Bread and Baking in Early Modern England Bread and Baking in Early Modern England Author Cindy Castro Supervising Editor Melissa Walter Editor Kate McPherson Copy Editor Leah Hamby Senior Encoder Leah Hamby Encoding and Metadata LEMDO Team Copyright Holder (Content) Kate McPherson Copyright Holder (XML and interface) University of Victoria Early Modern England Encyclopedia EMEE

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.

 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Mitacs Globalink Research Internship Utah Valley University

Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a

 University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform

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Early Modern England Encyclopedia

By Cindy Castro, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions

Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines

This document uses Canadian English spelling

 Document Types All documents in LEMDO are either born-digital documents or primary documents. Within those two general categories, LEMDO offers additional ways to categorize a file. Born-digital Born-digital documents are anything other than primary texts Critical Critical material, such as a general introduction or a textual introduction. Responsibilities Responsibilities Author A person, family, or organization responsible for creating a work that is primarily textual in content, regardless of media type (e.g., printed text, spoken word, electronic text, tactile text) or genre (e.g., poems, novels, screenplays, blogs). Use also for persons, etc., creating a new work by paraphrasing, rewriting, or adapting works by another creator such that the modification has substantially changed the nature and content of the original or changed the medium of expression. LEMDO uses the term author in two contexts: (1) to indicate the author of a primary work or document (such as Hamlet), and (2) to indicate the author of a secondary text (such as the Critical Introduction to <title level="m">Hamlet, by David Bevington). Editor A person, family, or organization contributing to a resource by revising or elucidating the content, e.g., adding an introduction, notes, or other critical matter. An editor may also prepare a resource for production, publication, or distribution. For major revisions, adaptations, etc., that substantially change the nature and content of the original work, resulting in a new work, see author. LEMDO uses the general term editor only in edition metadata and only to indicate when a person is responsible for editing all parts of an edition. Otherwise, use the more granular terms to describe the precise nature of the editorial role. Supervising Editor An editor who supervises the work of a student editor. Copy Editor LEMDO uses the term owner for the person who checks facts, quotations, and citations; may make formatting changes; may convert from one citation style to another; may suggest wording changes; and enforces conformity with the project style guide. Markup Editor A person or organization performing the coding of SGML, HTML, or XML markup of metadata, text, etc. Gloss needed. Copyright Holder A person or organization to whom copy and legal rights have been granted or transferred for the intellectual content of a work. The copyright holder, although not necessarily the creator of the work, usually has the exclusive right to benefit financially from the sale and use of the work to which the associated copyright protection applies. Normally the editor is the copyright holder for an LEMDO edition. EMEE Keywords Culture Learn about the customs, beliefs, and daily lives of people in early modern England. Daily Life Assizes Baking Food Recipes Published file. Updated metadata Changed Luna reference to Folger Digital Collections. Corrected date and name order in Savory Biscuits source. Moved Lloyd into print sources and removed UFV proxylink. Corrected spelling of Stansby. Attributed Assize of Bread to the Privy Council. Corrected soliders to soldiers (2x). proofed Review of article finished. updated author respStmt. updated a url in the citations and added public domain tags. swapped the desc and figDescs to be correct. Added images and image citations. Created File. Michael Best Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

 Cindy Castro Cindy Castro

Cindy Castro was a student of the University of Fraser Valley.

 Leah Hamby Leah Hamby

Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.

 Navarra Houldin Navarra Houldin

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

 Janelle Jenstad Janelle Jenstad

Janelle Jenstad is a Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Director of The Map of Early Modern London, and Director of Linked Early Modern Drama Online. With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Beatrice Kaethler, she co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old Words, New Tools (Routledge). She has edited John Stow’s A Survey of London (1598 text) for MoEML and is currently editing The Merchant of Venice (with Stephen Wittek) and Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody for DRE. Her articles have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Elizabethan Theatre, Early Modern Literary Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin, Renaissance and Reformation, and The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. She contributed chapters to Approaches to Teaching Othello (MLA); Teaching Early Modern Literature from the Archives (MLA); Institutional Culture in Early Modern England (Brill); Shakespeare, Language, and the Stage (Arden); Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate); New Directions in the Geohumanities (Routledge); Early Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter); Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana); Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (Minnesota); Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies (Routledge); and Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London (Routledge). For more details, see janellejenstad.com.

 Kate McPherson Kate McPherson

Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom, at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.

