Food Composition and Production in Medieval England and Their Mutual Influences

Food is one of the key elements for people to survive all over the time. Unlike today’s highly industrialized society, food and its production activities had much higher and significant impacts on the medieval English society. Food vastly changed medieval English’s life, and it is more evident when famines or population changes came. Thus, observing the food condition, their agricultural productions and relations between them is one of the most revealing ways to understand medieval English life and what’s going on with English people in that particular time. This paper will at first describe the food and agricultural condition of medieval English society. Also, it will try to explain the close relations and mutual influences between food and its production: how food requirements and conditions changed the structure of its production over time, and how on the other hand, food production changed the diet composition of different English classes as time passed. The paper will describe the food and its agricultural production according to their types since different foods had different weight on the medieval society. We will mainly focus on the time from after the Norman’s conquest(11th century) to around the end of Middle Ages(about 15-16th century). Also, to have a more comprehensive view of medieval English food structure, the agricultural production we discuss will also include gardening, fishery and even hunting in addition to the traditional arable farming and livestock husbandry. Although they are playing a less important part than the core issues like grains, it is inevitable for us to consider them as well if we want to have a better, closer look in the Medieval English food culture and their signifi-