The Picnic Chronicles, Vol. IV: The Medieval Hunt Feast — Picnics for the Powerful
Part of The Picnic Chronicles — a journey through the entire human history of gathering, feasting, and eating outdoors. From ancient civilisations to the present day, this series traces the one instinct that has never changed: the urge to share food somewhere beautiful, with the people you love. Browse the full series below.
The word "picnic" does not exist yet.
We are somewhere in medieval England — let's say the early 1300s, a crisp October morning in a royal forest that stretches for miles in every direction. The frost is still on the bracken. The horses are standing in a wicker corral. The hounds are drinking from a stream. And on the grass of a woodland clearing, a feast is already being laid out.
Not a modest feast. Not a packed lunch. A proper spread: cold game from yesterday's hunt, joints of roasted meat, manchet bread — the finest white bread, made from the most painstakingly sifted flour, reserved exclusively for the lord — wine cooling in clay pots in a nearby spring, and ale for everyone else. Three tables, laid in order of rank: the lord and his closest companions at the large table, the principal huntsmen at a smaller one, and the valets, pages, and servants at a cloth spread directly on the grass.
The word "picnic" does not exist. But this is, beyond any reasonable argument, a picnic.
Why Hunting Mattered So Much
To understand the medieval hunt feast, you first have to understand what hunting meant in medieval England — which is to say, you have to understand that it was about almost everything except the deer.
It was about power. It was about land. It was about who you were and how you demonstrated it in a world that had almost no other public spectacle to speak of.
After the Norman Conquest of 1066, William the Conqueror did something that made him genuinely, lastingly unpopular: he appropriated vast tracts of English land as royal forest. Not forest in the ecological sense — forest was a legal term for land reserved for royal hunting, regardless of whether it contained trees. It could encompass moorland, heathland, farmland, whole villages. The New Forest was created in this way in 1079, by royal decree, at enormous human cost to the people displaced.
The Forest Laws that followed were savage by any measure. Commoners who had previously shared the right to hunt, gather wood, fish, and pasture animals on common land suddenly found themselves excluded from all of it. The right to hunt was now reserved for the very top of the social order. Anyone else was, by definition, poaching. Punishments ranged from crippling fines to blinding, mutilation, and — in the early years — death.
By 1217, the death penalty for poaching had been abolished and the Charter of the Forest had restored some rights to commoners — the right to gather wood and honey, to fish, to cut peat. But the right to hunt remained the exclusive preserve of the nobility throughout the medieval period. And that exclusivity was, entirely by design, the point.
To hunt was to announce, without saying a word, that you were someone who mattered.
The Assembly: Where the Picnic Begins
The structure of the great medieval hunt was elaborate — almost theatrical in its choreography. There were eight recognised stages to a proper par force hunt: the quest, the assembly, the relays, the moving, the chase, the baying, the unmaking, and the curée. Every one of them had its own precise terminology, its own protocols, its own expectations.
But it is the second stage — the assembly — that interests us most.
Before the hunt could begin in earnest, the hunting party gathered. Early morning. A forest clearing, or a designated meeting place. The chief huntsman presented his findings to the lord: tracks he'd followed before dawn, droppings he'd collected and laid out on a cloth for examination, evidence of where a good hart had been overnight. The lord and his party examined the evidence. A plan was agreed. And while all of this happened, food was served.
Gaston III, Count of Foix — known as Gaston Fébus, one of the greatest huntsmen of the medieval world and author of the Livre de Chasse (Book of the Hunt, written 1387–1389) — describes the assembly in meticulous and wonderful detail. The hunting party gathers in the early morning. A meal of cold game, bread, and wine constitutes a breakfast — though that word doesn't exist yet either. Bread marks each place setting. Diners eat with hands and knife — forks are not used. There is considerable wine, some of it cooling in terra cotta vessels in a nearby spring.
The horses are in a wicker corral. The dogs are drinking in the stream. Three groups sit according to rank: the lord and his attendants at the large table, principal hunters at a smaller table, the valets and pages at a cloth on the grass.
A cloth. On the grass. In a forest clearing. With cold game, bread, and wine.
Tell me that is not a picnic.
