The English cream tea: a question of preservation

This post has an odd genesis, principally owed to the sometime blogger the Naked Philologist, and though she has sadly shut up shop, nonetheless this is for her. When she was planning to be in the UK the summer before last, one of the plans she had of which I got to be part was an extensive sampling of the cream teas of England, and the reason for this was that Cornish clotted cream is now a protected designation of origin and because the stuff is so perishable it’s just not shipped outside the UK.¹ This much I learnt, rapidly, from Wikipedia, but in doing so I came upon a few sentences that have an unexpected amount to do with the blog’s usual fodder. At the time of writing that text is still there, and it goes like this, stripped of citations because we’ll come to them in a minute:

It has long been disputed whether clotted cream originated in Devon or Cornwall, and which county makes it the best. There is evidence that the monks of Tavistock Abbey were making clotted cream in the early 1300s. After their abbey had been ransacked by Vikings in 997 AD, the monks rebuilt it with the help of Ordulf, Earl of Devon. Local workers were drafted in to help with the repairs, and the monks rewarded them with bread, clotted cream and strawberry preserves.

The tenth-century bit of this immediately struck me as unlikely, you’re probably not surprised to hear. Initially I just thought the idea of strawberry preserves more or less ruled it out, but investigation (by which I mean asking people at seminars) has made this seem less definite. The estimable Magistra et Mater owns a copy of Ann Hagen’s Anglo-Saxon Food and Drink, from which she derives some of the expertise that let her write posts on the early medieval jam tart, and from it she kindly informs me:

On pp. 51-52, she says that some of the leechbooks mention strawberries (streawbergan) and Aelfric Bata translates “fragaria” as “streabariye”; they’re also mentioned by a tenth-century Irish source. There’s archaeological evidence for strawberries being cultivated in Wessex, and remains found from a C9 context in Gloucester (FJ Green, Archaeo-physika 8 (1979), 39). In terms of dried fruit, Hagen (p. 53) just mentions Bede’s will leaving dried prunes and raisins.²

This doesn’t really get us towards preserves as such. Without sugar, these couldn’t have been the kind of preserves we think of, i. e. jam, but I also spoke to Dr Caroline Goodson about late Roman practice and established that fruit was sometimes stored under honey, and I wonder if whether you filled a stoneware jar half with strawberries, perhaps pulped, and half with honey and stoppered it well, whether you wouldn’t have something that would last a few months that could be spread on bread. Anyway, it’s not quite possible to rule out this story on intrinsic grounds, I think. So, never mind the jam, what about the sauce, I mean source?

The still house of the old abbey of SS Mary & Rumon Tavistock, restored 1884. They distilled herbs here, supposedly, it’s as thematically close as I can get… Image from Wikimedia Commons.

Well, the Wikipedia article links, then and still for now, to a 2004 article on the BBC news website, entitled, “Ancient roots of cream tea discovered”. This is a masterpiece of poor attribution. The key phrases are these, with unnecessary paragraph breaks between every sentence removed:

Historians in Devon have unearthed evidence which they claim proves the traditional cream tea originated in the county some 1,000 years ago. Local historians have been studying ancient manuscripts as part of research leading up to next year’s 900th anniversary of the granting of Tavistock’s Royal Charter by King Henry I in 1105. After piecing together fragments of manuscripts, they have discovered that the monks of Tavistock’s Benedictine Abbey could have created the famous dish to reward workers who helped to restore the building. The Abbey was established in the 10th Century, but was plundered and badly damaged by Vikings in 997 AD. The task of restoring the Abbey was undertaken by Ordulf, Earl of Devon whose father had been responsible for establishing the Abbey. Ordulf was helped by local workers who the monks fed with bread, clotted cream and strawberry preserves.

This is just no help, really. Who are these ‘local historians’? They are never named, and neither are the ‘ancient manuscripts’ whose ‘fragments’ are at issue. Nor, even, is the author of the story. This is presumably because really the article was a puff piece for the 2004 Tavistock Food and Drink Festival. Unfortunately, as this surprisingly sharp little page on the subject observes, it has subsequently become the source for all claims of Devon developing the cream tea before Cornwall, something some people would obviously like to believe. There it might rest, but the source of this is still a question, and it’s more interesting than it appears when one digs into it. I did this by fetching my copy of H. P. R. Finberg’s Tavistock Abbey off the shelf, as doubtless you have yours too by now, and finding there what is subsequently confirmed by Simon Keynes’s page for the abbey on the Kemble website and the article by Finberg which that points to.³ That is, that the refoundation of the abbey is referred to in two documents, a charter of King Æthelred the Unready confirming its endowment, known only through a record that it had been seen and confirmed genuine in the reign of Edward III, and a narrative of the foundation, also written with sight of that charter which it partly reprises. Both of these are known from the probably-fifteenth-century cartulary of the abbey, and that’s where the fun really starts.

