The simple secret that kept the ordinary Tudor diet surprisingly healthy

The excesses of Henry VIII conjure images of lavish feasts: whole-roasted pigs, venison pies, exquisite fruit jellies and fine wines imported from the continent.

It’s an image of luxury – but one almost entirely disconnected from the reality experienced by most people living in Tudor England.

While Henry VIII and the upper echelons of Tudor nobility could pick and choose from vast, sprawling buffets, ordinary people had their diets dictated by the unyielding rhythm of the seasons.

According to the historian Ruth Goodman, this seasonality imposed strict limits on what people could eat and when. At the same time, however, it also created an extraordinary variety across the year, with no two months’ food ever quite the same.

Speaking on the new HistoryExtra Academy course Tudor Life, Goodman explores what this meant as the year unfolded, and asks: what was a Tudor diet really like – and just how healthy (and how tasty) was it?

The simple foundations of the Tudor diet

The diet of most Tudors was built on very humble foundations.

“The most important food for any Tudor was probably bread,” Goodman explains. “But ‘bread’ often meant a whole range of things; it covered many different styles.”

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In the fifth episode of her HistoryExtra Academy series Tudor Life, social historian Ruth Goodman takes us inside the kitchens of ordinary Tudors, sharing what would have been served up on the average table. 

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In many upland areas, wheat was difficult to grow, and ovens were expensive to build and fuel. As a result, people typically turned to oats instead. “Oats were easier to make into a flat cake rather than a traditional loaf,” says Goodman. “These were dried in front of a fire and cooked on a griddle.”

This pattern was repeated across England. According to Goodman, people ate “different sorts of oatcakes, barley bread, rye bread”, and “every region had its own specialities”. What linked these breads together – whether wheat or oat – was their importance as a staple food.

“Bread was the thing that people ate most often,” notes Goodman. “For many people, it was their main food: breakfast, dinner and supper. This was a time before potatoes, before widespread rice, before pasta. The carbohydrates people ate came exclusively from local grains.”

But what were people eating with their bread?

How pottage changed throughout the year

“The next most important food for most people was pottage, which simply means ‘something cooked in a pot’.”

Pottage could be thick or thin, vegetarian or enriched with meat or dairy. Its defining feature, though, was flexibility. “It was even more varied than bread,” Goodman says, “and it was super seasonal.”

This variety was driven by necessity, but it also prevented monotony. Even if the method of cooking remained the same, the flavour, texture and nutritional profile of meals shifted constantly.

Pottage wasn’t the only food that changed, however. Modern diets assume year-round access to milk, eggs, butter and meat – but most Tudor diets did not.

“It’s not just plants that changed with the seasons,” Goodman explains. “In Tudor times, meat, fish, eggs, cheese and butter all had seasons of their own.”

Milk production followed the reproductive cycle of cattle. “Cows went dry in the winter,” Goodman says. “You then had to wait until they’d had a new calf before they came into milk again.” As a result, “the milk season ran from March through to about October”.

Yet even in that broad time frame, some dairy products were better suited to being made in certain months more than others. “That first flush of milk – when the grass is lush and green – is very high in fat, which makes it extremely good for butter-making.” Butter was therefore a spring and early summer food, unless preserved with salt.

She continues: “As the grass changes and the weather moves through the seasons, the milk contains more casein [a type of protein], which makes it perfect for cheese-making.” As a result, Tudor cheese production peaked from early summer onwards.

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Eggs, meat and the limitations of daylight

Eggs were equally seasonal. “Chickens don’t lay in low light levels,” Goodman explains. “They’re triggered into laying by the pituitary gland, which responds to how much daylight there is.” As days lengthened, egg production rose; as nights drew in, it stopped.

What meat was available was dictated by a very similar logic. “It didn’t make sense to kill a cow when she was in calf,” Goodman notes. Slaughter was therefore timed to avoid waste and protect future productivity.

Sheep were managed strategically, too. “Easter was the time for lamb, if you had one spare. For the rest of the year, you’d wait until the sheep had been shorn. After they’d been shorn and you’d made your money from their wool, the oldest ewes would be eaten as mutton.”

The winter months of the Tudor diet

Fish added another layer of seasonality. “Different shoals come through at different times of the year,” Goodman explains. Fresh fish availability fluctuated with migration patterns and weather.

Preservation methods (salting, smoking and pickling) extended access to fish, but these foods filled gaps rather than dominating diets. “Yes, you could preserve things – salt cod, pickled herring, smoked kippers – and eat them all year round. But people tended to eat them in the late winter, when there wasn’t much fresh food.”

What about vegetables?

But for all that meat and dairy were important components of the Tudor diet, it was vegetables that formed the backbone of pottage.

“You were generally reliant on your own garden for vegetables,” Goodman says. “It was good to have a garden with lots of variety that would ripen at different moments. There was a huge seasonality.”

A diet built around bread and pottage might sound very dull, but Goodman argues the opposite. “Although living off bread and pottage sounds super boring, the Tudor diet was actually quite varied.”

She concludes: “The list of ingredients that went into pottage was very specific to the week of the year. What you ate one week would be completely different from the next – and so pottage changed constantly.”

This was a variety fostered by the seasons, deeply embedded in an understanding of the rhythms of the natural world. For all that Henry VIII enjoyed what he wanted, when he wanted it, most Tudors were able to keep themselves fed with a humbler – though no less variable – set of foods.