Gaston Fébus's Livre de Chasse became so influential that the hunt assembly evolved into a recognised concept — the repas de la chasse, the hunt meal, eaten at a predetermined outdoor location before or during the hunt. From this deliberately arranged outdoor feast in the forest, a tradition grew. And it mattered because this is where, for the first time in the written historical record, we have detailed, first-person evidence of people arranging to eat together outdoors, with some care and ceremony, not at a religious festival, not beside a tomb, not in a Roman garden — but simply because they were there, in the open air, and it was a good time to eat.
The Forest as Theatre
The medieval hunt was not simply a way of obtaining meat. It was the primary leisure activity of the aristocracy, and it was staged as carefully as any court entertainment.
Every detail was considered. Costumes for the hunt were specially made — Edward III of England spent approximately £80 a year (something in the region of £49,000 in today's money) just on keeping his pack of hunting hounds, and favourite dogs might wear silver collars. The right terminology was a marker of class: every animal to be hunted had its own specific terms for every year of its life, every body part, every stage of the chase, every aspect of the hound's behaviour. To know the terminology was to announce your breeding. Sir Thomas Malory, in Le Morte d'Arthur, has a character declare that all gentlemen who bear old coats of arms ought to honour the huntsman Sir Tristram for establishing the proper terms, through which all men of respect may distinguish a gentleman from a yeoman and a yeoman from a villein.
Not knowing the right word for a male deer in its third year was, in medieval aristocratic society, roughly equivalent to using the wrong fork at a Victorian dinner party.
The kill itself — the unmaking of the deer, the ritual dissection of the carcass — was governed by precise ceremonial rules. Different body parts were allocated to people of different rank. The lord received the finest cuts. The huntsmen received specific portions as a recognised reward. The hounds received the curée — their share of the carcass, given in a formal ceremony that was considered essential both as reward and as training, to ensure they associated their effort with their due. Even the dogs had their portion dictated by protocol.
This was not merely eating. It was a performance of the social order, enacted in the open air, in a forest, with the smell of woodsmoke and autumn and fresh-killed game.
What They Actually Ate
The medieval table — outdoors or in — was profoundly hierarchical in its contents as much as its seating.
At the very top, the food was extraordinary. A feast given by the Archbishop of York at his installation during the reign of Edward IV consumed, among other things: 300 quarters of wheat, 300 tonnes of ale, 100 tonnes of wine, 1,000 sheep, 104 oxen, 304 calves, 2,000 geese, 1,000 capons, 400 swans, 104 peacocks, and 1,500 hot venison pasties. The scale of this is almost incomprehensible. The planning took months. The point, of course, was precisely that — the point was the scale, the abundance, the demonstration that this household could marshal these resources. The feast as proof of power.
For the aristocracy in the field, the portable outdoor feast was rather more manageable — cold game, manchet bread, wine, ale — but no less deliberately curated.
Manchet bread deserves a moment. This was the finest bread available in medieval England: made from wheat flour of such extraordinary whiteness and refinement that it required enormous labour to produce. It was known as the lord's bread because the small rolls — weighing only around 200 grams — were so costly to make that only the lord received one. To be served manchet at a meal was to know exactly where you sat in the social order.
Pottage was the daily reality for everyone else: a thick stew of grains, legumes, and vegetables, kept over the fire, added to over days, endlessly varied depending on what was available. The wealthy enriched theirs with saffron, ginger, and exotic meats. The poor made do with oats, peas, and whatever the hedgerow offered. It was, in one form or another, what almost everyone ate almost every day.
And then there was the game. Deer, wild boar, hare, rabbit, pheasant, partridge — the prestige foods of the medieval world, accessible only to those with the right to hunt. To eat venison at a feast was not merely to enjoy good meat. It was to participate in a system of power that controlled who could obtain it.
Hippocras — a spiced wine sweetened with honey and flavoured with cinnamon, ginger, cardamom, and pepper — was the fine wine of the medieval feast, served warm and fragrant, primarily to the higher tables. The lower tables drank ale. The gap between the two drinks was as legible as the gap between the tables themselves.
Maying: When Everyone Got a Picnic
The hunting feast was, by definition, for the few. But medieval England had its own great tradition of outdoor communal eating that belonged to everyone — and it happened every May.
