SC - Nobility and Feasts

[Bronwynmgn at aol.com]

In a message dated 10/31/98 1:09:53 AM Eastern Standard Time,
pagedgrt at mediaone.net writes:

<< Do you not have any imagination, wear is your creativity. Just because it
is not
 on paper does not mean it has not happened before. >>

Imagination and creativity are fine - but when working on something with a
historical basis it needs to be informed creativity.  It's not history to
imagine that a medieval noble would eat an eagle and use a modern ethnic
recipe to cook it - or make up a recipe, and then call it a medieval dish.  We
have lists of birds that were eaten and pages and pages of recipes as to how
they were cooked.  Using that information means that we are recreating history
- - and taking a recipe for, say, peacock, and using it to cook a chicken
because you can't get peacock, and chicken was another medievally available
bird, would be better history that using a 14th century recipe for peacock to
cook a turkey, which didn't hit Europe until the 16th century.  
And, as I've said before,  there is no way to prove it happened before if it
wasn't recorded somehow.  You can imagine or speculate that it did, and if you
basis your speculation on available historical data then your speculation is
more likely to be true, but it is still only a speculation, and not history. 
<<Is not history a part of imagination or guess work. >>
Informed guesswork, yes, working from the existing knowledge and extrapolating
the possibilities from there.  Informed imagination, yes, but to a lesser
degree.  The more details you make up, the less likely the whole is to be
historically accurate.  Making something up because it sounds logical to
modern ears is neither.

<< If it was not for the poor working slobs them there would be no and I mean
NO nobility.  You would have to do your own dishes. >>

Being nobility doesn't only mean that you have other people to do your work.
Lots of nobles wrote books on things like hunting, including the care of
hounds and horses and such.  Certainly we today look at the care of animals as
servant's work.  But the noble needed to know how to do that work in order to
instruct and supervise his servants, and that means it's very likely that he'd
learned to do it by doing it.  Being noble also means being born into a noble
family, owning land, having a hereditary office in the king's court (many of
which were serving positions, such as helping him get dressed or get ready for
bed).

Brangwayna Morgan
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