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The Chicken, the Cookshop and the Cathedral

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Amelia Doherty considers the importance of chickens to the medieval food economy, particularly for the poor. Caring for them was woman’s work, and studying them opens up insights into the lives of working-class women.     Chickens are particularly interesting to me, but it was about how they are intertwined with womanhood and class that really drew me in. Working-class women don’ t leave behind evidence in the same way as upper-class men. They’re primarily illiterate in medieval Europe, if not entirely so, and even if they’re not, they’re not wasting their paper on things like chicken-keeping. This means that most of our understanding of caring for chickens comes from male writing, even though most of the people that do the labour of it are women.  Perceptions of chickens are rarely present compared to other animals such as horses or dogs or sheep, and this is because they’re not worth very much. They are described as the most inferior of birds by Bartholomew the En...
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Spaghetti, Sardines and Semolina: Changes in the Food Supply on the Home Front 1914 to 1918

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Helen George explains the ways in which rationing influenced how people shopped and what they ate during the First World War in this fascinating post based on a talk she gave at the WESWWHN Conference on Historical Perspectives on Women and Food in 2025.   Ration cards, powdered eggs, long queues for food: they usually conjure up visions of the Second World War Home Front. However, through my research into home life during the First World War I have found that they were very much part of daily toil a generation earlier. Between 1914 and 1918 submarine warfare decimated merchant shipping, leaving import-dependent Britain dangerously short of food. What of the young wives and mothers struggling to feed their families and manage household budgets as their menfolk joined the Armed Services? They had to change their shopping practices, manage their homes with fewer or no domestic servants, cope with acute food shortages, encourage their families to try new foods and, during the last yea...
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A Mysterious Death: Maud Davies, Pioneering Sociologist

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Jane Howells raises some intriguing questions about the tragic death of pioneering sociologist, Maud Davies, in 1913.   Life in an English Village was published in 1909. Subtitled An Economic and Historical Survey of the Parish of Corsley in Wiltshire, this pioneering study was written by Maud Frances Davies, inspired by Sidney and Beatrice Webb when she was a student at the London School of Economics. John Chandler of the Hobnob Press had long planned to produce a reprint of Maud’s book, and invited me to write a substantial new introduction about Maud. [1] This was published in 2013, on the centenary of the author's death. Maud was born in London in 1876. In 1897 the family bought Corsley House, west of Warminster in Wiltshire. Her father, Byam Davies, became an inspector of Poor Law schools for the Local Government Board. Children in workhouses increasingly attended local elementary schools, an improvement Davies had recommended from some of his earliest reports. It is very ...
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