[Sca-cooks] Scottish food

[johnna holloway]

Johnnae llyn lewis sends greetings:

I have gone back through my files and located
an article on medieval Scotland that those
interested in such things might want to look up.
It's by Peter Yeoman, who is Fife's Regional
Archaeologist. He is the author of Medieval Scotland.
The two introductory paragraphes are below:

Dispelling medieval Scotland's gloom
The modern Scots have tended to look back on
their medieval centuries as a time of unmitigated
misery. It is certainly true that periods of
intermittent warfare, pestilence and famine,
coupled with a climate which was even worse than
today, would not seem like a recipe for a Golden Age.
And yet for Scotland the Middle Ages were in fact a
period of growth; growth in towns, in trade, and in
standards of living.

Scotland embraced urbanism from a standing start in
the early 12th century, through the granting of `burgh'
status by David I and his successors to numerous
settlements such as Edinburgh and Glasgow, Stirling,
Berwick, Perth, and St Andrews; and archaeology has
shown that the creation of burghs was rapid and successful.
Urbanism acted as a spur to the spread of innovation and
the creation of a mercantile trading economy, which in
turn stimulated an increase in agricultural production
and fundamentally altered the subsistence way of life
that had formerly prevailed throughout much of the country.

Find the rest of the article at:
http://www.britarch.ac.uk/ba/ba11/BA11FEAT.HTML

This was found at Council for British Archaeology
Internet Information Service
** the gateway to British archaeology online **
http://www.britarch.ac.uk/index.html

It's a neat website for a number of reasons.

Johnna Holloway