First English cheese treatise digitized, transcribed

The University of Leeds has digitized a 16th century manuscript that is the earliest known English book about cheese. In fact, it is probably the earliest English-language treatise on a single foodstuff of any kind. The high-resolution scans of the volume and a much more readable pdf transcript are now available to on the university’s website for modern readers to enjoy.

The “pamflyt compiled of Cheese, contayninge the differences, nature, qualities, and goodnes, of the same” was written in the 1580s but it was privately owned for centuries and completely unknown and unpublished when it emerged in a May 2023 auction. It sold for £45,000 ($60,000), acquired by the University of Leeds thanks to a grant from the non-profit Friends of the Nation’s Libraries. The “pamflyt” then joined the university’s library’s extensive Cookery Collection of manuscripts and printed books about food.

The book was hand-written on 112 vellum pages with a gilt-stamped lion rampant on the center of the front and back covers. The lion is likely a heraldic reference to the Fisher family, as the front flyleaf contains a note signed by “Cle[ment] Fyssher”, a member of parliament from Great Packington, Warwickshire, asking a friend that the book be returned to him after perusal. The name of “Walter Bailei”, regius professor of medicine at Oxford and one of Queen Elizabeth I’s physicians, appears on the last page. The third name that appears in the book is “Ed]ward Willughbi” at the head of the flyleaf inscription. The Willoughbys were a family of parliamentarians from Bore Place, Kent.

Whether they or anyone else authored the book is unknown, but Willoughby seems the likeliest candidate of the three because of a mention in the book of the village of Kingsnorth near Ashford in Kent as a center of cheesemaking. Kingsnorth had no reputation for cheeses at all, nor did the county of Kent for that matter, so this suggests the author had special localized knowledge of the area. On the other hand, the work repeatedly references Galen, the 3rd century Greek physician whose writings on anatomy and medicine based on the four humors theory was the foundation of Western medical thought well into the 17th century. As a physician, Bayley was very well-versed in Galen’s writings, and left two of his works to Oxford in his will. The treatise also addresses medicinal uses of cheese, including a revolting prescription of Galen’s calling for smearing rancid cheese and bacon fat on the swollen joints of a gout patient so that the skin breaks and the fluids causing the swelling run out.

The manuscript’s elegant secretary hand was transcribed by Ruth Bramley, one of 200 living historians at the 16th century manor house of Kentwell Hall who re-enact the functions and events of the Tudor mansion, creating immersive historical events for visitors to experience. She is a spinner and weaver, but she has become adept at reading 500-year-old handwriting in the course of her work. Another of Kentwell Hall’s living historians has a unique insight into the treatise thanks to her practical experience in Tudor cheese-making.

[Bramley’s] colleague Tamsin Bacchus, who works in the Tudor Dairy at Kentwell, comments, “What warmed my heart towards the author of the Pamflyt is that when he finds conflicting ideas among his learned sources, he turns to his contemporaries who actually know the work: he ‘diligently inquyred of countrey folke, who have experience in theis matters,’ and they settled the argument for him.

“The debate about whether one can eat cheese on certain religious fasting days because of the animal element in the rennet feels surprisingly modern. An alternative suggested was to use fish guts to curdle the milk! It’s also reassuring to find written down what we know from our actual practice in the Kentwell Dairy: that to make a really hard cheese to keep indefinitely (‘Suffolk Thump’) you skim off all the cream. He’s a bit scathing about it, though, calling it ‘the worste kind of cheese, accordinge to our Englishe proverbe, hit is badde cheese when the butter is gone to the market.'”

* This article was originally published here