On the first day of May, something remarkable occurred across the length of England. Before dawn, villagers rose and went out. Not to work — to gather. They walked into the meadows and woods and gathered blossoming flowers and branches: hawthorn, woodbine, birch, sycamore. They wove them into garlands and wreaths. They decorated their homes and the village well. A maypole went up on the green.
And then they feasted outdoors, together, in the field.
This was going a-Maying — a tradition rooted partly in the ancient Roman festival of Floralia, partly in the Celtic Beltane celebration of the summer's opening, and wholly in the human desire to mark the turning of the season with food and company in the open air. Chaucer describes it in The Knight's Tale. Malory has Queen Guinevere and her court ride out on May morning to gather flowers and make garlands. The feast that followed was communal, seasonal, and entirely democratic — the one day of the year when the distinction between the lord's table and the cloth on the grass briefly, joyfully, collapsed.
The medieval calendar was punctuated with outdoor feasts of this kind — Whitsunday, Rogation Sunday, harvest festivals, saints' days — each one an occasion to gather outside, eat together, and mark time passing. The Church calendar shaped the year and its communal eating rhythms as profoundly as the agricultural one.
What this tells us is something important: the outdoor feast was not only a privilege of power in medieval England. It was also a form of communal belonging, as ancient and as necessary as the seasons themselves.
The Illuminated Feast: The Très Riches Heures
If you want to see what the medieval outdoor world looked like — really looked like, in its colours and textures and particular quality of light — there is one manuscript you must find.
The Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry was painted between approximately 1412 and 1416 by three Flemish brothers — Paul, Herman, and Jean de Limbourg — for their patron Jean, Duke of Berry, a man of extraordinary wealth and a passion for beautiful things. It is a Book of Hours — a devotional calendar — and it contains some of the most vivid depictions of medieval life ever committed to paint.
The calendar pages illustrate each month of the year with a full-page scene. January shows a grand indoor New Year's feast. February shows peasants warming themselves by a fire, with — famously — a lack of undergarments that the editors of Life magazine felt compelled to retouch when they published it in 1948. April shows a young couple exchanging rings in an outdoor garden. May shows young nobles riding out in a joyful procession, garlanded with green branches, celebrating the season.
The hunting scenes are extraordinary: figures in rich costume on horseback, hounds streaming across the landscape, forests that feel genuinely alive. The detail is meticulous. The light is clear and particular, like early autumn in the countryside — which, in Somerset terms, feels deeply familiar.
The Très Riches Heures is publicly available via the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Musée Condé in Chantilly. The calendar pages are among the most reproduced images in the history of art, and they are free to view in high resolution online. If you've never spent an hour with them, I cannot recommend it strongly enough. Every page is a window into a vanished world that is, in its seasonal rhythms and outdoor gathering instincts, surprisingly close to our own.
The Cloth on the Grass
Let me bring this back to where we started.
A woodland clearing. A crisp October morning. Cold game, manchet bread, wine cooling in a spring. Three groups seated according to rank — the lord at the large table, the huntsmen at the smaller one, the servants at a cloth on the grass.
The word "picnic" is still 350 years away from existing. But the thing itself is here, in full and recognisable form: food carried to a chosen spot outdoors, laid out with some degree of care and ceremony, shared in a clearing among people who are there together, in the open air, for the pleasure and purpose of the occasion.
The medieval hunt feast is not the democratised picnic — that comes much later, with the railways and the Victorian hamper. This is the picnic as theatre of power, performance of status, and pleasure of the elite. It is exclusive and hierarchical and built on a legal apparatus of staggering brutality toward those who were excluded from it.
And yet. Strip away the forest law and the silver dog collars and the argument about whose body part of the deer belongs to which rank of huntsman, and what you have is this:
People, outside, eating together, in the fresh air of an autumn morning, with the light coming through the trees.
The instinct is the same one that sent the Egyptians across the Nile to feast beside their dead. The same one that had the Romans angle their dining rooms toward the garden view. The same one that made the Greeks fling wine dregs at a bronze disc and call it a dinner party.
It has never changed. Only the social codes around it have shifted — and they will shift again.
