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They glowed in brilliant colours in the dim and dusty store, deep blue and red, yellow and pale turquoise, grass green, picked out with gold and silver bands and edgings. Some had exquisite paintings of shepherdesses and country scenes done by hand, or sprays of flowers, or blue and white Chinese scenes of willows and pagodas. The cups were all sorts of shapes and sizes, with handles or without them, with or without saucers. There was imported Chinese porcelain, there were clumsy 17^th century attempts at making tin-glazed earthenware look like Chinese porcelain and European attempts at making porcelain. There were silver lustre teapots and red stoneware teapots and earthenware teapots shaped like cabbages with moulded green leaves.

In twenty years or more at the museum, I had never had any idea that they were there. I only discovered them because I had recently been promoted to a job which meant I had responsibility for keeping the collection records for the whole museum up to date and accurate. I had hitherto spent most of my time working on the archaeology collection, so I thought I ought to spend some time on the social history collection as well. Since I specialised in medieval pottery, it seemed a natural progression to check the post-medieval pottery next.

These tea cups and pots were not found on excavations. A few had probably been donated to the museum by the daughters and grand-daughters and nieces of local people of historical interest. Most of them had been bought at auctions, car boot sales, or market stalls. They were chipped and cracked, and some had been very badly mended with a glue which had a tendency to yellow with age, so their financial value was virtually nil. I assumed they had been bought as a reference collection, to help identify small sherds found on site, or for occasional inclusion in a display of a period room. Or because the long-retired curator whom I suspected of having collected them just liked that kind of pottery.

But they were beautiful, even the damaged ones, with their jewel-bright colours and gilding. And the whole history of tea drinking in Britain was there. Tea was introduced into Europe from the Far East by the Dutch and Portuguese in the early 17^th century, reaching England by the mid-17^th century. It is said to have been popularised by Catherine of Braganza, the Portuguese wife of Charles II. Tea grew to enormous importance in British diet, trade, and social rituals. Think about all the references to tea drinking in Jane Austen’s novels: Jane Bennet making tea in the drawing room after dinner, Catherine Morland and her chaperone taking tea in the interval at a ball. Think about William Cobbett’s fiery condemnation of tea-drinking among the labouring classes in his “Cottage Economy”: “I view the tea drinking as a destroyer of health, an enfeebler of the frame, an engenderer of effeminacy and laziness, a debaucher of youth, and a maker of misery for old age”. Oh dear!  In his opinion they should have stuck to nutritious home-brewed ale and he blamed the tax on malt. The production of the equipment needed for preparing and drinking tea, both metal and ceramic, was a major spin-off.  Think Royal Worcester, Crown Derby, Bow, Lowestoft, Liverpool, Chelsea and other major manufacturers.

You might say that that small collection of quite common tea and coffee wares, in poor condition, wasn’t really worth keeping. If it has been discarded since I retired I wouldn’t complain. But it gave me great pleasure at the time. And it allows me to show off a bit if I’m watching the Antiques Roadshow with friends!

When I was a schoolgirl studying the history of Britain, about 50% of what I had to learn by heart was the names and dates of battles. After about 1750 it was the names and dates of Acts of Parliament. Very dry stuff. Some of the battles had a long-term effect on the development of the British political system, language and culture in general, such as the battle in 43CE which led to the lasting legacy of the Romans in Britain, or the Battle of Hastings in 1066CE which introduced a significant modification of the language and political organisation in much of Britain. But most of them were just attempts at empire-building or rearranging medieval political boundaries in ways that really didn’t matter in the long run.

And of course, when I was at school, all of them were looked at from the perspective of England, even before the date at which England became the dominant partner in the United Kingdom. Since moving to Orkney, I have found it very interesting to change perspective and look at the battles of British history from north to south rather than from south to north.

Until the late 15^th century, England, Scotland and Orkney were three different countries. Until 1468 Orkney was part of the kingdom of Norway (or Norway+Denmark+Sweden). Scotland and England were two separate kingdoms until 1707 and the Act of Union, even though after 1603 the same man was king of both of them. Unless they were fighting each other, which they often were, any battles between one of those countries and anyone else were usually of no concern to the other two, unless there was a way in which they could gain a political advantage while the enemy was distracted..

