tables’ [abacuses: calculators], a ‘dressing-knife’, a skimmer, two ladles, and a kneading tub for cooking – three brass pots, two little pans, two frying pans, one chafing pan [used over a charcoal fire for small, delicate dishes], two kettles, four copper pans, three iron spits and a rack, two grid-irons for grilling, two tripods, a grate, a bellows, and some wood and coal for laundry – a water-tankard [the kind of big hod used to deliver water to the household by the tankard-bearer], two washing tubs and a barrel.”
― Liza Picard, Chaucer's People: Everyday Lives in Medieval England

“In a separate ‘pantry and buttery’ there were: two cupboards, two candlesticks, miscellaneous table linen, two iron funnels, a pair of table knives [for carving], two ‘chargers’ [big serving dishes], ten ‘dishes’, eleven saucers [small dishes for sauces, to be put between diners at table], nine ‘trenchers’, two half-gallon pots each holding four pints, three quart pots each holding two pints, and one pint pot, salt-cellars, a holy water stoup, two shallow pewter bowls, a bottle [probably made of leather, certainly not glass], a hamper, a box, three round basins, one jar for ale, an earthenware pot, and various broken bits.”
― Liza Picard, Chaucer's People: Everyday Lives in Medieval England

“Once a physician knew the time of his patient’s birth he knew where to start, by computing the position of the heavenly bodies at birth and at the onset of the ailment. He might have with him, slung from his belt (pockets hadn’t yet been invented), a neat little ready reckoner of folded parchment, correlating the position of the sun and moon at the onset of the illness with the planet governing the part of the body affected. A headache should be referred to Aries. Taurus governed the neck, Gemini the chest, Cancer the lungs, Leo the stomach, Virgo the abdomen, Libra the lower abdomen, Scorpio the penis and testicles, Sagittarius the thighs, Capricorn the knees, Aquarius the calves and Pisces the ankles. The colour of the patient’s urine could also be relevant – any physician worth his salt would carry a shade card to match against the patient’s sample. Thus armed, the physician could make his diagnosis and advise on treatment, including the best day for blood-letting.”
― Liza Picard, Chaucer's People: Everyday Lives in Medieval England

“A surgeon should always be soberly dressed . . . rather after the manner of a cleric, for any discrete man clad in cleric’s dress may sit at a gentleman’s table. A surgeon must also have clean hands and well-shaped nails, free of dirt . . . It is also expedient for the surgeon to be able to tell good honest tales that may make the patient laugh.”
― Liza Picard, Chaucer's People: Everyday Lives in Medieval England

“Some baths were made of zinc, a metal which had made its début at the Great Exhibition in the shape, much admired for her curves, of Amazon by the German sculptor Kiss, and an 18-foot statue of Queen Victoria, admired for the maker’s tact, all in zinc. It”
― Liza Picard, Victorian London: The Life of a City 1840-1870

“Chaucer added three Europeans, Bernard de Gordon, a Scot, who had taught medicine in Salerno, the leading medieval university, in 1300;”
― Liza Picard, Chaucer's People: Everyday Lives in Medieval England

“In 1348 a pandemic swept the known world. The Victorians, ever handy with a snappy caption, called it the Black Death. At the time, the English knew it as the ‘Great Pestilence’. A contemporary chronicler, Henry Knighton, wrote that ‘there was a general mortality of men throughout the world. It first began in India, then spread to Tarsis [Persia] thence to the Saracens [Muslims], and at last to the Christians and Jews.’ It was the more terrifying because God was clearly angry, but with Christians as much as with infidels. No one, or everyone, was to blame. There was no remedy. Death came quickly, horribly and agonizingly.”
― Liza Picard, Chaucer's People: Everyday Lives in Medieval England

“The process of manufacturing the dye was quite elaborate. The woad leaves were crushed to a pulp in a mill, and then moulded into balls, which were allowed to dry in the sun . . . until the pulp began to ferment. A crust formed over the balls, and care was taken to ensure that this did not split. When fermentation was complete the balls were pulped again in the mill and again formed into cakes. The whole cycle was repeated a third time before the fully-fermented balls were thoroughly dried and sent off to the dyer. It took a hundredweight of leaves to produce 10lb of the final dye, and the ammoniacal stench of the fermentation process was so disgusting that Elizabeth I issued a proclamation that woad production had to cease in any town through which she was passing.3”
― Liza Picard, Chaucer's People: Everyday Lives in Medieval England

“A medieval physician needed the patient’s astronomical details, just as a modern GP would check his or her blood pressure.”
― Liza Picard, Chaucer's People: Everyday Lives in Medieval England

“Some innkeepers, such as Mine Host of the Tabard, provided meals. More humble landlords expected their guests to prepare their own, bringing in the raw ingredients and using the cooking facilities on the premises.”
― Liza Picard, Chaucer's People: Everyday Lives in Medieval England

