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We are what we eat, they say, and a new study by the University of Cambridge has found that this was as true in the medieval period as it is today, with diet being highly dependent on social status.
The approach taken in this research (published in Antiquity; https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2026.10284) followed what the team call a ‘whole-town’ approach. By sampling several contemporaneous sites from the same geographical area – in this case, medieval Cambridge – they aimed to provide clearer, more nuanced interpretations.
During the study, the team took bone samples from 220 medieval adults from four sites in Cambridge. These included All Saints by the Castle, a parish church that would have predominantly buried those of middling status, representing an ‘ordinary’ urban burial site (see CA 412), and the parish church of Cherry Hinton, south-east of central Cambridge, which reflects a rural parish population. The other two sites were the Hospital of St John the Evangelist, which would have interred a broad swathe of the local population, from benefactors and corrodians (live-in pensioners) to the poor who sought food and shelter from the establishment (CA 286); and the Augustinian Friary in the centre of Cambridge, which was a prosperous religious institution that buried friars and wealthy lay benefactors (CA 409).
The results showed that while people from all four sites were eating animal protein, the extent of this consumption differed. For example, the urban population from All Saints appears to have eaten meat and fish more regularly than their rural contemporaries at Cherry Hinton, who also do not seem to have consumed many secondary animal products (such as milk, cheese, and eggs), instead having a more plant-based diet. Similar findings from Wharram Percy, a medieval village in North Yorkshire, suggests that this may have been the case at other rural sites in England.
At the other end of the scale, the friars and wealthy laity buried in the Friary appear to have enjoyed the diet richest in animal protein, particularly in terms of marine foods. There was also a noticeable difference within the Augustinian burial population itself: those who had been buried with girdle buckles – indicating that they were friars – had a distinctive clustering of isotope values suggesting that they had a specific, probably proscriptive, diet.
Those buried in the Hospital, meanwhile, were the most diverse in terms of their background, and this was reflected in their diets, with a large variation in isotope values. While those with the least animal-protein-rich diets probably reflect the poorest members of society who were cared for at the Hospital, there is evidence too of individuals who had experienced better diets across their lifespan, perhaps representing better-off benefactors, or people who had only experienced short-term hardship later in life.
As the team conclude: ‘Inter-site differences were greater than intra-site differences, showing that even within a relatively small town, society was detectably partitioned and social differences in diet correlated with burial location.’
Text: Kathryn Krakowka / Image: Mark Gridley
