Mike B.

The first time ordinary English people could afford to eat meat, Parliament passed a law to stop them. In 1256 the harvest workers on one Norfolk manor were fed a diet that was 4% meat by value. Most of the rest was bread. The deer belonged to the king, the rabbits to the lord, and the peasant to the pottage. Then the Black Death killed half the country. Suddenly there were more fields than hands. The survivors could name their price, and they named it in beef. 1351: wages are frozen by law at their level before the plague. Asking for more is a crime, and every village is ordered to build a set of stocks for those who do. 1361: a labourer who leaves his lord for better pay is to be branded on the forehead with an F, for falsehood. 1363: a statute lays down what a servant may eat. Meat or fish once a day and no more. It held for 30 years. In June 1381 the ploughmen marched on London, took the Tower, and beheaded the Archbishop of Canterbury. Wat Tyler put their demands to the king in person. An end to serfdom. And every park, warren, river and wood in England thrown open, so that a poor man might take game the same as a rich one. At St Albans the rebels walked into the abbot's private warren, caught a rabbit, and tied it to the town pillory, as notice that the game was now theirs. Tyler was stabbed at the meeting. The king, who was 14, took back every promise. Villeins you are, he told them, and villeins you shall remain. 9 years later came the reply to the rabbit. 1390: nobody worth under 40 shillings a year may keep a hunting dog, a ferret or a net, on pain of a year in prison. Parliament wrote its reasoning into the preamble. Labourers had been seen out hunting on holy days like gentlemen, and were using the hunts as cover to meet and plot another rising. There were plenty of deer. What could not be tolerated was a ploughman with a haunch of venison, because a man who can feed himself can afford to say no. The laws failed. Hands were too scarce, and by 1424 that same Norfolk manor was feeding its harvesters 28% meat. The instinct behind the laws has never failed once. Whenever the poor get their hands on meat, somebody important discovers a reason they should not have it. The king's pleasure. The social order. Their cholesterol. The climate. The reason is replaced every century. The people giving it have never once missed a steak.