For most of the medieval period, Scotland was concerned with fighting the English and the Norwegians. England wanted to take over Scotland as it had taken over Wales, and Scotland wanted to take over the bits of modern-day Scotland which were then ruled by Norway. Orkney was part of Norway until 1468 (made official in 1471 by an Act of Annexation), and was therefore concerned with fighting the Scots. Scotland and Orkney, unlike England, were never at war with Wales or France.

The Battles of Agincourt and Crecy, for example, were nothing to do with either Scotland or Orkney. They are no more to do with the history of ‘Britain' than the Battle of Largs, which I had never heard of until I moved north.

The Wars of Independence took place between 1296 and 1328 when Edward I of England made a determined attempt to add Scotland to his kingdom. Peace and Scottish independence were restored only after a very nasty set of wars, with all the usual horrible medieval accompaniments of assassination, treachery, torture, excommunication etc. on both sides. They included plenty of battles, including the famous battle of Bannockburn. You probably have heard of that one. Most people have heard of the Scottish leader and eventual king, Robert the Bruce (something to do with spiders, wasn’t he?) and William Wallace (sanitised version in the 1995 film “Braveheart” played by Mel Gibson). The Declaration of Arbroath, an appeal to the pope for his support, does have some very good bits in it, especially the bit where they stated that they would get rid of any king who submitted to English rule, thus claiming the right to choose their king themselves rather than having to put up with the nearest male relative of the previous one. Just as good as Magna Carta, which introduced the revolutionary idea that the king should not be above the law.

Orkney had no more to do with the Scottish Wars of Independence than they had with the English Wars of the Roses. They were still part of a different kingdom. The only battles of any importance to Orkney between 1000AD and 1700 were the battles of Clontarf, Florvaug, Largs and Summerdale.

The battle of Clontarf took place in 1014 in Ireland just outside Dublin. Brian Boru, high king of Ireland, was fighting for Irish independence against the Dublin Vikings and their allies, who included the Irish king of Leinster, and Sigurd the Stout, the Norwegian earl of Orkney. Legend has it that Sigurd died after picking up a specially cursed banner prepared by his mother, a witch, which was supposed to guarantee his victory, so long as somebody else carried it. Whoever carried the banner was fated to be killed. When his men began to notice that whoever carried the banner didn't last very long they refused to pick it up and he lost his temper and picked it up himself. He got killed. The Vikings lost.

The battle of Florvaug was in 1194, when the Orkneymen and Shetlanders, rudely nicknamed the “island-beardies” from their unfashionable habit of wearing beards, joined in a rebellion against the king of Norway during a dynastic struggle for the Norwegian throne. They lost.

The battle of Largs in Ayrshire in 1263, was part of an on-going struggle between Scotland and Norway over control of the Western Isles. The Norwegian king sailed round to Largs on the Firth of Clyde and there was a battle. The Norwegians lost. The king struggled back to Kirkwall with the remains of his fleet, intending to winter there and have another try next year, but was taken ill and died in Orkney. Three years later his successor signed the Western Isles over to Scotland.

The battle of Summerdale in 1529 was part of a feud between the Caithness Sinclairs and the Orkney Sinclairs. The Orkney forces won. Comprehensively – the Caithness side had only one survivor.

As a pacifist, I am not much into the glorification of war or the celebration of battles. But as a person with an interest in history, if we must go on about battles, let’s get some proper perspective on them.

Reader, what images do the words “tea ceremony” evoke for you? A beautiful young geisha or a white-haired old tea master kneeling on a cushion whisking frothy green tea in a priceless old bowl? Or the Chinese version, seated round a low table watching the careful steeping of fragrant tea leaves in a red clay pot, before sipping the result from minute cups? I was privileged to experience the Chinese version on one occasion myself at a wonderful tea house in Singapore called Tea Chapter, but alas, when I hear the words “tea ceremony”, a very different image tends to come into my mind.

