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Interested in the history of Reading, Berkshire?

You might like to read these...

Five Stories from Reading Abbey

Medieval Treason at Reading Abbey - The Case of Thomas Kerver, 1444

The 1499 May Day Celebrations of St Lawrence's Church

Finding The Ancient Pubs of Reading, Berkshire

Mary I and Philip of Spain Visit Reading, 2nd August 1552

The Witches of Reading (1626-1636)

More posts always added, check back for more...

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Henry VIII's Easter at Whitehall, 1539

We go back to 1539 and see what Easter weekend looked like towards the end of the reign of Henry VIII. What does Henry VIII at Easter mean to you? Does it summon images of Henry throwing half-eaten chicken legs over his shoulder, laughing raucously and necking down a flagon of good ale? Today, Easter is all about chocolate eggs, fluffy bunnies and hot cross buns. But it's very different to the Easter traditions celebrated by the Tudors. Then, it was a much more serious and solemn affair. Let's go back to Henry's Easter, spent at his London palace of Whitehall, in April 1539. Photo by Olga Kononenko on Unsplash Henry VIII stands alongside some of the most important nobles in the realm, as he leaves his royal apartments and processes solemnly and slowly towards the richly-decorated chapel inside Whitehall Palace. The muddy water of the Thames lapping at the pale stone walls outside, Henry led the procession with George Brook, Lord Cobham, who car

What Really Made Henry VIII Obese?

A look at Henry VIII's road to obesity in later life. It's often blamed on his diet of meats, roasted birds and fatty fish. But was it all about his meat intake? Or was something else a bigger factor? Henry VIII, (c) British Library, Public Domain. Flickr Archive A big deal is always made of Henry VIII's middle-aged weight gain. One of his coats of armour, made in 1540 (almost certainly just worn for show) measures 52 inches around the waist, making him obese by even today's standards (1) . But as a young king, he was famed for his athleticism at jousting, riding and tennis - and, at the age of twenty-four, was considered by an ambassador "the handsomest potentate I ever set eyes on." (2) Portraits from early in his reign support this, too, showing a focused, pleasantly-smiling and slimmer Henry. So what happened? Prominent historians are quick to point the finger at his diet of fatty roasted meats, poultry and dairy. Phillipa Gregory, writin

Anne Boleyn's Tudor Apple Pie

Ok, so I don't really know if this was actually what Anne Boleyn's pie would have looked like, or even if she ate pie. But honestly, I bet she did. In early 1533, Anne talked of a craving for apples, being that she was now pregnant with her daughter Elizabeth. So an apple pie doesn't seem too far out of the equation, right? The clotted cream in the bowl alongside is a bit (but only a bit) of artistic licence. Clotted cream is thought to have been eaten in Britain since at least the eleventh century, when it was mentioned in sources relating to Tavistock Abbey in Devon - and Thomas Dawson's late sixteenth-century cookbook The Huswife's Jewell mentions clotted cream too, as an ingredient in a cake recipe, which sounds incredible. It's not unbelievable then that she could have eaten apples (or apple pie) with thick, sweet clotted cream in 1533. Because I wanted to create an apple recipe to honour Anne Boleyn, I wanted to find the earliest concise Tudor recipe I

Samatard - Medieval Pancakes

Another Medieval recipe! This recipe comes from A Noble Boke of Cookry ffor a Prynce Houssolde , which is an incredible resource for Medieval recipes. I'm determined to get through it all, and pick out some more recipes to recreate here. Watch this space. Written in 1467-68, which places it in the middle of the reign of King Edward IV, the book contains recipes for meats and fish, sauces and sweets. When reading it, if the language written seems a bit unfamiliar, it can help to read it out loud. Medieval people would have spoken very differently to us, but they wrote down how they spoke. You can really get an idea of the accents of the time in contemporary documents. These crispy, moist pancakes are not quite like the pancakes we're familiar with today, but then the dish is almost at least 600 years old. The recipe states to 'serve it forth in dishes with sugar thereon' but while making them, all I could imagine was to drizzle them with honey, so I did.

Medieval Rice Pudding

Reading through the recipe simply titled 'Rys' in the Fifteenth-Century Cookbook tenderly known to the world as MS 279, I discovered that Medieval people sweetened their rice and served it with almond milk and spices. Which sounded like a good idea. Here's the text, from the cookbook, thought to have been written in around 1430: 'Take a porcyoun of Rys, and pyke hem clene, and sethe hem welle, and late hem kele; then take gode Milke of Almaundys and do there-to, and sethe and stere hem wyl; and do there-to Sugre an hony, and serve forth. ' Fifteenth-century texts take a bit of translating, but what I managed to glean from the original writing was this: 'Take a portion of rice and pick it clean. Boil well and strain. Heat and stir in almond milk and add sugar and hony. Serve forth.' What we do know, as the original author put feathered quill to, presumably almond-milk-spattered parchment, is that the nine-year old Henry VI was cu

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