Milk in Britain Before Eighteenth Century
‘Lacte et crane vivant’ (they live on milk and meat) wrote Julius Caesar of the British. The milk of various animals was drink as liquid, eaten in semi-solid form as curds and whey. And made into butter an cheese in Roman Britain, though from the later Middle Ages cows’ milk gradually superseded that of ewes goats and asses.
But milk and meat represented distinct dietary patterns, and accounts from the Tudor period suggest that while the wealthier classes generally disdained milk in their preference for flesh, ‘white meats’ (milk, cheese and eggs) together with bread and pottage constitutes the main foods of poorer and larger part of the population.
Although cattle were almost universal over Britain they were more numerous in the pastoral regions of the north, where by the seventeenth century, areas such as Cheshire in England and Ayrshire in Scotland were already becoming noted for commercial dairying.
At this period many small peasant farmers and copyholders were able to keep a few cows on the stall unenclosed common and waste lands. Probate inventories of such small properties whose estates were valued at 5 to 15 pounds reveals that in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries 87 per cent owned cows in the North of England, 68 percent in the Midlands, 78 percent in the East and 55 per cent in the West.
Access to some land and possession do a few animals were the peasant’s ‘commonwealth’, and the resultant dairy products a mainstay of his family’s diet: estimated that his daily ration of 1 pint of milk, 1 pint of whey 2 ounces of cheese, 2 pounds of maslin bread (mixture of whey and rye), 2 ounces of pease and 1 ounce of bacon met all present day nutritional requirements except for some deficiency of vitamins A.
Milk in Britain Before Eighteenth Century