A group of people are sprawled on barrow-boards, in wheelbarrows, or cross-legged on the ground. Oh, the relief of sitting down for fifteen minutes after several hours with a pick and shovel in the blazing sun or the pouring rain! The tea is poured out of a battered tin tea pot into mugs which are sordid in the extreme. Hot water is hard to come by, sometimes even cold water comes in plastic jerry cans, and nobody really has time to spare for thorough washing up. The experienced keep a mug clearly labelled with their name, to avoid cold sores. The tea itself is the colour of dark mahogany and we often add flavour by idly lobbing lumps of mud into each other’s cups.  This is the tea ceremony as performed on almost every British-run archaeological site I ever worked on.

Mind you, it could get even worse. I went on an awful training dig in the Western Isles of Scotland during my second year at university. It took place during the Easter vacation. We spent a fortnight outside on the seashore, digging up an Iron Age wheelhouse in the freezing wind and rain. We had to wear goggles because the wind blew the sand back into the trench as fast as we could dig it out. At morning tea break, a large boiler in a hollow in the sand dunes provided us with tea and coffee. At lunch time it provided us with synthetic soup. At afternoon tea break it provided us with soup-flavoured tea. Of course there was nowhere to wash out the boiler. The tea was warm but I do not recommend it.

On the French-run sites I worked on there was no formal tea-break and no tea. Instead we were urged to take the odd break and help ourselves to iced water and fruit from a cool-box. But when I was working with a French team in the Lebanon, we were taken to visit the museum in Damascus in Syria. After we had been given a guided tour of the museum, we were served glasses of the most wonderful mint tea I have ever tasted. I have been trying without success to recreate the taste for the last fifty years.

I think I’ll go and put the kettle on…..

For many years, I only had a part-time permanent job as a museum curator, and I made up my weekly hours with education work and even re-enacting, at various museums. Food and cooking was a natural extension of my work on medieval and early modern pottery. I had an evening lecture on medieval food and cooking too, which was very popular with local associations, usually to follow their annual general meetings or annual dinners, and Dame Eileen Currant's Tudor Christmas had a regular spot at a local museum. Since the museum which was my home base was at an important Roman site, I ended up doing Roman food demonstrations at open days as well. I gradually accumulated a collection of replica kitchen equipment, and a set of recipes for demonstration purposes. I came to realise that for all of these periods, many of the recipes had a characteristic set of instructions, as to both ingredients and methods, which could be summarised as follows.

In cibum Romanum – to cook Roman food.

Pepper.  Honey.  Fish sauce.  Asafoetida. Herbs. Wine vinegar.

Roman recipes mostly come from the so-called “Cookbook of Apicius”, and many of them are extremely cryptic, often consisting of nothing more than a series of nouns. Project Gutenberg has a translation of Apicius with comments. The line above is a summary of the majority of Roman recipes, in the Apicius style.  To make anything taste Roman, use some or all of these ingredients. They seem to have used them to flavour everything from sliced cucumber to hard-boiled eggs to roast chicken and other birds (including parrot). But you don’t need to try to find sows udders or larks’ brains to go Roman. Most of the time they ate quite ordinary things like chicken or fish or lentils, flavoured as above. Serve them with wholemeal bread, and wine mixed with water.

The herbs could be any of lovage, mint, cumin seed, coriander seed, fresh coriander, oregano, celery seeds, caraway seeds, parsley, savory, thyme, fennel seeds, or ginger. Avoid rue or pennyroyal in case of bad effects.

Thai fish sauce makes a good substitute for the Roman version (“garum”). Hing or asafoetida is the nearest thing to the Roman herb silphium, which was a popular if expensive flavouring. Pine kernels were also used a lot. They were pretty fond of pouring beaten eggs over everything and turning it into a sort of omelette or frittata. Don’t forget that pepper was considered to go well on sweet stuff. Try dates stuffed with pine nuts, fried in honey and sprinkled with freshly-ground black pepper; they are delicious.

Moving on to the medieval period, we come to works such as the Menagier de Paris (The Goodman of Paris), a sort of medieval Mrs Beeton in French dating from the late 14^th century. The author is unknown but it is written as if narrated by an elderly Parisian householder to his inexperienced fifteen year-old wife, and gives instructions on almost everything, from how to roast a swan to how to make ink. The Form of Curye is one of the oldest surviving English cookery books, attributed to Richard II’s head cooks, also 14^th century. So:

For to make your food taste medieval

Smite hym in pieces

Fry hym up in grece

And do thereto good herbyes

Nym wine oder water

And seethe it tyl it be enow

And serve it forthe…

Smite i.e. chop it into pieces. This works for anything, meat or vegetable, but avoid potatoes and tomatoes because they come from South America which hadn’t been discovered yet.