 Melissa Walter Melissa Walter

Melissa Walter is Associate Professor of English at the University of the Fraser Valley. Her research focuses on early modern English drama and English and European prose fiction. She is the author of The Italian Novella and Shakespeare’s Comic Heroines (U of Toronto, 2019), and co-editor, with Dennis Britton, of Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Authors, Audiences, Digital Technologies (Routledge, 2018). Her work on English theatre and the European novella has appeared in several edited collections, including Transnational Exchange in Early Modern Theater (Ashgate, 2008), and Transnational Mobility in Early Modern Theater (Ashgate, 2012). She has also written about Translation and Identity in the Dialogues in English and Malaiane Languages (Indographies, ed. Jonathan Gil Harris. Palgrave 2012). At the University of the Fraser Valley, she is a lead coordinator of UFV’s Shakespeare and Reconciliation Garden.

 LEMDO Team The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors. University of Victoria https://www.uvic.ca/
A painting of a young boy in a grey shirt holding a basket of different kinds of bread. Evaristo Baschenis’s Boy with a Basket of Bread. 1665. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of Wikimedia. Public Domain.

In the early modern period, the wealthy ate foods such as beef, pork, lamb, veal, venison, and seafood in addition to bread and a few vegetables. However, for the majority of English people, bread was the staple food and the biblical staff of life (Lloyd 37). Most days, commoners in early modern England ate bread and pottage, a thick stew of vegetables, grains, and peas or lentils.

Flour & Substitutes in Baking

The Oxford English Dictionary provides a simple and straightforward definition of bread: A staple food made by mixing flour and water or other liquid (often with yeast or other leavening agent) to form a dough which is then cooked, usually by baking.

In this period in England, bread was made with flour ground from wheat, barley, rye, oats, peas, lentils, and even acorns. Wheat, which was often called corn (a generic term for grain, rather than the maize native to the Americas), was the most desirable grain for bread. But the flour base for bread was a challenge for poorer citizens. If usual grains like wheat or rye were too expensive or scarce, peas and beans were the next best alternatives for creating a dough. Seeds like acorns were also a primary source of their flour base, which they roasted then ground into a paste and baked to produce a traditional flatbread.

Upper-class citizens ate a different type of bread compared to the lower-class. The ideal loaf for upper-class citizens was white and soft, typically called manchet in Tudor England. Poorer people often ate a half-rye loaf called maslin, which is more difficult to digest due to coarser wheat and the harder crust.

Pastry Baking

Pastries were quite popular as well, and savory pastry crusts were often wrapped around meat for wealthier citizens. Gervase Markham’s 1615 The English Housewife offers a traditional pastry recipe that pairs with meat dishes: Of puff paste. Now for the making of puff paste of the best kind, you shall take the finest wheat flour after it hath been a little baked in a pot in the oven, and blend it well with eggs, whites and yolks all together, after the paste is well kneaded, roll out a part thereof as thin as you please, and then spread cold sweet butter over the same, then upon the same butter roll another leaf of the paste as before; and spread it with butter also; and thus roll leaf upon leaf with butter between till it be as thick as you make good: and with it either cover any baked meat, or make paste for venison.(157)

This recipe is quite similar to modern-day croissant recipes, with the layers of butter between each layer of thin dough. It is a classic, multi-use recipe. Markham also discusses adding sugar to the dough later for fruit pies or tarts.

A more affordable recipe that the average citizen would most likely use on a day-to-day basis would be biscuits. Here is a recipe for biscuits used in 1672 by Constance Hall in a handwritten recipe book. This dish was called Cogs Biskett: To make Cogs Biskett, Take 3 pound of fine flower well dry’d, a Ounce of Carraway seeds, 6 spoonefull of suger Double Refin’d, 6 spoonefull of Ale, 6 Eggs, the whites of Two, and wett it with warm Milk 2 peny worth of safforn. lett it Lye to Rise.

Bouchard and Tersigni have an excellent translation of this recipe, and even include how to bake it properly in a modern kitchen.

The Baking Station
Shows the interior of a large kitchen. In the center the pastry chef is removing a pastry from a wood-burning oven. On the right are two workers, one rolling out the dough and the other shaping it into a crust. On the right sits the proprietress accepting money from a woman who has just bought a small pie for the little girl sitting on her arm. All around are food and food-related items - finished cakes and pastries on a table in the foreground, sheaths of grain, cuts of meat and specially shaped pans hanging from the ceiling (Bosse) Abraham Bosse’sThe Pastry Chef. 1634. Printmaking. Folger Digital Collections. (The owner of the image has made the image available for scholarly use via a Creative Commons license.)