Remains of the cloister arches from Tavistock Abbey, from Wikimedia Commons

The documents of the abbey went to the dukes of Bedford at the dissolution of the monasteries, but as early as 1755 (when their archives were catalogued) the cartulary was no longer among them. Finberg wrote his history of the abbey working among the muniments of the dukes, but the cartulary was not available to him.⁴ Its location is not known today. Extracts from it were printed, however, in a seventeenth-century work, the Monasticon Anglicanum of Sir William Dugdale, and in an English version of it that sits on the quick reference shelves in the Institute of Historical Research, so I had a look.⁵ Sure enough, the foundation narrative is there: one Ordgar has a vision on three successive nights in which an angel bids him found a minster and so he does, but then come the Vikings before the work is complete, he has other things to do defending the realm and the work has eventually to be resumed by his son Ordulf Ealdorman of Cornwall later in the reign of Æthelred (who was Ordulf’s nephew, in fact, and Ordgar’s grandson), leading to the charter, which Dugdale then gave in its Edward III version, also from the cartulary. But the extract as printed stops with the charter: it does not describe the rebuilding, or whatever the monks might have put on the table for the labourers.

Engraving of William Dugdale in 1656 by Wenceslas Hollar, Dugdale being the last person who certainly saw the Tavistock cartulary. Is it in that pile behind him? Argh, not to know! Image from Wikimedia Commons

So, Dugdale is not the source, and that’s the real interest here. The source must be another version of the foundation legend, and if we can take the BBC’s mention of `ancient manuscripts’ seriously and if they know what `manuscript’, i. e. manu scripta, ‘written by hand’ means, not a printed one. I really don’t want to put too much weight on any part of this, neither the unsigned BBC article, the `local historians’ it doesn’t name, nor the fifteenth-century narrative of late-tenth-century events it may be using, but where is it getting that narrative from if it be using it? Because if, just by chance, these `fragments’ are in fact the actual missing cartulary or parts thereof, I think there are some people who might like to know!

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1. I think we agreed that the best we found overall was in the Abbey Tea Rooms, Glastonbury, should you be as interested as we were.

2. Full reference: Ann Hagen, Anglo-Saxon Food and Drink (Hockwold cum Wilton 2006).

3. H. P. R. Finberg, Tavistock Abbey: a study in the social and economic history of Devon (Cambridge 1951); Simon Keynes, “Tavistock”, in Kemble: the Anglo-Saxon Charters website, http://www.kemble.asnc.cam.ac.uk/node/135, last modified October 2011 as of 20 October 2013; Finberg, “Some Early Tavistock Charters”, in English Historical Review Vol. 62 (Oxford 1947), pp. 352-377, here esp. pp. 352-353; also Finberg, “The House of Ordgar and the Foundation of Tavistock Abbey”, ibid. Vol. 58 (Oxford 1943), pp. 190-201.

4. Finberg, Tavistock Abbey, pp. 294-295, lists his sources at the dukes’ seat of Woburn Abbey; they include two other cartularies of the abbey (one of which he thought earlier, see his “Some Early Tavistock Charters”, pp. 294-295) but not the one from which this story comes.

5. Roger Dodsworth & William Dugdale, Monasticon anglicanum, sive, Pandectæ cœnobiorum, a primordiis ad eorum usque dissolutionem, ex mss. codd. ad monasteria olim pertinentibus (London 1655-1673), 3 vols, and John Stevens, The history of the antient abbey, monasteries, hospitals, cathedral and collegiate churches: being two additional volumes to Sir William Dugdale’s Monasticon anglicanum (London 1722-1723), 2 vols, all transl. and augmented by John Caley, Henry Ellis & the Rev. Bulkeley Bandinel as Monasticon anglicanum: a history of the abbies and other monasteries, hospitals, frieries, and cathedral and collegiate churches, with their dependencies, in England and Wales; also of all such Scotch, Irish, and French monasteries, as were in any manner connected with religious houses in England (London 1817-1830), 6 vols in 8, covering Tavistock in II pp. 489-505 of the translation and giving the “Fundationis historiae (ex cartulario de Tavistok penes Joh. Maynard armigerum, fol. I)” pp. 494-495 and the Edward III inspeximus pp. 495-496.