Fry it in whatever you usually fry stuff in, but it should be animal fat (‘grease’)

Add whatever herbs you think will go well with it: thyme, parsley, sage, bay leaves and basil. Do NOT use chilli: again, it hadn’t been discovered yet. “Herbyes” included vegetables so add any that you like. The onion and cabbage families were popular.

Add wine or water

Seethe i.e. boil/simmer it until it is done. Medieval recipes didn’t give cooking times. After all, they didn’t have any clocks. The only clocks were in churches and other important buildings, and they were not very accurate. They didn’t give temperatures either, because they had no way of measuring them. They just had to move the pot closer to or further from the flames. Use your judgement.

Serve it forth, usually in a little wooden bowl with a spoon, accompanied by some “pain de main” (white rolls) or if you are a bit more down-market, some “maslin" i.e. mixed wheat and rye bread. And ale or wine of course. It’s really most authentic if two or three people share the same drinking cup…

If you want to show off, the medieval lord would expect dishes which included rice, almonds, rosewater, sugar, dried and citrus fruits, and a hint of exotic spices like cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger. These ingredients were mostly brought back to England from the eastern Mediterranean by the Crusaders. They might be used in something like a rice pudding flavoured with rose petals and a lot of cream, or a chicken dish, where the chicken is boiled, pounded to a paste, and then reheated with wine, ground almonds, dried figs and spices. And if you want to serve a medieval salad, leave out the tomatoes and peppers, go heavy on the spring onions, and use edible flowers and lots of herbs.

Finally we arrive in the 16^th century. For reasons of convenience in transporting the equipment in a small car, and setting it up in a very cramped corner of a small gallery, I usually concentrated on banqueting stuff, which may be summarised quite simply: sugar. They had just got hold of the New World and access to sugar cane in quantity.

A Tudor Banquet

 ‘Suckets’: candied everything – lettuce stalks, cherries, orange peel, rose petals, rosemary flowers, whole spices, etc, simmered in sugar syrup over a chafing dish.

“Manus Christi”: little sweets made of sugar flavoured with rosewater and decorated with gold leaf

‘Marchpane’: marzipan on a pastry base with a layer of icing baked onto it.

Gingerbread: made with breadcrumbs, honey and spices including ginger; it was often coloured red and shaped in small wooden moulds

Sweetened wine

If you were a Tudor with social pretensions, the banquet was a dessert course at the end of a feast. There are many surviving books with recipes for making banqueting stuff; The good huswife's Jewell by Thomas Dalton is as good as any. A banquet involved sweetmeats of all kinds, served on plates moulded from sugar paste, accompanied by sweetened wine drunk from goblets moulded from sugar paste, and enlivened by music, entertainers, and a “subtlety”, a huge sugar sculpture carried in by several servants. This often included a tasteful reference to the importance of the host, such as a coat of arms; or perhaps a reference to the occasion, for example a woman in childbirth if it was a wedding.

If you felt that providing your guests with sugar plates was a bit over-the-top, you might have a set of little circular wooden trenchers decorated in bright colours with gold leaf. Many of these little plates had a poem on the back. If you were going to eat a wet sucket dripping with syrup (my favourite is candied lettuce stalks), you might even use a fork. Fingers were still used for the rest of the feast.

If you were wealthy enough, you might have a separate banqueting house, where you went to enjoy your dessert after the rest of the feast was over. Some people built them on the roof of their mansion, others out in the garden, where they might be a permanent structure, or something made for the occasion out of green branches decked with flowers. My favourite was one built up a tree.

All this sugar was very bad for Tudor teeth, as Queen Elizabeth I is said to have found out the hard way!

Some of these dishes are really yummy. So if you get tired of making your food taste Chinese or Italian or Indian or Mexican, try a Roman, Medieval or Tudor dish instead.