“Magna Carta, the Great Charter of 1215, enshrining the freedom of the Church in England and the liberty of Englishmen. It is now revered all over the world, regardless of the facts that it applied only to free men, leaving women and serfs to live as best they could, and that it was designed to safeguard the interests of the barons who forced King John to sign it, after years of friction between them and the monarch. It was reissued in an amended form in 1225, and at frequent intervals thereafter, but ever since it has been regarded as the bastion of English liberty and the rule of law.”
― Liza Picard, Chaucer's People: Everyday Lives in Medieval England

“Sanguine was an expensive cloth dyed blood-red –”
― Liza Picard, Chaucer's People: Everyday Lives in Medieval England

“ginger would have been far more widely used.”
― Liza Picard, Chaucer's People: Everyday Lives in Medieval England

“As early as 1212 their craft had been subject to building regulations that required, for example, that roofs should be covered with non-flammable materials such as stone or tiles, not thatch, and that privies had to be sited well within the plot boundary. Judging by the repetition of these rules over the years, they don’t appear to have been strictly observed.”
― Liza Picard, Chaucer's People: Everyday Lives in Medieval England

“Spices were an important part of medieval cookery. We take them for granted, and often taste them ready-mixed in our commercially produced food. The Middle Ages saw them as mysterious and precious.”
― Liza Picard, Chaucer's People: Everyday Lives in Medieval England

“Perhaps, if he had a choice, he would have preferred a stay in London’s only dedicated mental hospital, out beyond Bishopsgate. It had been founded in 1247 as the Priory of St Mary of Bethlehem as a hostel for pious travellers, probably with a small infirmary for the sick. It was soon renamed by Londoners ‘Bethlem’, or ‘Bedlam’. By 1377 its patients included ‘distracted’ people, who were receiving the standard medieval treatment for mental illness – shackles, whips and ducking, a regime which will surely have ended their miserable lives prematurely. By 1403 most of its inmates were mentally ill, but when the changeover occurred, from the original purpose of the foundation to the exclusive care of the mentally ill, is not possible to trace. The alternative to Bedlam, custody within the family circle, may not always have been a good idea. Sometime in 1340 Alice, the wife of Henry de Warewyk, ‘who for the last half year had been non compos mentis . . . opened the door and ran by herself in a wild state to the port [quay] of Dowgate and threw herself into the Thames and was drowned’.”
― Liza Picard, Chaucer's People: Everyday Lives in Medieval England

“Every proper London cook would belong to a professional body. The Guild of Cooks had been formed in 1311, although it did not get a charter until 1482. The Guildsmen’s cook must have served the usual seven years’ apprenticeship, learning by example and practice. He would certainly know how to ‘roast and boil and broil and fry’, and much else besides.”
― Liza Picard, Chaucer's People: Everyday Lives in Medieval England

“Poudre-marchaunt’ was a kind of flavouring. Galingale is a root that looks like ginger but tastes more like mint; it has only recently returned to English kitchens from Thailand, via ‘fusion’ cookery recipes.”
― Liza Picard, Chaucer's People: Everyday Lives in Medieval England

“In big fourteenth-century houses the kitchen was sometimes in a separate building, to lessen the risk of fire. Otherwise it might be next to the main dining hall, on the first floor. Its windows were unlikely to be glazed. The wooden shutters and louvres kept the worst of the winter weather out and let out some of the smoke, but hardly helped with the light level. When daylight faded, candlelight and firelight had to suffice.”
― Liza Picard, Chaucer's People: Everyday Lives in Medieval England

“In 1343 the residents of houses in a fashionable quarter of London near Gracechurch Steet complained that ‘the shadows under a house built on beams [i.e. jettied] were the resort of bad characters, who sprang out on passers-by and robbed them’.”
― Liza Picard, Chaucer's People: Everyday Lives in Medieval England

“The London Weavers’ Company could trace its ancestry back to 1155, making it the earliest craft guild in England. Weavers were mostly small master craftsmen, working at home on piecework rates, on yarn supplied by the customer. Their monopoly over the weaving trade was gradually eroded by the growth of other textile companies such as the Mercers, and the immigration from Flanders of Flemish weavers, relying on royal support. The London weavers’ hostility to Flemings came to a hideous climax in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, when ‘the London mob beheaded all the Flemings they found, without judgement and without cause, even invading the sanctuary of a church where thirty-five Flemings had taken refuge, dragging them out and beheading them in the street’.2”
― Liza Picard, Chaucer's People: Everyday Lives in Medieval England

“On 12 May 1366, for example, Edward III entertained the great officers of his Council to breakfast. The ceremonies would have begun with hand-washing. A page would present to each guest a bowl of warm water scented with rose petals or some other sweet-smelling perfume. With considerable dexterity he would pour the water over the diner’s hands, catching it in the bowl below them. Then the diner could dry his hands on the towel slung over the page’s shoulder, and take his proper place at table.”
― Liza Picard, Chaucer's People: Everyday Lives in Medieval England