We know from Gervase Markham that, during this time, ovens were primarily made from bricks or mud construction, preheated, then used to bake bread. The ideal oven should also be made narrow, square, and easily covered to keep the heat inside.

First, the baker had to build a fire with wood and let it burn to coals. Next, the baker swept the floor of the oven clean from ashes and other debris and made sure the temperature inside was hot. Thermometers were not invented until the 18th century, so in the early modern period, the only way to measure oven temperature was through observation. Lastly, the shaped loaves were placed inside and baked.

It was also important to incorporate things besides an oven in a bake-house, including troughs to knead dough, casks for leaven such as beer, and safes to hold flour, bran or other substitutes. Bakers also needed various meal sieves that could sieve coarse flour to very fine flour and a large table to knead and mold bread.

Bread and Other Food Prices

Food prices were heavily regulated in the early modern period. The following is a list of common foods and their prices in 1599: Bread, ½d (pence) per loaf Beef , ½d per lb Eggs, 3 for 1d Butter, 4d per lb Cheese, ½d per lb Beer, ½d per quart.

For context, there are 12 pence (d) in 1 shilling (s), and 20 shillings in a pound (£). In London, a loaf of wheat bread was to be sold for around 1d depending on its size. To put the prices in even more perspective, in the same year of 1599, the Earl of Nottingham proclaimed a set amount that soldiers could be asked to pay for supper. For foot soldiers, that maximum amount was 3½d out of their 8d a day wage. That supper was mandated to include good wheaten bread and lots of other protein sources necessary to keep the soldiers well-fed (Lloyd 40).

Baking Regulations
Privy Council. The Assize of Bread, 1632, London. Folger Digital Collections. (The Folger Shakespeare Library has made the image available for scholarly use via a Creative Commons license.)

The price and weight of bread were rigorously controlled by local authorities. The Bakers’ Guild held the responsibility of enforcing the Bread Assize which controlled the prices, quality, weight, and types of bread sold in towns and villages. The Assize for Bread began in the 13th Century and lasted until the 18th.

All types of bread were sold for fixed prices for a half loaf or a full loaf. These prices did not change for centuries, but when wheat supplies decreased during a bad harvest for instance, the price then did go up for a smaller loaf of bread. This was why it was so important for regular citizens to improvise their bread baking ingredients by using different ingredients like rye, oats, and acorns.

The Worshipful Company of Bakers notes that the Bakers’ Guild enforced the Bread Assize from a 2-mile radius within London, or with a circumference of 12 miles around it, minus the city of Westminster. This Guild had legal power to enforce the Assize laws and determine fitting punishments for bakers who attempted to evade the regulations: The penalties for more serious offences were on the first occasion for the offender to be dragged on a hurdle through the dirtiest streets of the City with the faulty loaf hanging from his neck. For the second offence he was pilloried for an hour, and if he broke the law a third time, his oven was pulled down and he had to forswear baking for evermore.

Key Print Sources Civitello, Linda. Baking Powder Wars: The Cutthroat Food Fight That Revolutionized Cooking. University of Illinois Press, 2017. Lloyd, Paul S. Food and Identity in England, 1540–1640: Eating to Impress. Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. Markham, Gervase. The English Housewife. Edited by Michael R. Best, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1986. Rubel, William. Bread: A Global History. Edited by Andrew F. Smith, Reaktion Books, 2012.
Key Online Sources Baker’s Company. About us: History. The Worshipful Company of Bakers, 2022. https://bakers.co.uk/. Caton, Mary Anne. Fooles and Fricassees: Food in Shakespeare’s England. Folgerpedia. 1999. https://folgerpedia.folger.edu/Fooles_and_Fricassees:_Food_in_Shakespeare%27s_England (see Pottage & Bread). Tersigni, Elisa and Jack Bouchard. Savory Biscuits from a 17th-Century Recipe. Shakespeare & Beyond, Folger Shakespeare Library, 9 Nov. 2018, https://www.folger.edu/blogs/shakespeare-and-beyond/savory-biscuits-from-a-17th-century-recipe/.
Image Sources Baschenis, Evaristo. Boy with a Basket of Bread. 1665. Wikimedia. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Evaristo_Baschenis_-_Boy_with_a_Basket_of_Bread_-_WGA1404.jpg. Bosse, Abraham. The Pastry Chef. 1634. Folger Digital Collections, https://digitalcollections.folger.edu/img35714. Privy Council. The Assize of Bread. London: William Stansby, 1632. Folger Digital Collections. https://digitalcollections.folger.edu/img2921.