Over a decade ago, conservationists working in the early-medieval St Cadoc’s Church at Llancarfan in South Wales painstakingly chipped away 27 layers of paint and whitewash to uncover extraordinary vivid images of the Seven Deadly Sins. First to be unveiled was “Gula”: Gluttony or Greed, showing a devil indulgently pouring ale over the head of a corpulent figure with a monastic hairdo who is guzzling from a bowl. It is thought that the images gave moral guidance to illiterate parishioners from the 15th century, until they were whitewashed by Protestants, keen to hide Catholic decoration and ideas.
Has concern for gluttony been similarly whitewashed? As one of the Seven, it was considered by some theologians (among them St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas) as deadly enough to be categorised into five different subdivisions. The glutton ate or drank food that was too expensive or too fussily prepared; or (the one we would recognise today) simply ate too much food. Eating at an inappropriate time or too eagerly were also gluttonous. “The sin of the mouth”, as it was also known, was a sin against God because it might lead the sinner into worse – particularly lust. Just look what happened to Adam with that apple, cautioned Wulfstan, Archbishop of York in pre-Norman England. It was also seen as a sin against the self; corpulence due to immoderate eating and drinking was an abuse of the God-given body.
Gluttony – or rather the accusation of it – was also useful for social control. In pre-Reformation English society rules about what and how much you could eat were carefully enforced. How many different dishes you might eat from was tightly aligned to social – as well as spiritual – status. It’s unlikely that the ordinary parishioners of Llancarfan – farmers, workers, monks – who could only just afford bread, vegetables and cheese had much opportunity for gluttony. In the upper echelons, however, there were plenty of occasions for over-indulgence and the disapproval of it. Gerald of Wales was shocked to be served 16 dishes at Christ Church in Canterbury in 1179. Chaucer’s well-fed Monk in the Canterbury Tales was partial to roast swan – a detail suggesting that Chaucer had in mind the first of Aquinas’s categories of gluttony; food that is too costly.
Aside from its spiritual significance, policing overconsumption was one means of husbanding limited resources. The ecclesiastical year rigidly reinforced the needs of the agricultural year, through strict rules around feasting and fasting. Harvest, Christmas and Easter coincided with times that livestock and wild game were well-fed and plentiful. The Lenten prohibition on meat and dairy was essential to keep people from eating both wild and farmyard animals, and their milk, whilst they were engaged in the business of reproducing and feeding their own young; the food for the rest of the year.
This changed with the Reformation, and perhaps more crucially, a century or so later, with the “agricultural revolution”. New techniques and fodder crops fed livestock over the winter so that they were not competing with humans for the same grain in the leanest, post-Christmas months. Food became more plentiful. Greed was recast as a necessity to the modern economic state. In his controversial (and never fully understood) “Fable of the Bees” of the early 18th century, Bernard Mandeville – part satirist, part economist – suggested that private vices fuelled the engine of the economy and therefore produced public benefits.
Later 18th-century cartoons of corpulent Brits celebrated their meat-laden tables and prodigious appetites – particularly in contrast to those feeble, vegetable-fed (and Catholic) Frenchies. At the same time, the populations of England, Scotland, Wales and, in particular, Ireland were rocketing. Political and ecclesiastical attention was directed more towards getting the increasing numbers of the poor enough food; or for finding reasons to blame them for their hunger, depending on political outlook.
The image of Gula at Llancarfan is an appropriate one, in many ways. In spite of whitewashing the meaning of it, gluttony still lurks in the fabric of our society. Today we allow gluttony one meaning – of eating immoderately. We also care less about it – or say we do. Contemporary churches are, understandably, more concerned with making meals welcoming and inclusive than of frowning at parishioners enjoying overindulgence. As Mandeville hinted 300 years ago, our economy needs gluttony. The business model of restaurants relies on enough customers to care about what Aquinas might think of as over-fussy or expensive foods. The food industry is predicated on seasonal feasts, and the diet industry depends on our guilt and regret about them.
“Gluttony? I’m all for it,” said a friend of mine (the son of a vicar) as we tucked into the cheese course of a Christmas get-together. I agree with him. We need the gluttonous joy of feasts: the crucial punctuation of our year which brings us together as families and communities. But we need the counterbalance, too. The Lenten fast gives the natural and agricultural world, as well as the human body, space to recover.
Pen Vogler is the author of Stuffed: A History of Good Food and Hard Times in Britain (Atlantic Books, £22)
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