Anglo-Saxon Bread: Making and meaning
Debby Banham and Martha Bayless

• Saturday 17 June 2017, 2.30PM to 3.20pm
• Free admission
  Booking required
• K/133, King's Manor, Exhibition Square (map)
• No wheelchair access

Event details

We all eat bread, but do we think about it or just take it for granted? Historians Martha Bayless and Debby Banham have formed the Early English Bread Project to investigate England's earliest bread: what it was made of, how it was made, and what people thought about it. King Alfred may not have burned any cakes, but, if he had, Debby and Martha know what kind they would have been.

Join Debby of the University of Cambridge and Martha of the University of Oregon, USA as they show how to make the surprisingly simple and tasty earliest kinds of English bread, as well as the bread of the saints and the bread of kings. They’ll explain how to tell the breads apart, what they meant, and how bread shaped the course of England. 

About the speakers

Dr Debby Banham is a historian of medieval England, who teaches in the universities of Cambridge and London. Her main interests are in food production, diet and medicine, with a sideline in monastic sign language. She has published Anglo-Saxon Farms and Farming with Rosamond Faith (Oxford University Press, 2014), Food and Drink in Anglo-Saxon England (Tempus, 2004), and ‘Monasteriales indicia’: The Old English Monastic Sign Language (Anglo-Saxon Books, 1990).

Dr Martha Bayless studies medieval popular culture, including games, play, humour, and food.  She is Professor at the University of Oregon, USA and the author of Sin and Filth in Medieval Culture and Parody in the Middle Ages. With Debby Banham, she is part of the Early English Bread Project, with a blog and recipes at Earlybread.wordpress.com and @earlybread on Twitter.

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