The men-at-arms came clanking down the street amid the swirls of acrid smoke. Visors down, brandishing their swords and pikes, they strode past the Clock Tower and with ferocious cries, disappeared up the narrow street between the timber-framed tenements.

“Quick, get those fires out!”

…said the museum manager, who was standing beside me clasping two buckets of water, and watching in an agony of apprehension as the heaps of smouldering straw blew across the street and up against the nearby shop fronts. We ran about dousing the flames. Wrapping the parking meters with hessian didn’t exactly make them look medieval so lots of smoke was required to obscure their presence, but setting fire to a bicycle shop would not have made us popular. The men-at-arms reappeared grinning, their visors up.

“OK that time?” asked their leader cheerfully. He and his men were happy to play the scene over and over again, until everyone was quite satisfied. They were professional re-enactors and their hourly rate reflected it. Worth every penny.

Half an hour later, the street cleaned scrupulously in time for the shops opening, I was over at the cathedral, once a famous abbey, gulping mouthfuls of coffee between smearing my colleagues’ ragged costumes with a mixture of mud and strawberry jam to make them look like beggars come to pray for healing at the shrine of the saint. Though I say it myself (a colleague and I made the costumes), they looked most authentic. The jam was so cheap and horrible that it was better used externally anyway. They went off to huddle pathetically around a rusty cast-iron barbecue, among more artistic swirls of smoke.

When I signed up for a career in museums I didn’t foresee that one day I would be credited as co-Assistant Director and co-Executive Producer of a historical film, to say nothing of co-wardrobe and props mistress. One of the museum’s two sites had the standard short introductory film on the history of the site but the second museum, which dealt with the post-Roman history of the town, hadn’t got one. So we teamed up with the film studies unit at the local college to make an extremely low-budget ten-minute film summarising 1500 years of stirring events, including a famous 15^th century battle which featured in one of Shakespeare’s plays.

This project began with a bunch of curators spending many an hour arguing with the director of the film studies unit, a forceful lady with a well-deserved reputation in her own field, as she tried to keep the script short enough to fit into 10 minutes and snappy enough to engage the public, while we tried to stop it being oversimplified to the point of total inaccuracy.

Curators, front of house staff and film students were co-opted as actors. The film studies students practiced their skills as makeup artists, hairdressers, caterers etc. A small amount of money was allowed to pay for a few professionals like the soldiers, a real actor for the narrator, and the musician who provided the background music. A number of local groups like the lace-makers society and a men’s choir donated their services for free. We had to get permission from the various locations, from the police if we were going to hold up the traffic; find out where parking and toilets were available, and so on.  I became lost in admiration of the director’s ability to wheedle reluctant people into giving her what she wanted for nothing, especially when they had refused my request three times already.

I really had fun with that film. I enjoyed all the background research with my colleagues for the script, the locations, the costumes and props. We all pooled our knowledge of different aspects of different historical periods. It was a great feeling to see local events which I had known about for years come to life. But I also found pure pleasure in watching people with real expertise in a different profession do their job. The director and her camera-woman would quietly discuss the scene they were about to film, and then get everything and everyone organised to produce just the effect they wanted. One occasion I remember particularly was an evening when, after filming a scene which was supposed to be set in a 15th century shop in a small square room in a historic building, they proceeded to record another scene in the same room, but this time set in the 17th century, simply by turning the camera around to face the other way and altering the lighting so that it looked like a completely different place. It was extraordinarily effective.

The scenes I have described so far were perhaps my favourites, but they were run a close third by the totally incongruous scene which was supposed to represent a visit by Elizabeth I to a local manor owned by one of her courtiers. At the time of her most famous visit she was thirty-seven years old. The sight of a teenaged Gloriana sitting on a purple carpet on the steps of the now totally ruined manor, forking up sweetmeats (made by me) from a pewter platter held on her lap, was enjoyably ludicrous.

And finally, there was the men’s choir from a local church who sang plainsong for us one evening as a background to our monastery scenes. It was the most beautiful end to a long day’s filming.

Looking back on it, I still think that the script was pretty good, although some of the scenes, costumes and props were not quite what I would wish. But overall, it was an experience I shall always enjoy revisiting.

Title from William Shakespeare, Second part of King Henry VI, Act V, Scene II