Where to Go
The Morgan Library & Museum in New York holds one of the finest copies of Gaston Fébus's Livre de Chasse and has previously mounted extraordinary exhibitions on medieval hunting manuscripts. Their online collection is free to explore: themorgan.org
The Bibliothèque nationale de France holds the original manuscript of the Livre de Chasse (MS fr. 616) and has high-resolution images available online: gallica.bnf.fr
The Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry in full: search the Musée Condé collection via the BnF Gallica digital library. Every calendar page is available in extraordinary detail, free.
Glastonbury Abbey, Somerset — fifteen minutes from Evercreech — gives you the ruins of one of the most powerful medieval monasteries in England, set in 36 acres of grounds. By the 14th century it was one of the richest abbeys in the country. Walk around it on a winter morning and feel the weight of medieval Somerset under your feet.
King John's Hunting Lodge in Axbridge, Somerset — a perfectly preserved late medieval timber-framed building that gives you a genuine physical sense of what the domestic world of the medieval merchant class looked like. Free to enter. Quietly extraordinary.
Next in The Picnic Chronicles: The Renaissance & The Fête Champêtre — where the outdoor feast stops being about power and starts being about beauty, the pastoral ideal takes hold, and a Frenchman paints a picture that will scandalise Paris four hundred years later.
With love, Gemma x The Duchess of Picnics www.gemmaduck.com | @iamgemmaduck
Further reading
Gaston Fébus: Livre de Chasse (Book of the Hunt), 1387–1389 — the primary source for the medieval hunt assembly and outdoor feast. MS fr. 616 available via gallica.bnf.fr; English translation as The Master of Game by Edward of Norwich, free via Project Gutenberg (gutenberg.org)
World History Encyclopedia: Food in an English Medieval Castle — thorough, well-sourced overview of the medieval diet at every social level (worldhistory.org)
Brewminate: Hunting in Medieval Western Europe — detailed account of the eight stages of the par force hunt, including the assembly feast (brewminate.com)
Medievalists.net: Bread in the Middle Ages — the full story of manchet bread, trenchers, and the extraordinary class politics of medieval flour (medievalists.net)
PicnicWit.com: Gaston's Book of the Hunt — the most focused account of the hunt assembly as the origin of the outdoor picnic feast, with primary source citations (picnicwit.com)
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee: Feasting in Medieval England — academic but readable overview of the medieval feast structure, courses, and etiquette (uwm.edu)
Public Domain Review: Labors of the Months from the Très Riches Heures — all twelve calendar pages in high resolution, free (publicdomainreview.org)
The Morgan Library: Illuminating the Medieval Hunt — exhibition catalogue on Gaston Fébus manuscript illustration (themorgan.org)
P.W. Hammond: Food and Feast in Medieval England (The History Press) — the definitive scholarly text; worth tracking down
Wikipedia: Medieval Hunting; Livre de Chasse; Gaston III Count of Foix; Très Riches Heures; Forest Laws in England; Pottage; Manchet — solid foundations throughout
The Picnic Chronicles — the full series
A complete history of outdoor feasting, from the ancient world to the present day. Each post stands alone, but they're rather good together.
Vol. I — Ancient Egypt: The Original Outdoor Feast
Vol. II — Ancient Rome: The Civilised Outdoor Feast
Vol. III — Ancient Greece: When the Symposium Went Outside
Vol. IV — The Medieval Hunt Feast: Picnics for the Powerful (you are here)
Vol. V — The Renaissance & The Fête Champêtre: Picnics as Art (coming soon)
Vol. VI — Georgian England: When Picnics Became a Word (coming soon)
Vol. VII — The Victorians: The Golden Age of the British Picnic (coming soon)
Vol. VIII — Edwardian & Early 20th Century: The Picnic at Its Peak (coming soon)
Vol. IX — Post-War to the 1970s: The Democratic Picnic (coming soon)
Vol. X — The 1980s–2000s: The Picnic Gets Complicated (coming soon)
Vol. XI — The Modern Picnic Renaissance: 2010 to Now (coming soon)
Stay a while …
Come and be nosey …
The blanket is always out over on Instagram. Behind the scenes Picnicscapes, Somerset life as it actually happens, and the occasional opinion about gingham.
