Thursday...

... and still researching (and gardening, and...)

After a long break, I've decided to start brewing again. Here's a picture of my first 3 gallon batch of mead, started last sunday. Nothing complicated, just local wildflower honey: quaffing mead, I call it. Should be ready to drink as soon as it clears, probably in a couple of months. This is an approach I worked up a few years ago while thinking about the sort of mead Gwernin and his friends would have been drinking...



Back to work...

-GRG

Happy Solstice

Today is the Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year (in the northern hemisphere, at least), a subject on which I've blogged before. We will be celebrating tomorrow night for various reasons - Saturdays are generally more convenient that Fridays in regards to preparations, and doing it on Saturday evening allows a journey to the Saturday morning Farmers' Market for some of the feast ingredients. In our generic-reconstructed-British-pagan seasonal celebrations, we like to consider what foods would have been available to our ancestors, and this year our meat choice was "birds". So last night involved a hunting expedition to the local Safeway for some game hens. The hunt was successful, and the results are now thawing in my refrigerator. Tomorrow I get to cook them.

Other feast ingredients, assuming the Farmers' Market cooperates, will be new potatoes (yes, all right, I know they're New World...), asparagus, wheat bread, organic strawberries (the small local kind that actually taste like strawberries) and cream. Oh, and the first half dozen fava beans from my garden. Rowen, being the brewer, will provide the mead, and another friend her traditional deviled eggs (if you've done something that many years in a row, it's traditional). And weather permitting, we will have a small bonfire...

On other topics, I've finally finished another chapter of The Ash Spear (see the sidebar for the stats), and am beginning to have something like momentum in my writing again. This will of course be derailed (does momentum run on rails?) by our local Fourth of July camping event, followed all too soon by the Cymdeithas Madog Welsh Course (the poem is about as finished as it's going be, I think, though I'm sure there are still grammatical errors). In the meantime I'm hoping to get one or two more chapters done before July!

Happy Solstice, all!

-GRG

What's For Dinner?

I mentioned some food preferences in Roman and sub-Roman Britain earlier, as indicated by archeology. Another approach, using later literary sources, takes us back to the Law of Hywel. This source, remember, is 9th to 13th century, but it does give us some insight into what was available and how it was managed.

Like everyone else, a King and his court had to eat. How did they get their supplies? Well, one way was by going a circuit through the land, stopping at various places where the noble owners or the bound peasants were required to feed them. Another source was customary food renders, paid on a seasonal basis. Here's an example: the food-gift owed by a free township to the King in winter-time consists of "a horse-load of the best flour that grows on the land, and a meat steer, and a vat's quota of mead ... oats as horse-fodder ... a three-year-old pig, and a salt flitch with fat three fingers' breadth thick, and a vessel of butter three fistbreadths deep ... and three wide ... if the mead cannot be had, two quotas of bragget; if bragget cannot be had, four of beer." Summer food renders also mention cheese made from cow's milk. Vegetables are evidently much less important.

If this all sounds like the ingredients for a bacon cheeseburger, or possibly a pizza (without tomatoes!), there may be reasons. More tomorrow...

Mead: drink and metaphor

Mead is a word that occurs frequently in Welsh poetry, and not just in the context of drinking. One of the earliest fermented beverages for which we have evidence – traces have been found in Bronze Age grave goods – making basic mead requires only honey, water, yeast, and a little time. Strength and sweetness depend on the proportions of the ingredients, and meads can vary from champagne-dry to dessert-wine sweet. In the early Middle Ages it was probably drunk as soon as it clarified, and there are many references to glas medd – “green” or fresh mead. The locus classicus for this sort of mention is the long poem – or collection of poems – called Y Gododdin, possibly composed in the second half of the 6th century, and attributed to Aneirin. And that brings us to the second part of my title.

The mead-feast that a king provided for his retinue was not just a drinking party. It also was a bonding ritual, and symbolized the compact between them. The king provided maintenance – food, drink, weapons, and housing – for his warriors, and they on their part followed him and fought his battles. To pay for your mead – talu medd – meant to fight, if need be to the death, for your lord. To paraphrase Aneirin, “they drank mead, sweet, yellow, ensnaring … though sweet was its taste, its bitterness was long.” For the warriors of Y Gododdin, the price of their mead was considerably more than a hangover – but that is a different post.