There are a number of ways to test the temperature of your oven. Traditionally many Devon ovens incorporated a small ‘tell stone’ that changed colour as the oven approached bread-baking heat. If you lack the correct geological feature, however, you can throw a small handful of flour at the roof of the oven. If it sparks on contact you have reached

Many widows turned to brewing as a way of making a living. You really didn’t need very much to set yourself up as an alehouse. A bench outside provided the only customer accommodation necessary. When the night watch in Shakespeare’s play Much Ado about Nothing say that they will ‘sit upon the bench til two’, they are referring to just such an

A little practical thought quickly points out that nothing disguises the taste of bad meat, that spices were considerably more expensive than a new fresh piece of meat, and that rotten meat makes you sick regardless of its taste. If received wisdom was wrong and food was not highly spiced for disguising taste, was it highly spiced at all? Such

In his will of 1588, William Lane of Chadwell, Essex, listed two lockram shirts (coarse, heavyweight), one ‘holland’ shirt (fine weight and bleached white) and his ‘marrying shirt’, which presumably was of the best quality and loaded with sentimental significance.

The fashionable male walk maintained a small distance between the legs with the weight well back and the buttocks tight, body shapes that work well with the more elaborate upperstocks and trunk hose of the period, giving room to the codpiece and holding the shoulders open and broad. The extreme masculinity of this style of movement made it wholly

The hose that accompanied these early doublets were full length from waist to toe. All around the top, at the waistline, was a row of paired holes that allowed the hose to be tied to the doublet as tightly or loosely as you required. There is something of an art to ‘trussing’. A lovely neat look where the two garments join perfectly all round is

Henry VIII famously had a brand-new bathhouse built for him at Hampton Court, along with a steam bath at Richmond Palace, facilities that his daughter Elizabeth is recorded as having enjoyed regularly.

During Lent, or upon the weekly fasting days of Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, the next foods would be fish. The medical profession, acknowledging that this was both your Christian and patriotic duty, grudgingly accepted that fish had to be eaten at this point, but grumbled that it was not as healthy as meat – the medical ideas, after all,

Sir Thomas Elyot, in his Castel of Helth, finally concluded: ‘I thynke breakfastes necessary in this realme.’ He was refuting more ancient advice that claimed healthy adult men should wait until dinner. Small children, pregnant women, breastfeeding mothers and the sick had been granted the indulgence of breakfast in medieval advice, but it is clear